All for Nothing

ALL FOR NOTHING by Walter Kempowski, introduction by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Anthea Bell An NYRB Classics Original

Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. 

It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in Italy confiscating wine and olive oil for the troops. His wife, Katharina – “famous as a languorous beauty, black-haired and blue-eyed” – in a perpetual state of vague disengagement often locks herself away in her room. Their son is twelve-year-old Peter with his train set and microscope and always a cold or catarrh that keep him from the activities of the local Hitler youth.

 

The house is run by Auntie with the help of two constantly squabbling Ukrainian maids, Vera and Sonya, and a handyman -Vladimir, the Pole, who has an embroidered P on his jacket. The local Nazi party official – Drygalski, Heil Hitler! – keeps a wary eye on the goings-on at the Georgenhof.

They are insulated from the war by status and wealth but hear the air raid sirens in the nearby town. The distant guns are ominous signs that the front is moving inexorably closer. Tanks and trucks rumble past and daily life is disrupted by bombing raids and power cuts. 

For the Russians are coming, and a steady stream of visitors seeking refuge brings rumors and anxieties into the house. Each visitor brings a new level of foreboding There’s the political economist on crutches who advises Peter about his stamp collection.
You have a great many stamps showing Hitler, my boy.’ If the Russians came and saw those stamps, what would they say? Nothing but little portraits of Hitler. He wasn’t so sure, he said, suddenly turning to Katharina, but ‘Mightn’t they burn the house down over your heads, dear lady?’
Then he told Peter, ‘Go and get your paint box.’ He asked for a basin of water, and set to work on the Hitler stamps, dabbing a spot of black paint on every face of Hitler. Peter had only to dab all those Hitler stamps with black paint and wash it off again after the war, then there would be no problems. But leaving the stamps as they were … Suppose a Russian opens the album and sees the Führer grinning back at him a hundred times over?
The Russians? Would they be coming here? asked Auntie.

Soon, Auntie knows to pack her bag in readiness to join the refugees on the road.

Kempowski gives us a rich cast of characters and each brings emotional and historical depth to the story.  The often-repeated identifying details could be an annoying tic in the hands of a lesser writer but here they serve to layer memory and build meaning.

Auntie has a photograph of Hitler and remembers her childhood in Silesia where the family home was lost to war profiteers. Katerina remembers a romantic interlude when she and the mayor of Mitkau – he with his stiff leg and duelling scars on one cheek – had gone to the seaside. Peter’s tutor – the elderly Dr. Wagner – remembers his beloved Königsberg and eating fried flounders in a little restaurant on the River Pregel, and the sirens sounding on the big ships in the harbor.   

To think that the British, such a cultivated nation, had razed a city like Königsberg to the ground. The cathedral. The inn called the Massacre. It was more than he could understand. Dr Wagner couldn’t get the ships’ sirens and the fried flounders out of his head. And crunchy golden-yellow fried potatoes. Such a simple dish in itself.

Jackbooted Drygalski with his Hitler mustache, his petty-bourgeois resentments, and invalid wife remembers his son killed in Poland. Peter, with his microscope, remembers his little sister whose grave is in the woods. The servants, too, have their memories and keep their thoughts to themselves. 

All the characters – with their different stories and perspectives – contribute to a sense of generalized anxiety. 

Dr Wagner was always talking to Katharina over the boy’s head about the circumstances, those circumstances to which they were now exposed. He lowered his voice: the brickworks in Mitkau, the people who had to work there, prisoners in striped jackets. What would come of it all? ‘Who’d have thought it?’ … and then talking to Auntie about Pastor Brahms in Mitkau, who was said to be most incautious, saying all kinds of wild things in his sermons — God is not mocked, and so on and so forth, instead of keeping his mouth shut. And then the words ‘concentration camp’ uttered in an undertone.

The war is closing in, the Red Army advances. The inhabitants of the Georgenhof join the refugees fleeing on the roads to the west. The story of what happens next is unsparing but Kempowski manages to tell it with a  light touch. This is a novel that bears witness to a terrible episode in modern history yet does so in ways that are compelling and yes, hopeful.

When I came to the end, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and start again. This novel is that good.

JosieHolford

View Comments

  • Excellent review, and great comments too -- one of which (by Harold Jarche) led me to his very interesting post on the subject. My father was born in Germany and immigrated in his teens to the U.S. between wars (WW I & WW II). He never talked (at least, to me when I was a boy) about his life in Germany, and by the time I was a teenager, he and my mom were divorced, he again 'changed countries,' and I never did get to ask him the questions I wish I'd asked when I was too young to appreciate such knowledge.

    • "I never did get to ask him the questions I wish I’d asked when I was too young to appreciate such knowledge."

      Yes. Seems that is always the way.

      Thanks for the interesting comment.

  • This sounds fascinating and makes me realize I should give more translated books a chance.

    Anthea Bell is very gifted. She even wrote a regency I enjoyed years ago.

  • Ciao
    Complimenti per il tuo blog.
    Seguo il tuo blog da poco e mi piace molto.
    Anche se hai molti followers spero che visiterai il mio blog e magari che mi segui anche tu.
    Grazie e buona giornata
    Natalia
    Piacere di conoscerti

  • This is a book I read a couple(?) of years ago and also found it quite memorable. It popped up on my radar through the all too real story of Helmuth James von Molkte and his wife Freya who also had an estate in Silesia. First through a book called 'Letters to Freya' and a more recent volume published by NYRB in 2019 'Last Letters'. An amazing story.

    • So many stories. Some told. Some untold.

      Thank you for the references. I have so much to read and learn.

  • You might like to read Other Gert's review of this in 2016. Like you she found it a remarkable and deeply moving book.

  • Thank you for this review, Josie. My mother, who passed away in 2019, grew up in East Prussia and became a refugee in 1945, at the age of 14. She did not talk much about her experiences as a child during the war, so I look forward to reading this book.

    • I shall be really interested in your response Harold. I found it a deeply compassionate book about a very difficult and often ignored time in recent history. It's the kind of book that can sit beside the work of W.G Sebald. I can only imagine the hardships and deprivations your mother must have endured. This may prove a harrowing read.

  • Thank you for this glowing recommendation. I consulted a map to follow the different geographical references (Silesia, for example) and was reminded, yet again, about how little I know about European history. So many different countries and kingdoms and languages have existed over the past centuries!

    • One result of reading this has been - like you - doing a little digging into the history and political geography of the area. So much to learn.

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