Works
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 a small village near Hamburg.
In 2005 he finished his enormous oeuvre Echolot, a collection and collage of documents by people of any kind living in the circumstances of war. Echolot consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years.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.
He died of intestinal cancer, aged 78, in Rotenburg in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Walter Kempowski
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalms, 107:23-4.