For years, Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), one of Germany’s most popular and most celebrated writers from the second half of the 20th century, was an unknown quantity in the English-speaking world. Only recently has he begun to register on Anglophone readers’ radars, thanks to the publication of a couple of his works in translation. Those books delve into the past and examine the impact of World War II on Germans — how the brutality and futility of the conflict inflicted personal pain and engendered collective guilt.

As a novelist, Kempowski traversed similar terrain to that of his postwar peers. Like Heinrich Böll, he grappled with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an attempt to reckon with and overcome the past, specifically the horror of the Third Reich. (In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi reveals that this German term is in fact a euphemism for “redemption from Nazism.”) Like Günter Grass, who explored the sinking of a German ship by a Soviet submarine in his 2002 novel Crabwalk, Kempowski regularly flouted a hitherto taboo idea and showed Germans as victims. And like W.G. Sebald, Kempowski blurred fact and fiction to probe and make sense of memory, loss, and wartime destruction.