Wolfgang Koeppen

Koeppen, Wolfgang (Greifswald, 1906-1996, Munich), the illegitimate son of a Hamburg eye specialist, grew up with his mother Maria Köppen and, from the age of three, with an uncle to whose home mother and son had moved. They lived first in Thorn (West Prussia), then in Ortelsburg (Masuria). In 1919 his mother moved back with him to Greifswald, where he attended a secondary modern school (Mittelschule) before being apprenticed to a bookseller. Forced to abandon his job through ill health, in due course he began to study philosophy, Germanistik, and history of art at Greifswald University; an avid reader, he also turned to modern authors, including Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Kafka, Döblin, and (later) Faulkner. However, the early- to mid-1920s were restless years of intermittent study and various jobs, including two voyages as a ship's cook, and a job as an ice-cream maker in Hamburg. After a year spent in Würzburg (1926-7), where he worked at the municipal theatre as dramatic adviser (Dramaturg), he went to Berlin. Here he contributed two stories to the Communist periodical Die rote Fahne (1928); another story appeared in the literary journal Die Weltbühne (1930). At this time he was offered a job at the liberal (twice-) daily newspaper Berliner Börsen-Courier, which he owed to Herbert Ihering (1888-1977), a noted producer and theatre critic, who was on the paper's editorial staff until its enforced closure at the end of 1933 on account of its Jewish proprietors. Beginning in January 1931, Koeppen thus experienced three years of extremely versatile journalistic work. A study of Koeppen by David Basker, published in 1993, revealing new details about his professional activities between 1933 and 1945, lists more than 200 articles, including reviews. Early in 1934 Koeppen went to Italy, then into voluntary exile in Holland. By 1938 he felt that he must return to Berlin, crossed the border undetected, and subsequently succeeded in concealing this gesture of opposition to the National Socialist regime.

During his stay in Holland Koeppen wrote his first novels, beginning with Eine unglückliche Liebe (1934), a story of deep passion and unrequited love. Friedrich, the son of a respectable middle-class family, falls in love with Sibylle, a second-rate variety artist representing a world of disorder and anarchy. He follows her and, failing to enter her world, hopes to bring her into his. In the end they remain together, yet acknowledge an invisible barrier between them. The figure who suffers most is Friedrich, for whom Sibylle embodies an ideal which he cannot abandon even though he is aware of his self-deception. In his next novel, Die Mauer schwankt (1935), the architect Friedrich von Süde experiences a similar conflict, which now assumes political significance. The novel appeared again in 1939 as Die Pflicht, a title not chosen by Koeppen, who did not republish it under its original title until 1983. The manuscript of a third novel written in Holland, Die Jahwang-Gesellschaft, is lost.

Helped by contacts established during his first years in Berlin, Koeppen secured a job as a scriptwriter for the film industry that gave him certain privileges, including temporary exemption from military service. His ‘inner emigration’ (see Innere Emigration) was of a passive kind and involved a degree of compromise, but until the early 1940s he succeeded in avoiding work on scripts directly implicating him in propaganda for the regime. Around the time (1942-3) when he lost his Berlin home during an air raid, he found himself confronted with a project in Munich which he was determined not to support. Faced with no choice but to go into hiding, he made his way to Feldafing by the Starnberger See where he found refuge in a hotel, in which he survived the end of the war under increasingly harsh conditions. He subsequently settled in Munich.

Koeppen was in his mid-forties before he wrote the novels that established him as a leading writer and critic of the Adenauer era (see Bundesrepublik Deutschland): Tauben im Gras (1951), Das Treibhaus (1953), and Der Tod in Rom (1954), of which the first is his best. In 1972 they appeared again in a single volume and are known as his postwar trilogy. Strongly negative and satirical, they are remarkable for their resourceful modernity, favouring a mythologizing style that contributes to their multiperspective structure, and a cinematic technique of montage that juxtaposes historical and contemporary reflections (Simultanstil). Alfred Andersch was among those who shared not only his disillusionment with the new West German state but also his scepticism towards any party political commitment, which Koeppen has consistently avoided even in his younger years; maintaining that a writer should serve no party interests (Ein Schriftsteller ist kein Parteigänger), and likening his own role to that of Cassandra, he has described the world of his novels as a ‘pandemonium’ viewed with compassion for all who suffer. Conscious of being an outsider ‘within society’ and acquainted with deprivation and petty prejudices, he was particularly predisposed to furnish his central characters with autobiographical traits. It also inclined him to explore foreign societies and cultures, on which he based his next major publications, Nach Rußland und anders-wohin. Empfindsame Reisen (1958), Amerikafahrt (1959), and Reisen nach Frankreich (1961). In recognition of his achievements, he was awarded the Büchner Prize in 1962.

More honours followed in his later years, but inhibitions related to his persistent sense of isolation obstructed the completion of new projects. The volume Romanisches Café (1972), consisting of shorter prose written between 1936 and 1971, was followed fifteen years later by a second collection of prose written between 1974 and 1984, Angst (1987), and then by the volume Morgenrot (1987), containing fragments of an unfinished novel, In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs. Koeppen achieved his last remarkable success with his largely autobiographical volume Jugend (1976), which was later followed by reminiscences of his homeland, Es war einmal in Masuren (1991). The publication of Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (1992) revealed him as the author of a work based on the real-life story of a Jewish stamp-dealer who, having survived persecution, later went to live in the USA; at the volume's first publication in 1948 Koeppen's name had been withheld. Die elenden Skribenten (1981) contains essays, portraits, and reviews, selected by M. Reich-Ranicki, the editor of Gesammelte Werke (6 vols., 1986).