The Writings of Walter Kempowski

In Germany he published forty-odd books but only two of his novels were translated into English during his lifetime: Aus grosser Zeit (Days of Greatness) in 1978 and Hundstage (Dog Days – not to be confused with Günter Grass’s Hundejahre, Dog Years) ten years later. He kept insisting that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators during the Second World War, a position that became less contentious around the turn of the century, with the publication of Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (about the bombing of German cities by the Allies) and Grass’s novel Crabwalk (about the sinking of a German hospital ship by a Russian submarine), but which in an earlier postwar period was associated with the right. So much of Kempowski’s work is taken up with the Second World War, and/or with the history of his family, that Homeland initially looks like a departure: it’s not about his ancestors and it’s set at the time he was writing it, in the late 1980s.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk