Prima sort

Deutsche Chronik #4

by Walter Kempowski, Małgorzata Gralińska (Translator)

Najsłynniejsza powieść Waltera Kempowskiego, autora Wszystko na darmo.

Rostock, 1938 rok. Rodzina Kempowskich, Karl, weteran I wojny światowej, armator i makler morski, jego żona Margarethe oraz trójka dzieci: Ulla, Robert i Walter, wiedzie zwyczajne mieszczańskie życie, ale reżim nazistowski, a potem wojna coraz brutalniej wkraczają w ich codzienność. Narrator w sposób przejmujący, choć niepozbawiony sarkastycznego humoru, opowiada o dorastaniu w czasach brunatnej dyktatury. Władzę nad duszami i umysłami młodych ludzi dzierży Hitlerjugend i owładnięta nazistowską ideologią szkoła. Przemoc jest na porządku dziennym. Także rodzina, która za wszelką cenę próbuje zachować pozory normalnego życia i wierność zasadom, nie stanowi wystarczającego oparcia. Bo czy milczenie i bierność nie oznaczają przyzwolenia na wszechobecne zło?

Powieść Prima sort ukazała się po raz pierwszy w 1971 roku i z miejsca przyniosła autorowi rozpoznawalność oraz uznanie czytelników i krytyki. Cztery lata później niemiecka telewizja ZDF wyemitowała dwuczęściowy film pt. Tadellöser & Wolff w reżyserii Eberharda Fechnera na jej podstawie. W 2024 roku tygodnik Der Spiegel umieścił Prima sort na liście stu najważniejszych książek niemieckojęzycznych ostatniego stulecia.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Germany, Classics, German Literature, 20th Century, Novels

592 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Walter Kempowski was a German writer. He was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental Echolot ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like reading books about German people’s lives during the Second World War. I don’t mean the leaders’ lives but instead the lives of ordinary people. I’ve read enough books now about the leaders that got humanity into the mess. Tadellöser & Wolff is about ordinary people and this I like. The author writes of his youth, his adolescent years growing up in the port city of Rostock, East Germany, from 1938 to 1945 under Nazi rule. It starts when he is nine and continues until he has just turned seventeen.

This is a book of autobiographical fiction. It is told in the first person narrative. It draws an accurate picture of what many Germans experienced, were confronted by and thought about during the war. The picture drawn is not exaggerated. It is not intended to pack a punch, often the point of pure fiction. Most Germans kept their mouths shut, didn’t cause a ruckus, went along with the flow. Let’s be realistic now, lying low was a means of surviving. Put yourself in their shoes, is this not understandable?

I like the book for its honesty. On the other hand, it doesn’t grab one’s attention all that much. We share with Walter hours spent at school, we meet a couple of Walter’s friends, celebrate a Christmas holiday, a short vacation in Harz and his sister’s wedding. Food, clothing, books, games, illnesses (scarlet fever) are spoken of. We get a clear picture of Walter’s Mom and Dad. His older brother and sister we learn of too, but they are rather dry. Short episodes give readers a picture of grandparents. Air raids, bombing and time spent in shelters are what we see of the war. A trip is made to Hamburg and later Berlin after enlistment. At this point the insurgence of Russians is what is feared. We get a realistic picture of what many, many Germans went through.

The prose consists of short, abrupt sentences. Some of the metaphors I liked. Picture a guy with a head jutting out from shoulder as that of an eagle. Walter’s Mom wore a hat crowned by fake bird. You see such images in your mind’s eye and smile. The events spoken of don’t run smoothly; they move forward in stops and starts. What is delivered is more like a collection of snapshots. I would stop and ask myself, “What had happened between then and now?” The movement forward is jumpy. The style is choppy.

Are you wondering about the title? The father loved, loved, loved cigars made by Loeser & Wolff. So when things were going good, really good, family members would exclaim “Tadellöser & Wolff", which of course would mean the best of the best!!!! Call the expression family jargon!

The audiobook I listened to is read by Per Godenius. You can easily hear every word, so I like it. However, it is in no way extraordinary. Three stars for the narration. I would not hesitate to listen to other books by this narrator.

I’m glad to have read this, but it didn’t wow me. It’s unexceptional, sort of flat.

*****************************

*Tadellöser & Wolff 3 stars
*All for Nothing TBR

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't as polished or as measured as All for Nothing, but equally unsentimental and unsparing. Published in German as Tadellöser & Wolff, an untranslatable bit of family lexicon, An Ordinary Youth is Kempowski's fictionalized autobiography, recounted in highly episodic and diaristic form.

The fragmentation of the structure makes this novel a slow read, dependent on close observation of seemingly minor details, and it's very light on narrative drive or tension until its final chapters, when these tiny scraps of information accumulate into a devastating denouement. Reading this never felt suffocating, and Kempowski provides enough silences and negative spaces for the narrative to breathe.

Each short chapter depicts a thematic facet of Walter's youth during the Third Reich as the youngest son of a großbürgerlich mercantile family in Rostock, from a naïve and oblivious nine-year-old schoolboy under a tightening dictatorship, to an unwitting fifteen-year-old member of the Hitler Youth during wartime. It's an ordinary boy's life, filled with playmates, toys, books, crushes, jazz records, and homework, an idyll of learned helplessness that he's able to sustain until very late into the war.

While the cruelty and barbarity of the regime seeps into every corner of the family's life, young Walter lacks the adult postwar perspective of his adult self, and he's surrounded by parents and authority figures who range from passively resisting the regime, to being grudgingly tolerant of it, to being horrifically complicit with its worst excesses.

His World War I veteran father is a loudmouthed, militaristic buffoon revealed mostly through glib, ridiculous dialogue, until he vanishes into the maw of the eastern front. His mother, a cosseted heiress, clings to the trappings of a comfortable life, even through the fire-bombings and Soviet invasion and the departures of her husband and two sons into the war effort.

At its heart, this is a novel about the banality of evil, and the persistence of domestic life in extremis. Highly recommended, especially if you're going to see Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest, which presents a far more focused and concentrated vision of an orderly family life in an industrially genocidal regime in surgically controlled and calculatedly horrific form.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth book (of nine) of the German Chronicle by Walter Kempowski.

