The Anglophone embrace of the German novelist Walter Kempowski is already less inhibited than his reception at home. Kempowski, who died in 2007, was a member of an iconoclastic generation of West German writers that includes Alexander Kluge, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Uwe Johnson, and Kempowski’s occasional nemesis, Gunter Grass. For much of Kempowski’s career, he was put down by critics as an edgeless, even crude, stylist whose anti-socialist politics made him anathema to the West German literary scene. Kempowski’s determination to excavate the depths of German suffering in the Second World War only made him more suspect. “The secret therapist of the German middle class,” “the manic memory guardian,” “the knight-errant of the archive”: These were some of the epithets pinned on him in the feuilletons.
The recent translations of Kempowski into English invite a less encumbered assessment of this stubborn German writer, who was, if anything, more pitiless than his peers in his reckoning with the past. Born in the Baltic city of Rostock in 1929, Kempowski was a “Trümmerkind” — a child of the rubble. At the war’s end, the jazz-addled teenage Kempowski was working as a Luftwaffe courier and witnessed the Red Army smash through Berlin. In the late 1940s, he joined the fledgling Liberal Democratic Party in East Germany, worked as an informant for the U.S. military, and was later imprisoned with his brother on spying charges for eight years by the communist authorities. Deported back to West Germany in 1956, he expected to be hailed as a dissident hero. Instead, he was ignored. He achieved his first success two decades later with Tadelloeser & Wolff, an epic saga of a bourgeois family’s wartime travails that was made into a popular film. In his later years, Kempowski worked as a school teacher in a small town in Lower Saxony, smarting at his neglect — “There are only three dissertations devoted to my work!” he once groused— as the prizes started to roll in.
If Kempowski’s novels were unevenly received in Germany, the achievement of his historical work has been much harder to deny. Over several decades, Kempowski compiled an enormous array of wartime letters and postcards from ordinary Germans that he weaved into a giant tapestry of the war called Echo Soundings (a small portion of which appeared in English as Swansong 1945). This multivolume project now figures in postwar German literature like a symphonic accompaniment to the solo of Victor Klemperer’s diaries. Kempowski resurrected entire days from the 1940s, flashing between voices from Nazi high command, a German servant’s musings, a prisoner of war’s laments, a businessman’s prognosis, and so forth. The result is an unclassifiable kind of literary achievement that stuns the reader with its relentless seesawing between banality and apocalypse.
At the heart of Echo Soundings was the experience of the German refugees who fled the eastern provinces of the Reich — Pomerania, Silesia, and especially East Prussia — at the end of World War II. It was the greatest refugee crisis in German history and entirely of the Nazis’ making: More than 2 million German nationals sought refuge within the shrunken borders of the postwar German states. Hundreds of thousands died on their wagon treks or were left behind. Only ghostly traces of them survive. In the area around today’s Konigsberg, renamed Kaliningrad after one of Stalin’s most thuggish henchmen, the grand old Juncker manors and churches mostly lie in ruins. Faded signs for German pharmacies can still be glimpsed in some city streets. In a last-ditch sop to East Prussian nostalgia, “Konigsberger” meatballs are now offered on German trains.
One can only imagine Kempowski’s frustration when, in 2002, the German literary scene was enraptured by the publication of Grass’s Crabwalk. The novel reconstructed the largest naval massacre in history — the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German military transport full of nearly 10,000 East Prussian refugees, by a Soviet submarine. Only Grass, a left-wing writer with strong anti-capitalist credentials, seemed to be in a position to reclaim one of the most potent German war traumas from the memory vault of the far Right. But Kempowski had already devoted 100 pages of Echo Soundings to the sinking of the Gustloff. Four years later, as if answering a charge in a duel, Kempowski published his own East Prussian novel, All for Nothing, a full-dress historical epic centered on an East Prussian aristocratic family’s experience of the Red Army’s advance, in which the young boy of the household, loosely based on Kempowski himself, threads the needle of survival.
