Graal‑Müritz | A Place of Writers

Dora Diamant came from a Hasidic family in Poland and was working as a volunteer at the Müritz holiday colony. How old she was is still disputed: she herself said nineteen, and so it stands in Max Brod; her biographer Kathi Diamant later found a birth certificate dated 4 March 1898, which would make her twenty-five.

She wrote down her memory of that first encounter later. On the beach, she recalled, a family had caught her eye – parents and two children – and one man among them whose impression she could not shake off; she even followed them into the town. When it was announced at the People’s Home that a Dr Franz Kafka would be coming to supper, she happened to be working in the kitchen. She looked up – outside the window it had grown dark, someone was standing there – and recognised the man from the beach. Until then she had not known it was Kafka, nor that the woman beside him had been his sister. He came in and said quietly something about such delicate hands having to do such bloody work.

From then on the two spent much of their time in Müritz together. Kafka left Prague for her sake: from September 1923 to March 1924 they lived in Berlin, he in Steglitz, she in the Scheunenviertel. It was an intense time under poor conditions – inflation and economic crisis left them dependent on money and food parcels from Prague, and Kafka spent hours in queues.

There were marriage plans, too. Max Brod records that Kafka wrote to Dora’s devout father, saying that although he was not an observant Jew in the traditional sense he was nonetheless a penitent, one who was returning, and might therefore hope to be received into the family. The father travelled with the letter to the Gerer Rebbe, whose authority meant everything to him. He read it, put it aside and said nothing but a brief “No”.

The Kafka Dora describes is not the one most people picture:

“Kafka was always cheerful. He liked to play; he was a born playmate, always ready for some kind of joke.”

Dora Diamant, recollections, in: Hans-Gerd Koch (ed.), Als Kafka mir entgegenkam, Wagenbach, Berlin 2005, p. 196. Translated from the German wording.

The best-known story about Kafka and children also comes from her: walking in the park, he is said to have met a crying girl who had lost her doll, and to have explained that the doll was merely away travelling and had written to him; he would bring the letter tomorrow. At home he sat down and wrote it, as earnestly as if it were a work of literature. The episode rests solely on Dora’s oral account, and already in her version and Brod’s neither the time nor the place agrees – scholars consider it possible but not established.

The Berlin period ended when the tuberculosis entered its final stage. Kafka was taken back to Prague, then to sanatoria and hospitals near Vienna. When Dora saw him again he could no longer speak. She was with him when he died on 3 June 1924; at the funeral in Prague she collapsed.

What she kept of his is lost. On 8 March 1933 the Gestapo searched her flat in Pariser Straße in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and confiscated 35 letters from Kafka and 20 notebooks. They have never been found; the Kafka Project at San Diego State University has been searching for decades.

Family and profession

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on 3 July 1883, the first child of the merchant Hermann Kafka and his wife Julie. Two brothers followed and died young: Georg in 1886 at fifteen months, of measles, Heinrich in 1888 at six months. Then came the sisters Gabriele (Elli), Valerie (Valli) and Ottilie (Ottla). The father was domineering and quick to anger, the mother remained a distant figure, and the maids and cooks took out their own authority on the children. Franz became an anxious child and withdrew.

The inclination to be alone stayed with him; a few friendships lasted all the longer. The most important was with Max Brod, a year younger, a friend from his student days – and the reason Kafka’s work exists at all: as executor, Brod overrode his friend’s last will, which had demanded that all the manuscripts be burned.

After excursions into German studies and philosophy, Kafka read law, entirely in Prague. He passed the examination in legal history in 1903 “with good result”, the remainder “with sufficient result”. On 18 June 1906 he was made a Doctor of Law – two weeks before his 23rd birthday, so at 22. From July 1908 until his retirement in July 1922 he worked for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, just under fourteen years, and without pleasure. His “scribbling” at night was his “only desire”.

He wanted to write early on. His school friend Hugo Bergmann recalled that Kafka spoke of it in his first years at the Gymnasium; the earliest attempts date from that time. In March 1908, aged 24, eight short prose pieces appeared in the magazine Hyperion.

The work, year by year

1912 is Kafka’s year. He begins Der Verschollene (“The Man Who Disappeared”, given the title Amerika by Brod), meets Felice Bauer on 13 August – they will become engaged twice and never marry – and in a single night writes “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), finding the manner of writing now called Kafkaesque. In the same year Rowohlt in Leipzig brings out his first book, Betrachtung (Contemplation), eighteen short prose pieces; the title page already carries the year 1913.

