CANR
WORK TITLE: All For Nothing
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/29/1929-10/5/2007
WEBSITE:
CITY: Munich
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
LAST VOLUME: CANR 304
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 29, 1929, in Rostock, Germany; died of cancer, October 5, 2007, in Germany; son of Karl-Georg and Margarethe Kempowski; married Hildegard Janssen (a teacher), April 20, 1960; children: Karl-Friedrich, Renate.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Padagogische Hochschule (teaching college), Göttingen, West Germany (now Germany), 1960.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Teacher and archivist in Nartum, Germany, 1960-80; freelance writer, beginning 1969. University of Oldenburg, professor of literature and pedagogy, 1980-90.
MIILITARY:German Army, Luftwaffe, 1945.
AWARDS:Prize for Developing Writers under auspices of Lessing Prize, City of Hamburg, 1971; Prize for Developing Writers under auspices of Gryphius Prize, 1972; Karl Szuka Prize, 1977; Lower Saxony Prize, 1979; Federal Service Cross, First Class, German government, 1979; Bambi Prize, 1980; Jakob Kaiser Prize (with Eberhard Fechner), 1980; Radio Play Prize of the War-Blinded, 1981, for Moin Vaddr læbt; Konrad Adenauer Prize, 1994, and Uwe-Johnson-Prize, 1995, both for Das Echolot: ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943; Großes Bundesverdienst-kreuz du Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1996; Heimito-von-Dodever Preis, 2000.
WRITINGS
Many of Kempowski’s novels have been adapted for German television and radio.
SIDELIGHTS
German author, playwright, and teacher Walter Kempowski was perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical novels about a family that bears the same name as his own. Through these novels, he not only discusses things that actually happened to himself and his parents and siblings, but provides a fictional portrait of Germany’s history from the turn of the century through its division following World War II. Kempowski did not pen these stories in chronological order; the first in terms of chronological setting was translated as Days of Greatness for English-speaking readers in 1981. Kempowski is also notable in his own country for his radio plays. One, titled “Moin Vaddr läbt,” uses a made-up language based on Yiddish and garnered him a Radio Play Prize of the War-Blinded. He also won several other German literary awards. One of the author’s nonfiction works that has been translated into English, Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Deutsche Antworten, became available in the United States as Did You Ever See Hitler? German Answers in 1975.
Kempowski was born in the German city of Rostock in 1929, to a family of shipping merchants. He was the youngest child, and his early days were fairly untroubled, except for a struggle against scarlet fever during the year 1940. As Patricia H. Stanley reported in her entry on Kempowski for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he “was not an athletic child” but instead “inherited the parents’ artistic interests: he played the piano and the organ, went to concerts with his mother, and read voraciously.”
Like many boys of his time and place, Kempowski was a member of the Hitler Youth organization, starting in 1939. In Stanley’s words, this meant that “he wore a uniform on required occasions, learned to march, went on camping trips, and spent some vacation time working on a farm.” Within the Hitler Youth, Kempowski was valued for his musical talent and often helped provide entertainment at the group’s larger events. When Germany became actively engaged in World War II, however, both Kempowski’s father and older brother Robert were sent to fight. In early 1945, as war fortunes grew increasingly worse for Germany, the Nazi army drafted Kempowski as a courier, though he was not yet sixteen years old. His father died in combat.
For the rest of the Kempowski family, the war ended when the forces of the Soviet Union took Rostock. Walter Kempowski temporarily relocated to the part of Germany occupied by the United States, but only three years later, he returned to Rostock because of homesickness. Not long afterward, the Kempowski brothers were arrested by the Soviets as spies; not long after that, their mother was also arrested. She spent a little under six years in a women’s work camp; Walter and Robert spent eight years in a similar facility for men.
Upon his release, Walter Kempowski determined he would become both a teacher and a writer, and enrolled in a teachers’ college in Göttingen. By 1960 he had married a fellow student, Hildegard Janssen, and obtained his first school position. His first book, Im Block: ein Haftbericht, was a factual account of his years in the Soviet prison camp, published in 1969. The book did not do well commercially; Stanley explained this phenomenon thus: “That was not … a good time to bring out revelations of East German prison life; the public was more interested in the political consequences of the student movement of the past year.”
Kempowski’s next book, though based on factual events in his family’s history, was fictionalized into novel form. Tadellöser & Wolff: ein bürgerlicher Roman takes its title from an untranslatable yet joyous exclamation habitual to Kempowski’s father, and the story begins in 1939, when Kempowski was ten years old. For the most part, he gives the characters the real names of the family members who inspired them, including himself. The tale stems from the Kempowskis’ celebratory move into a larger apartment to the end of World War II when Rostock is invaded by the Soviets. Stanley explained: “The reader sees a mixture of trivial and significant moments so representative of life in that traumatic wartime period that Germans who read the book recaptured part of their own past.” As a result, she continued, “the novel immediately became popular, and in the same year several passages were dramatized for radio.”
