Walter Kolbenhoff’s memory book “Schellingstrasse 48” – Munich
“And the evening in Munich, through which I walk, is for the most part a sad landscape of ruins,” writes Hans Werner Richter succinctly in his 1979 book about Group 47. He doesn’t say more about the city that was bombed in the war. Quite different from Walter Kolbenhoff, Richter’s friend from internment camp days in America. In his autobiographical memory book “Schellingstrasse 48”, published five years later, the detailed descriptions of Munich in the immediate post-war period are among the most impressive that one can read. You can tell from the trained look of the reporter Kolbenhoff, who died for death in his hometown Berlin before he emigrated to Copenhagen in 1933 World in the morning, to die Red flag, the Forward reports Hut.
After his release from American captivity, Kolbenhoff actually wanted to return to Denmark. It was a coincidence that he ended up stranded in Munich and finally stayed there for the rest of his life. Maybe luck too, who knows? He arrived in Munich for the second time in his life in March 1946 via the stations in New York, Le Havre, Bad Aibling and Dietramszell. But he did not recognize the city, which the 17-year-old, who was born in 1908, once got to know: “I walked like a dream hiker through this desert. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just wanted to see the city. But there was no city.” What there was, on the other hand, was rubble and ruins as far as the eye could see.
Kolbenhoff only wanted to get away “from this desolate hell”, but it turned out differently. At Marienplatz he discovered a request from Alfred Andersch, whom he had also met in America, on a board wall littered with notes. All newspaper people should report to Schellingstrasse 39, stand there. Kolbenhoff went there, found himself in the editorial office of the New newspaper again and shortly thereafter to their feature editor, Erich Kästner. He hired him on the spot. He also organized a room to sublet for his new translator and literary critic. “What a day, I thought when I was back outside on Schellingstrasse.”
In the months that followed, newspaper and literary history was written: in 15 sections, Kolbenhoff impressively tells this cultural rebirth from the ruins of the past, which he worked on as an employee of New newspaper, of call – Independent papers of the young generation as well as being a founding member of Group 47. Hans Wallenberg, the editor-in-chief of New newspaper, made him a reporter again, chased him out into the street. It is the time of the black market, of hunger, but also of the “total oblivion” of the Nazi atrocities.
“Every niche in the wall was a brothel, every doorless house entrance a market hall”
Pistonhoff, whose trademark was his pipe, encountered gatekeepers, disabled people and miracle healers. He loved to hang around the station area. Here “it was teeming with crooks, money changers, fraudsters and highwaymen. In between refugees, the lonely, lost, abandoned (…) Every niche in the wall was a brothel, every doorless house entrance a market hall for everything a person needed.”
Even though Kolbenhoff had a job and was then assigned the apartment on the fourth floor at Schellingstrasse 48 that gave his autobiography its title and which soon became popular with the crème de la crème of the cultural scene at the time, he too suffered from hunger and cold. On the day of his wedding on January 4, 1947, the thermometer showed minus 27 degrees. The modest wedding celebration takes place in Nymphenburg with Hans Werner Richter, who meanwhile also lived in the city. Trams didn’t run, the newly married couple set off on foot from the city center, armed as a precaution. “All people used to stay in the middle of the ruined streets when they were out at night, clutching a hard object in their pockets. Death could lurk in the rubble to the right and left,” we read.
“Schellingstraße 48. Experiences with Germany” is an autobiographical inventory and a chronicle of contemporary history in one. Kolbenhoff tells associatively, and his language is always impressively clear. The sensitive portraits of his friends Alfred Andersch, Hans Werner Richter and Günter Eich are branded. On one of their nocturnal forays through Schwabing, Kolbenhoff and Eich kept passing a shop window with a cardboard board with the riddle word “literate” in it. Eich was fascinated, brooding over it all evening: “That must have been an old man who wanted to tell us something. Now he is surely dead and can no longer tell us anything … writer …”
Walter Kolbenhoff died in Germering in 1993. Since 1995, the city has honored people or groups with the Walter Pistonhoff Prize for outstanding work in the fields of fine arts, literature, music, theater and film, performing and performing arts and architecture.
Walter Kolbenhoff: Schellingstrasse 48. Experiences with Germany, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1984; or SZ-Bibliothek, Munich 2008, 240 pages. Both antiquarian.