The first major novel by German author Walter Kempowski describes a youth that was anything but ordinary. When the curtain rises in 1938, the protagonist Walter is a nine-year-old living with his family in the north-east German city of Rostock; by the time the novel ends in 1945, amid the smouldering ruins of the end of the second world war, he has just turned 17. Narrated through a chorus of voices, the novel recounts how the boy’s middle-class conservative milieu fell apart under the pressures of growing intolerance, political extremism and the destruction of war.
Throughout the book, “ordinary” aspects of family life sit uneasily alongside the extraordinary arc of world history, and the Germans’ uniquely catastrophic role in it. The unspoken tensions between the everyday and the apocalyptic, banality and evil, give the novel its narrative momentum and powerfully unsettling impact. As the Nazis are consolidating their power, young Walter is putting on silly plays with his brother; as combat rages, he listens to records and submits fake sick notes to get out of Hitler Youth sessions. His family, meanwhile, are desperate to cling to their social habits. Walter’s mother complains about maids having the gall to wear fur coats; his father monologues about business. When Walter’s brother hears a school friend has been killed, he wonders who will inherit the roofing-felt factory that the boy was expected to take over. Kempowski’s narration captures all of this impassively. Historical atrocity appears, not in nightmarish chiaroscuro, but edging into and around the fabric of ordinary life. “The whole family was photographed: Mother in her pelerine dress, Robert sailing, and me in my Hamburg suit. Even father, in his SA uniform, standing under a birch tree.”
