From the author of the seminal All For Nothing, comes An Ordinary Youth: an astonishing autobiographical novel and a chilling exploration of how one family adjusted to life under the Nazis.
Join The Wiener Holocaust Library for a talk by the translator of Walter Kempowski’s important work. Growing up in Rostock, in the north of Germany, Kempowski had a comfortable upbringing. But, as the country rolled toward war, the attitudes of his teachers, peers and family began to slide, and it wasn’t long before the roar of falling bombs, charged silences and mounting intolerance begin to puncture Walter’s carefree youth.
Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, An Ordinary Youth is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. All the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries – communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations – running alongside the Kempowski family’s daily life.
Written in a richly layered choir of voices – referencing songs, advertisements, literature, films and political slogans of the time – it weaves an impressionistic, expansive and hugely evocative portrait of war-time Germany, and reveals the many forms that complicity can take. A bestseller upon publication in Germany, it remains one of the most successful and acclaimed works by this leading post-war writer.
About the author
Walter Kempowski (1929 – 2007) was one of Germany’s most important post-war writers, known for his acclaimed collection of first-hand accounts of the Second World War, including Swansong 1945. He is also the author of many novels, including Homeland and All For Nothing, which was a bestseller in both Germany and the UK.
About the speaker
Michael Lipkin is a writer, translator, and professor of German literature. He was born in Riga and came to New York City with his family as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1989, thanks to the efforts of the Hebrew International Aid Society.
He received his Ph.D at Columbia University and currently teaches in the Department of German at Hamilton College, where his work focuses on literary realism as a lived practice and form of life. His writing and criticism has appeared in numerous publications in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany, including for the Times Literary Supplement, The New Left Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, and the Merkur.
Good evening everyone my name is Christine schmit and I’m the deputy director and head of research at the vener Holocaust Library here in London and we are delighted to welcome you to tonight’s book talk with the translator of wter kow’s important work and ordinary youth uh Prof with Professor
Michael Lipkin following the kovsky family from the months before the outbreak of War through to the fall of Berlin an ordinary youth is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood and extraordinary times all the while all the while the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries communicated in furtive looks or hushed
Conversations running alongside the kovsky family’s Daily Life the book weaves an impressionistic expansive and hugely evocative portrait of wartime Germany and reveals the many forms that complicity can take a bestseller upon publication in Germany it remains one of the most success uccessful and acclaimed works by this leading postwar writer and
For the first time it is now available in English with Professor lipkin’s wonderful translation so before I introduce our speaker um just a few notes of housekeeping this event is being recorded but your screen will not appear in the recording we will um publish it on our YouTube channel after
The event in case you have to leave um halfway through and you’d like to um catch up on anything you’ve missed um you will be kept on mute throughout the entire program but please feel free to post your questions or comments in the chat at any time and after Professor
Lipkin’s talk we’ll leave some time for questions and answers and we hope to of course get to as many as possible and so now I’d like to introduce our speaker this evening Michael liin is a writer translator and professor of German literature he was born in Ria and came
To New York City with his family as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1989 thanks to the efforts of the Hebrew International Aid Society he received his PhD at Columbia University and currently teaches in the department of German at Hamilton College where his work focuses on literary realism as a
Lived practice and form of life his writing and criticism has appeared in numerous Publications in the US the UK and Germany including for the Times literary supplement the new Left review the nation the Paris review and the merker so without further Ado I’d like to welcome to welcome uh Professor
Lipkin and hand the virtual floor over to you thank you very much Christine I I really really appreciate your uh you’re having me here I just want to say thank you so much for uh uh for for hosting this event and for setting it up and I
Also really want to give a big thank you to the the people at granta who did the editorial work uh in the UK for organizing this event and for making the book possible and I’m really really very very thankful to be here and uh I have
To say sort of on a on um on a personal note I thought I would maybe Begin by by introducing myself I mean um I find it I for me it’s a little bit strange to be uh to be speaking at a at a holocaust
Library in the sense that uh in my own jewishness my relationship to my my jewishness has has never really been a part of my public Identity or my professional identity and so this is really the first time I would say in my entire life I think I I can actually
Confidently say that I’ve ever made any kind of public address or um offer my opinions on something uh as uh as a Jew and so I thought to just introduce myself very very briefly and I’m a scholar of German literature uh I studied German literature uh at University sort of
Through comparative literature I’m not sure if that’s uh kind of you know an operative academic discipline uh in in the UK but in the United States that simply means that you study literature uh in in a different language I was always very interested in German literature as I think most people are as
Um you know the sort of the philosophical literature par excellance so as Christine mentioned um I was born in the Soviet Union and uh I came to America as a child with with my parents so uh English and also with my grandparents my my my my father’s
Parents and the Jewish context that I grew up is specific I grew up in is specifically this Russian Jewish diasporic context in New York uh so we would spend summers in the borch belt which the as you in the UK may or may not know is a kind of little
Strip it’s about uh two hours driving outside of New York City where you would have these summer Resorts and these Bungalow colonies uh you might know it from the film Dirty Dancing with uh with Jennifer grah and uh uh so this was sort of the Jewish context that as a young
Person I I knew and uh and I recognized and so for example at one of the at this Bungalow Colony some of the older people were in fact survivors of the Holocaust it was something that didn’t fully Reg to me as a as a child so for example the father of my fourth
