Skip to product information
1 of 1

An Ordinary Youth

An Ordinary Youth

by Walter Kempowski, translated from the German by Michael Lipkin

Regular price $19.95
Regular price Sale price $19.95
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when this book and other new titles are available for purchase:
An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view—dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans—tell a different story.  Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski's novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681377209
Pages: 476
Publication Date:

Praise

What was it like to grow up in Nazi Germany? In the autobiographical novel that made him famous, Walter Kempowski shows that it was completely ‘ordinary’—and for that very reason, deeply uncanny. Doing justice to both the innocence of the boy he was and the moral judgment of the man he became, Kempowski creates an appealing and appalling case study in the banality of evil.
—Adam Kirsch

Fascinating and disturbing. Kempowski plunges the reader into the already running tide of one of history’s great horrors so that we see it as if from within. . . . An unflinchingly honest re-creation of a time and place that still beggars understanding.
—Carol Birch

Compellingly immersive in all its intensely evocative detail, sometimes very funny, sometimes not funny at all, An Ordinary Youth reveals once again Kempowski’s extraordinary gift for showing how lives are lived in the narrow confines of the quotidian even as mighty forces are rumbling in the background and preparing to overturn and perhaps destroy those lives. The appalling events of mid-twentieth-century Europe have been the subject matter of many fine writers: arguably none more truthful to the unsentimental, unheroic reality of the lived experience than Kempowski.
—David Kynaston

First published the year I was born, this book was a favourite in my family, both for its humour and its unflinching eye on Third Reich Germans. I grew up with Kempowski’s idioms and eccentric phrasings passed around the table at dinner. For decades, the novel was considered too idiosyncratic to work in translation, but Michael Lipkin has pulled off a masterstroke, retaining the sense of being inside Walter’s head: the boy in the midst of events, understanding little, but capturing everything in snippets of sound and image and experience.
—Rachel Seiffert

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it