The echo sounder

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The echo sounder. A collective diary is the title of a four-part book series consisting of ten individual volumes by the German writer Walter Kempowski . The books consist of a collage of diaries , letters , autobiographical memories and photographs from the time of the Second World War . In addition to well-known diaries such as those by Thomas Mann or Ernst Jünger, as well as depictions of leading National Socialists and Allied politicians , the collage includes numerous previously unpublished records of soldiers, civilians, resistance fighters , perpetrators and victims of the Nazi regime, which Kempowski has kept in his private archive for decades had collected. In the chronologically ordered and uncommented comparison of recordings from different perspectives, the echo sounder documents the simultaneity of a variety of events such as perspectives during the Second World War.

The first part of the echo sounder was published in 1993. It comprises four volumes of entries from January to February 1943. The same months in 1945 were dealt with by the second part, which was published in 1999 under the title Fuga furiosa . The single volume Barbarossa '41 , published in 2002, is the beginning of the series in chronological terms and contains records from the period June to December 1941. The end of the work was Abgesang '45 from 2005. Again in one volume, it focuses on four dates in April and May 1945, the end of World War II. The first editions of all parts were published by Albrecht Knaus Verlag . The echo sounder was received very positively by German literary criticism and has received several literary prizes. Along with Kempowski's German Chronicle, it is considered to be the author's main work.

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January and February 1943

Mass rally in the Berlin Sports Palace with posters for the total war on February 18, 1943

The first part of the echo sounder concentrates in a total of four volumes on the period January 1 to February 28, 1943. Kempowski commented on the termination: “At that time, the Third Reich had reached the peak of its power internally and externally and was about to close it exceed [...] - it is surprising how often the question arises in notes and letters from this period: Is this going to work? One had the feeling that the arc was overstretched: And this is exactly where I start with the echo sounder . ”The Casablanca Conference , the sinking of the 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad , Joseph Goebbels ' speech at the sports palace fall within the period of the volumes. with the call for total war and the execution of the Scholl siblings from the White Rose resistance group .

The records are arranged chronologically, each day results in a chapter. As a result, the focus is less on tracking an individual fate than on the juxtaposition of very different experiences of different people arranged by the author. Longer interim texts separate the individual chapters, not even those from Kempowski's pen, from which only the foreword comes. The first entry every day comes from the bulletin of Adolf Hitler's personal physician Theodor Morell . The last entries are the notes of Heinrich Himmler and the calendar of events at Auschwitz-Birkenau by Danuta Czech removed.

Fuga furiosa. Winter 1945

Refugees from East Prussia in February 1945

The second part of the echo sounder is again divided into four volumes and deals with the period from January 12 to the bombing raids on Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945. In between, there is Hitler's retreat into the Führerbunker , the major Red Army offensive that followed subsequent flight and expulsion from the eastern regions as well as the rape of the German civilian population, the death marches of concentration camp prisoners and the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , the fall of Wilhelm Gustloff and the Yalta conference .

Kempowski's intention was to “place cause and effect side by side. [It] crosses the refugee trains from East Prussia with the long misery trains of the prisoners "to bring the suffering together. As a chronicler of the bombing attacks and refugee flows, which were previously little discussed in German literature, he also saw himself as a taboo breaker: “We must also be allowed to tell that.” In addition to the individual reports from the first part, official sources are also incorporated into the volumes: newspaper reports, the radio program and Wehrmacht reports . In addition, the German perspective is supplemented by numerous foreign records that Kempowski had found since the first part was published.

Barbarossa '41

Mobilization of Soviet troops outside Leningrad 1941

In chronological terms, the third part of the echo sounder can be understood as its prologue . It returns to the year 1941. Compared to the previous publications, the structure has changed: in just one volume, three larger periods are considered: June 21 to June 30, 1941, July 1 to July 8, 1941 and December 7 to 31 December 1941. The title is given by Operation Barbarossa , the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22nd including the initial victories in the following days. This is followed by the Leningrad blockade and the withdrawal of the German army in the first winter of the war at the end of 1941. Reports from both warring parties are compared more consistently than in the previous volumes, with German and Soviet soldiers as well as the suffering Leningrad population have their say. The daily entries each begin with a quote from the Bible, followed by notes from famous writers. At the center of every daily entry are the recurring diary entries made by some people who were directly affected by the war, such as a mother whose son died, a doctor and several soldiers on the Eastern Front, including Jochen Klepper's notes . At the end there are references to the National Socialist crimes in the form of Adam Czerniaków's diary and Danuta Czech's Auschwitz notes , some of which are supplemented by the diary of an SS man serving in Einsatzgruppe A.

