All for Nothing

December 1, 2017
The late German author serves up a bleak tale of the final days of World War II as a down-on-its-luck family prepares for worse to come.Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderfuhrer stationed in Italy, his job to ransack the country of its best foods and wines, while his wife, Katherina, "famous as a languorous beauty, black-haired and blue-eyed," is left to run his rattletrap East Prussian estate. As Kempowski (Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, 2015, etc.) quickly makes clear, though, the person who is really in charge is called "Auntie," "a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin" whose resourcefulness is not to be underestimated. At the center of the story, with all its roman a clef elements, is 12-year-old Peter, who would rather be doing anything than mandatory service in the Hitler Youth. Keeping a disapproving eye on him is Drygalski, the manager of a nearby estate, who, though mourning a dead son and tending to a sick wife, has plenty of time to spy on the von Globigs and their suspiciously multiethnic household, with its Polish handyman and Ukrainian maids. Into this odd scene, as Russian guns rumble on the horizon, comes a steady flow of refugees and dispossessed people: a mixed family whose sons, half Jewish, "had been dreadfully sad because they couldn't join the Hitler Youth," a political economist, an artist, a musician, and others. For a time it seems as if the war might bypass this odd congeries of people, as if somehow taking pity, but in time events catch up to them in the form of bullets, bombs, and columns of ghostlike people bound for the camps a step ahead of the advancing Red Army--about whom a schoolmaster remarks to Peter, hopefully, "The Russians had been here in the First War, too, and had behaved decently."Memorable and monumental: a book to read alongside rival and compatriot Gunter Grass' Tin Drum as a portrait of decline and fall.

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December 18, 2017
Kempowski’s atmospheric novel opens on the decaying Georgenhof estate, which lies on the East Prussian border, in 1945, as the Red Army approaches. The vestiges of a family whose paterfamilias and uniting figure is serving in Italy bide their time and try to go about life in the mansion, where Hitler’s likeness still adorns paintings, stamps, and banknotes, not fully aware of the danger of the approaching Red Army. At the story’s center is young Peter, sincere and bookish, who studies his microscope in a bedroom adjacent to that of his dead sister, Elfie, and is taught by the foppish schoolmaster Dr. Wagner. Peter’s father, Eberhard von Globig, has gone to the Italian Front; Peter’s mother, the “languorous beauty” Katharina, perhaps already a widow, waits in vain for news of Eberhard’s fate. “Auntie, a sinewy old spinster,” keeps a lookout for the influx of refugees that—originally confined to the surrounding buildings—soon mobs the courtyard. A change is coming to their way of life, heralded by a series of guests—a disabled “political economist,” an unreconstructed Nazi violinist, a painter, a debauched Baltic baron, and, fatefully, a Jewish fugitive. Gothic and haunting, the novel asks what things will be like “if things turn out bad,” knowing the answer will come too soon.

April 1, 2018

Published in 2006, this final work by major postwar German author Kempowski (Swansong 1945) takes place in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-45, as refugees flee west before the relentlessly advancing Soviet Army. Interestingly, it's not the refugees but the once distinguished, now nearly destitute von Globigs who form the novel's core. With Eberhard von Globig at a reasonably cushy job behind the lines, the tumbling-down manor house is occupied by his beautiful but vacuous wife, Katharina; their serious young son Peter, coming of age at exactly the wrong time; and Auntie, who single-mindedly runs the estate. People drop in, from a Nazi violinist and Peter's fey tutor to a stuffy Baltic baron foisted on the family and a Jewish refugee Katharina helps less from conviction than passivity. But what astonishes throughout is the clearly delivered sense of how the von Globigs cling to the past and refuse to face what's coming. Who will survive and, as the title suggests, what's the point? VERDICT Penetrating work for readers of literary and upmarket historical fiction.

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