When I reviewed Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel Alles umsonst ten years ago, I complained that the author was unknown in the United States and none of his work had been translated. Thankfully, that has now changed with the publication of All For Nothing, translated by Anthea Bell - one of our best translators of German fiction. And now the book has also been reviewed by James Wood - one of our best critics - in The New Yorker magazine. Wood has high praise for the novel as a moving depiction of wartime survival - the cowardice and heroism - sometimes in the same character - in the face of almost certain death.
“All for Nothing” immerses us in the scandal of this arbitrariness, so that we see the differences that make up a collective narrative. In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy said that he was trying to write about “the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind,” by breaking history into the smallest individual units. This is something the novel is supremely equipped to do, because it is the great form of interior inquiry, the form that listens for privacy; but also because the novel simultaneously pulls apart and pushes together a smallish “swarm” of characters. “All for Nothing” is more powerful than “Swansong 1945,” not only because its fictionality feels as real as anything in Kempowski’s oral history but because Kempowski’s novel is a distillation, rather than a collage. Instead of thousands of different testimonies, we encounter a dozen or so lives, densely realized, and these dozen or so people must encounter one another, even if their meetings are only meetings between solipsists.
I'm very glad that in his review Wood also discussed Kempowski's life project: Das Echolat - his massive "collective diary" of the Second World War as experienced by everyday German people. So far, only the final volume has been published in English as Swansong 1945:
“Swansong 1945” is a shattering experience; it shatters history, so that each single shard cuts deeply. It also offers a lesson in the disorienting arrhythmias of simultaneity: Thomas Mann is at work in sunny Pacific Palisades while survivors gasp for life in Bergen-Belsen; a woman is avoiding getting raped while a British soldier in northwest Germany writes quite cheerfully to his parents that they don’t need to send him any more chocolate. (“We get plenty, thank you.”) Historical injustice has causes and large forces, identifiable culprits and victims. But the moral injustice of the accident of temporality is hard to bear, because it is so arbitrary, as Auden noted in “Musée des Beaux Arts”: while someone is suffering, someone else is “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” The torturer is wicked, but the torturer’s horse is innocent, and needs to scratch “its innocent behind on a tree.” Erpenbeck puts this eloquently in her introduction. Kempowski, she writes, “proposes his life’s work as an antidote to the traumatic experiences of a wartime childhood, all that he was obliged to learn as a youth: that when bombs start falling, one building will be struck while another is spared, one fifteen-year-old boy will fall in battle while another survives, and one prisoner will know what he’s in jail for while another may have been mistakenly arrested during the chaotic months following the end of the war.”
The novelist Jenny Erpenbeck wrote the introduction to the American edition of All For Nothing, and this may have attracted Wood to Kempowski's novel. Wood had early written a glowing review of Erpenbeck's Go,Went, Gone.(See my review of Gehen, Ging, Gegangen ).
Hopefully, Americans will someday get to read Letzte Grüße - Kempowski's funny novel about a German novelist's travels through America (my review here).
Alles umsonst is a terrific novel about the plight of the 14 million Germans in East Prussia fleeing the Red Army. But Kempowski did not experience that terrible event himself. For a first-hand description I recommend Arno Surminski's 1974 novel Jokehnen or, for English readers, my good friend Gunter Nitsch's memoir Weeds Like Us.
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