Besichtigung im Haus Kreienhoop

• Permanent Exhibition

The house turned out exactly as I had imagined it, a little cave, a little manor house, school and monastery.

House Kreienhoop can hardly be seen from the street - it is so enchanted in the large natural garden, between fields and meadows, built in the wide moorland landscape with birch groves on the flat horizon. Located on the edge of the small village of Nartum near Bremen, the cool charm of northern Germany is raw and unadulterated here.
Walter Kempowski designed his house himself and built it in several construction phases. It reveals the artist's dazzling inner world and has an impressive external impact. The result is a place full of surprises - with an inner courtyard, hall, pavilion and tower, with book aisles, work rooms, “lottery corner” and veranda. The extensive garden with an arbor and avenue is grown nature, but at the same time it is also a useful area with fruit trees, a chicken coop and a sheep pasture.

A house to live and work in
At first glance, House Kreienhoop appears to be a labyrinth. However, the visitor quickly becomes aware of the cloister architecture on which the property is based. Walter Kempowski lived and worked here, the archive for published autobiographies was housed here and the landlord organized literary seminars, conferences and author meetings here. Walter Kempowski described his domicile as a “sun-focusing house”, a “space station” and a “museum”. In the novel “Dog Days”, the “Kreienhoopwunder” went down in literary history as the house of the writer Alexander Sowtschick - you will only look in vain for the swimming passage in the real Kreienhoop...