Grade teacher in Elementary School Miss lamb he was there uh and he he spent summers day you had this little house you went there with your grandparents uh your parents would stay in the city they would only drive up on the weekends you got to run around all day totally
Unstructured activity and so uh the children there uh we all spoke a kind of take Clockwork Orange like mix of Russian Jewish sorry Russian English uh and like a little bit of Yiddish but as far as the older generation if you think about Soviet people and what they had
Gone through and also some of the Americans the American Jews and what they they had gone through there were Holocaust Survivors there and uh it simply didn’t register right in its full in the full enormity of who these people were because I mean to some you could
Say they were living the lives that the Nazis had wanted to take away from them you’d see them doing the backstroke in this one in pool you would see them playing tennis and uh it’s simply the full enormity of what those people had gone through did not register to me as a
As a child but one thing I do remember was uh the film Schindler’s List being screened right when it came out and this being this huge huge huge event and uh it was very serious and um as far as my own family history so uh my father’s
Side of the family is Jewish and my mothers is not uh and so by Soviet standards they have an interracial marriage which is very very strange to to think about and um my grandmother uh was a medical administrator for the railroad in uh in the Soviet Union and
She was the during the war and her extended family was was killed during the Holocaust during the Nazi Advance uh in pams uh and this is a history I didn’t really know about didn’t really understand as a child not because my sort of not that my grandma kept it from
Me exactly or from anyone I think it was H I think just the past that she was happy to to leave uh to leave in the Soviet Union and the idea of having children who simply wouldn’t have to deal with the enormity of all this and what this
Really entailed so her first husband had been killed and this was something I didn’t really know until I was a teenager and uh she married my grandfather in 1946 and to me it’s you know the the idea of having a child like oh how can I
Line up to the the the details of my life in such a way that we could possibly have children seems like such an enormous and impossible decision the idea that after all that my my grandmother met met someone fell in love uh and had a child uh I find almost you
Know in in incomprehensible and so I never really connected to this history I never really understood this history because I find one aspect of this Russian Jewish dipor kind of life is that uh I mean you’re the people are from places that no longer exist the
Soviet Union no longer exists so I I don’t think I just understood the details of my grandmother’s life in uh I I couldn’t put them together into a coherent biography whereas for example my my girlfriend my partner uh her family uh they’re from Atlanta in the South and Georgia and I can immediately
Tell you who everyone is in her family I can put it all into a coherent history because it’s part of a history I’ve been socialized into which is which which which is American history uh so in this particular context the idea of German literature uh has this really really
Ambivalent and really ambiguous kind of position in that there are people my grand uh my grandparents know my parents know who would simply say I have no desire to ever read a word of Germany ever period right uh if Germany were turned into Farmland according to you
Know the Morgan plan that would have been fine and uh I simply never want to hear the German language in fact no Jewish person should ever learn the German language on the one hand I think this is a in my opinion a totally under understandable reaction a totally understandable uh deeply say
Sympathetic way of dealing with that history on the other hand when I think of my grandfather my grandfather I describe him he was kind of he a bit of an oddball he was kind of say self-styled intellectual and I think he belonged to another kind of Jewish tradition Jewish approach to
Germanness which believe that the cultural achievements of Germany were not in effect really German at all but belonged to a common Humanity uh and so the idea that you would Kant I mean I don’t know that he ever read K but was aware of Kant as a
Person worth respecting and uh and Hegel and that you would listen to the music of Vagner which we had on a little cassette those are all things my grandfather was was open to and never really sort of put in the context of Nazism and the Nazi invasion
Uh of the Soviet Union and so that to some extent that’s always informed the way I think about German literature and my approach to German literature in so far as uh in some ways right I think of Germany I find it not I find it hard not
To think of Germany as the land of the perpetrators in in some respects but on the other hand I would say I personally on a personal level connect very very deeply to the German Jewish tradition that existed before the Nazis which I think can be compared favorably to the
Renaissance as a time of intellectual artistic uh and scientific flourishing and so when I read for example Isaac deutser the biographer of tropy I read his book The non-jewish Jew which is about H and trosky and Rosa Luxembourg and the idea that the Jewish position in German Society specifically its
Outsiderness specifically pushes towards and allows for the articulation of the project of a common Humanity uh that’s something that resonates with me very very intensely and there’s something I thought about when I trans the transition to this book kow’s book which is a book that is about Nazi
Germany uh and is therefore about the Holocaust although Jewish people and the Holocaust itself are mentioned I would say they’re present in in in in very much in uh in in their absence and then uh I’ll say a little bit about Kowski but you know he’s above among other things he
Was a diarist and in his Diaries uh of the uh the wall and of reunification he talks about reading a book um that was it was a memoir by an English bomber and he says you know this is really good I like this book and it’s a
Shame it’s not more popular in Germany it’s surprising that people aren’t more curious about the people who were bounding them and to some extent that’s how I feel about this book which uh is about it’s an autobiographical novel about kow’s family I mean I think aspects of it are clearly fictionalized clearly
Constructed uh but I I think much of it is very autobiographical that follows his family from 1939 to 1945 and specifically follows their life uh in rosock uh Germany so um some of you may have read all for nothing uh which I think really got a very warm and very
Wide reception I think for the most part kosu is not really known in his lifetime uh in the English speaking world that’s from 29 to 2007 but uh Koski was born in Roso and his father was had a shipping company uh and uh he was his father fought on the
Eastern Front I believe eventually died uh on on the Eastern front and then as a Young Man Kowski and his brother were sent to prison for they were sentenced to prison for 25 years but they served eight by the Soviets uh because they for engaging with the Soviets considered Espionage uh
