Kempowski wrote this novel in 2006, but perhaps he had been thinking about its themes for much of his life. “We Germans are not children of melancholy.” Kempowski borrowed heavily from his own life. However, it is a fictional tale of how an East Prussian aristocratic family, the von Globigs, manage during the Russian invasion of January, 1945. “Mecklenburg, Prussia, Saxony: how pleasant it had been in the Germany of the past, and he spoke of when measurements were in ells, feet and miles, he spoke of post-coaches in which you travelled from country to country without needing a passport or a visa, he spoke of kreuzers, guilders and shillings…. But sad to say, the Prussians had eliminated that wonderful variety, insisting on unity, unity, unity!” In reality, Kempowski was fifteen at the time of the Russian assault. His father, a shipowner conscripted as a Wehrmacht officer, died in the last days of the war in a battle on Vistula Spit, one of two narrow strips of land over which all the Prussian refugees heading west had to flee. Over 300,000 Prussians would die attempting to escape the Russians.
Kempowski’s novel shows humanity in all its complexities. “There was something wrong with the gentry over the road. Putting out the swastika flag only when absolutely necessary, and then it was just a tiny little rag of a thing.” His story shows humans at their best and their worst. And often it was the very same people. “Wartime had made it possible to do many friends a good turn on the quiet.” The same man could be kind and gentle at one moment and callously conniving at the next. “If you were going to kill something you had to do it properly. From time to time Vladimir came along with the axe, picked up a chicken, and one blow was enough to kill it…. Some time or other every chicken’s turn came, and the axe went chop-chop.” No one in the novel is a caricature. Everyone is more complicated than they first seem. “Pastor Brahms was thought of as fractious, and a fractious person was somehow very German. ‘Here stand I, I can do no other…’ Sarkander had pointed out that Martin Luther had also been a fractious man.” The novel seeks to show how people react in a crisis. “Keep the teaspoons. They could be used like coins. ‘This is cash in hand!’ As a refugee, he said, if you want to cross a river you could simply offer the ferryman a teaspoon.” Pushed to the brink some men will lie, steal, cheat, and murder. “Onlookers shot the prisoners hostile glances. It’s the fault of people like that, they thought. They stirred everyone else up against us, they fanned the flames setting the world alight.” War is nothing but misery. “Had it all been for nothing? The columns of tanks, side by side and one after another, moving through the wheat fields of the east along a broad front, and the lieutenant himself standing in the turret of one of the tanks. Those had been the days!” And the brutality of war takes its toll on civilians just as much as on the soldiers. “And telling her to take down the picture of Hitler. What was the man thinking of? Didn’t you have to show something like that? If you didn’t defend first principles everything went down the drain. Wasn’t the Fuhrer their ultimate prop and stay?” In total war, no one in society is spared. “The teacher and his wife had believed that mankind was basically good and ‘nothing will happen to us’, but they had taken rat poison in the end. And now they were lying in their own vomit.”
The novel begins by sketching some interesting characters who wind up as refugees, wandering into the von Globigs’ landed estate, the Georgenhoff. “It was true that the centuries-old oaks of the Globig property warned the Schlageter Settlement, with its brand new birch trees, to stay where it was, calling halt to any further advance.” A political economist, a violinist, a painter, and a baron all spend time at the Globigs’ manor house. “Refugees: there were some dubious characters among them who might appropriate stuff that wasn’t theirs. Many of them never washed, or were always complaining. But there was also a fine old national tradition in those parts, people you could imagine in an engraving, upright and not to be intimidated. German blood that must be saved. The homeland spread its arms to take them in.” Already in the estate’s surroundings there were servants from the Ukraine, a Polish groundskeeper, French POWs, Hitler Youth, a Lutheran preacher, and Jewish slave labor. “Vladimir would have liked to tell people how the Russians had driven his comrades into a pit and shot them there, but he kept that to himself. He had once told the Czech in the Forest Lodge, and it had been a very bad idea. Since then he and the Czech had been at daggers drawn.” The plot drags on haphazardly, but then slowly takes up many subtle twists and turns as the intrigue and action builds. “On, go on was the watchword, reinforced by the rumor: ‘The Russians are coming.’” One theme that runs throughout the novel is the pressure war puts on a man’s morality. “Why did I have to go and marry a Jew? she had said, forgetting the good years, abusing him and complaining. She even talked about the Fuhrer.” Character is revealed through stress. “What a good thing there were people still trying to save what could yet be saved, at least in a small way…. These terrorist gangsters couldn’t tear the poetry in his head out of him.” The codes of civilized life and the bonds that hold society together can easily fracture under the threat of death and miserable deprivation.
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