An Ordinary Youth
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A provocative novel about growing up in Nazi Germany, as seen through the eyes of a child witnessing the spread of intolerance and political unrest in his town.
An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view—dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans—tell a different story. Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski's novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.
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.