So he spent this time in Soviet prison uh and that became koski’s first book which he wrote in his late 30s called the a report from the cell block it was published in 68 and it was really not successful because it went very much against the mood of the time in Germany because
Nobody in West Germany uh I mean the the sort of the left the student demonstrators nobody wanted to think about the Soviet Union or East Germany uh or communism right as a totalitarian state and then it’s simp nobody in East Germany wanted to think about the Soviet
Union or East Germany as the kind of place where people went to prison for practically nothing so book is really not successful but then this book which was published under the title todle loser and wealth I’ll get to that uh in in a second and why we changed the title
For for the English version version uh that book was a huge hit um it w and then it i s it was a hit a large hit and then there was a film version in 1975 and that was so those two things together made it a very huge hit and I
Think the book’s politics which are on the one hand uh I would say deeply deeply deeply critical uh of the Bourgeois so it’s specifically about the Bourgeois life uh upper middle class life in Nazi Germany but on the other hand there’s a a strong a really really really strong element of
Nostalgia uh in the book which really really really lovingly reconstructs this family context I mean it’s full of references it’s full of little details it’s full of all kinds of things that if you were alive in rosak at the time you would say I remember this you know I
Remember this and so he he had this readership Kowski did of people who really despite the ostensible politics or orientation of the book I think we’re very happy to kind of go back with him uh and I think the film version specifically uh actually does a really
Good job sorry I think the film version Sands off a bit of the rougher edges of the book and it has actually a kind of more warmly sepat toned uh nostalgic uh nostalgic picture of those years uh and and of that life so for Kowski he ended up developing two really
Large projects one of which was the German Chronicle which was the series of novels that were about German life more or less from the bhaman era to uh the period right after the war and this usually have these kind of sarcastic titles uh like for example we’re still
Golden That’s from a quote his mother mother had when the sort of the Eastern the the Red Army rolled into rosock where she said as long as you don’t have TV or G Stones like we’re we’re still golden uh that’s specifically about this question of ideology I think that’s the
Primarily the focus of the novels is that specifically about the question of how do people process their experiences how do people make sense of their experiences and I think the Insight is that people the way people do this is fundamentally affirmative people’s sort of ideological Machinery is to look at what’s going on
No matter how catastrophic and to say you know everything’s okay and everything’s fine and it’s going to be fine uh and then kosi also part of the German Chronicle was that Kowski also had two what he called question volumes Fraga Bender where as he uh kind of did
Book tours and stuff he would ask everyone he met the same question one of which uh I think this is the superior one that did you ever see Hitler so have you ever did you ever physically see see see Hitler uh and then the other one uh
Was did you know about it it mean the Holocaust but no clearly never specifically said right and uh I feel like the fact that the Holocaust is never specifically mentioned um influen the kind of answers that he got which often were not sometimes very blunt but sometimes very very uh evasive and the
Hitler book I think also gets this wide range of answers uh where you know uh people I think appreciated the opportunity to say well you know yeah I did see Hitler and it was fine you know there you go there women who said I saw Hitler and I thought he was very
Attractive how’s how’s that uh the other project is called echolot it’s called so in German in English You’ say sonar this is a collective Diary of World War II that was assembled from family materials uh he would put um advertisements in the newspaper and people would write in and then
Also um Diaries of famous people like Picasso Thomas man you know Herman Garen people like that he would use to create this kind of collage effect of uh so to show you what was happening on any given day in World War II so on this day right such and such uh this and
That number of people died in alwiz and at the time you know Picasso was in New York City and he uh you know painted an ostrich feather Pink as a gift for you know his uh his lady friend so uh one of the things those those two huge projects
Really occupied kow’s life in a way that I think can kind of obscure the fact in the way that he’s really an author of the The small the very the very small detail so one of the I would say the this novel uh is in some ways I would compare it to
Joy’s Ulisses right uh in the sense that it’s filled with all kinds of little details uh all kinds of little uh references historical references references to high middle low brow culture uh and there’s also a lot of family jargon including the title totle loer and wolf which is the sort of
Verbal tick his father had this made me think of my own father uh who actually has all kinds of sort of weird jargon he kind of uses uh so it’s a combination of the word tados which means Flawless or great uh and then a cigar brand called
Loser and wolf uh which he liked to smoke and then if you do a little bit more historical research you’ll see that loar and wolf was actually aryanized by the Nazis in 1937 and so uh this constant right there’s this sense in the novel as he
Depicts this uh this family life uh of being constantly surrounded by uh historical signs that were I think the basic sense of the realism uh there’s the sense that we’re in um we’re surrounded by historical signs that we have to investigate and interpret in a situation in which the catastrophe is
Constantly at the door right there’s this time pressure as uh uh there’s there’s this time pressure as well uh and so I just want to give to give you guys an example of that I wanted to just read you very briefly one CH uh just
Just a passage from uh I want to read you yes just a brief passage this is from the 11th chapter where um just before the war breaks out uh Walter the protagonist his his grandfather died and his grandfather was kind of a Von viant and he has uh it’s implied right that he
That he died of complications from syphilis so he’s kind of um dissipated sort of guy Juniper Med medlar and White Cedar were in the old Cemetery which was laid out like an accounting book each grave beside the next listing the names of the Dead in the new Cemetery the graves lay
Tucked away in enclosures like Parks it felt like we were in the city Zoom but there were no donkey noises and no sign of any parents bicycle riding singing and loud nois making or punishable by law it’s a sign the crematorium was located in the center you reached it by walking up the