The fictionalized Kempowski family chronicle continues with Uns geht’s ja noch gold: Roman einer Familie, which comes from another family colloquialism meaning “we’re still doing well.” This title is somewhat ironic, because the novel deals with the time between the end of the war and Kempowski’s imprisonment, a time in which the family learned of the father’s death and in which the mother had to work very hard to ensure the family’s survival. Following that was Ein Kapitel für Sich, which means “a chapter in itself,” the novelization of the life events he had already chronicled in Im Block. Of this version, Stanley observed that “Walter’s chapters occupy most of the novel and show his development to manhood in the unusual environment of prison. The book is thus a bildungsroman of sorts”; she added: “Even the negative impact of the delicately described homosexual episodes and the periods of solitary confinement contribute to Walter’s education.”
For the next book in his family saga, Kempowski goes back to what would prove the beginning. In Aus grosser Zeit, readers see the upbringing of the parental characters from the other books; the novel opens in the year 1900. “The reader, who has already met the family, will find here the origin of many sayings and incidents alluded to in the other novels,” Stanley reported. “He knows already that the grandparents’ coldness, rigidity, and even cruelty did not repeat themselves in Karl-Georg and Margarethe’s parental roles but produced the opposite effect.” Idris Parry, reviewing the English-language version, Days of Greatness, in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that the author “seems to have deliberately muted the plot in order to emphasize that human destiny is … only part of the total scene. His concern is not merely human character but the character of an age, and this he establishes forcefully and convincingly.”
Kempowski’s novel Schöne Aussicht bridges the gap between Aus grosser Zeit and Tadellöser & Wolff. The “beautiful view” of the title is that of the splendid apartment Karl-Georg decides to rent for his family at the end of the novel—the apartment in which Tadellöser & Wolff begins. One of Schöne Aussicht ‘s highlights, according to Stanley, is the section in which the mother and her siblings have a family reunion at the seashore. “Whether or not this episode actually happened, it is charmingly portrayed,” she remarked. Kempowski ended his long family saga with Herzlich willkommen, which means “hearty welcome.” In this volume, his semi-autobiographical protagonist returns to his family after being released from prison, goes to teaching college, and acquires a bride. Wes Blomster, reviewing the saga’s end in World Literature Today, compared Kempowski to famed German novelist Thomas Mann, and concluded that “the superb quality of Kempowski’s writing—and this is perhaps stronger and more touching here than in any of the earlier volumes—is the authenticity of sentiment encountered in it.”
Another Kempowski novel, Hundstage, unrelated to his family saga, and published in his native land in 1988 and translated into English as Dog Days in 1991. In the novel, protagonist Alexander Sovtschick, in his late fifties, is trying to work on his next novel while his wife is away on vacation. The matter is complicated when a mentally retarded girl he has always been kind to is murdered, and he becomes the chief suspect. Critical opinion of the work was somewhat divided; a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that the combination of serious literature with murder mystery did not mix well, and added that “Sovtschick’s interminable musings make this lengthy novel … a slow read.” R. Swenson in Choice, however, described it as “a lively, readable story with an unending variety of literary pleasures.” Similarly, Wes Blomster in World Literature Today declared it an “exceedingly enjoyable and well-written novel. Kempowski’s honesty about the nature of human sensuality makes the narrative especially compelling.”
Kempowski’s final novel, All for Nothing, takes place in 1945 on an estate in East Prussia. The Von Globigs, once wealthy and respected, and not fully aware of how near the danger of the Red Army is, struggle to maintain a sense of pride on the deteriorating Georgenhof estate. The estate, surrounded by miles of snow, is falling apart. The summer drawing room is abandoned and freezing cold, with dead flies littering the floor. On the walls are paintings of Hitler, further highlighting the family’s ignorance of the impending Russian attackers.
In the house live twelve-year-old Peter, his mother Katharina, and his aunt, “Auntie.” Peter’s father, Eberhard, is off in Italy working a desk job, which includes the task of raiding the country for its best food and wine. Peter spends his days playing with his microscope, avoiding his dreaded Hitler Youth duties, and avoiding nosey neighbor Drygalski. Peter’s mother Katharina, beautiful, vain, and naive, has retreated into herself, constantly aware that her faraway husband may already be dead. She is unable or unwilling to maintain the estate, but where she falls short, Auntie steps forward. Auntie, an old spinster with a wart on her chin, monitors the refugees that arrive on the estate. She hires some of them and allows others to stay as visitors, leading to an interesting flow of characters entering and leaving the story. For her own visiting relatives, she holds resentment for their expectations of hospitality, ultimately demanding ration coupons as payment. Neighboring Drygalski, who oversees the estate across the street, keeps a constant eye on the Von Globigs estate. He is suspicious of their Polish handyman and Ukrainian maids, but simultaneously encourages refugees to arrive at the doors of the estate.
