Homeland by Walter Kempowski review – confronting German guilt and suffering

There is no healing catharsis in a 1980s road trip to the lost territories of East Prussia, by the author of All for Nothing

Walter Kempowski, who died in 2007, was 15 when he witnessed the flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from the Red Army as they advanced into the eastern territories; his father, who was conscripted as a Wehrmacht officer and killed in the last days of the war, owned one of the ships used to shuttle refugees from East Prussia to Rostock, where the Kempowskis lived. Close to 300,000 starved, drowned, froze to death or were killed by the allies as they fled.

The young Kempowski became a Luftwaffe courier, only to be found guilty in 1948 of collaboration with the US and sentenced to 25 years in prison by the occupying Soviets. He served eight, and on release was deported to the west. There, as well as writing his German Chronicle series of novels, he amassed a vast collection of wartime letters, testimonies and documents, using it to create the monumental Echolot (Depth-Sounder), a 10-volume “collective diary” and unique contribution to the collective act of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “working through the past”.

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from Books | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QF2aZ8