Wide steps of a brick building from the 20s where you noticed the high chimney that had been incorporated into the architecture the chimney wasn’t smoking they hadn’t started yet father was afraid that Aunt syby would come but there was no need to worry she didn’t show foroud District Court counselor
Wartin was there though funny she whispered all the old ones are dying off now the mother of her best friend her Pops from the luani stasa had passed away recently and now my grandfather there was something Cinema likee about the hall at the front of the auditorium the coffin was covered with
Many wreaths half the city knew him old her kovsky the 100 Mark wreath from console disher was all the way in the front the pastor raised his arms and said a light in the darkness such a man is rare he had never been too big on going to church though he hadn’t even
Attended his own wife’s burial my father had a photograph taken of the grave to show how uncared for it was but the old man had want hadn’t wanted to look at the photo not once speaking to a waiter he’d once declaimed Jesus is my life and death my reward he won’t give me
Anything more and has put me out of mind then it was time and the coffin rode away calmly steadily without shaking or trembling oh quietly all the dead are resting an interpolated song The Lodge song as my mother called it the women’s eyes wed up with tears and the men’s voices trembled
The musician up above at the harmonium gave it his all a light in the darkness the fire turned blue from the heat in the furnace my mother told us the corpse reared up one last time and then crumbled you play such beautiful piano my father said my mother said to my
Father on the tra but you can’t even sing a simple Coral you get everything completely mixed up you really should be ashamed after military funerals they played the most cheerful marches my father told us they start with funeral marches but then once the dead man has been buried everyone must sing and be
Married so one of the things I wanted to connect I wanted to emphasize two things about kow’s realism and that here you have uh this really striking descrip the description of uh his grandfather being cremated which resonates of course uh with the image of crematoriums at the uh at the death
Camps and one of the things that I found especially striking here right is that the connection is not explicitly made and so when I was looking at the jacket copy some part of me winced a little bit because it sort of suggests that the book is a little bit more sentimental
Than it is uh in that it’s about oh a family uh that is sort of reacting to the rising intolerance uh in Germany and that’s that’s kind of not the case in the sense the family never really reacts to anything so the home context the sort of
The veil of ignorance in which there’s this uh very obvious connection to be made uh between the crematorium one set of one crematorium and another crematorium well perhaps they don’t know who knows perhaps uh but there’s all kinds of other connections right that that are never really made and I think what’s
Also very telling is that the novel is from the perspective of a child and once again the jacket copy kind of makes it sound like it’s you know the boy with the striped pajamas or something like that but that’s also not the casee in that as a narrator of Walter as a child
Is well he’s like most children are he’s he’s selfish uh he’s concerned primarily with himself he’s naturally differential to Authority but at the same time he kind of acts out all the time without really thinking about the contradiction between the two um periodically he’s kind he shows
In you know he doesn’t he’s not cruel he has um he has Jewish friends for example and the book never does the thing where it’s like ah all of a sudden the Jewish friends disappear and he’s like what what what happened here they disappear but everybody else disappears too
Everybody flees the town right because it’s a it’s being bombed uh so on a personal level he’s kind of compassionate but he never really connects that to a wider sort of politics right he never makes the connection about every single authority figure in my life is saying
That Jewish people are bad but I’m friends with this uh this Jewish person and so you know they must be wrong there must be something wrong with this author he simply never makes the connection um and I think the book kind of gets at something to do with the book in that
Way becomes a a a reflection on two things which I’d like to emphasize here uh one is ideology and the other one is is historical thought and so I guess to make a brief remark about ideology the book in my opinion is really in conversation with works of political
Philosophy like from Hanah orent or friends nman these are Jewish people worth worth emphasizing uh who were abroad because this was not really the tenor of the conversation in Germany that where these books specifically dealt with the question of how totalitarian was totalitarian fascism right to what extent was resistance
Possible how consistent was the ideology so in AR’s argument as some of you may know it from uh on the origins of totalitarianism which I think has really enjoyed uh and Resurgence lately I mean AR’s whole characterization of ideology is that it saves you the trouble of having to think ideology is
Simply pure logic it’s like math and so she quotes the famous line from bre’s the measures taken so he who says a must say B you say A you have to say B and so she says that’s exactly what an ideology is is that it’s it relieves you of the
Responsibility of independent thought uh and so what distinguished Hitler and Stalin even in their sort of respective party apparatuses was that they were the most inflexibly ideological the most inflexibly the most inflexible iron CL appliers of this logic right so Hitler refused to make plans for Germany’s post-war survival because he just said
Like Germany has lost the struggle between races and doesn’t deserve to survive right that’s that’s the that’s that’s how extrem he want and so in the novel itself you see you there’s a certain uh you see this ideology at work in that every single person in Walter’s
World is constantly sort of par in Nazi ideology uh so the school right they go on these nature hikes where it turns out oh there’s a Nazi take on every okay in the sort of the Nazi Universe um there are certain plants are favored it’s like
Oh this is the Aryan plant and that’s the Jewish plant like for uh for for example and so all around him right uh this you see this this the ideology is constantly repeating itself and that’s something that the book uh emphasizes this is this made it a bit difficult to
Translate in its constant use of reported speech so uh German for reported speech switches into the subjunctive um which emphasizes right that a statement is neither true nor false but somebody else said it so in English we sometimes do this right when we say she said she was coming so what
She really said was I am coming but we changed the tense to indicate right that it’s a tributed speech uh so the idea is well uh this there’s this constant ringing of dialogue that is not dialogue in the true sense of the word like like I’m speaking to you and I’m expressing
My sort of I’m expressing my feelings I’m trying to share something with my interior life and and and my thoughts with you it’s not real dialogue in fact right there’re simply detached statements detached spe speech acts that kind of flow float around and Echo to one another
