Walter Kempowski Award for biographical writing for Jochen Schimmang’s works

We are proud to announce that Jochen Schimmang has been awarded the Walter Kempowski Award for biographical writing, worth 20.000,- Euros! The jury praised his subtle humour, melancholy wisdom combined with surprising cheerfulness.

Among his latest books:

© Maja Bechert

ALTES ZOLLHAUS, STAATSGRENZE WEST
(Old Customs House, Western Border, 2017)
A novel about life at disappearing borders, a quarter of a century after the end of the Bonn Republic. Gregor Korff, the protagonist of the much acclaimed novel Das Beste, was wir hatten, moves to the countryside in search of solitude.

© Maja Bechert

NEUE MITTE
(The New Centre, 2011)
We were neither enclave nor exclave, neither interspace nor periphery; we were right in the middle. Perhaps we were even what none of us wanted to be, the new centre. Jochen Schimmang creates a future Germany in the finest post-modern manner, celebrating the pure pleasure of the text. But the novel also is a suspense-filled political thriller with ironic distance towards its own genre. And in passing it tries to answer the question of how to live together.

© Maja Bechert

DAS BESTE, WAS WIR HATTEN
(The Best We Had, 2009)
It was not only the German Democratic Republic that collapsed after the Berlin wall was torn down, but also the old Federal Republic of Germany. In his novel Das Beste, was wir hatten Jochen Schimmang portrays the life of Gregor Korff and Leo Münks, two young men who are studying in West Berlin and happen to get involved with the Leftists in the 1970’s, and then become a minister consultant in the (former) German capital Bonn and a federal homeland-security agent in Cologne respectively. Both rationally understand what is happening in 1989, but they have trouble realizing that their old »republic« (BRD) won’t be the same after all the historical changes.