An Ordinary Youth
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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.
Walter Kempowski
Walter Kempowski (1929–2007) was one of Germany’s most important postwar writers. In the 1980s he began gathering diaries, letters, and memoirs of World War II, which he edited into ten volumes published in German. Swansong 1945 is the first portion to appear in English.
More by Walter Kempowski
Michael Lipkin
Translated by
Michael Lipkin is the Academic Director and Senior Instructional Professor of the Program for Public Thinking at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on the longue durée of realism in Germany, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, in publications such as the German Studies Review, the Colloquia Germanica, and the Gottfried Kellers Moderne project. His writing on culture and politics has appeared in American and European publications, such as The Baffler, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Merkur. His translation of Walter Kempowski's An Ordinary Youth (Tadellöser & Wolff) was published with New York Review of Books Classics and Granta in 2023.
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