The first major novel by German author Walter Kempowski describes a youth that was anything but ordinary. When the curtain rises in 1938, the protagonist Walter is a nine-year-old living with his family in the north-east German city of Rostock; by the time the novel ends in 1945, amid the smouldering ruins of the end of the second world war, he has just turned 17. Narrated through a chorus of voices, the novel recounts how the boy’s middle-class conservative milieu fell apart under the pressures of growing intolerance, political extremism and the destruction of war.
Throughout the book, “ordinary” aspects of family life sit uneasily alongside the extraordinary arc of world history, and the Germans’ uniquely catastrophic role in it. The unspoken tensions between the everyday and the apocalyptic, banality and evil, give the novel its narrative momentum and powerfully unsettling impact. As the Nazis are consolidating their power, young Walter is putting on silly plays with his brother; as combat rages, he listens to records and submits fake sick notes to get out of Hitler Youth sessions. His family, meanwhile, are desperate to cling to their social habits. Walter’s mother complains about maids having the gall to wear fur coats; his father monologues about business. When Walter’s brother hears a school friend has been killed, he wonders who will inherit the roofing-felt factory that the boy was expected to take over. Kempowski’s narration captures all of this impassively. Historical atrocity appears, not in nightmarish chiaroscuro, but edging into and around the fabric of ordinary life. “The whole family was photographed: Mother in her pelerine dress, Robert sailing, and me in my Hamburg suit. Even father, in his SA uniform, standing under a birch tree.”
The book draws heavily on its author’s own experience. Born in 1929 to a prosperous Rostock family, Kempowski witnessed the rise of the Nazis as a schoolboy, joining the Hitler Youth before spending a brief spell in the Luftwaffe. He was imprisoned by the Soviets and later released to begin a new life in 1950s West Germany, where he trained as a teacher and began a literary career focused on understanding Germany’s past. To these ends, he developed a documentary mode that was as sober as it was ambitious in scale. Before his death in 2007, he produced two massive historical projects: a nine-part series of historical novels, plus books of survey responses to questions such as “Did you know about the Nazis’ crimes?” – this series was known as the German Chronicle – and Das Echolot, a 10-volume collage of ordinary people’s diary entries, letters and unpublished memoirs from the Nazi years.
In An Ordinary Youth, the first instalment of the German Chronicle, this documentary impulse is already in evidence, despite the original’s ironical subtitle “a bourgeois novel”. It unfolds in semi-fragmented style, a mosaic of interrelated snippets and scenes; the narration is frequently interrupted by the names of books or household goods, by advertising slogans and street signs, by quotes from music and poetry, and by often unattributed snatches of dialogue. At the centre stands Walter, who just wants to listen to jazz and play tin soldiers but eventually finds himself conscripted. His child’s-eye view frames the whole book, keeping the reader in a state of not-quite-comprehension. Kempowski has an eye for the strange, seemingly insignificant detail – a family in-joke, a disturbing line from the mouth of a minor character – that adds to a haunting, incantatory portrait of an epoch. Not quite a collage in the style of John Dos Passos or Arno Schmidt, or indeed Das Echolot, the novel succeeds remarkably at injecting the wider social world, often disorientingly, into an autobiographical childhood novel.
When the book was first published in German, in 1971, it proved controversial. At a time when progressives insisted on German society’s wider collective guilt, this outwardly amoral chronicle of a typical bourgeois family struck some critics as reactionary. Certainly, the ostensible normality of life and absence of absolute evil in the Kempowski house may have produced a conservative aftertaste. Yet it is precisely this normality that lends An Ordinary Youth its moral force and historical interest. Rather than excusing Walter’s world, the novel underlines just how desperate his family is to cling on to its hard-earned bourgeois “normality” – which they will defend at all costs, including by complying with a murderous Nazi regime they say they never supported.
If Kempowski’s child narrator, like most children, is anxious, naive, credulous towards authority, generally selfish, and incapable of turning isolated moments of compassion into an alternative politics, well, he’s not the only one. The same goes for his family, who, even as the war effort fails, refuse to abandon innocence and face the moral and political cataclysm before them. The victims of nazism only momentarily enter the frame of the book – a neighbour’s Jewish wife, a locked-up Social Democrat, a few passing references to concentration camps – but its apparent lack of curiosity, its don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude, mirrors that of its subjects. Tellingly, the word “Auschwitz” appears only once. When Walter is visiting his grandfather, a Hitler supporter, he reads in the newspaper’s Miscellaneous section about a “bloody marital drama” that played out on the street “in Auschwitz, at Kattowitz”.
Midway through, a young Dane visits the family in wartime. “Please don’t think all Germans are bad,” the mother says. “Nazis and Germans: there’s a difference.” But for all the Kempowskis’ protestations, the novel clearly records the continuity between bourgeois Germany and Nazi atrocity in this period. The early chapters show plenty of evidence that the family’s prewar environment was home to antisemitism and anti-Slav prejudice, authoritarian social structures, casual intolerance towards the different or weak, and nationalist German exceptionalism – plenty of evidence, too, that both moderate and radical manifestations of these things were tolerated by middle-class Germans so long as their personal and business interests went unaffected. An Ordinary Youth captures, if not quite the “banality of evil”, then at least the everydayness of complicity and compromise. Today, it’s more timely than ever.
• An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski, translated by Michael Lipkin, is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
