Evening with Walter Kempowski

- "I am at home wherever I am read." (Walter Kempowski on October 23, 1991 in Somnia - Diary 1991, 2008)
The Folklore Museum cordially invites you to this special evening with Christiane Woest and Rüdiger Ullrich!

We take Walter Kempowski's quote "I am at home wherever you read me" literally and invite you to this special evening of chatting on March 19,2026 at 7:00 pm! Excerpts from "Tadellöser und Wolff" and "Uns geht's ja noch gold" will be read at the Schönberg Folklore Museum. The guests of the evening are cordially invited to bring their own reading contributions! Afterwards we invite you to chat!

The works "Tadellöser und Wolff" and "Uns geht's ja noch gold" are two of a total of six novels and three interview books in Walter Kempowski's German chronicle. Here, the author, who was born in Rostock in 1929, tells the story of his family from the Wilhelmine era to the 1960s.
"Tadellöser und Wolff" and "Uns geht's ja noch gold" were published at very short intervals in 1971 and 1972 and are still known to a large readership today.
Memories of childhood and youth in Rostock from 1938 to 1945 are told in detail in "Tadellöser und Wolff". The novel "Uns geht's ja noch gold" begins seamlessly in 1945, when the Red Army marches into Rostock and the Kempowski family experiences the terrible everyday life after the war and tries to resume their bourgeois life. Because it's still gold... And yet everything changes. The novel ends in 1948. On March 8, Walter Kempowski is arrested during a visit to Rostock....

"Years of life, all in vain." is a quote from "Tadellöser und Wolff", which resonates with melancholy and an expression of the perpetual search for the meaning of life. This characterizes Walter Kempowski's way of writing. He writes the story of his family, a German chronicle, touching and authentic, in order to be able to live.