It is against the backdrop of this life’s work that his novel All for Nothing must be read.
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If you’re looking for a formula to describe the retrograde course of human progress, the Echolot will let you delve deep enough to find one.” Listening can make it possible for us finally to come to terms with one another. “The Echo Sounder,” Kempowski writes, belongs to “all those who patiently listen to the voices that fill the stratosphere. From his first book to his last, he remains a singular figure in the German literary landscape, equipped with a penetrating gaze that allows him to see through political manipulation of every sort.Ī letter from a starving, lice-ridden Russian soldier to his fiancée is juxtaposed with instructions issued by Himmler for tending the medicinal herb garden at the Dachau concentration camp the description of a boozy family celebration is followed by an entry in a file about a Jewish woman’s suicide and a note by Hitler’s personal physician about his daily injection stands side by side with an observation by anti-fascist Sophie Scholl on God’s goodness. He is immediately deported to the West, where he studies education and begins to teach. By the time of his release, the German Democratic Republic has already been in existence for seven years. At an age when other young people are pursuing their studies, prison is Kempowski’s school. His mother, charged with having knowledge of the crime, spends six years behind bars. In 1948, he and his older brother are found guilty of collaborating with American intelligence and are sentenced by the Soviet occupying forces to 25 years in prison, eight of which he serves. Kempowski himself, born in 1929 and raised in the coastal city of Rostock, which was almost entirely destroyed by British bombs in 1942, barely escapes the last major European offensive of the war, the Battle of Berlin, as a Luftwaffe courier. Soon afterward he will learn that his father, who’s been conscripted as a Wehrmacht officer, has fallen in battle on the Vistula Spit during the final days of the war. One of the last ships to shuttle between Rostock and the East Prussian coast with a cargo of desperate refugees is the Friedrich, a vessel belonging to the shipowner Karl Georg Kempowski, whose son, Walter Kempowski, is 15 years old when he witnesses the exhausted East Prussian refugees disembarking in Rostock and “dragging themselves” through the town. The story of this evacuation is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the German civilian population in the final months of World War Two.
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They will freeze or starve to death, be strafed by aircraft as they straggle along the roads, or break through the ice of the frozen Vistula Lagoon with their horses and carts, or else the ships ferrying them to safety will be torpedoed by Soviet submarines. Along the way, 300,000 of these people will perish. By the end of this icy winter, nearly 750,000 refugees will attempt to escape from the front, fleeing west along the Baltic coast via two narrow strips of land-the Curonian Spit and the Vistula Spit. The Red Army is advancing toward East Prussia.