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.