ABSTRACT
Koeppen spent his early years in East Prussia, went to sea, took various odd jobs, then studied at several universities. After a brief spell as cultural editor of a Berlin newspaper he wrote two novels, Eine unglückliche Liebe (1934), on a young man’s relationship to a variety performer, and Die Mauer schwankt (1935), which was republished in 1939 under the title Die Pflicht, on the undermining of accepted certainties experienced by an architect imbued with the Prussian ethos when he meets a young Slav revolutionary. Although Koeppen wrote his second novel in the Netherlands, he did not remain in exile, and although he made no concessions to the Nazi cultural programme, he cannot be associated with the ‘inner emigration’ of already established writers (Klepper, Langgässer, Wiechert, Reinhold Schneider), many of whom adopted a clear Christian stance. He belongs rather with those of his generation (Eich, Huchel, Andersch) whose initial careers suffered inevitable disorientation during the Third Reich, but who went on to find themselves in the early post-war years. Koeppen’s early novels can be read as anti-Nazi, but proved acceptable on publication because the criticism present in them is made in the context of the Weimar Republic by characters who cannot be clearly identified as the author’s mouthpiece.
