AN ORDINARY YOUTH

WALTER KEMPOWSKI

Translated by Michael Lipkin

480pp. Granta. 18.99 [pounds sterling].

The German writer Walter Kempowski's autobiographical novel An Ordinary Youth (Tadelloser & Wolff, 1971) opens in the Baltic port city of Rostock in 1938. The nine-year-old narrator, also named Walter, is the youngest of three children in a bourgeois family, living a life of comfortable routine. On Sundays the children stroll through the city with their father, who owns a shipping company, while their mother bastes the roast at home. But the veneer of normalcy is thin, with signs of impending war at every turn: the children's concerts in the city park have a military theme, Walter's teacher is "always talking about war being glorious and the foxhole being a sacred site", and Walter's father broods obsessively on military history. The only counterpoint to this drumbeat comes from Walter's older brother Robert, a jazz enthusiast who buys banned swing records from second-hand shops and is a part of the rebellious Swingjugend ("swing youth") counterculture reviled by the Nazis. By the time the book concludes in 1945, more than 400 pages later, the war has eviscerated any trace of the ordinary in Walter's youth.

Walter Kempowski was born in Rostock in 1929 to a family much like the one described here. He became one of postwar Germany's most...