After a brief interruption by book #3 (Dіd you ever see Hitler? – an interview book) we’re back with the Kempowski family of Rostock again. This book (all fictitious! – it says) covers the time from 1938 to May 1945 (the second half of the Thousand-Year Reich). It took me the better part of the first chapter to realize why it reads so differently than the previous novels. That’s because it’s a first person narrative from the perspective of Walter Kempowski (the author? the fictional one? – who knows for sure). Walter is 9 years old in 1938 and just turned 17 at the end of the war. This puts him in the unique position to experience adolescence and war at the same time. Hitler Youth and girls, school and nonchalance, family and jazz music, war and air-raid shelters. He gets it all at once and he has to deal with it…


[bombed out Rostock – April 1942; from here; photo credit unknown]

“Tadellöser & Wolff” is the most popular novel of the German Chronicle with almost three times as many ratings on Goodreads as any other book in the series. It was also the first one being published (in 1971). The publishing order is a mess, by the way; it goes IV, V, III, VIII, VII, I, VI, II, IX. But I’m reading them chronologically by the time they’re set because I figure it makes sense with a book series that has the name Chronicle in its title.

I have to say that I liked this installment a little less than the previous two. The collage style the author is famous for is a little overdone here. The whole text looks a little like a patchwork quilt. It’s well made, no doubt, but I sometimes felt a little lost. The characters don’t have enough room to develop properly between the different patches.

There are still many great (albeit short) scenes, especially when the whole family meets. Again, the reader plays the role of the fly on the wall. And since I’m used to the family-jargon, their “Schnack”, by now I enjoyed those scenes very much. This is in parts a war-novel, but in contrast to the first book (World War I) we don’t get any battle-scenes. To the people of Rostock the war is limited to the air-raids but those were quite severe and are presented as such. Apart from the actual war actions the tone is more on the ironic/sardonic side. Kempowski was accused of naivety by contemporary critics, especially for using the word “Auschwitz” only once in the book and in context of a newspaper article that doesn’t have anything to do with the concentration camps. If those critics would had bothered to read the whole book carefully they would have discovered quite a few references to KZ. In fact everything of these fateful years is there, you just have to find it; it is not shoved down your throat. Another intriguing new character I like to mention is Sven Sörensen, a Dane who is spending his time in Germany voluntarily, working for the family company. He gives the story a nice extra touch by presenting his view as a foreigner on Germany and the Germans. Unfortunately he is leaving for Denmark in the middle of the book, but I’m quite sure he’ll make a re-appearance in a later book.

Like I said, I read the books in the wrong order (not in the one they’ve been published), but I didn’t notice this fact at all. It’s amazing how well the books fit together in “my” reading order. There are references back and forth between the books and none of these seem awkward of forced. This is also shows what a great and standing-above-it-all author Walter Kempowski was.

PS: A brief explanation about the title of this book: The term “Tadellöser & Wollf”, although it reads like the name of a company, is in fact part of the Kempowski family-lingo and is used for anything that is extraordinarily good. There was a cigar manufacturer in Berlin called “Loeser & Wolff” [Karl Kempowski’s favorite brand of cigars and apparently also featured in Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz]. The first name, “Loeser”, is pronounced the same way as “Löser”. The word “tadellos” means blameless, or impeccable. The comparative form of this adjective would be “tadellöser” (blamelesser?) in German (if it would exist, what it doesn’t). So Karl Kempowski smokes the blameless cigars of “Loeser & Wolff”, and calls them “Tadellöser & Wolf”, and then later anything that is of the highest quality. As you can imagine there are not a lot of things you could call “Tadellöser & Wolf” in wartime. But here are a few, and especially the mother is definitely a person for whom the glass is always half full.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Kempowski's 1971 biographical fiction novel Tadellöser & Wolff (and which has the title of An Ordinary Youth in English translation) might be the first of Kempowski's German Chronicle novels if one considers its date of publication. However, with regard to historical time, Tadellöser & Wolff actually comes after both Aus großer Zeit (Days of Greatness) and Schöne Aussicht (which does not seem to have been translated into English, and that is too bad, since it leaves a large gap between Days of Greatness and An Ordinary Youth).

But while Tadellöser & Wolff (which is also the most well known of Kempowski's German Chronicle books and has even been made into a film) is technically considered to be fiction, the presented story is drawn so directly and heavily from the author's, from Walter Kempowski’s own boyhood experiences, from his and his family's life in Rostock, Germany, during the Third Reich, during the Nazi regime, that I for one and most definitely find Kempowski's text majorly and intensely autobiographical and as such also rather more non-fiction than fiction in scope and nature (but which is actually also something I personally have much enjoyed and do appreciate about Tadellöser & Wolff). For this autobiographical, taken from actual and realistic life, this non fiction and historically authentic and accurate feel of Tadellöser & Wolff, it really and nicely gives a wonderfully delightful and also enlightening textual immediacy and I as a reader equally and certainly do feel as though I am being given with Tadellöser & Wolff not only a first person narration from Kempowski's pen but that I am also getting to know the entire Kemposwski clan (as well as WWII Germany and Germans in general for that matter) on an intimate, on a personal level and in a historically authentic and accurate manner.

And albeit part of me certainly (with some personal and I guess entirely German feelings of guilty discomfort) kind of misses detailed information of the Holocaust being shown and critically addressed in Tadellöser & Wolff, well, because the text is written from the point of view of the youngest son, of Walter, who was four years old in 1933 and sixteen in 1945, I did not in fact expect many if any textual Holocaust details to be presented in Tadellöser & Wolff unless the Kempowskis had been actively resisting the Nazis and had made it their mission to find out what was going on and to publicly speak out against this, but no, this obviously but unsurprisingly is not at all the case in Tadellöser & Wolff. As while the members of the Kempowski family are seemingly and from Walter Kempowski's remembrances and his featured narrative not actively and rabidly supportive of Adolf Hitler et al, they also do not in any way resist and fight against the National Socialists either, they are shown as being what most Germans likely were during WWII, so-called Mitläufer, running along to the tune and the dictates of the government, even sometimes willingly and uncritically accepting and believing Nazism and Adolf Hitler's ridiculous lies, which for me definitely is quite emotionally problematic, but it also does not take away from the fact that I have definitely very much enjoyed reading Tadellöser & Wolf and very warmly do cherish the textual foray into WWII Germany and what a German family like the Kempowskis was like (and that this was obviously the case for much of Germany in general).