Life on the estate is boring and uneventful, save for the interactions between the various people living there or visiting. The quiet of the house is in direct contrast with events ongoing in neighboring lands in Europe, events that will inevitably make their way to the door of the Von Globigs’ estate, disrupting the sleepy lives of the Von Globigs and changing their realities forever.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly described the book as “gothic and haunting,” while Eileen Battersby in Irish Times wrote, “Kempowski has summoned unforgettable characters who are shocking, even heartbreaking, in their human responses.” Carol Birch in London Guardian described the book as having “a quiet undercurrent of growing unease getting steadily stronger, always ignored, put aside till tomorrow.”
Kempowski’s efforts in the capacity of editor or compiler are also worthy of attention. In Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?, Kempowski collected the anonymous answers and anecdotes of 230 people with whom he talked during his travels throughout Germany. In Immer so durchgemogelt: Erinnerungen an unsere Schulzeit, which means “Always Tricked My Way Through,” Kempowski records similar recollections from anonymous German interviewees about their primary schooling. A later project, Das Echolot: ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943, provides readers with letters and diary entries about how the first two months of the year 1943 were perceived by various German participants in World War II. Kempowski’s selected sources range from a female inmate of the concentration camp Auschwitz to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s physician. Denis Stauton gave high praise to Das Echolot in the Observer, concluding that “in bringing together all these memories Kempowski has undoubtedly created an important work of art but, more significantly, he has produced a profound and moving monument to national shame, spoken by the individual, authentic voices of the German nation.”
Kempowski continued his work with additional publications related to Das Echelot, which eventually numbered ten volumes. One of those volumes was published in 2005: a collection of documents that chronicle the end of World War II in Germany. Later, in 2014, the collection was published in English translation in England, and the following year it appeared in the United States as Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich. This is the first volume of the ten-volume Das Echolot to be published in English. The purpose of the volume is to depict the chaotic final days of World War II in Germany, from Hitler’s birthday on April 20 to the German surrender on May 9. To this end, Kempowski collated newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs, and other documents that record the words of more than 400 voices. Among them are well-known historical figures, including Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Joseph Goebbels. Many other documents, however, come from ordinary people: the exhausted Allied soldiers who discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; those who were present during Hitler’s final birthday celebration and during his last moments in his bunker; Stalin’s daughter celebrating the Allied victory; a German refugee trying to escape the Red Army; witnesses to the rape of German women by Russian soldiers; and numerous others. While many of the documents are contemporaneous, providing unfiltered images of the end of the war, some are postwar reflections. The result is a volume that records history with the intervention of a historian, giving voice to the men and women who participated in, and in some cases made, history during those historic weeks.
Reviewers regarded Swansong 1945 as an important addition to the literature on World War II. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the book as “a raw, tremendously moving set of reactions to the momentous events of April through May 1945.” The reviewer concluded by calling the book “a riveting portrait of what Kurt Weill called the ‘total breakdown of all human dignity,’ revealed through the bric-a-brac of war-shattered lives.” Frederic Krome, in a review for Library Journal, called the stories Kempowski preserves “often compelling,” while a Publishers Week reviewer found the collection “riveting,” adding: “Kempowski’s careful selection and sequencing convey the horror, misery, irony, and intensity of living through the last month of war in Germany.” For Roger Bishop, writing in BookPage, “The power of the work comes from the great variety and volume of the personal accounts, many of them eloquent and moving.” Bishop went on to note: “This important book takes us beyond geography, statistics and battles and reveals the cost of war in very human terms.” Daniel Hahn, commenting on the mosaic-like quality of the book’s pieces for the London Independent Online, wrote: “But, of course, it’s their cumulative effect that makes the book so remarkable, because even if the quoted extracts are not all artful, their selection and meticulously considered arrangement certainly is. One extract gives you a glimpse of some new part of the picture, then the next confirms it, or challenges it, or chips slightly away at its edges.” Hahn concluded: “The best history writing doesn’t simplify a reader’s understanding of the past, it complicates it. It adds layers, draws out contradictions and sharpens them, digs down into complexity, presenting a narrative that is rich and not simple at all. Swansong 1945 does all these things supremely well.” Finally, the Wall Street Journal Online reviewer Gerald Steinacher, calling the collection an “artful collage,” observed that it “is neither a scholarly work nor a traditional work of literature. Yet whatever its genre, the book … is difficult to put down.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 75: Contemporary German Fiction Writers, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.
Hacken, Richard, and Bernd Hagenau, compilers, Walter Kempowski zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, A. Knaus (Munich, Germany), 1989.
