"Feuilletons" & "Romanfragmente" Reading & discussion with the editors of the new volumes Jörg Döring, Walter Erhart and Hans-Ulrich Treichel. Moderated by Eckhard Schumacher

The new volumes "Feuilletons" & "Romanfragmente" of the Wolfgang Koeppen work edition by Suhrkamp Verlag

"Feuilletons" (Volume 13), edited by Jörg Döring
Wolfgang Koeppen once said that no bibliographer would ever be able to list all of his newspaper articles in full. Jörg Döring has disproved this pessimism with this volume of his works. As a result of the meticulous autopsy of almost all the publications in which Koeppen had the opportunity to publish, a compilation of all Koeppen's feuilletons, reviews and newspaper reports has been compiled: They are reprinted in this volume for the first time ever. Their republication reveals an author, especially from the 1930s, who was (almost) willing to do anything if the right assignments were available: in short contributions to the "Wit" section, in reviews of films and books as well as in reports on theater performances and in feuilletonistic and reportage-like observations on culture and everyday life, a writer articulates himself as a young journalist for the first time.

"Romanfragmente" (Volume 11), edited by Hans-Ulrich Treichel and Walter Erhart
Wolfgang Koeppen's novel fragments were written over a period of almost sixty years. As much as the author knew phases of increased productivity, such as in the years 1951 to 1954, when his novels "Tauben im Gras", "Das Treibhaus" and "Der Tod in Rom" were published, he was also repeatedly exposed to the experience of not being able to realize his literary plans. Wolfgang Koeppen was undoubtedly a writer in crisis, but it is possible that the unfinished and fragmentary was not only an obstacle to his productivity, but also a condition of it. And sometimes it was even the completion itself, as literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki called Koeppen's 1976 novel "Jugend" a "completed fragment".