Uh in this world right with no interiority at all right where none of the characters really have possess anything like the capacity for self-reflection uh anything like a real reflective interiority right it’s simply speech talkinging to itself uh and so from one perspective you could argue that the book uh is
Really the book captures from somebody who lived through it and somebody who was really embedded I’d say in uh in the world of fascism in a way that I think many of the artist many of the writers who write about fascism were not so for example I mean you know an author like
Peter Vice who wrote the investigation that’s a play collaged from a dialogue from the Frankfurt alitz trials and vice did not grow up in a fascist context and so to some extent he there’s a limit to what he can say really say right about what it’s like to inhabit the world of
Fascism and indeed in most of his books fascism is kind of more of an idea than an actual habitus and so here we get the sense that there really was no way out right there was this was a Structure this is a way of living that simply squeezed the interiority out of people
And replaced it with just this kind of endless chatter just an ideology constantly talking to itself on the other hand uh if we think about this from the perspective of for example uh France nman right who’s a member of the Frankfurt School his his book Behemoth so nman made the opposite argument which
Is that in fact Nazi ideology was totally unstable it was completely incoherent because if you think about the material demands of Nazism it had to balance between sort of various power centers including the party and then you had uh big business the Civil Service the military and so Nazi ideology was
Constantly changing it was totally incoherent uh it was fundamentally contradictory and it was in in a state of constant revision and then so one thing that you see for example uh is that nobody not a single character in the book ever kind of exactly gets the message
Right uh and so for nobody in the novel is completely and totally a Nazi right it’s simply the ideas are simply floating in the air so kow’s older brother likes listening to Jazz uh something for which he’s kind of bered by by by passers by uh his mother uh so they there’s a
Period where uh a worker from the shipping company a young Danish man is living with them and he kind of ports Walter’s sister and then he’s locked up briefly by the gustafa uh for uh because he he’s been marking which building have been destroyed on a map and so the gapo
Considers this an active Espionage and so he’s thrown into prison uh and then W Walter’s mother goes and demands that he be released and uh she’s constantly sending him food uh in the sort of very silly and naive way but he is eventually released right and so in this particular case
Right there is no in specifically in this context the Bourgeois context and these are people who believe that they were above Nazism right Nazism is too coarse for them this really is a um right there’s this sense that ultimately in the end right ideology it’s kind of
Like a beam of light that passes through the fish bowl of of the life world and so IDE life is simply too chaotic people are too strange to ever for ideology ever really to get a firm and tight hold on them and that’s where a lot of the
Book’s comedy comes from the book has I think a really dark and Bleak sense of humor and you could also think of it in that way as as for ex you and one other aspect of it if you think in sort of like this this gibberish phrase like tooer and
Wolf everything’s okay it’s yippity skippity fine and dandy um is that ideology also has to pass through language and you could see Kowski as kind of belonging to a postmodern kind of deconstructive tradition which emphasizes the playfulness of language the elusiveness of language there’s tons of punning throughout everybody is
Always punning his father is constantly punning uh in this way that makes the translator’s life completely and totally miserable I I would say uh and so you could see the book as really being interested in this context between life and ideology uh in that in that
Sense on the other other hand we’re now on the third hand there’s three hands here you could think about the book as say saying something about ideology to the extent well that’s exactly how ideology works right if somebody came up to you or if you were listening to
Somebody and they said well I’m I’m a Nazi here’s the Nazi message they wouldn’t be very credible because you would think of them as an ideologue but so the way that IDE ideology completes itself the way that ideology gets a foothold onto reality is precisely Always by viering away from message uh
You could say um you know that they that ideology circulates precisely by never appearing to be ideology precisely by taking on incoherence so most people don’t think of themselves or their parents or their loved ones as racists and they would say well how can how
Could my father be racist uh he owns a car dealership and you know he’s got he has several black employees right so that’s that uh and I think that to some extent right the book you you you could see the book as being a study of exactly the the
Relationship the kind of dialectical tension Sor that’s uh needle SC scholly were but you could say the contradiction the fundamental tension uh within ideology between its iron clab logic and the fact and just the simple chaos uh uh of life it reminded me um so when I was
In high school I saw the film uh I don’t know if if any of you have seen it the film American History X with a with a close friend of mine so we we went and saw him it’s a film where Edward Norton plays a sort of a ralat Trent skin head a
Neo-Nazi and then at some point in the movie he kind of recounts right how he kind of learned the error of his ways and so he went to prison where he became disillusioned with neo-nazism and then he befriended an African-American inmate and they became friends uh and I
Remember walking out of the movie with my friend who sort of scratched his chin and said you know in real life he would have been friends with that guy continued being a neonazi uh not seeing the contradiction and I think that’s basically the humor of uh that’s exactly what the book itself
Seems to be kind of getting at which is that uh the nature of ideology itself perhaps is that it never it allows room for it allows that kind of wiggle room uh that it’s functioning precisely demands and requires that kind of wiggle room one other thing that I wanted to
Mention specifically with the book’s relationship to the Holocaust is uh this question of historical thinking so uh we should so if you think about the context of the book it has kind of a sarcastic subtitle a Bourgeois novel in that it’s about the Bourgeois uh the upper middle
Class uh which who you know popularly in the in the popular sociology of fascism are believe to be the last people onto the Nazi bandwagon right Nazism is believed to be a petite boura movement primarily uh that then made an alliance with the aristocracy but uh I think to
Some extent Koski is drawing on the long Bourgeois tradition here the tradition of the bouris novel uh in Germany so if you’re thinking about a family in Northern Germany and then the way that it falls apart I mean to most English language readers that would mean wooden
