ABSTRACT
After periods as a vagabond in three continents and as a communist journalist in Berlin Kolbenhoff moved to Denmark in 1933, where he found employment in radio and wrote under a pseudonym. Forced into the army after the German occupation of 1940 he became an American POW in 1944. Having got to know fellow-prisoners Andersch and Richter in the USA he contributed to the magazine they edited, Der Ruf, and was a cofounder (with Richter) of Gruppe 47. His first novel, Untermenschen (1933), is a casestudy of the isolation and political apathy of the underclass towards the end of the Weimar Republic as embodied by the narrator, overshadowed by the two novels by which he is now mainly remembered, Von unserem Fleisch und Blut (1946), in which a seventeen-year-old member of the Werewolf organization, his loyalty to the Führer unimpaired, spends a night running amok in a devastated city already occupied by the Americans, and Heimkehr in die Fremde (1949), in which a motley group of men and women find different ways of coming to terms with the material shortages and spiritual vacuum of the hunger years; both are quintessential Trümmerliteratur’. After Die Kopfjäger (1960), a thriller, Kolbenhoff returned to social realism with Das Wochenende (1970), which makes election day on what is otherwise a typical weekend in the lives of two working-class youths the occasion for the confrontation of their political apathy with the combative socialism represented by the grandfather of one of them and by a student drop-out. Schellingstraβe 48 (1984) is an autobiographical account of Kolbenhoff’s involvement in the literary life of the first post-war years.
