Wolfgang lived first in his grandmother's house on Bahnhofstrasse, but after her death in 1908 moved with his mother to her sister's in Ortelsburg (Szczytno), East Prussia, where Koeppen began attending the public school.
Finally in 1920, Koeppen left Greifswald permanently, and after 20 years of moving about, settled in Munich, living there the remainder of his life.
[4] As noted by critic David Ward, neither novel addresses directly the Nazis' rise to power, but both "are marked by a sense of imminent danger: a precarious imbalance that cannot be sustained but is never resolved, hinting at the impossible position of the artist in Hitler's Germany" [5] Unable to secure a working permit in the Netherlands, in 1939 he returned to Germany, and from 1943 until his death he lived in Munich.
In 1947, Koeppen was asked to write the memoirs of the philatelist and Holocaust survivor Jakob Littner (born 1883 in Budapest, died 1950 in New York City).
Gottlieb Judejahn, a character in Der Tod in Rom, is a former SS general condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials.
Conductor Kürenberg is married to Ilse, who is Jewish and who survived the Holocaust as she and her Gentile husband could afford to live outside Germany during the war.
Der Tod in Rom is an exploration of themes associated with the Holocaust, German guilt, conflict between generations and the silencing of the past.