Furthermore, just to say that I for one do also majorly value the textual honesty of Walter Kemposwki's remembrances and that Tadellöser & Wolff would indeed be a very very much distasteful and uncomfortable (even quite personally unacceptable) story for me had Kempowski even remotely attempted to textually render his family as for example being anti Nazi resistance fighters when this does not represent the truth, because with WWII and with National Socialism, I for one (and with my German background) always want and need honesty and truth and which I do believe Tadellöser & Wolff and Kempowski's printed words very nicely provide, and that I am also rather majorly pleased that not everything textually encountered in Tadellöser & Wolff is just about WWII and National Socialism, that much of Walter Kempowski's text shows a close-knit, affectionate family, with their own private jokes and stories, breakfast routines, dinner quarrels, moods, anxieties, and that at first, no one, neither the parents nor even more the children suspect and comprehend the incoming chaos and cataclysm of WWII.

Now finally, with regard to Walter Kampowski's writing style for Tadellöser & Wolff, well, I do have to say that it took me a rather long time to get used to Kempowski bringing the German (and Rostock) past to life through a rather distracting and textually all over the place choir of multiple voices (dialogue, song, architecture, literature, commercials, political slogans and so on and so on) and that often sentences are not only really short and choppy but also seem to quite regularly lack verbs (are thus not always grammatically correct, and that this means that I as a German language instructor would probably not consider using Tadellöser & Wolff in a German as a Second Language classroom). But yes, after my initial stylistic frustration and distraction, I did get increasingly accustomed to (and also appreciative of) how Walter Kempowski writes in Tadellöser & Wolff and that Kempowski's many textually jumpy sketches of Rostock and of his own family, rather brilliantly mirror the contents of Tadellöser & Wolff, by stylistically showing the turbulence of Germany racing towards war and also becoming increasingly intolerant and ready to accept and not question the worst of National Socialism, with Tadellöser &, Wolff thus being a kind of time capsule, and that Walter Kempowski's personal family story with sadness and resignation demonstrates how even those Germans who did not intensely support Adolf Hitler but did nothing actively against National Socialism's rising tide of power, of racism and intolerance certainly do have some collective guilt to consider and to accept.

And yes, I have now ordered the entire German Chronicle series from my local independent bookstore and am especially looking forward to reading the as mentioned above first novel (chronologically) Aus großer Zeit (and am kind of wondering if Walter Kempowski's family story will perhaps also feel a bit similar to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks but without the family decadence and decay).

[Marika_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5?

Zakładam, że wszyscy czytaliśmy już mnóstwo książek fikcyjnych i z literatury faktu opowiadających o II wojnie światowej, ale jak często czytaliście coś z perspektywy niemieckiej?

Kempowski w „Prima sort” opisuje historię niemieckiej rodziny… Kempowskich. Zbieżność nazwisk raczej nieprzypadkowa, szczególnie, że narratorem jest chłopiec imieniem Walter (na początku książki 9-letni), a jego rodzice to Karl i Margarethe, imiona takie same jak ojca i matki autora, a w książce pojawia się też rodzeństwo Waltera - Ulla i Robert. W „Prima sort” śledzimy dzieje tej rodziny czasów rozwijającego się w Niemczech reżimu nazistowskiego i podczas II wojny światowej. Samej wojny początkowo nie ma wiele, to tylko dalekie tło przebijające się przez opisywane perypetie rodziny. Im dalej jednak, tym bardziej wojna zaczyna być namacalna, ojciec na wojnie, młody narrator w Hitlerjugend, nocne ucieczki do schronów.

I tak, użyłam wcześniej słowa „perypetie”, bo wbrew pozorom to książka jest miejscami niezwykle zabawna, napisana ze swadą i dziecięcą beztroską. Dzięki temu czyta się to niezwykle dobrze, a dodatkowo lekkości dodaje jej też forma dość fragmentaryczna, patchworkowa, z miejscem na oddech pomiędzy akapitami oraz bogata we wtrącenia z cytatami z piosenek, wierszy czy literatury. Jest to mocno chaotyczne, ale mam wrażenie, że w tym chaosie jest metoda i oddaje to też pewną gorączkowość narodu niemieckiego spowodowaną wrzawą wojenną i moralnym rozdarciem.
Podobało mi się bardzo i czekam na kolejne tomy tej kroniki rodzinnej.

„- Podobno po raz pierwszy do walki wkroczyły jednostki Waffen-SS. - A co myślałeś, ci, jak uderzą, to nie zostaje kamień na kamieniu, nie ma co zbierać.
- Tak - przytaknął ojciec. Kompletna ruina. Oni się nie cackają. - Ten cały Hi*ler zna się na rzeczy. Szast-prast ich załatwi”.

[Daniel Duda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rewelacyjnie jest to napisane. Znakomicie Kempowski wyważa obrazy z życia codziennego i wojenne tło.

[Lara Stanley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not unhappy that I read this, but I did find it a bit of a slog in parts. Maybe Walter’s observations skipping from paragraph to paragraph made it harder for me to get into, maybe the mundanity of his life was just a bit boring? Maybe also it wasn’t surprising to me that some people were having relatively normal childhoods in this time. I would have liked to have seen more of the adult conversation - Walter’s family are obviously complicit in the regime even if they don’t think they are, I would have liked to have seen more of what his parents thought of things, and slightly less of his reports of what was happening. It was however extremely detailed and sometimes immersive, and I admire people who can write convincingly in the voice of a child.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kempowski beschreibt in diesem collagenartig angelegten Roman, der Teil der insgesamt neun Bände umfassenden „Deutschen Chronik“ ist, seine Kindheit im Dritten Reich.
Was dieses Buch lesenswert macht, ist Kempowskis oft grotesk und zynisch anmutende Art mit diesem schwierigen Kapitel deutscher Geschichte umzugehen. Hier wird nicht ermahnend der Zeigefinger erhoben, sondern vielmehr auf eine einzigartige Weise durch bewusste Auslassungen, Verharmlosungen und Belustigungen provoziert. Der Roman bietet einen authentischen Einblick in das private Leben der durchschnittlichen bürgerlichen Existenz jener Zeit.
In das kollektive Gedächtnis eingegangen sind vor allem die vielen Kempowski’schen Sprüche, die vor allem in den 70ern und 80ern, aber auch noch heute bei Kennern zu geflügelten Wörtern geworden sind.
Tadellose Sache das, dieser Roman!