Brooks right away but uh I think it’s there there’s also a really good comparison to be made to the novels of teodor Fontana um who wrote eff Bree which you may know from the fosbender film version uh irretrievable their novels about the lower the the Prussian aristocracy the Prussian
Nobility and um that usually at moments of historical crisis so right before the Battle of alitz for example uh or his last novel The schling which is sort of the aristocracy right at the moment of the rise of social democracy uh and one thing that Fontana protagonists always have is that they
They’re not very bright they don’t pick up on things they don’t pick up on signs and and so in this world of Fontana the characters are surrounded by historical signs historical symbols monuments for example street names books paintings that they’re constantly trying to interpret right at this moment of Crisis
To try to figure out well you know what what is the past saying to us what is the what what is it that we’re supposed to learn from the past as we’re heading to this obvious crisis how can we somehow put together a knowledge of the
Past with a conception of the future in the present in such a way that we can thread the needle we’re kind of we’re we’re we’re moving towards and Fontana’s characters uh I would say without fail uh fail they they they they fail at this test almost almost all of
Them uh but there it happens in such in this way that it puts this onus on on the reader and I think to it’s important to think about Kowski in sort of his personal politics Kowski I think became more and more conservative over the years I think he became kind of consumed
By his anti-communism uh especially in the 70s during the years of you know Billy Bron’s OST politic when West Germany normalized relations with with with the East uh but in the early 70s I think it’s important to keep in mind that the idea of thinking about Nazism and thinking about the Holocaust this
Was at this time still a very much alive political question in that many people in the Westerman government had been revealed to have been Nazis right uh so there’s the the affair with glubka in adenauer’s government then there was kinger uh who had been a Nazi for 12
Years and became uh you know chancellor of Germany so the idea that Nazism could potentially come back right uh that some kind of realism had to be developed that could help that could somehow interpret right connect this message of the past to the present at a moment of indecision
And crisis is what I think this constant interpreting of signs uh this this sort of feeling your way through the past uh is what the book is really really trying to to get at and I think it asks what I think is a meaningful question so not
Is is there anything to learn from the example of Nazism which I think is extensively debated today so on the one hand you can say like for example you know the political Economist Adam TW would argue well this was a once in a lifetime or sorry this is this is a once
In a his a one-time phenomenon so many various factors had to come together here there was the Great Depression there was the experience of World War I which sort of normalized people towards violence it was a highly politicized Society already where people participated in political parties and uh
And you know param all kinds of extra governmental organizations and that these things sort of all came to together right to form something like Nazism and it’s it’s unlikely that something like that will ever happen again the opposite end you have something like the Frankfurt School argument which is that all democracy
Tends towards fascism right that simply fascism is always going to appear on the horizon as a solution to the inherent contradictions and problems of mass politics which is that mass politics problem promises US agency uh agency that it doesn’t really give us so democracy as it currently
Exists in that form fascism is always going to be uh s an appealing it’s always going to be the reverse side of democracy and so it’s always going to be there then somewhere in the middle you have something an argument that would say well if you look at fascism you can
Use it to at least interpret and predict certain parts of the Contemporary right but then you’re in my opinion if you ask this question right you’re sort of thinking about well what is the relationship to the Past right that the novel is establishing what’s the relationship between 71 and 39 and
What’s our relationship between what’s our relationship to 39 or to 71 and then 39 um you’re already kind of thinking in the way that the book wants you to think and is challenging you to uh to think and to that end uh I we’re coming to the
End here and so I sincerely hope uh for any of you who haven’t read the book that I would strongly encourage you to read it I think it’s a classic of modern German literature and I think it’s been really rewarding to see through the efforts of Publishers like granta and nyrb Classics
And in the US uh that we we’re finally getting this kind of richer picture of Germany and Germany’s writers uh in the postwar period uh in a way that I think might actually be very useful and helpful to us today as we think about the relationship between politics democracy
Thinking about the past our relationship to the past and literary practices so I want to thank you very much for your time uh and that’s it thanks so much um I just want to remind everybody um that you can post your questions or comments in the chat
At any time um and I of course want to thank you Michael that was a really fascinating um look at this book and actually the process you went through um in terms of your um translation and you know what you’ve the complexity that you’ve presented it I mean it it it must
Have um it it was obviously a huge effort to um to translate this and and and to manage the language complexities and the the the contextual historical complexities um and actually I was going to ask Caroline’s question um that she’s posted and but if I could before we get
To that question if I could sort of pick up on the last point that you made um you know one of the challenges of translating this for audiences today for English reader English speaking readers today in the context of today um do you feel like you know as you delved so deeply into
You know the 1939 1971 and then thinking about translating it today did it sort of change the way that you thought about obviously that you know we all bring you know translators bring their own um cultural backgrounds into their translations but how do you think the Contemporary situation if if at all
Contributed to how you um how you finished the translation and how you activated the translation in this context it’s just a really interesting point that you ended up on and I would have loved to hear just a bit more about that sure sure I mean I think my overall
Philosophy as a translator is that uh I think it’s the task of the translator to render the most readable and immersive text possible uh and so that means that in my opinion the translation is primarily a service to the reader and not to the writer not so uh given