Swan '45

Symbolic gathering of American and Soviet soldiers on Elbe Day

The last part of the echo sounder is also limited to one volume and becomes the epilogue of the project in the detailed presentation of the last few days of the war . The volume begins with the Fiihrer's last birthday on April 20, 1945. It is followed by April 25, Elbe Day , when Allied troops first meet, and April 30, the day of Adolf Hitler's suicide. The volume is concluded with an extensive chapter at the end of the war through the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht and the reactions of the victorious powers and the German population on May 8 and 9, 1945.

The events are framed by two poems, Ludwig Uhland's Spring Faith (“Now everything, everything must turn.”) And Friedrich Hölderlin's Der Frühling (“The human activity begins with a new goal / So are the signs in the world, the miracles many . ")

Technique of collage

In the motivation of his work, Kempowski referred to Walter Benjamin's unfinished Paris passages , which had once been planned as a pure literary montage of quotations, and borrowed Benjamin's maxim: “Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Just to show. ”According to Dirk Hempel, the intention behind the form was to objectify the subjective experience, to embed the individual in an overall event, to put together a historical truth from a mosaic of individual truths. Kempowski described this process with a comparison: "Wind can only be represented on the cornfield, not on the individual stalk."

Despite the complete renunciation of a fictional speech, Kempowski designed the collected material. The individual factual reports are set in parallel, reinforced or contrasted by his cut, for example when many escape experiences follow one another or the tea hour follows the experience at the front, the birthday party follows concentration camp atrocities. In this way, the actually uncommented narration triggers an intended effect on the reader and lets them take a stand. In this design, Kempowski became the author of his documentation for Hempel and the echo sounder became a literary work that went beyond a mere collection of material.

Sabine Kyora differentiated diachronic and synchronous texts in the echo sounder . The first category included records such as those by Thomas Mann or the Swiss Wilhelm Muehlon, which comment on the war from the outside and offer the reader an orientation function about the events. Some narrative strands form an ongoing plot, such as the events surrounding the White Rose . Other texts tend to form a synchronous unit in that, for example, reports from people of the same age, edited one after the other, offer an insight into a common generation and their different attitudes towards National Socialism. Next to it are isolated text fragments that remain fragments without beginning or end or offer only a pointed individual description, texts that Kyora assigned to anecdotal narration.

Wolfgang Struck judged that the effect that the juxtaposition of everyday life and horror triggers is less the result of a literary composition than a consequence that the text fragments are torn out of their context, released from an explanatory, meaningful biography and presented to the reader unprotected become. However, the weighting changes in the course of the project. In the final volume, Abgesang '45, everyday fragments take up less and less space, which he saw as being due to both the historical circumstances and Kempowski's changed selection procedure. By incorporating autobiographical texts that were created later, the hermetic nature of collective experience is dissolved in the moment and replaced by a subsequent selection of forgetting, repressing or conscious omission. Creative measures such as counting down the days at the end of the war are used to convert the snapshot of the first volumes into a historical construction, which, if not meaningful, is given a goal, shifting the weight of the “collective diary” into a “collective biography”.

Position in the factory

Walter Kempowski

Walter Kempowski saw the echo sounder as a counterweight to his German Chronicle , the autobiographical chronicle of his family over several generations, which mirrored the German bourgeoisie from the German Empire to the divided Germany after the Second World War. The echo sounder , on the other hand, is "a kind of parallel operation, in a sense the second hull of the catamaran." Kempowski mounts "a great dialogue in the echo sounder that accompanies my chronicle in a whisper." In another picture he compared the two pillars of his work with two floors of a house: "Above the chronicle with the accessories, below the echo sounder material." For Dirk Hempel, Kempowski had increased the stylistic device of many narrators from the chronicle in the echo sounder to a thousand-part choir, and thus also the intention to objectify a subjective experience from individual experiences putting together a historical whole, taken to extremes. Both the chronicle and the echo sounder are Kempowski's literary attempt to find an answer to the question: “How did it happen?” The question is aimed both at the personal fate of Kempowski and his family and at the collective fate of all those affected by the war.