[Witoldzio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jest to troche dziwna powiesc, dluzyla mi sie, ale dotarlem do konca. Pisana w malutkich, czesto bardzo krotkich paragrafach, w obrazkach, scenach. Takie modernistyczne podejscie. Raczej slaba ta narracja, jesli ktos chce znalezc w tej ksiazce fascynujaca podniecajaca akcje to raczej jej nie znajdzie. Nasz bohater nie ma specjalnie wrazen, uczuc, moze najbardziej uczuciowa jest jego mama, cala reszta, sasiedzi, krewni, koledzy ze szkoly, nauczyciele, ojciec, dziadek, to jacys zahamowani ludzie. A dzieciaki bawia sie i bawia, kombinuja po miescie, a dookola jest wojna o ktorej sie malo mowi. Generalnie wszyscy posluszni i malomowiacy, zatkalo ich. Duzo w ksiazce odnosnikow do piesni, wierszy, muzyki. Autorowi chodzilo o uwiecznienie wlasnego dziecinstwa i o przypomnienie starszemu pokoleniu w co ich wpakowano. Dobrze ze przeczytalem "Wszystko na darmo" najpierw. "Wszystko na darmo" jest tradycyjna powiescia, a "Prima sort" jest w pewnym sensie odnosnikiem do Zachodnich Niemiec z wczesnych lat 70tych, ten mlody bohater powiesci jest praktycznie kandydatem na hipisa. Ja natomiast podejrzewam ze jednak az tyle wolnosci za Hitlera w latach 1944-45 nie bylo, ze trzeba bylo jednak na siebie duzo bardziej uwazac. Ksiazka jest w pewnym sensie zastanawiajaca, ta wojna dziejaca sie dookola jak gdyby naszego bohatera osobiscie nie dotyczy, on sobie chce czytac ksiazki, sluchac jazzu i psocic jak glupi dzieciak. Ale rola tej ksiazki w wewnetrznej debacie w Niemczech o wojnie jest na pewno duza. Ten spisek milczenia w ktory sie wszyscy wpakowali jest naprawde zastanawiajacy. I zabralo 30 lat by napisac i wydac taka ksiazke w Zachodnich Niemczech.

[Gemma · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final scenes of this book are incredibly memorable, but it is a very slow read - and sometimes a struggle to get through. 3/5.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Billed as an autobiographical novel, this is essentially an autobiography embellished into a novel. Kempowski, an upper middle class German teenager living in Rostock during world War Ii, gives you a real sense of what it must have been like for ordinary people at the time, although at times I had to wonder why he and his mother, weren’t more frightened and depressed. The book does give you the sense that people like his family who should’ve known better went along with what was going on, and only had doubts as Germany began to collapse. This is an important work for anyone interested in Germany during the war.

[Amy Stine]

I really wanted to love this, but I feel like I missed out on at least a quarter of the book because of the translation to English. There were so many German references that I didn’t understand and I couldn’t figure out if they were important enough to research.
It’s also written in short vignettes (not sure if that’s the right word) so it’s easy to read, but is also choppy.
The overall storyline was good, which kept me reading, but I wish I could’ve understood all of the nuances along the way. It would’ve made for a much better story. All in all, especially knowing this was based on the author’s own upbringing, it was worth the read. But, I can’t quite put my finger on a rating.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ish. I think a lot of the nuance of this book must be lost in translation. I don’t think that’s the translator’s fault. He does explain in an endnote the difficulties of translating this novel.

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In antiquierter Sprache, herrlich zynisch erzählt - ein wunderbares Kleinod deutscher Literatur!

[HansBlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deutschsprachige Rezension aus HansBlog.de:

Walter Kempowski schreibt ein sehr sinnliches, eigenwilliges und altmodisches Deutsch, das jedoch stets kraftvoll und in der direkten Rede teils verspielt und/oder falsch tönt: "Entpörend… konfortabel… Immerhinque… vom Stamme Nimm… allerhandlei… Verstahne vous?... zu und zu schön"
Manche Sprüche erklingen wieder und wieder, wie altvertraute Möbelstücke.
All die sprachliche Finesse bringt meine btb-Ausgabe 3. Auflage 1996 über lange Strecken ohne jeden Tippfehler, dann passiert's aber doch: "mach Hause" (sic) heißt's auf S. 391, dort m.E. kein Sprachtic des Sprechers.
Walter Kempowski (1929 – 2007) archiviert neben sprachlichen Antiquitäten auch Sitten und Objekte der 1930er, 1940er Jahre, darunter Butterrosen, ans Jacket geklammerte Hüte und Lehrer mit Kasernenhofton. Und er zeigt eine Familie, die mitten im Krieg eine wunderliche Normalität zelebriert – nicht hitlertreu, eher angenervt vom Nazischmarrn, aber nicht wirklich im Widerstand, an Alltagsritualen verbissen festhaltend. Der rebellische Teen kommt nicht an die Front, sondern in eine noch erträgliche "Pflichtgefolgschaft". In einer zerbombten Stadt, 1942, heißt es lauschig:
Nach Tisch saß man immer noch ein Weilchen beisammen. Die Sonne schien ins Wohnzimmer, und der Kanarienvogel sang. "Kinder, wie isses schön…"
Und die Nachbarn "ließen immer die Wohnungstür offenstehn, damit der Mief ins Treppenhaus abzieht."
1944 mutiert der junge Ich-Erzähler zum kratzb��rstigen Pubertier, und während um ihn herum das Land zerfällt, Bomben ihm das Dach über dem Kopf wegreißen, pflegt er modische Tics und persönlichen Kleinkrieg mit Aufsichtspersonen.
Zwar gibt es keine dramatische Handlung. Das Drama entwickelt sich aus dem allmählichen, höhepunktfreien Zerfall von Land und Familie. Der Autor collagiert Sprach- und Erinnerungsbausteine virtuos zu einem komplexen, kleinteiligen Mosaik: erst mit einigem Abstand erkennt man die großen Linien. Doch Kempowski erzählt von einer ganz normalen Familiengeschichte in außergewöhnlicher Zeit in packend-passender, dabei leicht konsumierbarer Sprache. Die Sprache als solche "sagt" hier viel mehr als in den meisten anderen Büchern. Sowas gibt's heute gar nicht mehr.
Und auch das erfahren wir aus Rostock, Meckpomm:
S. 370: Der Kerl war ja auch in der Partei. Und wie kann man bloß "Merkel" heißen.
S. 424: Frau Merkel, eigentlich eine dumme Pute.
Die Merkes kehren im Anschlussband Uns geht's ja noch gold kurz wieder. Die Geschichte wurde 1975 fürs ZDF verfilmt – in Sepia. Die dreiteilige TV-Fortsetzung Ein Kapitel für sich folgte 1979 auf Basis weiterer Kempowski-Romane, darunter Uns geht's ja noch gold.
Vergleich mit dem Vorgängerband Uns geht's ja noch gold
Der Collage-Mosaik-Stil in Uns geht's ja noch gold ist weniger sprunghaft als in Tadelloeser & Wolf, der Stil wirkt etwas moderater. So bleibt Kempowski in Uns geht's ja noch gold teils über mehrere Abschnitte hin bei einem Thema, das wäre in Tadelloeser & Wolf undenkbar. Nur in Uns geht's ja noch gold gibt es ausgeprägtere Rückblenden, während Tadelloeser & Wolff viel strikter nur das Hier und Jetzt beschreibt, also die Jahre 1938 - 1945. Tadelloeser & Wolff fügt sich insgesamt zu einem runderen Erzählbogen als Uns geht's ja noch gold.
"Gold" interessiert sich deutlicher für untergeschossige menschliche Ausscheidungen und liefert in meiner älteren dtv-Ausgabe mehr Grammatikfehler.
Man könnte meinen, dass Tadelloeser & Wolff mit seinem Blick auf die Kriegszeit mehr Leid und Stress schildert, tatsächlich ging mir jedoch Uns geht's ja noch gold mehr ans Gemüt – wegen der Plünderungen und Vergewaltigungen, teils in der erzählten Jetztzeit, teils in Rückblicken. Und Kempokenner ahnen, dass in "Gold" weitere Leidprüfungen bevorstehen.
Freie Assoziationen:
Die Buddenbrooks, wegen der Handelsfamilie an der Ostsee und der sinnlichen Sprache mit purzelnden Vokalen (aus derselben Gegend stammt auch Tonio Kröger, und Kempowski hat eine Anna Kröger im Personal) (im Anschlussband Uns geht's ja noch gold werden die Buddenbrooks und Thomas Mann ausdrücklich angesprochen)
Weitere Kempowski-Bücher wie Uns geht's ja noch gold (die Fortsetzung von Tadellöser und Wolff, der titelgebende Satz erklingt mehrfach bereits in Tadelloeser & Wolff) und Heile Welt wegen des unverwechselbaren Kempo-Ideolekts (der in Tadelloeser & Wolff dank Ich-Erzähler eher überzeugt als beim teil-auktiorialen Erzähler der Heilen Welt)
Günter Grass' Katz und Maus: Er beschreibt auch Jugendliche im Krieg im deutschen Nordosten, die teils mehr mit Privatkram als mit dem Großenganzen hadern; Ton und Inhalt unterscheiden sich jedoch deutlich