PERIODICALS
BookPage, April, 2015, Roger Bishop, review of Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, p. 27.
Books in Canada, March, 1982, review of Days of Greatness, p. 23.
Choice, March, 1992, R. Swenson, review of Dog Days, p. 1083.
Journal of European Studies, March, 2002, Richard Aston, “Amnesia and Anamnesis in the Works of Walter Kempowski: Language, History, and Evasion of Guilt,” p. 27.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2015, review of Swansong 1945; December 1, 2017, review of All for Nothing.
Library Journal, August, 1981, review of Days of Greatness, p. 1566; February 15, 2015, Frederic Krome, review of Swansong 1945, p. 112.
New Yorker, October 26, 1981, review of Days of Greatness, p. 200.
New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1991, review of Dog Days, p. 14.
Observer, January 16, 1994, Denis Stauton, review of Das Echolot: ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943.
Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Dog Days, p. 136; July 17, 1981, Barbara A. Bannon, review of Days of Greatness, p. 81; February 23, 2015, review of Swansong 1945, p. 68; December 18, 2017, review of All for Nothing, p. 96.
Quill and Quire, March, 1982, review of Days of Greatness, p. 69.
Times Literary Supplement, January 22, 1982, Idris Parry, review of Days of Greatness, p. 76.
World Literature Today, spring, 1985, Wes Blomster, review of Herzlich willkommen, p. 262; autumn, 1989, p. 671; summer, 1991, Wes Blomster, review of Dog Days, p. 484; autumn, 1992, p. 710.
ONLINE
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (November 15, 2014), Daniel Hahn, review of Swansong 1945.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 31, 2015), Eileen Battersby, review of All for Nothing.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 28, 2015), Carol Birch, review of All for Nothing.
New York Times Book Review Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (October 11, 2007), Tobias Eickelpasch, “Walter Kempowski, German Author and Diarist, Dies at 78.”
SignAndSight.com, http://www.signandsight.com/ (August 15, 2007), Peer Teuwsen, “Richness, Beauty, Horror,” interview with author.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://www.wsj.com/ (May 7, 2015), Gerald Steinacher, “The Book of Chronicle,” review of Swansong 1945.*
Walter Kempowski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter Kempowski
Walter Kempowski (April 29, 1929 – October 5, 2007[1][2][3]) was a German writer. Kempowski was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental Echolot ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War.
Contents
1 Life
1.1 Childhood (1929-39)
1.2 During World War II (1939-45)
2 Works
3 List of works
4 References
5 Further reading
6 External links
Life
Childhood (1929-39)
Walter Kempowski was born in Rostock. His father, Karl Georg Kempowski, was a shipping company owner and his mother, Margarethe Kempowski, née Collasius, was the daughter of a Hamburg merchant. In 1935 Kempowski began attending St. Georg School; in 1939, he transferred to the local high school ("Realgymnasium").
During World War II (1939-45)
As a teenager Kempowski, who was unathletic and had acquired a taste for American jazz and swing music through his older brother, chafed under compulsory service in the Hitler Youth, and was transferred into a penalty unit (Strafeinheit) of the organization.[4] In early 1945 he was drafted into the Flakhelfer, the youth auxiliary of the Luftwaffe, serving in a special unit that performed courier functions. Kempowski's father, who had volunteered for military service at the beginning of the war, only to be turned away because of his membership in the Freemasons,[4] was accepted for service in summer 1940, and died in combat on 26 April 1945.
Works
Walter Kempowski's first success as an author was the autobiographic novel Tadellöser und Wolf, in which he described his youth in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a well-off middle-class family. In several more books he completed the story of his family from the early 20th century into the late 1950s, when he was released from an East German prison in Bautzen where, accused of spying for the US military forces in West Germany, he had been incarcerated for eight years. In West Germany he became a teacher in Breddorf (as of 1960), in Nartum (de) (as of 1965) and in Zeven (between 1975 and 1979).
In 2005 he finished his enormous oeuvre Das Echolot, a collection and collage of documents by people of many kinds living in the circumstances of war. Das Echolot consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years. The documents are now deposited in the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The last of the twelve volumes of Das Echolot has been translated into English by Shaun Whiteside under the title Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler's Birthday to VE Day (Granta 2014).
Kempowski died of intestinal cancer, aged 78, in Rotenburg in 2007.
List of works
Im Block. Ein Haftbericht. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969.
Tadellöser & Wolff. Ein bürgerlicher Roman. Munich: Hanser, 1971.
Uns gehts ja noch gold. Roman einer Familie. Munich: Hanser, 1972.
Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Deutsche Antworten. Munich: Hanser, 1973 (=Did you ever see Hitler?: German answers, Michael Roloff (trl.) with a preface by Helen Wolff, postscript by Sebastian Haffner, New York: Avon Books, 1975. ISBN 0380005190.)
