Though his nobility is new, the estate itself is ancient and half-ruined, a dark island in a snow-covered forest.

Though not terribly long, it is epic in scope, and it is the starkest novel written in recent decades that I’ve read.Ĭentred on the evacuation of East Prussia in January 1945, it follows the lives of more than a dozen characters in an old estate, close to the approaching Eastern Front.Įberhard von Globig, recently ennobled, is the absent master of the Georgenhof estate.ĭespite the pervasive sense that the war is not going well, he is seen to be safe, managing logistics in Italy (and sending home the odd illicit shipment of sugar) rather than fighting at any of the several fronts. I am glad that I’ve taken time to ruminate, as my impressions have only gotten stronger in the week since I finished it. She renders Kempowski’s tale with stunning directness. She was an impressively versatile translator of everything from Asterix to Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig. This, too, is one of her final works, finished in 2014 (she died last year). He was sent to a penalty unit for his lack of enthusiasm for the Hitler Youth, and was made a courier for the Luftwaffe later in the war.Īfter 1945, Kempowski worked for the Americans in West Germany, for which work the Soviets subsequently sent him to a prison camp for eight years.Īnthea Bell translated the work forcefully into English. Kempowski was born in 1929, in Rostock, which the British almost totally obliterated in 1942. The book was published in German in 2006, just before Kempowski’s death in 2007. Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing is nothing short of a tour-de-force, a magnum opus possessed of such power that it has taken me a few days just to process it, and a few more to write anything about it-though in the meantime I have spoken of little else.

All for nothing kempowski