Wolfgang Koeppen

Wolfgang Arthur Reinhold Koeppen (June 23, 1906 – March 15, 1996) was a German novelist and one of the best known German authors of the post-war period. 

Koeppen was born out of wedlock in Greifswald to a seamstress. His father never accepted the fatherhood formally. He lived first in his grandmother's house on Bahnhofstrasse, but moved after her death in 1908 together with his mother to her sister in Ortelsburg (Szczytno), East Prussia, where Koeppen started visiting the public school. He and his mother moved back to Greifswald in 1912, but only two years later returned to East Prussia. Koeppen came back to Greifswald after World War I, working as a delivery boy for a book dealer. During that time he volunteered at the theater and attended lectures at the University of Greifswald. Finally in 1920, Koeppen left Greifswald permanently, and after twenty years of moving about, he settled in Munich, living there the remainder of his life. Throughout the 1950s, Koeppen travelled extensively, to the U.S., the Soviet Union, London and Warsaw. 

He started as a journalist. In 1934 his first novel appeared while he was in the Netherlands. In 1939 he came back to Germany, and from 1943 lived in Munich, where he also died in 1996 at age 89.