[Triglaf]

Tadellöser & Wolff, which is the German title of An Ordinary Youth, is one of my favourite books, so much so that I bought it in English. I wanted to see how the translator Michael Lipkin coped with this task - a task that must have been very demanding, I can fully understand his ‘translator's notes’. That's why I don't want to go into the content of the book here, because there are already other reviews. My point is to warn English-speaking readers not to take everything at face value.

To summarise, the translations of Kempowski's books by Anthea Bell (‘All For Nothing’), Charlotte Collins (‘Homeland’, also as ‘Marrow and Bone’) and Leila Vennewitz (‘Days Of Greatness’) are better. Significantly better. These ladies knew what they were doing.

Unfortunately, the text has been shortened quite a bit, but there was probably no other way - but the translation errors could have been handled differently. In the following, I refer to the page numbers of the Granta paperback edition of 2024. However, there are not only errors, but sometimes also small notes for understanding, which in my opinion are still necessary, for example right on

p. 12
Whether out in the woods or snug in your den
Enjoy Dr Krause's Mineral Water.

German:
Ob im Wald, ob in der Klause
Dr. Krauses Sonnenbrause

The ad slogan rhymes in German, of course, and ‘Sonnenbrause’ means ‘sun soda’ or ‘sun pop’ as a brand name. But it sounds very home-made. The use of ‘Klause’ (cell, hermitage) sounds unprofessional, very laboured and bumpy, a word that was probably only used for the slogan by Dr Krause when thinking it up - because almost nothing rhymes with Brause (soda). The meter feels off too. This is completely lost in the translation.

p. 41
In Between Red and White, Erich Dwinger described how they smashed prisoners' balls between bricks.

This is a correct translation, but what is missing is that Dwinger's book is about his captivity in Russia during the First World War, and ‘they’ are the Russians. Presumably, the author is alluding to his own imprisonment by the Russians from 1948 to 1956 (which German readers already knew about because he had written his first book ‘Im Block’ about it), foreshadowing what’s to come.

p. 45
„You shouldn't worry about the rucksack“, said Eckhoff. He told me I could bring up the rear, then people would think I was the leader.

Why would a leader go at the back? The original says ‘Furier’, not Führer, and that's an old military term - a non-commissioned officer responsible for procuring food, I don't know if you'd say ‘forager’ in English.

p. 50
Nickel pulled his trousers down, shat, quickly wiped and pulled his trousers back up.

What? What was the translator up to? Why would the boy, lined up in formation, squat down in front of everyone else for this purpose? How do you come up with wiping? It's absolutely incomprehensible what Mr Lipkin was thinking here.

In the original, the boy briefly drops his trousers to tuck the ends of his Hitler Youth shirt back in again: Der Nickel ließ die Hosen runter, strich das Braunhemd glatt, nahm die Zipfel zwischen die Beine und zog die Hose wieder hoch.

p. 56
With the whole party with the yacht club friends, you have to remember that such clubs were very much disliked by the Nazi regime, even more so the swing fans that Walter's brother Robert and his friends were. ‘Swing boys’ were even sent to concentration camps for this, see the very detailed article ‘Swingjugend’ in the English Wikipedia. However, the translation creates the impression that they are convinced Nazis, and brutal ones:

One time Heini had reached over the counter and slapped her [a saleswoman].

No, that's totally wrong! The original says: „Heini schlug sie einmal kurz über die Tischkante“. Heini smashes Robert's unpopular record onto the edge of the table to destroy it, because records were fragile back then. The German word for record, Schallplatte, has a female gender, hence ‘sie’.