In several smaller works, Kempowski had already addressed the dialogue between the post-war and the Nazi generation through the motif of “speaking” with the dead, which also had an influence on the echo sounder : Today's reader enters directly and unfiltered with contemporary witnesses Conversation. In the radio play Moin Vaddr Läbt (1980) a dead father tries to establish contact with his sons, in Mark und Bein (1992) a son goes on a journey to find memories of his father who died in the war. In the latter novel, echo is even considered as a metaphorical possibility of contact between the two - a passage that may have influenced the title of the echo lot.

The Deutsche Chronik was already based on the technique of collage and on the memories of third parties, whereby Kempowski's methodology at that time was mainly based on the tape interviews of his mother, the written records of other relatives and card boxes full of notes. Later, Kempowski expanded the technology of his private opinion polls . As early as the 1970s, so-called “questionnaires” were created to deal with the Third Reich, which arose from a collage of answers to Kempowski's questions: Did you see Hitler? and did you know about it? . In his later work, the diary became the focus of Kempowski's work. He kept a diary himself every morning. Edited diaries from 1983 and 1989 to 1991, the period of German reunification , were published under the titles Sirius , Alkor , Hamit and Somnia .

While working on the echo sounder , Kempowski also created some of the side works in the same style as a polyphonic choir. The radio play production The war is coming to an end . Chronicle for Voices traces the end of the Second World War in the first half of 1945. It was produced by Walter Adler , elaborately read with 220 speakers and broadcast on May 8, 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War by almost all broadcasters of the ARD . The red rooster. Dresden in February 1945 from 2001 is a chronicle , partly overlapping with the Fuga furiosa , of contemporary witness accounts of the bombing raids on Dresden between February 13 and 17, 1945.

History of origin

In the foreword to the first part of the echo sounder , Kempowski named a winter evening in 1950 in the Bautzen prison as the decisive experience for his later collection of old eyewitness reports , when he heard the murmur of voices from his fellow inmates while walking in the yard and realized that this constant Babylonian choir had never been recorded by anyone. The first idea for an archive of unpublished biographies arose in 1978. Two years later, on January 1, 1980, Kempowski founded the archive for unpublished autobiographies . In August 1988, Kempowski had made the plan to record the years 1943 to 1948 day by day in a collective diary. He found the title for his project in October of the same year, Das Echolot , based on the echo sounder in shipping. Kempowski advertised his search for photographs, autobiographies and diaries in various newspapers and received numerous mailings. The Echolot project was later explicitly mentioned. In January 1989 the project was structured as follows:

  1. Downhill run 1943/44
  2. Chaos 1945/1 (escape - bombs)
  3. Chaos 1945/2 (reflection, you find yourself again)
  4. Suffering / advancement / penance 1946/47
  5. Plateau 1948

First calculations of the scope seemed to put a complete realization of the plans a long way off: “Today I have calculated that at least 1800 entries can be expected per year. That is certainly 1000 pages. How am I supposed to get this under control? I'll keep going for now. ”With the support of his wife and a colleague who managed the steadily growing archive, Kempowski divided the project into sections and limited himself to the completion of a volume in January and February 1943. Knaus Verlag , which is based on the author Hoped for novels, was not very enthusiastic about the plans for the echo sounder . According to Kempowski's lecturer Karl Heinz Bittel , the project was considered incalculable, but did not want to throw up with the successful author and issued the motto: “Close your eyes and go through!” The circulation was limited to 3000 to 5000 copies “for the libraries and the most loyal ones Kempowski fans ”.

In December 1991 Kempowski suffered a stroke and in May 1993 a second. Immediately after each recovery, he continued working on the echo sounder . At the end of 1992 a first preprint appeared in Spiegel on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. In October 1993 the first part of the echo sounder was published. The period of the second part was originally supposed to cover the months of December 1944 to May 1945, but the volume got out of control and had to be restricted to January and February 1945. Kempowski postponed the end of the war to a later publication. After initially only the employee Simone Neteler had helped him to compile, track down and organize texts, the project continued to grow: up to twelve employees were now working on the echo sounder. Texts came in from all over the world that often had to be translated and entered into a computer at Kempowski and sorted there. The publication of Fuga furiosa took place in October 1999.

