Chaos, control and consistency

Wolfgang Koeppen's critical and popular reputations stem largely from his literary success in the 1950s, a success which has overshadowed the author's activities in the earlier years of his career. It is in the interest of redressing this imbalance that the present study has been undertaken. It traces a consistent line of development from Koeppen's journalistic activities in the Berlin of the 1930s, through his earliest creative writing, and on, in this light, to the post-war publications for which he is most famous. It is thus possible to place the whole of Koeppen's career within the social and literary context of sixty years of German history.