An Ordinary Youth

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 Walter Kempowski’s boyhood in Rostock, Germany, at the height of the Nazi regime. For Walter, whose family is moving house when the novel opens, the interest is in his tin soldiers and older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. The Kempowskis are a close-knit, affectionate family, with their own private jokes and stories, breakfast routines and dinner quarrels; despite the packing crates, everything seems in its rightful place, and no one, least of all Walter, suspects the coming cataclysm. In place of a coherent literary narrative, Kempowski brings the past to life through a choir of voices: dialogue, song, architecture, literature, commercials, and political slogans all speak through Walter’s perspective. Through these deft sketches of Rostock, at the heart of which is his own family, Kempowski shows this hugely turbulent nation—with its mounting intolerance and political machinations (sometimes in gossip, sometimes bombs falling from the sky)—racing toward war. An Ordinary Youth is a time capsule of talk: the talk of the respectable bourgeoisie who are complicit members of a racist, genocidal regime. If there is guilt in Kempowski’s universe, it belongs to the whole body formed by these individual voices. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolf), An Ordinary Youth remains the best-known of Kempowski’s novels and the most revealing.

Walter Kempowski (1929–2007) was one of postwar Germany’s most acclaimed and popular writers. His novels include All for Nothing and Marrow and Bone (both published by NYRB Classics). In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, which gathered firsthand accounts, diaries, letters, and memoirs of World War II. It is considered a modern classic.

Michael Lipkin is a translator and scholar of German literature with a focus on realism. His writing has appeared in The New Left Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The Paris Review, among others. He is currently a visiting professor of German Studies at Hamilton College.