Walter Kempowski

Walter Kempowski (April 29, 1929 – October 5, 2007) was a German writer. Kempowski was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental Echolot ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War.

Walter Kempowski was born in . His father, Karl Georg Kempowski, was a shipping company owner and his mother, Margarethe Kempowski, née Collasius, was the daughter of a Hamburg merchant. In 1935 Kempowski began attending St. Georg School; in 1939, he transferred to the local high school ("Realgymnasium").

As a teenager Kempowski, who was unathletic and had acquired a taste for American jazz and swing music through his older brother, chafed under compulsory service in the Hitler Youth, and was transferred into a penalty unit (Strafeinheit) of the organization. In early 1945 he was drafted into the Flakhelfer, the youth auxiliary of the Luftwaffe, serving in a special unit that performed courier functions. Kempowski's father, who had volunteered for military service at the beginning of the war, only to be turned away because of his membership in the Freemasons, was accepted for service in summer 1940, and died in combat on 26 April 1945.

Walter Kempowski's first success as an author was the autobiographic novel Tadellöser und Wolf, in which he described his youth in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a well-off middle-class family. In several more books he completed the story of his family from the early 20th century into the late 1950s, when he was released from an East German prison in Bautzen where, accused of spying for the US military forces in West Germany, he had been incarcerated for eight years. In West Germany he became a teacher in Breddorf (as of 1960), in Nartum () (as of 1965) and in Zeven (between 1975 and 1979).

In 2005 he finished his enormous oeuvre Das Echolot, a collection and collage of documents by people of any kind living in the circumstances of war. Das Echolot consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years. The documents are now deposited in the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Das Echolot was partially translated into English under the title Swansong.

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