Der Hahn im Nacken. Mini-Geschichten. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973.
Immer so durchgemogelt. Erinnerungen an unsere Schulzeit. Munich: Hanser, 1974.
Ein Kapitel für sich. Munich: Hanser, 1975.
Alle unter einem Hut. Über 170 witzige und amüsante Alltagsminiminigeschichten. Bayreuth: Loewe, 1976.
Wer will unter die Soldaten?, Munich: Hanser, 1976.
Aus großer Zeit. Hamburg: Knaus, 1978 (=Days of greatness, Leila Vennewitz (trl.), London: Secker & Warburg, 1982. ISBN 0436232901.)
Haben Sie davon gewußt? Deutsche Antworten. Hamburg: Knaus, 1979.
Unser Böckelmann. Hamburg: Knaus, 1979
Kempowskis einfache Fibel. Brunswick: Westermann, 1980.
Schöne Aussicht. Hamburg: Knaus. 1981.
Beethovens Fünfte. Moin Vaddr läbt. Radio plays. Hamburg: Knaus, 1982.
Herrn Böckelmanns schönste Tafelgeschichten nach dem ABC geordnet. Hamburg: Knaus, 1983.
Herzlich willkommen. Munich: Knaus, 1984.
Haumiblau. 208 Pfenniggeschichten für Kinder. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1986.
Hundstage. Munich: Knaus, 1988 (=Dog days, Norma S. Davis, Garold N. Davis, and Alan F. Keele (trls.), Columbia, SC: Camden House, c1991. ISBN 0938100785.)
Sirius. Eine Art Tagebuch. Munich: Knaus, 1990
Mark und Bein. Eine Episode. Munich: Knaus, 1991.
Das Echolot. Ein kollektives Tagebuch Januar und Februar 1943. 4 vols. Munich: Knaus, 1993.
Der arme König von Opplawur. Ein Märchen. Munich: Knaus, 1994.
Der Krieg geht zu Ende. Chronik für Stimmen - Januar bis Mai 1945. Radio play. Stuttgart 1995.
Weltschmerz. Kinderszenen fast zu ernst. Munich: Knaus, 1995.
Bloomsday '97. Munich: Knaus, 1997.
Heile Welt. Munich: Knaus, 1998.
Die deutsche Chronik. 9 vols. Munich: Knaus, 1999.
Das Echolot. Fuga furiosa. Ein kollektives Tagebuch Winter 1945. 4 vols. Munich: Knaus, 1999.
Walter Kempowski liest »Tadellöser & Wolff«. Audio book. Georgsmarienhütte: CPO, 2001.
Alkor. Tagebuch 1989. Munich: Knaus, 2001.
Der rote Hahn. Dresden 1945. Munich: Knaus, 2001.
Das Echolot. Barbarossa '41. Ein kollektives Tagebuch. Munich: Knaus, 2002.
Walter Kempowski liest »Aus großer Zeit«. Audio book. Georgsmarienhütte: CPO, 2003.
Letzte Grüße. Munich: Knaus, 2003.
Das 1. Album. 1981-1986. Frankfurt a.M. 2004.
Walter Kempowski liest »Schöne Aussicht«. Audio book. Georgsmarienhütte: CPO, 2004.
Das Echolot. Abgesang 45. Ein kollektives Tagebuch (=Swansong, see below). Munich: Knaus, 2005
Culpa. Notizen zum Echolot. Munich: Knaus, 2005.
Hamit. Tagebuch 1990. Munich: Knaus, 2006.
Alles umsonst (=All for Nothing, see below). Munich: Knaus, 2006.
Walter Kempowski/Uwe Johnson: Der Briefwechsel. Berlin: Transit, 2006. ISBN 978-3887472146.
Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich. Shaun Whiteside (trl.), New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. ISBN 978-0-393-24815-9.
All for Nothing. Anthea Bell (trl.), London: Granta Books, 2015. ISBN 978-1847087201.
Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) was born in Hamburg. During World War II, he was made to serve in a penalty unit of the Hitler Youth due to his association with the rebellious Swingjugend movement of jazz lovers, and he did not finish high school. After the war he settled in West Germany. On a 1948 visit to Rostock, his hometown, in East Germany, Walter, his brother Robert and their mother were arrested for espionage; a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, of which he served eight at the notorious "Yellow Misery" prison in Bautzen. In 1957 he graduated high school. His first success as an author was the autobiographical novel Tadellöser & Wolff (1971), part of his acclaimed German Chronicle series of novels. In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, gathering firsthand accounts, diaries, letters, and memoirs of World War II, which he collated and curated into ten volumes published over twenty years, and which is considered a modern classic.
