An Ordinary Youth: A Novel

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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.

Reviews

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. 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 * Guardian *
Mesmerising... Intimate and immediate... A hypnotic immersion deep inside one of our continent's darkest periods and a book that from some angles feels chillingly contemporary * New European *
This book feels horribly timely as a renewed posing of the question of what horrors we are willing to accept as normal * Observer *
This is the first English edition of one of [Kempowski's] most important works... The Nazi menace is only glimpsed, and this weaving of the evil with the banal is what gives the novel its moral force * The Times and Sunday Times *
An immersive, unsensational portrait of one family's life under Nazism and a disquieting examination of complicity * Bookseller Editor's Choice *
Compellingly immersive in all its intensely evocative detail, sometimes very funny, sometimes not funny at all, An Ordinary Youth reveals once again Kempowski's extraordinary gift... The appalling events of mid-twentieth-century Europe have been the subject matter of many fine writers: arguably none more truthful to the unsentimental, unheroic reality of the lived experience than Kempowski -- David Kynaston, author of Engines of Privilege
Fascinating and disturbing. Kempowski plunges the reader into the already running tide of one of history's great horrors so that we see it as if from within... An Ordinary Youth weaves an impressionistic web of nostalgia, complicity, terror, denial, love and dissidence into an unflinchingly honest re-creation of a time and place that still beggars understanding -- Carol Birch
Deeply uncanny. Doing justice to both the innocence of the boy he was and the moral judgment of the man he became, Kempowski creates an appealing and appalling case study in the banality of evil -- Adam Kirsch
An intimate, gossipy, conversational snapshot of a 'normal' family in Nazi Germany... Translated with huge care and dexterity by Michael Lipkin * Irish Times *
Part of the novel's power is its eye for the ordinary. The understanding it has for the details of ordinary life is partly what makes it so seductive... It is a brilliant, subtle account of societal corruption and we are fortunate to have it in English * Jewish Chronicle *
While Kempowski never trivializes the gravity of his subject matter, there is a lightness to his narration, a wit in the tension between the child narrator's keen observations of the world and his limited capacity to interpret them. The book strikes an unusual balance between precise detail and the dreamlike texture of childhood recollected from a great distance... * TLS *

Author Bio

Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) was one of Germany's most important post-war writers, known for his acclaimed collection of first-hand accounts of the second world war, including Swansong 1945. He is also the author of many novels, including Homeland and All for Nothing, which was a bestseller in both Germany and the UK.

Michael Lipkin is a professor of German Studies at Hamilton College. His writing on German literature has appeared in many publications in Germany and America.