Orchestrating echoes of the past Walter Kempowski and Das Echolot

Author(s)

Valéria Sabrina Pereira

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2011-07-04

Examining board members

Celeste Henriques Marquês Ribeiro de Sousa; Jorge Mattos Brito de Almeida; Elcio Loureiro Cornelsen; Markus Volker Lasch; Juliana Pasquarelli Perez

• Advisor: Celeste Henriques Marquês Ribeiro de Sousa

Abstract

From 1993 to 2004, Walter Kempowski published a sequence of ten books named Das Echolot. Ein Kollektives Tagebuch. (The Echo Sounder. A collective diary.) In these books, Kempowski aims to depict main episodes of the Second World War by presenting documents written mostly while the events took place: diaries, letters, memories, speeches or radio programs. Those documents were sorted according to the day they were written, and so they composed a great collective diary which depicts the events in a comprehensive and multifaceted perspective. In this thesis, the volume Barbarossa 41, which narrates the invasion of the USSR in 1941, was taken as an example to question the role of the author in this monumental montage of quotations that, at the first sight, seems to be just a formal organization of documents. In order to determinate how the meaning of the elements organized in the book gets established, the following items were observed: 1) the own structure of the book, 2) the quotations of some of the main figures that can be considered as exemplary and 3) the internal sequence in two whole days of the diary. The quotations of the exemplary characters were compared with the original documents, in order to identify the intentions that guided the author in the selection of the texts and the excerpts that would be published. The result of this research indicates that the role of the author in the constitution of the sense of the narrative which comes from the connection of the fragments is crucial. With another selection of texts and excerpts, the characters would leave a different impression on the reader; it was also confirmed that the specific organization of the material has created a panorama of the Second World War that is due to the intentions of the author, even if this fact remains mostly unnoticed by the reader. (AU)