All for Nothing was instantly declared a masterpiece when it appeared in English in 2018, not least because Anthea Bell’s virtuosic translation softened some of the awkwardness of Kempowski’s prose and made the English version feel more natural than the original. Now, NYRB Classics, which has done so much to bring us the best of modern German literature, has issued an even more unsung “episode” from Kempowski’s oeuvre, the novel Marrow and Bone.
Marrow and Bone reads like a coda to All for Nothing, though it was published before it. The novel is set in the summer of 1988, when the wreckage of the war had long been gilded over but the fall of the Berlin Wall was not yet a foregone conclusion. Jonathan Fabrizius is a middling critic in Hamburg, a city full of Greenpeace activists, Turkish Germans, African migrants, and East Prussians, “every one of whom must have a story to tell.” But Jonathan knows better. “None of the glossy magazines that clamored for tales of blood and murder were interested in these stories,” Kempowski writes. “Love and peace and harmony were what they looked for with regard to their neighbors to the East.” Jonathan is a man of opinions who, when not receiving an allowance, ekes out an existence through art reviews in West German newspapers. His Danish girlfriend, Ulla, a fellow aesthete, is on the brink of an affair with her museum director boss. Together, Jonathan and Ulla maintain a routine of indifferent sex while feeding each other’s aesthetic fixes: He gives her histories of human atrocities, and she honors his interest in Gothic buildings, his “northern goddesses.”
The second part of Marrow and Bone is a grimly entertaining road trip novel. When a German car company offers Jonathan the chance to write up a publicity tour in a part of former East Prussia, now a part of Poland, he reluctantly agrees. The pay is good, and there are some Gothic churches there that he wants to tick off his list. There is also a deeper though more indistinct attraction. For Jonathan is the orphan of two East Prussians: His mother died giving birth to him in their trek wagon, and his Wehrmacht soldier father was shot on the Vistula Spit in Lithuania, not far from Thomas Mann’s summer house. The publicity tour includes wonderful snatches of black comedy. In their fine-tuned V-8 engine “supercars,” the Germans feel, compared to the Lada-driving Poles, like members of a “master race,” and Jonathan keeps running into a tour group of German pensioners who ask for a discount at a Holocaust museum.
No one is spared in Marrow and Bone: not the Armenian genocide-denying Turkish German restaurateurs in Hamburg, the “endearing disorganized Poles” (at least one of whom rubs his hands with satisfaction when he speaks of the vanished Jews), or the Soviet submarine commander who destroyed the Gustloff and now sits “feeding pigeons in Leningrad … still pleased with himself for doing such a good job.” (Jonathan, or perhaps Kempowski himself, is confused, since Alexander Marinesko died in 1963 as an only marginally rehabilitated Soviet veteran.)
The true power of Marrow and Bone, adeptly translated by Charlotte Collins, comes in Kempowski’s sly exposure of Jonathan’s aesthetic voyeurism, his fumbling attempts to mourn, and his blind man’s bluff with the German past. Part of his trouble is the thoroughly kitschified way that his mind functions. Everything he sees is a borrowed image that seems to have been implanted from elsewhere. A formation of cars brings up the image in Jonathan’s mind of “those excessively long American cars, the black Lincoln thingies that pull up outside the Waldorf Astoria and a solitary woman gets out with a white toy poodle under her arm, and all she wants is a box of chocolates.” Mired in these kinds of cliches, even Jonathan’s borrowed image of his mother’s death runs like a meaningless loop in his mind. When the tour group passes near the spot on the Vistula Spit where Jonathan’s father was shot, he breaks down:
In one of his late interviews for Der Spiegel, Kempowski was asked what he thought about the reconstruction of Dresden. “I was in favor of rebuilding the Frauenkirche,” he said, speaking of the baroque church in the center of the city. “But now that it is back, a strange feeling creeps in on me: It is a lie. The dead cannot be brought back to life. … The mountain of guilt that we accrued under National Socialism cannot be reduced.”
Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society in Goettingen, Germany.