1913 brings “Der Heizer” (“The Stoker”), the first chapter of Der Verschollene, and in June the first printing of “Das Urteil” in the yearbook Arkadia; it appeared as a separate volume only in October 1916. In 1914 Kafka begins Der Proceß (The Trial). “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) appears in Die weißen Blätter in October 1915 and as a book that December. 1917 brings the haemorrhage. 1919 the engagement to Julie Wohryzek, 1920 the separation and the long correspondence with Milena Jesenská. In 1922 he begins Das Schloß (The Castle), and “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist”) appears.

In July 1923 he meets Dora Diamant in Müritz and moves to Berlin for her sake. In March 1924 he has to return to Prague. His last work, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”), appears on 20 April 1924 in the Prager Presse. Six weeks later, on 3 June, he dies at the Hoffmann sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna.

The choice of place

“The choice of place was always rather difficult, for it had to be cheap, not lie too far from Berlin, and it had to answer to the ideal my parents held of rural stillness and beauty. And so my parents discovered summer retreats to which, in those days, scarcely a single Berliner had ever come. […], and we spent many a summer holiday in Graal when everything there was still quiet and rural, without Strandkörbe (roofed wicker beach chairs) and without any visitors’ tax. In Müritz there were already Berliners – Müritz was a flourishing Baltic seaside resort – but in Graal peace still reigned.”

Bathing twice a week, no more

“How the days fly by! Do we then not bathe in the sea at all? But we do! Of course we bathe! Graal is already beginning, shyly, to call itself a Baltic seaside resort, so one must presumably bathe after all. Admittedly, almost forty years have passed since then – really no such extraordinarily long span of time – but at any rate, in those days people still thought very differently about bathing than they do today! Too much bathing was unhealthy; it ‘drained’ you; one had to take care with one’s bathing, not too long and not too often! And so it was that we bathed at most two or three times a week, and I cannot honestly say that this rare bathing impaired our holiday happiness in any way. […] Goodness, one was by the sea after all, and so it was simply part of the thing; but at bottom, wading was far lovelier!”

Ladies’ bathing, gentlemen’s bathing

“There were two little bathing establishments, a ladies’ bath and a gentlemen’s bath, and the separation of the sexes was enforced most strictly. The notion of simply bathing from the beach was so indecent that it had not yet raised its marsh-bubbles in a single skull. To be sure, there were the odd degenerates who loitered about in the dunes during bathing hours, but these were mere exceptions, who were soon tracked down by the fishermen keeping watch and fell prey to general contempt. Yet their harvest of pleasures, even with field glasses, cannot have been great, for the ladies in those days still wore those curious, mostly red bathing costumes whose trousers reached well below the knee. A skirt fell over the whole, and the ensemble, held in place by a belt, sat partly in gleaming folds and partly as though slapped flat against the body, and looked comical rather than seductive.”

The battle for the finest sandcastle

“However little visited Graal still was in those days, the struggle for the finest sandcastle was already in full bloom, and we had not laboured for days on end raising a rampart and a moat – which seemed able to defy even the mightiest storm surge – for nothing! The joy of coming to one’s home castle and finding all still in the best of order; the outrage when the plank bridge across the moat had been stolen from us (which we had first stolen ourselves), or even the beam that formed Mother’s seat! Scouting expeditions were organised, spies sent out, and once the whereabouts of the stolen goods had been ascertained, then – according to the nature and strength of the new owner – either entreaty or open force or cunning was resolved upon. Indeed, these summer holidays had this further good consequence, that we four siblings suddenly formed a levy in arms. Just as the holidays brought us closer to our parents, so too did they forge unity among us siblings, at least against the outside world. In Berlin the four of us had been two separate great powers […]. Here in Graal it was quite otherwise. If we wished to achieve anything, we had to hold together.”

To Graal with an ordnance map

“Once the place of the coming summer holiday had been settled, the first thing was that my father bought maps of it – official survey maps, so-called plane-table sheets. […] Under his guidance we learnt, imperceptibly, to read maps; we soon knew every symbol on those sheets. We knew the way from Gelbensande to Graal with every turning, every plantation. We could say precisely when the wood ended and the long-drawn-out village came into view. And however well we knew all this beforehand, we were nevertheless surprised again and again when what we had seen on the black-and-white sheet turned into reality. The small, puny woodland symbols on the map now became an overwhelmingly lofty cathedral of beeches; the path, which had lain so clear and smooth before us, to be taken in at a single glance, now wound through the wood in so many bends that one could not foresee a hundred paces ahead. Nor was it smooth: it was cut deep into the sand, and rose over little hillocks of which the map had known nothing.”

