An Ordinary Youth
A Novel
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Growing up in Rostock, in the north of Germany, Walter has a comfortable upbringing: quiet and content, he spends his days scheming with school friends and resisting the torment of his older siblings. But, as the country rolls toward war, the attitudes of his teachers, peers and family begin to slide, and it isn't long before the roar of falling bombs, charged silences and mounting intolerance begin to puncture Walter's carefree youth.
Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, An Ordinary Youth is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. Here, Walter's academic struggle sits alongside his father's conscription; his brother's love of jazz burgeons amid the destruction of the barrages. And all the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries - communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations - running alongside the Kempowski family's daily rituals and occasional scandals.
A bestseller in Germany on publication, An Ordinary Youth is all the more unnerving for the warmth, humour and empathy with which Kempowski imbues his hometown. Written with a sensorial immediacy, it is a meticulous chronicle of daily life in 1930s Germany, and a discomfiting exploration of the many forms that complicity can take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This distinctive autobiographical novel from Kempowski (1929–2007; Marrow and Bone), first published in 1971 and translated into English for the first time by Lipkin, remains his best-known work in his native Germany. In early-1940s Rostock, the Kempowskis are an upper-middle-class shipping family supporting the war effort despite their distaste for Nazism. Walter, the youngest, plays with toy soldiers and learns to love jazz from his wayward older brother, Robert, who fails at school and skips Hitler Youth meetings to go to the movies. Over the course of a few years, the family is pulled apart—Walter's father goes off to the front, reliving his WWI glory days in Flanders, where he was stationed; Robert becomes a driver for the army; and their sister marries a Dane in Copenhagen. Walter is left at home with his mother, a wonderfully realized character who's anxious, ridiculous, and courageous all at once. Lipkin's masterly translation successfully renders the family's quirky routines and made-up expressions like "That's Goodmannsdörfer" and "That's Badmannsdörfer," combining regular adjectives with random words from Rostock. The result is a distinctive portrait of a pivotal time.