Then Kempowski began work on the volume Barbarossa '41, which was in advance of his original planning . Kempowski's changed interest was explained by his close colleague and biographer Dirk Hempel with a changed picture of Russia by the author. While Kempowski had been shaped by the experiences of his imprisonment in Bautzen for many years, he had gained positive impressions on a trip to Moscow in the late 1990s as part of the German Culture Weeks. The chance acquaintance with Anatoli Platitsyn, a former lieutenant colonel in the Red Army, led Kempowski to record the voices of numerous Soviet war witnesses in the echo sounder . Kempowski dedicated the volume Barbarossa '41 to Platitsyn . Originally he wanted to contrast the events of the second half of 1941 with Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812 , but then deleted the texts from the 19th century because they "distracted from the tragedy of the actual events of 1941."

As early as 1993 Kempowski had predicts in an interview: "I think the work on the depth sounder . Will accompany me to the end of my days" Two years before his death he brought the project finally to a conclusion when the plan for the sounder also had changed over time. In February 2005, just in time for the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, the last part of the work was published with Abgesang '45 . At the same time, Kempowski published the accompanying volume Culpa , in German Schuld. which consists of his own diary entries for the development of the echo sounder . At the same time he expressed the hope that “with such a life work also a little to atone for the guilt of his own people”.

reception

The echo sounder was received mostly positively to enthusiastically in the German-language feature pages. Dirk Hempel called the echo sounder “the great literary event of the nineties in Germany”, which was discussed abroad “how seldom a work of contemporary German literature”. Marked Stephen Kinzer , the sounder in the New York Times as "an extraordinary historical work to a publishing sensation was."

Frank Schirrmacher in 2007

In December 1992, Volker Hage announced the work in Spiegel magazine as “one of the last great literary ventures of this century”. After publication, Frank Schirrmacher published the Saturday supplement Pictures and Times of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with a review on the echo sounder and coined the sentence: “If the world still has eyes to see, it will […] in this work be one of the greatest achievements in literature of our century. ”Karl Heinz Bittel rated this review as“ the initial spark for enthusiastic reception in all media. ”Twelve years later, Schirrmacher was still enthusiastic about reading! zum Abgesang '45 : "This book replaces an entire library on the subject of the end of the war." And Denis Scheck praised in hot off the press "one of the greatest reading adventures of our time".

The size of the project and Kempowski's work were particularly emphasized in many reviews. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Gustav Seibt described Das Echolot as "one of the most ambitious and, in terms of work performance, most impressive companies in German literary history." Martin Lüdke saw Kempowski go down in "literary history" through "an incomparable monument". For Fritz J. Raddatz , Kempowski's echo sounder had “something gigantic, but it bears testimony to a gigantomania of terror.” Hannes Hintermeier stated that “only this mammoth company [Kempowski] brought the recognition that it had been given for many years from dubious ideological undercurrents failed out "

Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 2007

However, it was questioned whether the uncommented collection of documents was literature. Raddatz did not see Kempowski as the author he presented himself as: “You are not an author if 3440 pages do not have your own line”. Johannes Willms found that “this mixtum compositum has little to do with literature or even historiography, but that it is merely the result of a monomaniacal collecting instinct”. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was unwilling to discuss the echo sounder in the Literary Quartet in February 1994 : “That annoys me. Four volumes, stuff like that, what's that?” He doesn't read “phone books” because he's “for literature and not for this pile of text ”. Bernd W. Seiler also criticized the lack of exemplary compression, and he saw in the “mammoth production [...] a phenomenon of the affluent society. Assuming that there is an abundance of time and money (350 marks!), The reader is presented with an abundance of material, and if his time is perhaps not so far, it does not matter. "