Poppies and cornflowers by the field path

“That very evening, after supper, Father went down to the beach with us children, while Mother and Christa prepared the sleeping quarters. It was still almost light, and we ran, cheering, from the field path to the edges of the cornfields. We picked red poppies and blue cornflowers, pink corn-cockles and white marguerites. We were city children; it seemed to us incomprehensibly glorious that all this grew ‘for nothing’, that we had no flower-woman to give money to for it.”

The walk through the woods to the sea

“Now we come into the wood, and it grows darker around us. We children keep closer to Father and begin to listen for whether we can already hear the surf of the sea. But Father tells us there will be no surf today; there has been scarcely any wind all day. And yet we go on hoping and go on listening.[…] Gradually the tall-trunked pine wood grows lower; it slopes away towards the sea like an immense slanting roof, the trees all grown landward. Lower and lower they become, ever more stunted, and already a brightness shimmers through them ahead of us. Now we start to run once more, each wanting to be first to see the sea. The pines have come to an end; we now toil uphill through the dune sand. The marram grass rustles; a cool breath blows softly upon us. And then I stand once again atop the dune and, as every year when we are by the sea, the old familiar and yet ever-astounding feeling of the immense vastness that opens before me overcomes me. At first I see and feel nothing but this: how great it is, how it goes on and on, even there where horizon and water run into one another.”

Hans Fallada was really named Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen and was born in Greifswald on 21 July 1893. His father, Wilhelm Ditzen, was a district judge; his career took the family to Berlin in 1899, where he joined the Court of Appeal, and to Leipzig in 1909, to the Reich Court. The household was solidly bourgeois. The childhood was not.

Of his early years at grammar school he later wrote: “At school – or, as we simply called it, the swot-shop – I played a most hapless role at that time. I attended the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium on Grunewaldstraße, and that was then a very fine grammar school, by which is meant that it was chiefly the sons of the officer and civil-service nobility, and of wealthy people too, who warmed the school benches there. My parents, however, were all for the utmost thrift, and so it came about that when a pair of trousers had worn through, I got no new ones, but my mother set a couple of stout patches into the sorely wounded pair. But since she often had no exactly matching cloth, other fabrics were chosen for the purpose without any great scruple. That is a good five-and-thirty years ago now, and yet I still see the trousers of doom clearly before me: they were dark-blue Bleyle trousers, and they were adorned with grey patches. Oh, the scorn and the mockery those trousers earned me! […] I still see myself standing there, pale, sickly, despairing, in my corner by the wall. The whole school delighted in its free quarter-hour; to me it was a torment. I always breathed again when the bell rang once more for lessons.”

In 1910, at seventeen, Ditzen caught typhoid fever on a Wandervogel hiking trip and recovered only slowly. In the spring of 1911 his parents sent him to a sanatorium near Bad Berka for eight weeks. In October of that year came the event that divided his life: on 17 October 1911, on the Uhufelsen cliffs near Rudolstadt, he staged a pistol duel with his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker, planned from the outset as a double suicide. Von Necker died; Ditzen survived, severely wounded. The manslaughter proceedings were dropped because he was held not to be criminally responsible, and from February 1912 to July 1913 he was housed at the Tannenfeld care institution in Thuringia.

From 1917 onwards he spent years in withdrawal clinics and sanatoria; he fought alcohol and morphine for the rest of his life. Towards the end of the First World War, Ditzen made his first attempts at writing, from the very beginning under the pseudonym “Hans Fallada”. He assembled it from two of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales: “Hans in Luck” and “The Goose Girl”, in which the talking horse “Falada” – spelt with one l in Grimm – proclaims the truth until the betrayed princess is granted her due (“Alas, Falada, hanging there”). Fallada left no statement of his own about this derivation; scholars regard it as the likely one.

Der junge Goedeschal (1920) and Anton und Gerda (1923) both failed. The breakthrough came in 1931 with A Small Circus (Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben). Little Man – What Now? (Kleiner Mann – was nun?) followed a year later and was read around the world.

