A Pastor Brahms also figures in tangentially when he involves Katharina in a plot to provide clandestine lodging for a mysterious overnight guest.Īnd then there is Drygalski, a kind of deputy mayor of the housing development, who fancies himself the resident Nazi authority of the area.

Wagner, the schoolmaster who gives private lessons to Peter, whose tonsillitis has kept him from participating in the Hitler Youth. (Not to overlook Jango, the dog.) They are regularly visited by Dr. Other members of the household are two quarrelsome Ukrainian kitchen maids, Sonya and Vera, and Vladimir, the Polish farm hand. “None of it was as easy as others might think.” “She kept a handkerchief tucked into her sleeve, and put it to her red nose again and again,” Kempowski writes in his thumbnail-sketch of her. ” ‘You must keep the kitchen door closed,’ ” Auntie proclaims. Their efficient care is provided by Eberhard’s aunt, a sinewy whirlwind of activity.

Eberhard, a special officer in the army, has a desk job in Italy, leaving his beautiful, distracted wife and twelve-year-old son Peter at home. In its pages, we meet Katharina and Eberhard von Globig, landholders of the Georgenhoff and members of the civil service aristocracy created by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Martin Luther quote aside, none of the book’s characters display any deeply held religious convictions. In fact, All for Nothing ends with a question: “Was everything all right now?” And it begins with an answer, a quote from Martin Luther: “To save our souls from sin, dear Lord,/ Our lives are all in vain./ Only Thy grace and Holy Word/ Obliterate its stain.”

Though the book’s authenticity resides in the use Kempowski has made of the countless journals, documents and memoirs he has collected from those who survived World War II - 750,000 refugees fled west along the Baltic coast escaping the eastern front, with only 300,000 surviving - the book’s power resides in the questions it poses. Still, All for Nothing goes beyond portraiture it is is a deeply philosophical book. This, indeed, is a book to savor for its little stories of a dozen or so people: the residents of a small estate, the Georgenhoff, dwellers in a housing development across the road, known as the Settlement, and the passersby who seek temporary lodgings among them. Before it ends, all the characters that populate All for Nothing will have joined the exodus. The Russian Army is marching west relentlessly shoveling refugees ahead of it. It is always satisfying for a lover of history to happen upon a literature that recreates so believably a time and place as does All for Nothing, Walter Kempowski’s window into East Prussia in January, 1945.

All for nothing by walter kempowski