![]() Still, as a literary response to a long-buried collective trauma, All for Nothing is well worth reading, especially now that the country’s parliament contains delegates from the far-right Alternative for Germany party with deep ties to groups who were expelled from East Prussia. The assembly of found texts is apt for establishing the period setting and marking the disintegration of German culture, not for the creation of characters with much depth. ![]() ![]() In All for Nothing, that chorus is shrunk to a chamber motet that is finely blended yet only bitterly poignant, making the novel’s bloodied and epic finale feel insufficiently supported. Kempowski’s sympathy for the suffering of his characters and his acknowledgment of the attendant destruction of their civilization are diffused by a fine-grained ambivalence. ![]() But All for Nothing isn’t easily appropriated by any ideology. Preview this book What people are saying - Write a. ![]() I found it even more moving than the far less poetic (if far more Hollywoodian) The Book Thief, more factual than The Tattooist of Auschwitz. All for Nothing, published in 2006, was the last novel by Walter Kempowski, one of postwar Germany's most acclaimed and popular writers. This novel, now published in a crystalline translation by Anthea Bell, examines with melancholic detachment the members of a still-privileged household in a small East Prussian town as they wrestle with a crucial decision: whether to stay or go. Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing is a breathtaking book about life inside Nazi Germany (and more specifically in current day Poland which the Nazis had annexed in 1939). ![]()
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