Other famous works by Hans Fallada:

• Once a Jailbird (Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt, 1934)
• Wolf Among Wolves (Wolf unter Wölfen, 1937)
• Geschichten aus der Murkelei (Tales from the Murkelei, 1938)
• Iron Gustav (Der eiserne Gustav, 1938)
• Kleiner Mann, großer Mann – alles vertauscht (Little Man, Big Man – All Mixed Up, 1940)
• Damals bei uns daheim (Back in Our Day at Home, 1941)
• Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 1947)
• Zwei zarte Lämmchen – weiß wie Schnee (Two Tender Lambs White as Snow, 1948)
• The Drinker (Der Trinker, 1950)
• Ein Mann will hinauf (A Man Wants to Get On, 1953)

In March 1933 the previous owners of his house in Berkenbrück denounced him to the SA, claiming to have overheard a conversation hostile to the state. Ditzen spent a short time in custody. He already knew prison: three months in 1923 for embezzlement, two and a half years in 1926 for fraud, both consequences of his addiction. Those years, not 1933, are what Once a Jailbird draws on.

In July 1944 the marriage to Anna Issel was dissolved. On 1 February 1945 Ditzen married Ursula Losch, 28 years his junior, who like him was dependent on alcohol and medication. In December 1946 he was committed to the psychiatric ward of the Charité in Berlin and wrote Alone in Berlin there within a month. He died on 5 February 1947, a few weeks after being transferred to a hospital in Pankow. The death certificate records heart failure; scholars assume a wrongly dosed sleeping draught.

Korlsbüttel, 1935

He wrote this summer down twice, and both times from a great distance.

The first time was in 1935, in a children’s book. Two years earlier his name had been called out on the Opernplatz in Berlin as the German Student Union burned books; Kästner stood among the onlookers. Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives) remained for the time being the only one of his books still permitted. The second Emil novel appeared in October 1935 with the Atrium Verlag in Basel, for a readership that lay outside the country.

There is no bitterness in it. It is a holiday book. The seaside resort is called Korlsbüttel and lies somewhere between Travemünde and Zinnowitz; the beach is three minutes’ walk through an alder carr, and a wooden pier runs so far out that it almost seems to reach the horizon. Kästner liked travelling by train, and his reason was that one covers sixty kilometres in an hour without taking a single step. In the book he tells how laborious the journey had been a good decade earlier: alighting at a small station on the Lübeck–Stralsund line, then behind a heavy Mecklenburg horse along sandy forest tracks, past juniper, charcoal kilns and now and then a herd of deer.

The sea in this book was described by a man who had seen it once, at fifteen. It lies mirror-smooth to the horizon, a ship sails into the evening, above everything a slender crescent moon, and in the distance the lights of the beacons come on.

The lodging in the book is called “Villa Seeseite”, an old-fashioned house with a glazed veranda, sash windows and an open balcony. In the village, today’s “Villa Martha” at Strandstraße 16, then the “Pension Meeresblick”, is held to be this house. No statement by Kästner on the matter is known.

Dresden, 1957

The second time he wrote this summer down was in 1957, in Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I Was a Little Boy), forty-three years after the holiday. Kästner was fifty-eight, and the city the book is about no longer existed: Dresden had been destroyed in February 1945. What he writes about Müritz therefore stands at the end of a book about a vanished childhood, and the rupture on which it ends is the same 1 August.

The coast never let go of him. For the summer semester of 1921 he enrolled for one term at the University of Rostock before continuing his studies in Leipzig.

Little remains of what the fifteen-year-old saw. Graal and Müritz then had wooden piers; the last of them were destroyed by heavy ice in 1940/41 and afterwards demolished. Only in October 1992 did construction of a new pier begin; it was inaugurated in March 1993. Coastal steamers returning in the evening from moonlight cruises no longer exist here. The house in the Strandstraße still stands, and whether it is the right one, nobody knows for certain.

What remains is the beach and two books. Kästner himself explained why that was enough for him: “Old is what one has forgotten. And the unforgettable was yesterday.”

Sources and Notes

The account is based on Erich Kästner, Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (1957), and Emil und die drei Zwillinge (Atrium, Basel 1935). The passages on Kästner’s stay, on the pier and on Korlsbüttel follow the descriptions in these books and render them largely in our own words.

“Mole” and “mole head” are Kästner’s words. Müritz had no mole but wooden piers, at which the steamers docked.