All for Nothing
Publishers Weekly. 264.52 (Dec. 18, 2017): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
All for Nothing
Walter Kempowski, trans, from the German byAnthea Bell. New York Review Books, $17.95 trade paper (372p) ISBN 978-168137205-1
Kempowski's atmospheric novel opens on the decaying Georgenhof estate, which lies on the East Prussian border, in 1945, as the Red Army approaches. The vestiges of a family whose paterfamilias and uniting figure is serving in Italy bide their time and try to go about life in the mansion, where Hitler's likeness still adorns paintings, stamps, and banknotes, not fully aware of the danger of the approaching Red Army. At the story's center is young Peter, sincere and bookish, who studies his microscope in a bedroom adjacent to that of his dead sister, Elfie, and is taught by the foppish schoolmaster Dr. Wagner. Peter's father, Eberhard von Globig, has gone to the Italian Front; Peter's mother, the "languorous beauty" Katharina, perhaps already a widow, waits in vain for news of Eberhard 's fate. "Auntie, a sinewy old spinster," keeps a lookout for the influx of refugees that--originally confined to the surrounding buildings--soon mobs the courtyard. A change is coming to their way of life, heralded by a series of guests--a disabled "political economist," an unreconstructed Nazi violinist, a painter, a debauched Baltic baron, and, fatefully, a Jewish fugitive. Gothic and haunting, the novel asks what things will be like "if things turn out bad," knowing the answer will come too soon. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"All for Nothing." Publishers Weekly, 18 Dec. 2017, p. 96. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520578830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=611bbe56. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520578830
Kempowski, Walter: ALL FOR NOTHING
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kempowski, Walter ALL FOR NOTHING New York Review Books (Adult Fiction) $17.95 2, 13 ISBN: 978-168137-205-1
The late German author serves up a bleak tale of the final days of World War II as a down-on-its-luck family prepares for worse to come.
Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderfuhrer stationed in Italy, his job to ransack the country of its best foods and wines, while his wife, Katherina, "famous as a languorous beauty, black-haired and blue-eyed," is left to run his rattletrap East Prussian estate. As Kempowski (Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, 2015, etc.) quickly makes clear, though, the person who is really in charge is called "Auntie," "a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin" whose resourcefulness is not to be underestimated. At the center of the story, with all its roman a clef elements, is 12-year-old Peter, who would rather be doing anything than mandatory service in the Hitler Youth. Keeping a disapproving eye on him is Drygalski, the manager of a nearby estate, who, though mourning a dead son and tending to a sick wife, has plenty of time to spy on the von Globigs and their suspiciously multiethnic household, with its Polish handyman and Ukrainian maids. Into this odd scene, as Russian guns rumble on the horizon, comes a steady flow of refugees and dispossessed people: a mixed family whose sons, half Jewish, "had been dreadfully sad because they couldn't join the Hitler Youth," a political economist, an artist, a musician, and others. For a time it seems as if the war might bypass this odd congeries of people, as if somehow taking pity, but in time events catch up to them in the form of bullets, bombs, and columns of ghostlike people bound for the camps a step ahead of the advancing Red Army--about whom a schoolmaster remarks to Peter, hopefully, "The Russians had been here in the First War, too, and had behaved decently."
Memorable and monumental: a book to read alongside rival and compatriot Gunter Grass' Tin Drum as a portrait of decline and fall.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kempowski, Walter: ALL FOR NOTHING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A516024668/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=567dce41. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A516024668
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski review – ordinary Germans in the last days of the Reich
In his final novel, the German author bears witness to the collective experience of war with compassion and grace
Carol Birch
Sat 28 Nov 2015 11.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.55 GMT
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Walter Kempowski
Poetic sensibility … Walter Kempowski.
This novel by the German writer Walter Kempowski, who died in 2007, is influenced by his mighty collection of diaries, letters and memoirs, Das Echolot (Echo Soundings), a 10-volume collage of the collective German experience throughout the second world war. He began work on the project after finding some old photographs and letters lying in the street, and deciding to “bend down and pick up” the testimonies of all, from concentration camp prisoners to the Reich’s high command – leaving nothing out, simply presenting.
All for Nothing, his last novel, translated by Anthea Bell, resounds with that same love for the pathos of detail, the same determination to bear witness to the entire human experience. The book’s characters may see each other as Jew, Nazi, peasant, aristocrat, Pole, foreigner, but the writer steadfastly refuses to see any of them as less than fully human.
It follows the fortunes of a family in East Prussia, between January and May 1945. The once rich Von Globigs live in run-down grandeur on the Georgenhof estate, an old shambles of a place not far from the eastern front, bracing itself against the bitterness of a terrible winter. The Georgenhof sits, along with a modern housing estate, in the middle of miles of snow, its gate askew, the summer drawing room ice-cold and full of dumped packing crates. Dead flies lie on their backs in the teacups on the dresser. Twelve-year–old Peter, a quiet boy, hangs around playing with his microscope, trying to get out of his Hitler Youth duties and avoiding Drygalski, the petty official who oversees the estate across the road.