Incidentally, the record is called ‘Im Gänsemarsch’, which doesn't mean goose-step (the German equivalent has nothing to do with geese), but ‘walking in a single file’. It is an accordion piece by Will Glahé (in Wikipedia) and in no way militaristic, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UHxG....

p. 58
Bubi [...] did the Schuhplattler

Why would a North German ‘swing boy’ perform Bavarian folk dances? The original says ‘er bladdelte’, with B and D, a word I don't understand in German either, it's probably slang from back then. Presumably it means doing some cool moves to the music.

p. 59
We'd kick over their stuff in the evening, just when they'd gone topless.

I don't understand it. ‘Topless’? Why? The boys want to destroy the beach neighbours' sunbathing place as soon as they'd have gone upstairs, i.e. home from the beach (German beaches on the Baltic Sea often have wooden steps leading down from the dunes).

p. 61
the Schuhplattler recommenced

As above.

p. 61
The enamel sign under the emergency brake had been amended. It now read:
„Jeder Miß_auch wird __straft“.

No, it didn't read like that.

The full text reads ‘Jeder Mißbrauch wird bestraft’ (the translation of which is strangely correct). Vandals have scratched out letters so that all that remains is ‘Jeder Mißb_auch wird_ _ straff’, which makes for an extremely lame joke: Every Miss's belly gets taut. [This was a popular joke among train vandals, and some would in a similar lame way turn ‘Notbremse’, emergency brake, into ‘Kotbremse’, faecal brake.]

I understand that this is untranslatable, but then it could have been left out, like so many other things. It's not exactly decisive for the plot.

p. 65
The Selketal River

One really doubts Mr Lipkin's translation skills. I mean, you don't have to hire a native speaker, but wouldn't that help? Tal means ‘valley’, so ‘Selke River Valley’ (the Selke is actually just a better stream, but never mind) would be correct. It's really very beautiful there, see the picture in the Wikipedia article ‘Selke (river)’.

p. 72
The train ride from Königsberg to the Harz had taken an entire day, they told me. […] The corridor of the train had been locked, and the curtains drawn.

A little prior knowledge of the political situation in the summer of 1939 would certainly not have been bad for the translation, especially when it comes to very basic things. The girls come from Königsberg, East Prussia, a province which has been separated from the rest of the Reich since 1920, and have to use a train travelling through the ‘Polish Corridor’. That's why the carriage (not the ‘train corridor’) is locked and they are not allowed to look out. See Wikipedia ‘Polish corridor’ and ‘Privileged transit traffic’.

p. 73
Then we met him again at the indoor pool.

No, they didn't. This is an communal open-air swimming area at a lake. How else could Esau chase Ulla into the bushes?

The somewhat outdated German word ‘Badeanstalt’, which is there in the original, usually means public swimming pool (on a fenced-off section of a lakeshore), formerly also public (bath tub) baths. So it wasn't the hotel management that had a wooden cross thrown into the water, but the spa administration.

[Incidentally, this is where we meet Elisabeth von Globig, who also appears again in ‘All Is Lost’, albeit only in passing, which I noticed here for the first time in 20 years...]

[Elisabeth] stayed out of sight, wanting to be alone with Esau

No, she's not. She is just jumping around him and he still doesn't pay any attention to her.

p. 76
The two towers, of the church and Wernigerode castle, like two fingers at the hand you swear with

Must have been a strange oath hand with the church in the valley and the castle on the mountain. Mr Lipkin could have looked at the map, after all. They of course see an abbey with twin towers, when they look down from their hiking trail, see Wikipedia again: ‘Saint Cyriakus, Gernrode’.

p. 78
beromüsterstation
Beromünster station, a Swiss radio station, would be correct. So Robert wants to listen to a Swiss station in an German officers' vacation hotel in the middle of the Nazi era. This is completely lost.

p. 86
'Careful, you scamp,' said the wood handler

What is a 'wood handler'? A Holzhändler is a timber merchant.

p. 101
„If only it would snow now“, said my mother, before gently singing „I'm dreaming of a white Christmas“.

So Walter's mother sings ‘White Christmas’ at Christmas Eve 1939, three years before the song was even written? Obviously this is all wrong again, as father Kempowski would say, just like the explanation in the back of the book with the alleged German version of the song.

The mother doesn't sing at all. She says: ‘Couldn't it have snowed now? A white Christmas like last year?’, referring to last year's Christmas Eve, i.e. 1938, when there was actually 7 cm of snow in Rostock (thanks, Internet).

But now it's over. I've limited myself to the year 1939 so that this little gripe doesn't get too long. Besides, I had run out of post-its :) And that was only 101 out of 457 pages...

I will be happy to answer any further questions about the book in the comments.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my third Walter Kempowski novel and it didn't quite measure up to the standard of the previous two (All for Nothing and Marrow and Bone). The novel is based on the author's boyhood growing up in Nazi Germany and it is written from the point of view of the boy, who is nine when the novel opens in 1938, and 16 when the novel comes to a rather sudden conclusion in 1945. The lead character, also named Walter Kempowski (despite the author's assurance to the reader that "all details completely made up") lives with his parents and two siblings in Rostock, an important port and industrial center in eastern Germany that was heavily bombed by the Allies. We live through the chaotic war years with Walter and his family, as everyone tries to maintain a normal life despite the ongoing war.

In many ways, I found the tone of the novel to be odd. Because it is told from the viewpoint of a young boy, there is very little about the war and a lot more about his schooling, his activities with his friends, his yearning for sex with girls, and books and music. The war intrudes, of course, as the family has to seek shelter from bombing raids and from time to time we learn of acquaintances who have been killed in the fighting. But Walter seems to be mostly unaffected, except for vague physical complaints that he uses to escape duty in the Hitler Youth. I think I got to page 440 before there was any real sign of terror on the part of someone whose home city was being destroyed by continual bombing raids. The usual response was to marvel at the destruction and to talk about local landmarks, such as churches, that had been reduced to rubble. Because the novel was so heavily tilted toward a description of everyday life, rather than a more broad perspective, some sections of the novel became quite tedious.

There are various subtle references to Nazi atrocities, mostly derogatory comments directed toward Jews. One sees how ordinary citizens adopted the views of their leaders and became complicit in their crimes, before they began to express doubts as the tide of the war turned against Germany. But the real violence, the deportations and the gassings and the shootings, and later the atrocities, such as rapes and murders, perpetrated by the invading Russians, occur way off stage. Perhaps it was an inevitable result of writing from the point of view of a clueless youth, but the impact of living through such horrifying events seemed strangely muted. Still, the novel is unique and makes some telling points, but you have to look hard in order to pick up on them. But maybe that was the point, as the young boy becomes the mirror image of adults who let the crimes go one without a word of protest. That a young person could easily see and comment on horrifying cruelties depicted as everyday life constituted a strong condemnation of "ordinary Germans."