That today’s “Villa Martha”, Strandstraße 16, was the Kästners’ lodging is local tradition without contemporary evidence; the house is also named as “Haus Meerblick” at the fisherman Hoff’s. That Korlsbüttel stands for Müritz has not been confirmed by Kästner; scholarship names no real model.

The history of the piers follows local accounts: in Graal and Müritz-West they were built in 1905, in Müritz-Ost in 1910. The New Year’s Eve storm surge of 1913/14 destroyed them, after which they were rebuilt; which pier stood in July 1914 is not recorded. After the heavy ice of 1940/41 they were demolished.

Kästner’s enrolment at the University of Rostock for the summer semester of 1921 is recorded in regional sources.

Closing quotation: Erich Kästner, Als ich ein kleiner Junge war, first chapter.

The return in 1990

“The reunion with his homeland was overwhelming. It awakened memories, yet it also tore open old wounds,” writes the Kempowski Foundation Haus Kreienhoop on its website (www.kempowski-stiftung.de). After the war the Rostock family had lost everything: the firm, the flat, the furniture, the homeland, and with them photographs, letters and books.

In 1956 he was released after eight years and went to the West: first Hamburg, then Göttingen, where at twenty-eight he took his school-leaving certificate and studied education, then from 1960 a primary-school teacher in Breddorf and from 1965 in Nartum near Bremen. Everything else grew out of that village-school existence – the work, the archive, the writer.

He never forgot his native Rostock, the landscape there and the Mecklenburg Baltic coast. On New Year’s Day 1990 he recorded in his diary that the city had never let go of him in all the years of separation: he had described it forwards and backwards, collected photographs, even rebuilt it in paper. To call it longing, he felt, was an understatement. The next day he collected his brother Robert, and the two of them travelled home for the first time in over forty years.

On 5 January 1990 the journey took them by way of Rostock to Rövershagen – a name Kempowski took pleasure in. It was from there that the wretchedly long Sunday walks to Graal had once set out: the parents striding ahead along the dead-straight forest ride, the children trailing behind, tea with lemon in the flask, the father at the front with his map case and his field glasses from the First World War.

In May of the same year Kempowski sat for a few hours on the beach at Graal. The weather was wonderful, not a soul in sight, and of his parents’ great days no trace was left to find. He took away a piece of glass rounded smooth by the sea. On Easter Sunday in April 1993 he read from his works at “Haus Grahl”.

From 1990 onwards Kempowski came to Rostock regularly and to Graal‑Müritz several times; those visits included rides by horse-drawn cart through the Rostock Heath. He had almost twenty years left for it.

In 1994 the Hanseatic City of Rostock made him an honorary citizen, in 2002 the university awarded him an honorary doctorate and in 2003 an honorary professorship in modern literary and cultural history. His archive is held today at the Kempowski Archive Rostock, Klosterhof House 3.

Graal in the novels

What it feels like to arrive in Graal he described in Aus großer Zeit: after a week you are at home there. The place lies in the forest; to reach the beach you walk a quarter of an hour along narrow, springy paths, smooth with old fir needles, while above you the pines sway like masts against a sky across which the clouds are racing.

Two kinds of memory attached Kempowski to Graal: his own excursions from Rostock, and one that was older than he was. In the summer of 1913 his parents met on the pier – his mother, Margarethe Collasius, was 17, his father, Karl Kempowski, just 15. In the diary entry of 1990 Kempowski gives his father’s age differently, as seventeen.

In his diary of 1983, published as Sirius, Kempowski describes family photographs taken on the beach at Graal in that pre-war year of 1913: nothing but carefree, well-fed people in the sunshine, pictured seventy years earlier – and nowhere any sign of what was to come a year later.

Kempowski set his family’s history down in his novels, his parents’ meeting on the pier at Graal included. The cycle is called Deutsche Chronik (German Chronicle) and tells the story of a family and, in passing, of half a century of German history, with an eye for the incidental and a humour that never forces itself upon the reader.

Anyone who wants to know how people in Rostock lived, thought and spoke around 1915 or 1925 or 1935 will find it in Kempowski’s novels Aus großer Zeit (1978), Schöne Aussicht (1981) and Tadellöser & Wolff (1971).