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Drygalski, mourning a dead son and caring for a sick wife, is a puffed-up bureaucrat obsessed with his own importance. He keeps a constant suspicious eye on the Georgenhof’s Polish handyman and two Ukrainian maids. There are a dog and a cat, a few chickens, and, on the edge of the wood, the small grave of Peter’s little sister Elfie, who died two years before. Peter’s father Eberhard has a desk job in Italy far from the front, and his mother, Katharina, is a placid beauty, vague and naive, withdrawn to the point of vacancy. The real brains of the household is Auntie, “a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin”.
Various travellers arrive: a political economist, a young violinist, a touring artist recording buildings and bridges for posterity. Each brings news: a blown-up bridge, distant cannon-fire. Rumours abound, but the wireless says everything is under control and the trains still run, supplying the Reich with the products of Ukraine and Byelorussia, where even the topsoil has been stripped and sent west.
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The novel builds gradually, dreamily at times, with simple prose and lots of short sections, a quiet undercurrent of growing unease getting steadily stronger, always ignored, put aside till tomorrow. After all, how does one leave a life? No one can quite make the radical decision to go, even as the trickle of refugees from the east becomes a stream, passing stolidly between the Georgenhof and the houses opposite, bearing with them the loss of what they have left behind and the few small, saved details of their lives.
Kempowski uses detail like a repeating phrase in music, and there is a musical quality also in the movement of the book as a whole, from its quiet beginning through the relentless build to its massively impressive climax. The repetition is skilfully fed into the narrative to create a gradual deepening of tone. People are revealed slowly by the things they cling to. The trivial becomes profound as objects take on huge emotional significance: a Persian lamb cap, a meerschaum pipe, a stamp album. Memories are also possessions, of course, and the mundane ones, endlessly recurring, are equally poignant.
Inevitably, the Von Globigs’ reality is overtaken by war. The change has the suddenness of nightmare, and is made all the more powerful by the fact that the style remains precise, a simple recounting of facts, the worst and the best of it. “People’s intentions are never unequivocal,” Kempowski once said, and his observations of human foibles, fears and weaknesses are honest and humane. All for Nothing is a beautiful, forgiving and compassionate book that looks beyond the futile divisions people make between themselves. It reaches its last devastating line with poetic sensibility and the grace of a classical tragedy, confirming Kempowski as a truly great writer.
• Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie is published by Canongate. To order All for Nothing for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
Book Review: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski, translated by Anthea Bell
Vicious reality of war is reflected in life in a manor house passed by those fleeing conflict
Walter Kempowski: his life in Nazi Germany shapes his writing. Photograph: Klar/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Walter Kempowski: his life in Nazi Germany shapes his writing. Photograph: Klar/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Eileen Battersby
Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 02:00
First published:
Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 02:00
Book Title:
All For Nothing
ISBN-13:
978-1847087201
Author:
Walter Kempowski, translated by Anthea Bell
Publisher:
Granta
Guideline Price:
£14.99
Outside the walls of an old estate manor house in East Prussia, refugees are fleeing for their lives. It is January 1945, the weather is harsh but no one pays much attention to it as the Russians are advancing against a defeated Germany. The once polished army of the Third Reich is now directionless.
Meanwhile, untouched by the chaos filling the countryside, the quasi-aristocratic von Globig family moves through each day much as before.
Ironically the family is not quite that rich. Despite the imposing main house, the Georgenhof, which had caused strangers to wonder “why don’t we live in a house like that ourselves, a place that must be full of stories?” most of the land “meadows, fields and pasture” had long been sold off by the young baron who had invested the money in English steel shares. But these days Eberhard von Globig is away, serving as a special officer, “an administrator who had nothing to do with weapons”, and he earns an army salary from behind a desk.
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His enigmatic wife, given to dressing all in black, remains at home and says little. Katharina is admired for her beauty but is believed not to be much interested in anything. Lost in her thoughts she favours lightweight books and displays a vague affection for her young son Peter. There is also the grieving for her younger child, a daughter named Elfie, who is buried in the forest.
The household is dominated by Auntie, a feisty spinster who resents her relatives and who may well concede hospitality but expects ration coupons as payment.
Daily life in the manor house represents a stalemate of sorts as Auntie monitors the antics of the two Ukrainian women working in the kitchen who are constantly bickering with each other.