In addition to the German scholars, historians also commented on Kempowski's work. For Ulrich Herbert, the echo sounder created “a picture of the war that no other representation, source collection or fiction work has drawn so precisely, vividly and differentiated so far.” Christian Meier agreed that the echo sounder offered “something different in Germany at the moment It is not so easy to offer: immediate access to the pasts of our parents and grandparents. ”Nevertheless, he criticized the procedure:“ It is not the individual but any collective that is the subject of this 'collective diary'. Musil's experience could be summed up as follows: 'This is what world history looks like in the vicinity: You don't see anything.' ”In a volume accompanying the Wehrmacht exhibition , Stefanie Carp questioned the choice of sources. Kempowski “gave up his collage to harmlessness. One suspects, however, that this harmlessness did not happen to the author, but that it is literary and ideologically intentional. ”For Christoph Cornelißen, Kempowski knows a lot about" [about] the moral dimensions of this decline and its individual consequences ", but nevertheless loses it "at a moment when more or less all people are portrayed as victims of a historical avalanche that can no longer be stopped, [...] questions about guilt and responsibility, yes, going even further, the whole thing eludes a concrete historical analysis." For him, the echo sounder was “an approximation of the cruel reality of the Second World War, not its image.”

Kempowski objected to the allegations that the echo sounder was "not a [historical] documentation", "but a [literary] collage." The literary scholar Carla Damiano also believes that the echo sounder should not be evaluated according to historical criteria. In the second volume of the echo sounder , the Fuga furiosa , Dirk Hempel saw the topics of flight and expulsion from the eastern regions presented in a breadth and clarity that was previously unheard of in German literature. Nevertheless, the literary criticism hardly emphasized this topic in the evaluation of the echo sounder . Instead, two years later Günter Grass was celebrated for his pioneering work on the novel Im Krebsgang . Kempowski was offended: “I'm also amazed by the short memory of the journalists who claim that Grass pushed open a gate. My echo sounder deals with escape and displacement on 3000 pages. The section on Wilhelm Gustloff alone is more than 100 pages long. I find it inappropriate that Grass can be celebrated as a bold taboo breaker. "

Contrary to the expectations of the publisher, Das Echolot became "one of the most spectacular successes in the history of Knaus Verlag", according to the editor Karl Heinz Bittel. By Christmas 1993 the first volume had sold 25,000 copies. By 2005 the number of sales had doubled. For the first part of the echo sounder , Kempowski was awarded the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Literature Prize in 1994 and the Uwe Johnson Prize in 1995, and the Dedalus Prize for New Literature in 2002 for Barbarossa '41 .