How his parents found one another

How his parents’ marriage came about is told in Aus großer Zeit. In 1913 the Kempowskis travel to the Baltic, to Graal, which lies between Rostock and Stralsund and which the brochure advertises with a stone-free beach and excellent surf: a small bathing resort with a few hotels and guest houses, five marks a day, all inclusive. At the “Waldperle” guest house meals are taken at one large communal table in the glazed veranda. When the Kempowskis first appear there, with a maid and a wheelchair attendant, there is whispering: who is the gentleman who cannot walk properly and has to be supported? Mother and daughter make an impression. Karl, the fifteen-year-old son, is at first barely noticed by anyone.

Karl makes himself felt all the same. His table manners are impeccable, he is courteous to the older ladies, plays the piano splendidly, handles a walking stick like an artiste, wears a checked suit and spats over his shoes. In the evenings he stands on the pier and lets the promenading ladies file past him, which he reports to a friend with a good deal of swagger. In August 1913 a slight blonde with a centre parting appears there: Grethe de Bonsac from Hamburg, daughter of a merchant with a shop in the Große Bleichen. In reality the family was called Collasius; in the novel they stay at the “Villa Ida” for four marks full board and find the choice of Graal every bit as happy as the Kempowskis do – the food splendid, salmon in aspic, tongue in burgundy, and even the coffee good.

Bathing does not begin until the third day, and then only two or three waves out, in a chain, because deep holes are said to lurk on the bottom, and to step into one is to be lost. Afterwards the family sits on the beach in full dress, the mother broad and heavy on her folding chair, the grown daughters white from head to foot in the beach basket, hands in their laps. Out at sea the paddle steamer “Fürst Blücher” stamps through the waves, the excursionists on board wave across, and the family reflects that they really should have brought the field glasses.

On the landing pier stands a wooden booth selling picture postcards of that very wooden booth. It is there that Grethe meets Karl Kempowski on 15 August 1913. He comes from Rostock, wears a watch chain across his stomach and has his dog Stribold with him. She finds his broad Mecklenburg dialect hilarious, he likes the way she stumbles over a pointed stone – and already they are discussing whether they might see one another at Saturday’s réunion.

And although Grethe laughs a great deal about Karl on that Graal holiday, although she imitates him, although the liaison is for her no more than a game and a pastime, and although during the First World War she is hopelessly in love with another man, the two become engaged in 1917 and marry soon after the war.

In his diary of 1983, published seven years later as Sirius, Kempowski recorded what interested him about Schöne Aussicht more than the historical setting and the rise of National Socialism: that two spouses who did not really want one another nevertheless brought something workable into being. There could be no talk of a marriage of convenience in his parents’ case, he thought – rather one of embarrassment. He never forgot the constant quarrels at table, which usually began with his mother, because his father never went anywhere with her. He would then fall silent.

The early years of his parents’ marriage and his own childhood in Rostock Kempowski describes in the novel Schöne Aussicht, which follows directly on from Aus großer Zeit. Another Rostock family life, this time in the 1920s and 1930s, and again exact down to the incidentals.

Excursions to Graal, and on foot at that, were routine in Kempowski’s childhood as well, with the family or in larger company. Schöne Aussicht describes one such undertaking: to make use of the summer weather, the hunting circle sets out one Sunday at six in the morning. The Rostock Heath beckons, some 6,000 hectares between the Warnow and the Baltic, a good 5,000 of them woodland, and after a forest ride kilometres long, dead straight, the party arrives in the heat at the beach at Graal. The rushing sound has announced it in advance; the sea is surveyed from a dune, the ladies’ hair flying, the gentlemen’s ties too. They stop at the “Strandperle” beneath the copper beech, order plaice, particularly good at this time of year, and a cool beer for 15 pfennigs. Afterwards the Kempowski couple walk out along the long pier to that postcard booth, sit down hand in hand on the bench and watch the waves, and a ship out there as well.

Back with the party the gossip carries merrily on, for from the “Strandperle” the whole promenade can be surveyed. After a little indignation about bathing suits worn too tight, a couple comes past whom Kempowski puts on display with evident relish: she in a dirndl, with diamond jewellery and blood-red nails, her little socks like the paper frills on a chop; he tanned and bald, in a tennis shirt without a tie. An appearance like that on the promenade at Graal gave people plenty to talk about.

Origins, imprisonment, new beginning

Walter Kempowski was born on 29 April 1929, the son of a Rostock shipowner. He had two elder siblings, Ursula and Robert. After the Second World War – his father had been killed – Walter Kempowski went to the West and worked as a shop assistant in a US Army PX store in Wiesbaden. He reported to the American Counter Intelligence Corps on the removal of goods from the port of Rostock by the Soviet occupying forces; according to the CIC files, however, it was not he who handed over the freight documents but his friend Hans Siegfried.

