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A review by mkesten
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
5.0
I discovered Walter Kempowski’s 2006 gem “All for Nothing” (“Alles umsonst”) quite by accident, reading a column on the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Environmental journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert called it the best book she had ever read. That seemed pretty high praise. As I was finishing the book I tweeted Kolbert and asked her what was it about the story that had so moved her.
She answered “I think it was the unvarnished grimness of it all, but also the way it did call attention to its grimness. I found it very affecting. Also, of course, it’s very well written (and translated).
Grim indeed. This story is about the collapse of East Prussian society in the winter of 1945 as it is clear Russian forces are only days away from over-running the region.
Most of the able-bodied men are away at the front. The characters are largely men, women, and children who for one reason or another have been excluded from service, including local Nazi functionaries intent on upholding the rule of (their) law in the disintegrating conditions.
For me there was a parallel between Kolbert’s own writings on environmental collapse and the societal collapse of the Nazi state. In this story, people are rushing presumably to safe zones oblivious to the tsunami about to overtake them.
The heroine of the story, Katharina von Globig, is swept up in a search of Jew-lovers and imprisoned for having harboured a Jew in her boudoir for a single evening.
As I read her interrogation I wanted to break into the story and say to her interrogators “Wait a minute: in a few short days you and all your cronies will be judged by the world as criminals in the highest degree having imprisoned, gassed, burned, and destroyed entire communities of innocent people. In the millions.”
Her husband is on the Italian front and about the same time puts a gun to his temple after finally accepting the inevitable has arrived.
Her young son Peter with the help of an aunt follows the tide of refugees through the streets of ancient towns and choked roads of people heading toward....what? A better life? Protection from the Russian hordes?
In reality, there is no escape.
I learned that this was among Kempowski’s last writings. He died of intestinal cancer in 2007 after having written more than 40 books and collected huge archives from the end of The Third Reich.
I was struck not only by the parallels with our own demonstrable environmental catastrophe but also by the parallels on the recent attacks on the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
On TV we watched polite society break down as rioters believing the US election had been stolen from Donald Trump and followers of a fictional hero Qanon sought to save freedom from itself.
As though a broad swath of American society was waking up to the pathology of a cult before its own eyes.
I found the opening pages of the story so evocative of the failed state: the black crows, the crumbling walls, the abandoned farm implements. Kempowski had that Chekovian gift of making such a huge canvas seem so close and suffocating.
This was such an apt read for the times.
Environmental journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert called it the best book she had ever read. That seemed pretty high praise. As I was finishing the book I tweeted Kolbert and asked her what was it about the story that had so moved her.
She answered “I think it was the unvarnished grimness of it all, but also the way it did call attention to its grimness. I found it very affecting. Also, of course, it’s very well written (and translated).
Grim indeed. This story is about the collapse of East Prussian society in the winter of 1945 as it is clear Russian forces are only days away from over-running the region.
Most of the able-bodied men are away at the front. The characters are largely men, women, and children who for one reason or another have been excluded from service, including local Nazi functionaries intent on upholding the rule of (their) law in the disintegrating conditions.
For me there was a parallel between Kolbert’s own writings on environmental collapse and the societal collapse of the Nazi state. In this story, people are rushing presumably to safe zones oblivious to the tsunami about to overtake them.
The heroine of the story, Katharina von Globig, is swept up in a search of Jew-lovers and imprisoned for having harboured a Jew in her boudoir for a single evening.
As I read her interrogation I wanted to break into the story and say to her interrogators “Wait a minute: in a few short days you and all your cronies will be judged by the world as criminals in the highest degree having imprisoned, gassed, burned, and destroyed entire communities of innocent people. In the millions.”
Her husband is on the Italian front and about the same time puts a gun to his temple after finally accepting the inevitable has arrived.
Her young son Peter with the help of an aunt follows the tide of refugees through the streets of ancient towns and choked roads of people heading toward....what? A better life? Protection from the Russian hordes?
In reality, there is no escape.
I learned that this was among Kempowski’s last writings. He died of intestinal cancer in 2007 after having written more than 40 books and collected huge archives from the end of The Third Reich.
I was struck not only by the parallels with our own demonstrable environmental catastrophe but also by the parallels on the recent attacks on the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
On TV we watched polite society break down as rioters believing the US election had been stolen from Donald Trump and followers of a fictional hero Qanon sought to save freedom from itself.
As though a broad swath of American society was waking up to the pathology of a cult before its own eyes.
I found the opening pages of the story so evocative of the failed state: the black crows, the crumbling walls, the abandoned farm implements. Kempowski had that Chekovian gift of making such a huge canvas seem so close and suffocating.
This was such an apt read for the times.