13 Facts About Viola Roggenkamp

Viola Roggenkamp was born on 15 April 1948 and is a German journalist-commentator and writer.

Viola Roggenkamp's output includes literary portraits, essays, opinion pieces and novels.

Viola Roggenkamp studied Psychology, Philosophy and Music and then set out on her travels.

Viola Roggenkamp returned to Hamburg, but there have been frequent return trips to south Asia since then.

For two years between 1989 and 1991 Viola Roggenkamp lived in Israel.

In 1977 Viola Roggenkamp was a founder member of the team around Alice Schwarzer that created the magazine EMMA.

Viola Roggenkamp's mother was dead by the time she started writing this third book, and had, with tact but evident difficulty, refrained from asking questions about the earlier work, "Familienleben" after Viola had admitted that she was writing it.

Viola Roggenkamp always thought she protected me and my sister from all that.

Viola Roggenkamp's contribution concerning his attitude to his wife's Jewish provenance was bound to attract attention.

Viola Roggenkamp asserted that although much had been written about Thomas and Katia Mann, Katia's Jewish ancestry had been very little delved into, beyond bald statements recording the fact that she had, like her mother and like her children, been baptised.

Viola Roggenkamp was particularly critical, in this respect, of so-called "Mann-experts" such as Heinrich Breloer, as well as Inge and Walter Jens.

Viola Roggenkamp contended that the tendency of the Mann family to ignore the Jewish roots of Thomas Mann's wealthy father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim amounted to denial and was deeply damaging.

Viola Roggenkamp's insistence that much of the book's explosive impact comes from a wider context, in which discussion of the fate of German Jewry during the post-war period has been suppressed, is a judgement that Roggenkamp self-evidently shares.