A visit to his mother in Rostock ended it. On 8 March 1948 Kempowski was arrested; in August a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to 25 years in a labour camp for espionage. It hit the whole family: his brother Robert was given 25 years as well, his mother ten years’ forced labour. Kempowski was eighteen when his imprisonment began and twenty-six when he was released on 7 March 1956, after eight years, most of them in the Bautzen penitentiary. In the West he was then refused recognition as a political prisoner – the authorities classed the offence as espionage. His petitions against that ran until 2002 and came to nothing.

Perhaps that was what decided him to begin his literary work in earnest. In 1969 his first book appeared, Im Block, an account of his years in prison. The literary critic Volker Hage described in Walter Kempowski. Bücher und Begegnungen (2009) what followed: the literary novice, a victim of arbitrary justice, first gathered around him everything that reminded him of his childhood and youth – old photographs, address books, newspapers, toys. Later he began sitting his mother, his brother and other relatives in front of a tape recorder and questioning them. Out of that came first the novel Tadellöser & Wolff and later that chronicle of the German middle class for which he became famous.

That Deutsche Chronik consists of six novels, comprising some 2,500 pages and the span from 1885 to 1960. Tadellöser & Wolff became the best known of them, because Eberhard Fechner filmed it for ZDF in 1975. Edda Seippel and Karl Lieffen played the parents so convincingly that Kempowski later said he saw the two actors instead of his own parents whenever he thought of them.

In 1960 he married Hildegard Janssen. The children were born in 1961 and 1962: Karl-Friedrich and Renate. Kempowski stayed some twenty years in the school service of the district of Rotenburg an der Wümme, latterly in Zeven until 1979.

Walter Kempowski died on 5 October 2007 in Rotenburg an der Wümme.

The novels of the Deutsche Chronik:

• Aus großer Zeit (1978) – the lives of the grandparents and parents up to 1918
• Schöne Aussicht (1981) – the 1920s to the beginning of Nazi rule
• Tadellöser & Wolff (1971) – Kempowski’s youth in Rostock up to the end of the war
• Uns geht’s ja noch gold (1972) – Rostock in the immediate post-war years, up to the arrest of the 18-year-old Walter in 1948
• Ein Kapitel für sich (1975) – eight years’ imprisonment in Bautzen and the arrival in West Germany
• Herzlich willkommen (1984) – the first years in West Germany

The Echolot

Besides his own family history, Walter Kempowski was always interested in the collective experience of the Germans. As early as 1972 he had the fixed idea of putting a single question to them: did you see Hitler? The book, “a magnificent document of contemporary history” (Hage), appeared in 1973. In 1979 there followed the answers to a second question, Haben Sie davon gewußt? (did you know about it?) – that collection too “an event” (Hage).

In the 1980s Kempowski also began collecting biographical material, often by newspaper advertisement: diaries, letters, autobiographies, notes and photographs. So an archive came into being whose substance, as he said in an interview, no contemporary novel could match – and that was precisely what fascinated him. Das Echolot (The Sounding Line) is what he called the mammoth project, in which he sifted and sorted the material, worked it into collages and published it; a parallel enterprise, the second hull of a catamaran, with the archival labour ranking equal to the literary. Frank Schirrmacher wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 13 November 1993 that the world, if it still had eyes to see, would come to recognise in this work one of the greatest achievements of the literature of the century. A year before publication, in the Spiegel year-end issue 53/1992 announcing the pre-print, Volker Hage had called it one of the last great ventures of the century.

The Echolot project:

• Das Echolot. Ein kollektives Tagebuch. Januar und Februar 1943 (1993, four volumes)
• Das Echolot. Fuga furiosa. Ein kollektives Tagebuch. Winter 1945 (1999, four volumes)
• Das Echolot. Barbarossa ’41 (2002)
• Das Echolot. Abgesang ’45 (2005)

From around the Echolot:

• Der rote Hahn. Dresden im Februar 1945 (2001)

Further novels:

• Hundstage (1988)
• Heile Welt (1998)
• Letzte Grüße (2003)
• Alles umsonst (2006)

Diaries:

• Sirius. Eine Art Tagebuch (1990)
• Alkor. Tagebuch 1989 (2001)
• Hamit. Tagebuch 1990 (2006)
• Somnia. Tagebuch 1991 (2008)