The choice between kind of pure Fidelity and uh an immersive text where uh the reader is not confused and the reader is oriented in that world I would opt for the latter and one of the things I learned with the sort of as we went through the editorial process at cranum
Was uh just how far you can go in in in that respect so there are certain parts of the book that I thought were just individual lines that were untranslatable they just rested on an untranslatable pun uh so especially most of the stuff comes from Walter’s father who kind of puns
Compulsively I think it’s implied that this is like a wartime trauma and just kind of how he uh just deals with it so for example there’s one line where he says um he’s talk he’s complaining that it’s cold in German you’d say a seit and then he goes off and starts talking
About a biography of the Social Democrat Louise seats so he’s like speaking of seit you know uh what happened to that book about Louis Deeds to me that’s not translatable just simply saying indicating to the reader that that is in book uh is not useful and in fact it
Pulls the reader out of the the novel so I guess this question of now this question of now and what the book is supposed to do now my feeling was that by making the novel as immersive as possible I thought that would be the best way to make the reader as receptive
As possible to what the novel was trying to do on a kind of technical political level that the more immersed the reader would be the more the techniques the kind of perception shaping uh Power of the techniques would kind of would be more likely to take hold because otherwise I I was worried
About the effect that this would be a you know it’s like oh this sounds translated and so that pulls you out of pulls me out of out of things I read one other thing we went through was um there was the question of you know there’s a
Number of racist remarks in the book and so what to do with them exactly whether they needed some kind of special commentary um so one thing in German study I would point out is that you know as in other aspects of um sort of in the American culture industry right in
German studies there’s a there’s an interest in you know anti-racism anti-racist pedagogy uh specifically uh kind of the position of black people in Germany and what that has to do with kind of uh in a sort of course of study that’s parallel in some way to the study
Of the Holocaust one of the things I found really appealing about this book is that it draws a direct connection between Germany’s imperialism right which W Walter learns about in class so he has like a young very enthusiastic Nazi teacher who’s reading him an account from a World War I Soldier about
The sort of German armies uh kind of decimation of black armies during World War I and so he draws this direct connection between the vaman era and the Nazi era between Germany’s African imperialism and the Holocaust uh in a way that I think even sort of that I think is very emphatic
And goes farther even than arguments uh people people would make today so there was this question of well you know there’s these racial slurs in here and what should we do with these um but I think we agreed that sort of they were doing something really powerful in the
Book they weren’t they weren’t gratuitous uh so that was another contemporary consideration that came into the picture thank you that’s that’s really helpful um and now to get to Carolyn’s question um you know and this maybe is related um what was behind the decision to translate the book now um and and how
Did you come to this project now um people really liked all for nothing I was genuinely surprised had written an article about kosy for the nation in 2014 and I think people people um I think the image of Germany in Decline and there’s there’s something about the grotesque strangeness of
Fascist life uh there’s this I think incredible magnetic power of this sort of graphic depiction of what I think can pretty earnestly be called the worst Society that’s ever existed on the face of the Earth uh and so with all for nothing which is about the kind of lower
Very Fontana like context the kind of high boura lower aristocratic context at the end of the war these people who are in their kind of villa their scho waiting for the war to uh to to kind of end in Germany to collapse onto them uh I think that captured the mood of the
Times very much uh I think in the kind of post brexit post Trump afd kind of uh you know the Georgia Maloney era uh but there’s something because I think with Koski the the books are really from within the perspective of fascism they really reconstruct uh the kind of the the
Emotional texture of fascist Society in a way that I think resonated very uh that book when it came out I think see it really really resonated with uh with people and so with this book in particular I remember thinking wow it’s surprising that that’s the Kowski book that really caught people imagination
Because I think this book is on just the level of artistic achievement on the level of style really at a kind of much I thought at a much higher level and also the book is extremely successful in Germany in a way that I think I mean it’s hard to tell to what
Extent books sway people politically but I think to some extent you know kuski was able to find an audience precisely because he did didn’t put himself across as a political person so you could be a reader in Germany at the time and say I well I don’t like Peter Vice you know
He’s he’s a bomb thrower he’s always making these provocative statements he’s obsessed with Vietnam and you know he’s drawing these comparisons between America and Nazi Germany and Vietnam and the Holocaust and uh and that’s just too much for me you know uh but you could
Open this Kowski book uh and sort of be like I remember this yes like that’s what it was like in a way that would potentially get you thinking uh in a way that would get you thinking about the past and your relationship to it and I
Think to some extent that’s kind of what caught that the book I would say that the book advances a credibly political realism that doesn’t fall into any of the aesthetic traps that political literature often falls into which is the that sense that it’s hectoring you uh in some way uh the Pol
The sort of the Politics the the perceptive change the book is trying to bring about comes out organically from the from the stylistic choices itself from the inner tensions of the novel itself and I think that is what made it so attractive uh and so I thought well
Okay if people like kosi very much to my surprise never imagined he would find an English language readership uh I was like this is this is really the one this is really in my opinion a classic of the postwar German period thank you that was really wonderfully stated and obviously that
Comes through with a really good and very careful translation like you’ve done just to um jump in um there’s a question by John um about translated German novels written in the 30s and 40s um which gives this kind of Insider view of the Third Reich and he’s um mentioned
Hans fada which I was actually thinking about two during your talk and um recently read Berlin finale but who else could you recommend and also thanks you for your interesting talk yeah thank you I don’t think you can recommend anyone but Fato and I I think to some
