There is intense foreboding everywhere, and little resembling peace reigns inside or outside the Georgenhof. But are these outsiders the implied speakers of “There has to be a place where you feel you belong,” or might this truism just as easily have been voiced by the Georgenhof’s owners? Since we can’t really decide who is speaking, we also feel the presence of an implied third speaker-the author, ambiguous, watchful, wry. Kempowski’s prose has quickly moved from the house to those people who cannot gain access to it. Then there’s the question of perspective, and its ironies. The simplicity-“why don’t we just stop and say hello?”-is disarming, and also feels a bit dangerous, like a child’s interrogative curiosity. There has to be a place where you feel you belong. Peace reigned behind the house and in the little park and the wood beyond it. NO THROUGH ROAD, said a notice on the big barn: no one was allowed to go into the park. They wondered who lived there: why don’t we just stop and say hello? And then with a touch of envy they wondered: why don’t we live in a house like that ourselves, a place that must be full of stories? Life is unfair, thought the passers-by. Kempowski’s novel does contain those elements, but the anticipated stability of the storytelling is impishly subverted on the first page, when the author switches from his description of the house to the people who pass it on the road:Īll that strangers driving along the road saw of the place was the main house. We think we know how this confident narrative will proceed, in ample furlongs of classic realism: the imperilled gentry, the advancing Red Army, the wintry trek westward. An opening paragraph sets a leisurely scene, like something out of Fontane or Turgenev: “The Georgenhof estate was not far from Mitkau, a small town in East Prussia, and now, in winter, the Georgenhof, surrounded by old oaks, lay in the landscape like a black island in a white sea.” It is January, 1945. That light touch is evident from the beginning. Then I encountered Walter Kempowski’s extraordinary novel “ All for Nothing” (New York Review Books), first published in German in 2006, and now available in Anthea Bell’s vital translation. I wouldn’t have thought it could be done.

Now imagine such a book written by a German who lived through those bitter months as a teen-ager, but written with a light touch, almost quizzically, the entire story suffused with an air of speculative detachment. Imagine, for a moment, a German novel about the final months of the Second World War, an epic tale of national collapse and shameful private defeat, the ruined landscape ribboned with refugees.

All for nothing by walter kempowski