Wolfgang Koeppen – the natural warm feeling of the man

Wolfgang Koeppen is one of our biggest writers, ”said the“ Frankfurter Rundschau ”in 1971:“ It is also because he has been silent for so long and may be silent for a long time. ” Silent – in the sense of: no more texts produced for the public – the great writer then has until his death. In 1996 he died at the age of 89.

If you look at conversations and interviews with him, the silence of Koeppen was very loud for decades. As a critical poet of modernity, as which he was traded by the featureletion, he was silent. After 1954 a novel never came out of him. Thanks to friends who worked on radio, he wrote a few more travel reports for the radio, but his productivity as a novelist was dried up at the latest at the beginning of the 1960s. His correspondence with his publisher Siegfried Unseld, an impressive document collection from 1957 to 1995, makes a testimony to how a writer who can no longer write can succeed from living from repeated but never written novels. Koeppen received fees for a novel for 40 years from Unseld.

His post-war romantic trilogy “Tauben in the Gras / The Greenhouse / Death in Rome” published between 1951 and 1954 is now part of the canon of the German-language literature of the 20th century, especially for them, Koeppen is considered an important author today. He once said, “these novels wrote very, very quickly because I wanted to finish them”. They are said to have been created in a few weeks. In their appearance, they met a stick-conservative German readership, which was used to the blood-and-floor ham and the Nazi trivial literature and could do little or nothing with modernity, with literary techniques such as assembly, the current of consciousness and the inner monologue. In addition, the writer also with the topics of his trilogy-the turmoil and the misery of the post-war period, the displacement of the Nazi crimes and the restoration, which ensured that the Nazis came back into office and dignity-did not meet the needs of the post-national socialist society.

However, until a few years ago, however, there was little talk of what Wolfgang Koeppen drove in the Weimar Republic and at the beginning of the Nazi era and that he was extremely productive in the 20s and 1930s as a journalist.

The recent volume 13 of the Koeppen work edition, which appears on 16 volumes, which appears in Suhrkamp-Verlag, now gathers all the feuilletonist newspaper texts that the author wrote at a young age. Koeppen, who did not graduate from school, initially worked in the 1920s “as auxiliary chef, factory worker, place of space or as an examiner of› Osram ‹Course lamps» (NDR) and actually wanted to go to the theater. Only “out of a shortage of money”, he then started “working journalistically”, Koeppen once said. In later autobiographical records he reflected on this time: «(…) Berlin was liberal and provocative, I wanted to participate, I breathed this air, Berlin delighted the head, but it did not fill the stomach. The last scream everywhere; But a young person did not apply. What live? There was no way of a job. And if there had been a job, thousands would have run after him. »

Koeppen received fees for a novel for 40 years from Unseld.

The revealing comment section of the new volume can be seen that the prospective author initially wrote “sometimes for communist, sometimes for boulevard leaves and thus opened” until he initially became freelancer in 1931, later feuilleton editor at the left-liberal “Berlin Börsen-Courier”, where he mainly operated the “Feuilletonist daily business”. That means: he wrote short reports, book and film reviews, reviews of cabaret and variety premieres and glosses, often in the snod-related tone of the new objectivity. The fact that he usually had to deliver his contributions to the evening edition of the newspaper until lunch gave him “little opportunity to proclaim”. Koeppen, who is known to have refined procrastinating the art form in his last three decades of life, was forced to write a contribution within a fixed time in his journalists: only “under this compulsion and under this pressure,” he said years later, he wrote it.

An exemplary passage from a long gloss from June 1933: «The ordinary Berliner sleeps up to the last five minutes before the start of his work. In the five minutes between getting up and office, he bathes, he puts on, drinks coffee, reads newspaper and drives with the underground. Anyone who keeps it differently is a wrong one. »

The early newspaper period at the “Börsen-Courier” was his “hardworking time”, Koeppen said decades later. “I wrote about everything and a lot (…) I enjoyed it!” Politically, the sheet was “democratic-republican-liberal”. “And in the feuilleton we were, as was said at the time,” Kulturbolshevist “.” In February 1933, the time when the National Socialists secured their power, overridden fundamental rights and arrested oppositional, Koeppen Las Musil’s novel “The Man Without Properties”. On March 10, his review appeared, in which he raves about the “adventure” of reading and of pleasure, “indulging in a spirit that is not known”. The “Börsen-Courier”, viewed by the Nazis as a “Judenblatt”, was finally fused in December 1933 with the “Börsen-Zeitung” controlled by the NSDAP. Koeppen was released.

In 1934 he settled in Holland for a few years, wrote and lived from the grants of a Jewish family. In 1938, when his patrons emigrated to the USA, he returned to the German Reich. “For a regime -critical author, which he later stylized, that would have been mad at that time,” said Deutschlandfunk on the occasion of Koeppen’s 100th birthday. In fact, the journalist, who was then a screenwriter in the Nazi state, “crumbled through the Hitler era”. A phase of life that the writer has beautified decades later by stylizing himself to the victim.

The fact that Koeppen, probably essentially for career reasons, actually had no fear of arranging himself with the Nazi regime is shown in a number of articles that the then almost 27-year-old wrote in the months after Hitler’s takeover. More and more flowed into its texts at the time: “Scholle”, “The People”, “Painting”, “Fatherland”, “The Fate of Germany”, “The New Zeit”, “The idea of ​​the spiritual-national”. He wrote about the kitsch poets, life reformers and forest shot (1864–1908) forgotten today: “He was a German poet, a poet of homeland and the plaice”, who “looked for the people, loved it over everything and put his whole poetry on his job”. Reviews assembled from ethnic phrases, as they were often printed at the time.

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And in a high -hymn major portrait, Koeppen celebrated the “conservative revolutionary” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925), who largely helped German fascism to prepare ideologically: “His love was Germany and it was not just the natural warm feeling of the man for his fatherland.” In the comparatively extensive contribution, he recognizes the resistance of the international-nationalist historian against the hated “liberal intellectualism” and “materialism” and praises his role model Mussolini: “Moeller reacted like an antenna (…) A fine feeling showed him the breed in the old people.”

As far as Koeppen’s opportunistic newspaper work is concerned, the publisher of the volume in the comment is forgiving, speaks in rather darkening words of the “ideological uncertainty of a mid -twenties in the interceptors of metropolitan culture” and that “a journalist was also forced from the rear bench like Koeppen” under Hitler. In fact, in the course of 1933 Koeppen loses the desire to write for an unfree Feuilleton. In a letter draft dated June 1933, it says: «What I do here is dirt. What I want to do is more. (…) A good sentence, a really good sentence, can be the result of months of effort. »

Wolfgang Koeppen: Works 13, Feuilletons. Published by Jörg Döring. Suhrkamp, ​​721 pages, born, 58 €.