Walking along the Märkisches Ufer one wintry and icy cold Sunday morning in Berlin, Walter Kaufmann notices a bundle. Coming closer he realizes it is a homeless person:

These are the opening lines of a 2009 reflective piece by Kaufmann published in the former East German party organ Neues Deutschland. For this surviving newspaper relic of the communist era, Kaufmann reminisces and retraces his life from his teenage years in Britain and Australia, a topic that he has returned to over and over again during a career that has spanned almost seven decades. Notably, it is really only in work produced since the fall of the Berlin Wall that he touches on the crucial period during which he lived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), though even then he is rarely very critical – his criticism seems limited to the pinpointing of moments of doubt. For the bulk of his career and throughout most of his oeuvre, he has chosen instead to transport the reader elsewhere.

The London dormitory passage and the following detailed recollections of his experiences as a 15-year-old Jewish refugee in England are programmatic for his entire literary work: a fusion of autobiography, social critique and adventure. Now more than 90 years old and still living on the banks of the River Spree in central Berlin, Kaufmann is in a position to look back proudly and to feel that he has been lucky in life. Having escaped the Holocaust, he returned to the – by then divided – land of his birth holding Australian citizenship. He worked as a foreign correspondent for several East German newspapers and magazines and led a very privileged life in the GDR, remaining free to travel outside the tightly controlled borders of his adopted homeland. His travelogues made for popular reading in East Germany and their high print runs allowed him to maintain a comfortable existence as a professional author.