Walter Kempowski has had a strange afterlife thus far. First he "tweets" (zwitschert) from the grave. Now his American friend, a professor of German in Utah, has revealed new information about Kempowski's involvement with the CIC – the US intelligence precursor to the CIA – in the immediate postwar years.
Professor Alan Keele discussed his findings in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
viel öfter mit CIC-Leuten getroffen hat, als er in den Romanen
behauptet. Dort ist nur von einem Treffen die Rede.
FAZ: Erfüllt das den Tatbestand der Spionage?
Ich würde sagen: ja. Kempowski hat den CIC damals in Wiesbaden von sich aus öfters aufgesucht und seine Dienste angeboten." (AK: The files show that Kempowski met more often with the CIC people than he maintained in his novels. There he only mentions one meeting. FAZ: Does this rise to level of being an actual spy? AK: I would say yes. Kempowskis sought contact with the CIC in Wiesbaden on his own initiative and offered his services).
Why did did the young Kempowski want to spy for the CIA? According to Professor Keele, it had nothing to do with Kempowski's ideological aversion to communism. Rather, the young man simply was looking to "spy his way into a job in the Nirvana of an American supermarket" (sich einen Job im „Schlaraffenland“ des amerikanischen Supermarkts erspionieren.)
Whether Kempowski was really a CIA spy or not is irrelevant: the authorities in the Soviet zone thought he had performed an act of espionage. He was arrested when he returned to Rostock and sentenced to 24 years in the prison at Bautzen. He served eight years of the sentence, and when he got out he started writing about his his experience. Maybe if he had been a successful spy he never would have become a writer, and that would have been a loss for postwar German literature.
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Fascinating. For so many reasons. I don’t remember how I knew this about him, but I did. Maybe he mentioned it. Really, I don’t think his espionage activities were any big secret.
As you say, it’s lucky he became a writer.
In retrospect,thogh I wonder if he continued to work for the CIA or west German intelligence. There were people of interest at the Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik in the 80’s: Niki and Elke Stenzel.
We will probably never know. One thing for sure: the antagonism among the faculty at the Sommerschule went far beyond the usual rivalries among academics and intellecuals!
That’s Niki Berwanger and Elke Stenzel.
Hattie,
What do you mean by “people of interest”?
Leftists. Elke taught at that time at the Freie Universität and Niki was the director of the Schiller archives. He was a journalist and editor of the German language newspaper in Rumania, a dedicated Socialist but enemy of the dictator Caucescau. He was in exile in West Germany and had received the prestigious post of director of the Schiller archives in, I believe, Marburg.
This was in the late 80’s. Berwanger died shortly after that, which was a tragedy for many of us. Berwanger despised Kempowski. In truth, Kempowski was hard to like in person, being mostly dry and ironic with an undertone of cynicism, although I always respected him for his genius and also for his goodwill toward students. Like most of us, he was a mixed bag. But if you want to talk about a man with a heart and soul, that was Niki.
The atmosphere at this school was highly political and all this was going on over the heads of most of the students, who were not proficient in German. I’m not making any allegations. The truth will eventually out, one way or another.