Not the greatest novel, but Kempowski is an excellent writer who looks at world-altering events from rarely seen perspectives, so he is always worth reading.

[Yannik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zu Anfang des Buchs könnte man meinen, es handle sich um eine einfache Familiengeschichte, bis man das nächste Mal mit einem Hitlergruß oder der Aussage "der Hitler sei ja doch ein Guter" daran erinnert wird, um welche Zeit der deutschen Geschichte es sich handelt.

Mit dem Ausbruch des Kriegs wird die Thematik um Weltkrieg und Nazis immer präsenter. Dabei geht es dennoch nie wirklich direkt um Kriegsgeschehen, Politik oder Gräueltaten. Die werden fast ausschließlich indirekt und oberflächig über Äußerungen und Sprüche der Figuren thematisiert. Krieg und Nazi-Herrschaft passieren mehr nebenbei als Kulisse, vor dem sich das Alltagsgeschehen abspielt.

»Tadellöser & Wolff? Was soll das eigentlich bedeuten?« Na, gut dem Dinge, weiter nichts. So rede man eben in der Stadt. »Gutmannsdörfer«, das sei auch so ein Schnack. Wenn man was gut finde, dann sage man einfach »Gutmannsdörfer«. Oder »Schlechtmannsdörfer«, oder »Miesnitz & Jenssen«.

Die Sprüche, Formulierungen, Worte und Satzbauten vermitteln ein humorvolles Abbild der damaligen Sprache. Der Grund aus dem ich mir relativ sicher bin, dass diese authentisch sind, ist, dass mir immer wieder Satz-Fragmente und Worte aufgefallen sind, die ich schonmal von mein Eltern oder Großeltern gehört habe. In diesem sprachhistorischen Aspekt liegt eine große Stärke des Buchs.

Warum die Mädchen Röcke anhaben und nicht Hosen wie wir. »Was glaubst du, wie die stinken, da muß immer frische Luft ’ran.«

Von Michael seien schlechte Nachrichten eingetroffen. Der liege im Lazarett. Beide Beine ab. Der komme nicht mehr auf. Wenn die Eltern das gewußt hätten, denn hätten sie sich womöglich gar nicht scheiden lassen. Erst abgebrannt, dann geschieden und nun der Sohn dot. Gott sei Dank wär ja noch eine Tochter da. Aber die habe so schlechte Zähne. Das wär ja auch kein Zustand.

Die zweite Stärke ist der Humor. Das Buch ist stellenweise durch den rohen Witz und unerwartete Grobheit ziemlich lustig.

Der Schreibstil hat mir immer wieder wegen seiner Fragmentiertheit Probleme bereitet. Die Sätze werden nicht verbunden, sondern aneinander geknallt. Gerne wird auch mal ohne Einleitung und Vorwarnung in Ort und Zeit gesprungen, was etwas verwirrend sein kann und ich nicht als angenehm zu lesenden Stil empfinde.

Außerdem verzichtet die Geschichte fast vollkommen auf einen Spannungsbogen. Die Handlung plätschert so dahin. Unterwegs werden Phrasen gedroschen und Witze gemacht. Selten kommt es zu einem Großereignis wie einer Bombardierung Ansonsten passiert als nächstes was halt als nächstes passiert. Was aus dem Vater wird, der zuvor an die Ost-Front versetzt wurde, wird nicht aufgelöst. Mundart und Jokes haben mich stellenweise nicht über immerhin knapp 500 Seiten getragen. Dadurch hatte das Buch seine Längen, die zu überkommen mir Fleiß abverlangten. Alles in allem aber ganz Gutmannsdörfer.

[john callahan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing a few years ago and liked it very much. It tells the story of a faded noble family in East Prussia at the end of World War II amidst the flight west of everyone who could flee, in order to escape the approaching Soviet army.

An Ordinary Youth, published in West Germany in 1971, reportedly made Kempowski famous. It is a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy named Walter Kempowski, who lives in his comfortably middle-class family in Rostock. It describes his everyday life in the years immediately before and during the war, from the age of 9 to the age of 15. Like his older brother Robert, Walter is a fan of "hot jazz," and for much of the novel engages in typical childish shenanigans. He is, however, eventually forced to join the Hitler Youth, but we see him not being a very good member of that group. The novel ends as the Soviet army approaches Rostock.

One commentator notes that the life of the Kempowskis in the novel is, well, perfectly ordinary. They pay lip service to being Germans but not Nazis, but they are as complicit in the atrocities of that period as everyone else.

It is not a conventional novel and is somewhat difficult to read, until one gets used to it. The novel consists of short paragraphs that do not necessarily connect with each other. There are a lot of non sequiturs and a lot of thoughts in parentheses within the narrative (it's not always clear whose thoughts they are). Most noticeably, there are countless lines inserted into the text out of context from German classical songs, pop songs, folk songs, poems, advertisements, movie dialogue, Nazi propaganda, and American jazz songs. Some of the language is the private language of a family. And the translator Michael Lipkin notes that there are portions of the novel in Low German/Plattdeutsch and a bit in Bavarian dialect (which readers of the English translation will not notice, of course).

I believe that a second reading would be necessary to appreciate the novel more fully. I don't think that I will read it again, but I would recommend it to those willing to put in the effort to read it.

One caveat: My notes on the novel, like all of my reviews in GoodReads, are very much colored by my mood when reading the books and writing the reviews. It wasn't great while I read this one.

[Kasc · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have picked up Tadellöser & Wolff out of my resolve to read more German literature. I figured that Kempowski being a renowned contemporary author would make him a solid choice, so I opted for one of his more popular works.

Tadellöser & Wolff is an account of WW2 from the perspective of his own German family that does not sincerely support the Nazi regime, but also does not actively oppose it. Over the course of eight years, Kempowski shows how his family member’s lives progress by stringing together little story snippets. Here, the major historical events are just a sidenote and only relevant in as much as they affect the Kempowski family. Throughout the story, the focus lies on Walter Kempowski himself, the family’s youngest son, who often seems unconcerned by the dramatic situation he is caught up in and is intent on living a normal life.
The larger portion of the story is set in Rostock, a town which is targeted by bombings several times and is therefore no stranger to the horrors of war. Kempowski shows how he and his family experience these traumatic events and the aftermath thereof. However, he does not linger on the trauma, but rather highlights how despite everything the mundane everyday lives continue. Naturally the citizens’ lives are altered by the war, but they adapt.
The Kempowski family is exemplary of thousands of other civilians in any war. They did not ask for their town to be destroyed, it is not in their power to start or end a war and yet they have to endure its consequences. Of course, it is an autobiographic story, so his focus on passive actors in the war is not really a deliberate choice. Still, I think this is what makes it an exceptional account of history. This novel is not about any unlikely hero who prevails against all odds or some political leader who can make a true difference. It is about the regular people and therefore about what was reality for the majority of people during the war.

