An Ordinary Youth — A Bourgeois Novel
Walter Kempowski
Granta, £18.99

WRITTEN in 1971, this is the author’s novelisation of his childhood years growing up in Hitler-Germany and during the war, until the fall of Berlin. By default, it depicts the whole Nazi era and the war as a rather innocuous backdrop.

He uses a fragmentary form, with the incidents, events and observations he recalls laid out on the page in terse sentences or paragraphs, separated from each other, like scattered shards of mirror glass. His was indeed “an ordinary childhood,” if one ignores the fact that he and his family grew up under the Nazis. 

Kempowski was born into a petit-bourgeois family in the eastern German port city of Rostock, where his father owned a small shipping company. His autobiographical novel epitomises the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt would so memorably describe it; a slow-working poison that seeps into everyone’s daily life.