25th Anniversary of the Death of Wolfgang Koeppen on March 15, 2021

Author Wolfgang Koeppen died on March 15, 1996 in Munich. 

He was born on June 23, 1906 in Greifswald. After living in Ortelsburg (East Prussia) for eleven years, he returned to Greifswald in 1919 before settling in Berlin in 1927. There, he worked as an editor for the Berliner Börsen-Courier from 1931 to 1933, when the newspaper was shut down by the National Socialists. Koeppen wrote reportages, features and penned his first literary works. In 1934, he published his first novel, Eine unglückliche Liebe. That same year, he emigrated to the Netherlands, where he began to put down his unfinished novel Die Jawang-Gesellschaft. In 1935, the novel Die Mauer schwankt was published but gained little attention. In 1938, Koeppen returned to Germany where he began to work for Bavaria Film in 1941 and moved to Munich in 1945. In 1948, the anonymously published the book Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch, which he only agreed to re-publish under his name in 1992. 1951, 1953 and 1954 resspectively saw the publication of the three novels that are considered the most accurate description of the atmosphere of the republic under Konrad Adenauer: Tauben im Gras, Das Treibhaus and Der Tod in Rom. Beyond that, Koeppen popularised travel literature in Germany with his publications Nach Rußland und anderswohin, Amerikafahrt und Reisen nach Frankreich.

Suhrkamp Verlag is the proud publisher of Wolfgang Koeppen's collected works, which are accompanied by an edition exploring the genesis of the texts that was compiled at the University of Greifswald and allows insight into the more than 1,500 pages of typescripts on Koeppen's texts. They contain diverging drafts, fragments and notes from the writer's estate that can now be searched with the aid of innovative research and visualisation tools.

For more information please visit the author's Foreign Rights Website or contact the respective Rights Manager.