Also present is a Pole, Vladimir, who is resourceful and slightly ambivalent. War has placed a number of nationalities in close, uneasy contact. It is vital that none of the non-Germans are caught smirking at the situation and, until the Russians actually arrive, there are some minor officials, such as the sneaky Drygalski, ruined shopkeeper now head trustee, who persists, in the atmosphere of prevailing betrayal to continue prefacing most encounters with “Heil Hitler”. Drygalski is bothered by the big house and is keen to billet refugees there.
Historian and novelist Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) spent his career in the shadow of fellow chronicler Günter Grass, who was born two years earlier and outlived him, dying last April, aged 87. Kempowski’s experience of life in Nazi Germany shapes his writing. The son of a shipping company owner, Kempowski, as a middle-class teenage nerd with a love of jazz and none for sport, was recruited into the Hitler Youth and in February 1945 was conscripted, aged 16, into the youth branch of the Luftwaffe. Yet it was his father, initially rejected for service on the grounds of being a freemason but later accepted into the army, who died at the front on April 26th 1945.
After the war Kempowski lived in Hamburg. On return to his birthplace, Rostock, he was arrested for spying for the Americans and sentenced to 25 years in Bautzen prison. He served eight years. On release he trained as a teacher. His first novel Im Block. Ein Haftbericht was published in 1969. By then he had already amassed material he wanted to record for posterity.
Best known for his Deutsche Chronik, a series of novels beginning with the autobiographical Tadellöser und Wolff (1971) about life in Germany, his grasp of the complexities of history as it affects ordinary people inform his fiction as astutely as it does his other work. His legacy rests for many on an Herculean 10-volume project, Das Echolot (sonar or echo soundings) begun in 1980 which draws on letters, interviews, diaries, newspaper articles, unpublished autobiographies and other documents.
It is a massive chorus of contemporary voices, not all German, responding to enduring the second World War. In Swansong, the final part, completed in 2005, the material relates to four specific days, including Hitler’s birthday and his suicide 10 days later and how people reacted.
Alles Umsonst was published in Germany in 2006, the year before Kempowski died. Placing him on a stylistic level with Wolfgang Koeppen, the author of The Hothouse (1953) and Death in Rome (1954), it is brilliant; vivid, unsentimental, fast moving, cinematic and, for all its apparent ease of telling, scrupulously well-structured.
As in Hans Fallada’s Dickensian tale, A Small Circus (1931; 2012), Kempowski’s tense characters move through his quicksilver narrative in contrasting states of sheer dread and disbelief. We enter their minds and observe their responses and interactions. The juxtaposing of normality and the extreme is pitch-perfect. Kempowski has a laconic flamboyance comparable to that of László Krasnahorkai. At times All For Nothing conveys the surreal off-beat unreality of Sátántangó (1985). The distinguished translator Anthea Bell has conveyed Kempowski’s wry tone with its irreverent mantra of “Heil Hitler” and her work here rivals that of her finest achievement to date, her translation of WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001).
Many of the conversations in All For Nothing are similar to chess games; most of the speakers are careful, although some are not and edge towards a convincing recklessness. The characters are mostly bewildered, except for the more cunning, such as Auntie.
Kempowski pokes fun at his own obsession with recording history through the interests of some of his characters such as a teacher in possession of archaeological artefacts and a bogus baron carrying historical writings. Also on the loose is a painter, who had been wandering through the German provinces for months, “drawing ‘what was left standing’ as he put it”. ’ He comes to the house as do a number of visitors. All are shown hospitality, albeit reluctantly by Auntie and, in return, take what they can. Humankind does not fare too well in times of war as survival obliterates all concepts of honour. Kempowski remains neutral, leaving the reader to assess the characters.
The supremely passive Katharina is requested to do something. She agrees and although afraid “was also a little proud of herself . . . No one had ever trusted her to do anything before . . . did she just want to prove that she thought herself capable of something?” Her family’s fate spins on her action.
All the while remote young Peter, with his airgun and microscope, evolves into a fascinating study of detached curiosity. He observes the suffering in much the same way as Jim does in JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984). In his travels Peter arrives at a village school to find the teacher’s body on the floor. The boy finds some food and then inspects the ransacked house, discovering a woman and child, also dead. “The teacher and his wife had believed that mankind was basically good and ‘nothing will happen to us’. And now they were lying in their own vomit.” He knows the dead had eaten rat poison and wonders if he should tidy up. It is time to leave. “But he sat on at the schoolmaster’s desk, staring at the scene.”
As a feat of storytelling All For Nothing surpasses even Grass’s Crabwalk (2002; 2003) based on the real-life sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, admittedly a first-person narrative. Kempowski has summoned unforgettable characters who are shocking, even heartbreaking, in their human responses. Far more than a great German novel; Kempowski’s late masterwork is a universal tract which suggests that history can only present the facts; it is crafted stories such as this which enable us to grasp a sense of the vicious reality of war.
Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent