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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 show more 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. Historical Fiction. Literature. Fiction. show less
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Jahre 1938 -45
Für mich war zweiter Weltkrieg auch ein ausgelutschtes Thema, bis ich Tadellöser&Wolff las.
Ein teils autobiografischer Bericht von der Zeit zwischen Ausbruch und Ende des Krieges. Ohne Pathos und leicht gehalten wird hier aus der Sicht einer gut bürgerlichen Familie erzählt.
Ein teils autobiografischer Bericht von der Zeit zwischen Ausbruch und Ende des Krieges. Ohne Pathos und leicht gehalten wird hier aus der Sicht einer gut bürgerlichen Familie erzählt.
Jun 18, 2009German
"Tadellöser & Wolff" nannte Walter Kempowskis Vater, Reeder in Rostock und guter Kunde der Tabakwarenhandlung Loeser & Wolff, so ziemlich alles, was nicht gerade "Miesnitzdörfer & Jansen" war. Und als "Miesnitzdörfer" ließ sich in der Zeit von 1938 bis 1945, im sogenannten Tausendjährigen Reich, von der dieser Roman erzählt, wahrhaftig vieles bezeichnen. Immerhin, trotz Verdunklungspflicht, SA-Eintritt und Schießdienst ging es des Kempowskis "ganz gold", wenigstens eine Zeitlang ...
Quelle: Amazon.de
Quelle: Amazon.de
Jan 22, 2011German
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ThingScore 88
The first major novel by German author Walter Kempowski describes a youth that was anything but ordinary. 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 show more the extraordinary arc of world history, and the Germans’ uniquely catastrophic role in it. 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. show less
The book – whether or not it is right to call it a novel is one of the many questions that it poses – consists of continuously relayed fragments of Kempowski’s youthful memories from the late 1930s to the fall of Berlin. The gradual triumph of nazism is made to creep up on the reader as it did on the young narrator. This is, it must be acknowledged, frequently a tedious book, one that show more asks its reader patiently to endure the succession of snapshots that it provides, lulled into a kind of mild torpor from which they can periodically be jolted. This may in part be a function of the translation: Michael Lipkin’s translator’s note observes that the impossibility of capturing the “distinctive opacity” of the original has resulted in a version that “looks rather a bit more like ‘a bourgeois novel’ than does the original”. In any case, the translated version is a book that invites the reader to become bored, and to become interested in, to reflect upon, their own boredom; to wonder how horror can find itself at home amid the ordinary. show less
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Die besten Werke der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur von 1924 bis 2024
100 works; 2 members
Author Information
60+ Works 2,079 Members
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. This is the first portion to appear in English. Shaun Whiteside's translations from the German include classics by Freud, Musil, and show more Nietzsche. show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- An Ordinary Youth
- Original title
- Tadellöser & Wolff : ein bürgerlicher Roman
- Alternate titles*
- We hebben 't niet geweten : een burgerlijke roman
- Original publication date
- 1971
- Important places
- Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Germany
- Related movies
- Tadellöser & Wolff (1975 | IMDb)
- Dedication*
- Detlev Nahmmacher gewidmet
- First words*
- Morgens hatten wir noch in der Wohnung auf grauen Packerkisten gehockt und Kaffee getrunken (gehört das uns, was da drin ist?)
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And now closer still: individual shots, probably shots of peace. One sailed through the pear tree and blossums rained down. 'I think we should go inside,' my mother said.
- Original language
- German
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 833.914
- Disambiguation notice
- 1681377209 | 9781681377209 2023 softcover English NYRB Classics
1783788844 | 9781783788842 2023 hardcover English Granta
1783788860 | 9781783788866 2024 softcover English Granta
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 833.914 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures German fiction 1900- 1900-1990 1945-1990
- LCC
- PT2671 .E43 .T3 — Language and Literature German, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures German literature Individual authors or works 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 245
- Popularity
- 131,902
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (4.06)
- Languages
- 6 — Dutch, English, German, Italian, Latvian, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 23
- ASINs
- 3
