Wolfgang Koeppen

Writer

• Born: June 23, 1906
• Birthplace: Greifswald, Germany
• Died: March 14, 1996
• Place of death: Munich, Germany

Biography

Wolfgang Koeppen was the illegitimate son of Marie Köppen, a seamstress, and the optometrist Reinhold Halben. From 1908 to 1919, Wolfgang and his mother lived with her sister Olga, first in Thorn, then in Ortelsburg, East Prussia. In 1919, they returned to Greifswald, where his mother worked as a prompter in the theater. She died in 1925.

For financial reasons, Koeppen left school in 1919. He worked in a bookstore and audited courses at the University of Greifswald. In 1921, he went to sea as an assistant cook, and then worked at various jobs in Hamburg. From 1927 to 1933, Koeppen worked as a journalist in Berlin, becoming the culture critic for the liberal newspaper Berliner Börsen-Courier, for which he wrote more than two hundred reviews, reports, prose pieces, and essays in two years. The National Socialist regime forced the paper to close.

In 1933, Koeppen fell in love with the actress Sybille Schlo�. The attraction was not mutual. Koeppen captured some of the details in his autobiographical first novel: Eine unglückliche Liebe (an unhappy affair). Sybille married one of his friends.

In 1934, Koeppen emigrated with Jewish friends to Holland. He returned to Berlin in 1938, earning a good income as a film script writer and avoided being drafted for military service. After Koeppen’s Berlin apartment was destroyed in an air raid in 1943, he found lodging in Feldafing, near Munich. His basement room in the Klubhaus Hotel looked out on Lake Starnberg. His roommate was a young girl, Marion Ulrich. They married in 1948, when Marion was eighteen and Koeppen was forty-two.

In the same year, Koeppen accepted a contract from the Herbert Kluger publishing company that caused considerable controversy decades later. He revised Jakob Littner’s manuscript, Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (notes from a hole in the earth), that described Littner’s struggle for survival in a Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. The book was published under Littner’s name in 1948, but under Koeppen’s name in 1992. In the foreword, Koeppen stated that it had become his story.

Koeppen’s literary breakthrough came with his three novels that exposed the flaws in German postwar society: Tauben im Gras (pigeons on the grass) 1951, Das Treibhaus (the greenhouse) 1953, and Der Tod in Rom (death in Rome) 1954. They are written with stylistic virtuosity. From 1955 to 1961, Koeppen traveled extensively for the Süddeutsche Rundfunk (South German Radio), going to Spain, Rome, the Soviet Union, Holland, London, the USA, France, and Greece. His travel reports were broadcast and published.

Koeppen wrote relatively little in his later years, but received twelve prizes for literature, including the Georg Büchner Prize (1962), the Immermann Prize (1967), the Andreas Gryphius Prize (1971), the Patronage Prize of the City of Bergen-Enkheim (1974), and the Arno Schmidt Prize (1984). In 1990, Koeppen was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald and in 1994, he was named an honorary citizen of Greifswald.

Koeppen did not feel he had realized his full potential, stating in 1982: “I am looking for a character for a novel, and the character is me myself.” The City of Greifswald honored him posthumously, creating the Wolfgang Koeppen Prize for Literature in 1998 and opening the Wolfgang Koeppen Archive in 2002.