All for Nothing
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In January 1945, the German army is retreating from the Russian advance. Germans are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot. But in a rural East Prussian manor house, the wealthy von Globig family seals itself off from the world.
Protected from the deprivation and chaos around them, they make no preparations to leave until a decision to harbour a stranger for the night begins their undoing. Finally joining the great trek west, the remaining members of the family face at last the catastrophic consequences of the war.
Profoundly evocative of the period, sympathetic yet painfully honest about the motivations of its characters, All for Nothing is a devastating portrait of the complicities and denials of the German people as the Third Reich comes to an end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kempowski's atmospheric novel opens on the decaying Georgenhof estate, which lies on the East Prussian border, in 1945, as the Red Army approaches. The vestiges of a family whose paterfamilias and uniting figure is serving in Italy bide their time and try to go about life in the mansion, where Hitler's likeness still adorns paintings, stamps, and banknotes, not fully aware of the danger of the approaching Red Army. At the story's center is young Peter, sincere and bookish, who studies his microscope in a bedroom adjacent to that of his dead sister, Elfie, and is taught by the foppish schoolmaster Dr. Wagner. Peter's father, Eberhard von Globig, has gone to the Italian Front; Peter's mother, the "languorous beauty" Katharina, perhaps already a widow, waits in vain for news of Eberhard's fate. "Auntie, a sinewy old spinster," keeps a lookout for the influx of refugees that originally confined to the surrounding buildings soon mobs the courtyard. A change is coming to their way of life, heralded by a series of guests a disabled "political economist," an unreconstructed Nazi violinist, a painter, a debauched Baltic baron, and, fatefully, a Jewish fugitive. Gothic and haunting, the novel asks what things will be like "if things turn out bad," knowing the answer will come too soon.