expenditure

literature

materials

Secondary literature

  • Carla Ann Damiano: Montage As Exposure. A Critical Analysis of Walter Kempowski's Das Echolot . Dissertation, University of Oregon, 1998.
  • Kerstin Dronske (Ed.): "Now everything, everything has to turn". Walter Kempowski's "Echolot". End of the war in Kiel . Wachholtz, Neumünster 2005, ISBN 3-529-03150-X , pp. 9-43.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Hage : Walter Kempowski. Books and encounters . Knaus, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-8135-0337-1 , p. 101.
  2. ↑ Volker Hage: That had biblical proportions . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 2000 ( online interview with Walter Kempowski).
  3. ↑ Dirk Hempel: Author, narrator and collage in Walter Kempowski's complete works. In: Carla Ann Damiano, Jörg Drews, Doris Plöschberger (eds.): What is this about ? From in the block to last greetings. On the work and life of Walter Kempowski . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-887-6 , pp. 27-28, 31.
  4. ↑ Sabine Kyora: "World history in the vicinity". On the role of subject and story (s) in Walter Kempowski's echo sounder . In: Carla Ann Damiano et al. (Ed.): What is this about? Pp. 164-168.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Struck: "I'll have a little bunker built in the garden". Text architectures in Walter Kempowski's echo sounder. In: Dronske (Ed.): "Now everything, everything must turn". Pp. 26-29.
  6. ^ Hage: Walter Kempowski. Books and encounters. P. 100.
  7. ↑ a b c Volker Hage: The Lord of the Diaries . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1992 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Hempel: author, narrator and collage in Walter Kempowski's complete works. Pp. 21, 27.
  9. ↑ See Carla Ann Damiano, Walter Kempowski's Echolot : Questions of Reception and the Genesis and Nature of Montage. In: Sabine Kyora, Axel Dunker, Dirk Sangmeister (eds.): Literature without compromise. a book for jörg drews. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2005, pp. 421–434, here pp. 429–432.
  10. ↑ Dirk Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography . btb, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-73208-5 , p. 218.
  11. ↑ Kempowski: The echo sounder. A collective diary. January and February 1943. Volume 1: January 1 to 17, 1943 (1993), p. 7.
  12. ^ Kempowski: Culpa. Notes about the echo sounder. Pp. 7, 9.
  13. ↑ Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. P. 198.
  14. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Walter Kempowski . @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.zeit.deIn: The time of January 25, 1980.
  15. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Walter Kempowski . @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.zeit.deIn: Die Zeit of July 13, 1990.
  16. ^ Kempowski: Culpa. Notes about the echo sounder. P. 128.
  17. ^ Kempowski: Culpa. Notes about the echo sounder. P. 132.
  18. ↑ Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. Pp. 200-201.
  19. ↑ Only shooting and barking dogs . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1992 ( online ).
  20. ↑ Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. Pp. 219-221.
  21. ↑ Dirk Hempel, Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. 3. Edition. btb, Munich 2007, p. 219.
  22. ↑ Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. P. 232.
  23. ^ Hage: Walter Kempowski. Books and encounters. P. 102.
  24. ↑ a b Volker Hage: The choir of the mute . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 2005 ( online ).
  25. ↑ Selection of reviews on Fuga Foriosa , Barbarossa '41 and Abgesang '45 by Perlentaucher .
  26. ↑ Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. P. 207.
  27. ^ "An extraordinary historical work that has become a publishing sensation". Quote from: Stephen Kinzer: German Echoes From 1943 Set Off A Book Sensation . In: The New York Times, June 1, 1994.
  28. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher : In the night of the century . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 13, 1993.
  29. ^ Kempowski: Culpa. Notes about the echo sounder. P. 374.
  30. ↑ Quotations from Kempowski.info , a website of the Knaus Verlag .
  31. ↑ Gustav Seibt : Now the guns are silent on all fronts In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 25, 2005.
  32. ↑ Martin Lüdke : The great choir singing. Here the story itself speaks: Walter Kempowski ends the gigantic effort called Echolot with a swan song '45 . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of March 12, 2005.
  33. ↑ a b Fritz J. Raddatz : Germany's journey to hell . In: Die Zeit of November 11, 1999.
  34. ^ Hannes Hintermeier: The archives of horror . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 16, 2005.
  35. ↑ Johannes Willms : The Critique in the Crisis. The disturbing echo on Walter Kempowski's collective diary “Das Echolot”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 31, 1993.
  36. ↑ Quoted from Gerhard Henschel : Check it out: More about Walter Kempowski . dtv, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-423-24708-5 , pp. 58-59.
  37. ↑ Bernd W. Seiler: No art? All the better! About the memorial literature on the Third Reich . Published in: Jörg Drews (Hrsg.): Past Present - Present Past . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1994, p. 206.
  38. ↑ Quoted from Hempel: Walter Kempowski. A civil biography. P. 214.
  39. ↑ Christian Meier : A direct access to the past of our parents? In: Merkur 12/1995, pp. 1128–1133.
  40. ↑ Quoted from Henschel: Let's dig deeper: More about Walter Kempowski. P. 72.
  41. ↑ Christoph Cornelißen : Orderly memories of the downfall. Reflections on Walter Kempowski's "Abgesang '45". In: Dronske (Ed.): "Now everything, everything must turn". Pp. 40-43.
  42. ↑ Comment by Kempowski in: Walter Kempowski, Until the end of my days. Interview with Volker Hage. In: Spiegel Spezial 5, 1993. Cf. Carla Ann Damiano, Walter Kempowski's Echolot: Questions of Reception and the Genesis and Nature of Montage. In: Sabine Kyora et al. (Ed.): Literature without compromises. P. 427f. (especially against Christian Meier's objections).
  43. ↑ Sven Michaelsen, Volker Hinz: Trouble has to get out . Interview with Walter Kempowski. In: Stern from August 10, 2004.
  44. ^ Kempowski: Culpa. Notes about the echo sounder. P. 375.