Wolfgang Koeppen

The essay "Passionsgeschichte eines Briefmarkenhändlers" (pp. 129-142), based on a lecture held in Frankfurt, discusses the question of the possibility of literary treatment of the Holocaust and describes the story behind Koeppen's "Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch" (published in 1948 under Littner's name and in 1992 under Koeppen's name). Koeppen never met Littner; he was told about him by his publisher, Herbert Kluger, who asked Koeppen to write the book. Littner was an assimilated Jew living in Munich, who was suddenly confronted with his Jewishness by the Nazis. Because his parents were from Poland, he was deported in October 1938 and experienced the Holocaust in a Ukrainian ghetto. Koeppen describes the contradictory orders, the capriciousness and arbitrary shootings by the Wehrmacht and SS, the hunger, the fear, and the humiliation. The book is a mixture of fact and imagination, alternating between a straightforward documentary style and a poetic, even epic one. The result is uneven, but anything more polished would have been inappropriate.