Overview

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.

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9781681377209

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"""First published the year I was born, this book was a favourite in my family, both for its humour and its unflinching eye on Third Reich Germans. I grew up with Kempowski’s idioms and eccentric phrasings passed around the table at dinner.  For decades, the novel was considered too idiosyncratic to work in translation, but Michael Lipkin has pulled off a masterstroke, retaining the sense of being inside Walter’s head: the boy in the midst of events, understanding little, but capturing everything in snippets of sound and image and experience."" —Rachel Seiffert"

Author Information

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.

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