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“... hedge of neglect. The Good Fairy, in this case, was a Berlin bookseller ‘who First recommended Koeppen’. Wolfgang Koeppen is 86. He wrote a couple of novels before the war, but his fame (now in abeyance, even in Germany where he was once classed with Böll and Grass), rests on the three he published in quick ...”

“... Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80 per cent of public officials, including many judges and senior civil servants, were former members of the Nazi Party ...”

“... high aspiration became debased by Nazism. Hofmann is a prolific translator of German prose (Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth and currently Gert Hofmann). He is also editing the selected works of Rilke. His own poetry enjoys a tacit dialogue with the works of Rilke and Hofmannsthal, and suggests a sympathy for the values of High Modernist Vienna (the ...”

“... as the most influential critic of his day. ‘He writes about me, therefore I am,’ observed Wolfgang Koeppen, one of Reich-Ranicki’s ‘discoveries’. But other authors had to endure his devastating Verrisse – a German word for which there is fortunately no English equivalent. It signifies a review in which the book is ‘ripped to ...”

“... has to do with the quality of the writing. ‘A great, inventive storyteller,’ the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen called him. And then, after a pause: ‘But literature it isn’t, of course.’ In his work big, fleshy men can’t help bullying; pale men with glasses are always fey; and hen-pecked husbands with red noses are stalked by domestic ...”

“... three novels came out in 1907, 1908 and 1909 with the firm of Bruno Cassirer (who later took on Wolfgang Koeppen). They represent Walser probably at the zenith of what it seems a mistake to call a career in anything but the most literal (or punning) sense. Walser was living in Berlin, sometimes in the house of his brother Karl, a famous and successful ...”