I read this novel in German, and I have to say I found it a little challenging. For one, the language used is a somewhat dated, but not overwhelmingly so. For another, it seems to me that there is a bit of a Northern German hue to the language, which I am not familiar with. There even are very few instances in which a character appears to speak Plattdeutsch, which – frankly – I cannot understand at all and would not even know where to look up. Thankfully, this only happens two times or so and only via some obscure tertiary character. Finally, while its fragmented nature makes this novel a quick read, it also at times prevents grasping the meaning of unfamiliar words from the context. These aspects made it a little difficult to get invested in the novel at first and only once I had gotten used to them was I able to really enjoy it.

In summary, Tadellöser & Wolff is a solid WW2 novel with a clear focus on Kempowski’s personal experiences. Stylistically it is somewhat challenging, but enjoyable, nonetheless. I will probably also read the follow-up novel Uns geht’s ja noch gold at some point as some things are left open in the conclusion.

[Steve]

Great book. Entirely enjoyed it. A super account of German life from 1938 to 1946. This biographical story was written by Walter Kempowski in 1971. It has now been translated to English by Michael Lipkin. Very eye opening as to what the general German population really thought about WWIi. The daily life of the youth was an “ordinary “ life. Amazing how similar growing up in Germany was to America in a lot of ways. The German population had to deal with no money, not much food, and home and country destruction all brought upon them by the emergence of the Nazi party that were not really the beliefs of a large part of the German population. The world needs to find a way to live in harmony. In 1948 Walter, his brother and mother were arrested in East Germany trying to revisit their homeland of Rostock on espionage charges. He spent 5 years in prison. He got his high school diploma around the age 30, the wrote this German best seller in 1971.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps not as poignant as All for Nothing, but still a somewhat eerie look at civilian life under the Third Reich from the perspective of a teenager. The novels is hundreds of very short vignettes. Put them together and you have the making of a tragicomedy. Kempowski's humor is so dry that it's prone to catching fire. But no amount of humor can paper over the disaster of a noble society falling under the spell of a madman. Speaking of papering over, one does wonder how much Kempowski is doing just that in regard to his own past and participation in the insanity. But nevertheless, this book is a valuable cultural artifact from a writer skilled enough to get a real-life twilight zone transcribed onto paper.

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

De NL titel, We hebben het niet geweten, zegt genoeg. Door de ogen van een Duitse jongen voor en in WO II zie je hoe alles gewoon kan worden als je even niet op zit te letten. Overtuigingen als deze, bijvoorbeeld, in dit soort grote woorden:
"Wij moeten een antwoord bieden op clown world die geleidelijk alle facetten van ons leven beheerst. Wij gaan onze beschaving redden van de dreigende ondergang. (...) We hebben doorzettingskracht nodig, discipline, overwinningsdrang, ja, zelfs overheersingsdrang."
(Dit had zo uit het boek kunnen komen, maar is een citaat uit een toespraak van de JFvD, uit 2019. Daar trappen we niet nog een keer in. Hoop ik.)

[Charles Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Kempowski's "All For Nothing" a while back and loved it. It was a great story of a German family basiscally waiting for the Russians to arrive. "An Ordinary Youth" is a novel drawn from Kempowski's youth. It's in the form of a diary. While there is an "arc" the book is in pieces just like a diary entries. It gives you a real sense of the orderinay German family during the Nazi time and what it was like to see the world they knew collapse around them and as the Americans and British bombed Rostock and then how the Russians arrived. In fact the book ends on the day of the Russian arrival.

[Steve Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book thinking it was a biographical effort, detailing the life of an ordinary German family during WW2. As I progressed I wondered whether it was more fiction than biography, more fantasy than history. In the end I was slightly disappointed that it was less than an historical biography of life in Nazi Germany yet still satisfied at the insights offered. I wish I better understood middle and upper middle lass Germans from the middle 1020’s through 1945. This book may not satisfy my longing for understanding of that place and time but it does provide insight into the period.

I have an interest is other writings by the author and I do recommend the book.

[Gabe Donahue · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a long time to get into this book---almost 150 pages, which is a third of the book. I didn't like the formatting of the paragraphs or the thing with the parentheses. Had I gotten it from the library, I'd have DNFed it. I kept reading because I just spent $22 on it. I'm glad I kept at it. I liked Walter's characters, including Walter himself and his narrative. You can tell he's growing up throughout his narrative, but he keeps his juvenility and sense of humor that maintains a constant as everything about the setting is changing.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collage of the experiences of an 'ordinary youth' in an extraordinary time and place - growing up in Germany between 1939-45. Interesting, but the stylistic device of constructing the narrative from a patchwork of brief experiences and vignettes with little context or overview leaves the uncomfortable feeling of a narrator shying away from an acknowledgment of broader shared awareness/culpability.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Ordinary Youth is a difficult, disjointed read in English at least for an American with no grounding in German culture particularly the day to day Germany in the years just orior to when World War 2 actually began to touch German soil. The point of the story, told through the eyes of a young boy, at the start merely nine, is how normal family life all seemed as the horrors of the Hitler regime were playing out all around him and his family.

[Kathy K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This began as quite a leisurely read - I had no real expectation of it but was curious to find out about ordinary life in war time Germany. I fell in love with all the characters - (perhaps not Dad actually) but they were all very real. I loved the young people and the life within them despite the horrors around them. This book made me want to meet them personally and it reaffirmed my love of the German people. Great translation work (didn’t feel like a translation) but I might hone my German and try to read it in the original.

[Nitesh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was kinda hoping this would be interesting since reading the memoir of someone who had grown up in the Nazi regime and not really one who’s a resistance fighter or anything but just an “average citizen”…

But for the most part, I kinda just found it uninteresting. Sure there’s some parts that feel like the “banality of evil” but also I can’t really blame the author since he’s just recounting his childhood and adolescence…but I don’t know, it just feels boring.