Extent I mean you know this is a little bit embarrassing to say but in my education as somebody who studies German literature uh Nazism the the Third Reich was just this massive black hole for me the 30s and 40s just because I um yeah I mean I I don’t think I could
Have told you a lot about the concrete history of Nazism right a lot about the particular history of the Holocaust itself just because uh the third right who’s a massive intellectual black hole and anybody with any kind of talent anybody with any kind of ability uh left
Uh immediately or in very very soon after just because I think it was made very clear precisely what was going to be demanded of you if you were going to stay I mean to some extent I would say I would make the argument that you can see
Um I mean in some of the philosophical projects um not in literature but in fact in philosophy so in terms of people who stayed and tried to accommodate their philosophical projects to Nazism so uh if you want to read The Works of Carl Schmidt for example right you can
See um especially the stuff that Schmidt wrote Under naism uh that gives you a sense right of how an otherwise extremely intelligent person could have kind of warped themselves to try and accommodate themselves to what was going on to try and even figure to try and even conceptualize what was going on
Which I think is I mean that’s kind of one of the interesting things about reading the Schmid uh text of that period you can read the work of heiger right i’ would say a widely respected philosopher even on the last I’m currently teaching in class on heiger
And Hana arand but one of the interesting thing you could see iger’s work especially in the 30s his lectures on n as some kind of accommodation with with Nazism you can read his uh his the talk he gave as the Director of fryberg exhorting students to support Hitler in
Using his own philosophical language but I think as far as literature and Publishing there was simply no Avenue at the time so many of these projects tend to be uh in retrospect except for f who kind of does his own thing and somehow managed to to hoe his own Road I would say
Thank you for that so we’ve got two more questions and then I think we’ll probably be out of time but um if you could just give um some examples this is for Nicola um of other untranslatable sentences um you decided to Omit to avoid distraction and confusion and then
If you could um close with saying a little bit about any other translation projects that you have on the horizon and and what you’re working on next for Kate uh sure I I don’t have anything off the top of my head just because the editing process for this book was so so
So extensive uh to be completely I made it sound like I just sort of clipped these things kind of willy-nilly that was not the case that was not the case uh there was really just a handful um I believe there’s one sentence where uh he and his friends are
Making some kind of pun on the buan uh which was the uh right the sort of the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth uh so there was some kind of pun there where it was like they were saying she was a real BDM type or they came up
With they used some German word that contained those letters and that supposed to be a pun on The Bu and anent and I thought that was not just not renderable as it was but I should I feel compelled to say that we really considered this very very carefully and
Uh there’s really just a handful and most often what we did was just add an end note I thought that that did it 99% of uh of the time I mean one I would say one other thing in terms of kind of deviating from the book uh is that
Sometimes uh like for example sent in the sentences that were the in reported speech uh put into quotations just because very often the cumul you can translate each one individually like you can keep the effect the cumulative effect it just doesn’t have the rhythm of English Pros it becomes extremely blurry uh becomes
Really um uh really very hard to follow uh it just doesn’t sound right and I think you can it’s I don’t know if anyone here is interested in translating themselves uh I know uh Christine you mentioned that sometimes people in the audience here are thinking about translating you know
Family projects but I think it’s helpful to think of translation not in terms of kind of rendering I mean you’re really translating groups of words and then you’re translating groups of sentences and then you’re translating groups of paragraphs right there’s all these different levels on which the text is
Functioning that have to be translated and preserved and very often preserving it at one level uh keeps you from preserving it at another level so these are these are difficult decisions uh to make I don’t have any more examples off the top of my head but um one other
Thing that I was um as far as what I’m working on now so I’m trying to get a translation going of the playwright Katherine rogam uh her she wrote a novel about the National Socialist underground trial and so not that this is my sole concern but
Uh this was a trial of it was kind of a trial of the century sort of thing of a a Neo-Nazi group that had committed these these murders of Turkish shop owners uh and it became this huge media spectacle and she wrote a novel that’s specifically about the trial itself from
The perspective of his kind of typified characters in the uh in the gallery uh and that is a really strange I would say really important uh and but also very difficult to put together into a coherent narrative event in contemporary German history uh I would say it’s something
Like the Kennedy assassination in terms of the she the way the sheer amount of information available about it somehow makes it impossible to cohere and uh into a narrative and the specific question the political questions that it raises because it turned out that there might have been uh complicity on the
Part of Germany’s Security Services uh so I’m hoping I applied for Grant to translate that uh that novel and then uh at some point in there I’ll have to write an academic book based on my dissertation so it’s uh it’s going to be a busy
Year um I I just if there aren’t any more questions I did just want to thank everybody for having me and just to say what what an absolute pleasure it’s been here and realizing that I hadn’t put the link into your book just searching for it really quickly in case anybody hasn’t
Purchased it yet or hasn’t had a chance to um I think that is the um the US edition of the book and and it it’s published by granta so um if you check granta’s website I’m sure you can find it at um for sale here um so it’s also
Um left for me to do um to thank you for this fascinating talk and for giving us insight into how you approach this which is um I think really remarkable and and really fascinating and of course thanks to everybody for coming and for questions thanks so much Michael thanks
Again yeah I wish you guys all the best and the UK version is very nice granted yeah the image is amazing yeah um hold on I was just gonna grab the link I I thought I had it up and then I didn’t have it up here it is great I’ll just drop that
In for everybody who’s still here great thank you thank you so much Christin I’d like to uh and I I hope everyone here has a great evening and I’d like to wish you all the best thanks Michael have a good evening bye bye bye