Walter Kempowski

This book was a sort of pilot project in Kempowski's plans for a large-scale literary undertaking. After the publication of his first book (Im Block, 1969) which deals with those matters most immediate and pressing - he had to come to terms with eight years imprisonment in Bautzen for alleged espionage - he presented Tadellöser & Wolff in 1971, the first volume of his 'German chronicle'. This was planned as a literary reconstruction of domestic life in a multi-volume cycle: contemporary history as family history; or a German upper middle-class perspective on the pre-war era.

According to the sequence of time periods covered by the individual volumes, Tadellöser & Wolff does not represent the beginning of the cycle, which starts at 1900, but it does fulfil the function of an overture: the characters are introduced, locations and perspectives are set, themes and motives touched upon. In autobiographical terms, the novel begins in the tenth year of the author's life, 1939, and covers the period until the end of the war in 1945. The story is not narrated or reported continuously, but through a pointillist accumulation of linguistic concretions of the milieu the author creates an image, reproduces the atmosphere, defines the horizons. The action is simply middle-class everyday life, which is dreadfully out of joint with the contemporary events which form the backdrop, and indeed is quite ridiculous: this society remains entirely untouched, the worst news does not move it or provoke any forceful reaction, let alone any change. The strongest expressions available are linguistic stereotypes, the endlessly-repeated clichés, gags and standard quotations. Hence the title: "Tadellöser & Wolff" is what the father inevitably says if he likes something, just as he always says "Miesnitzörfer & Jenssen" when something irks him. And the mother, brother, sister and all the others in that circle participate in the production and reproduction of the cosy thoughtlessness which accompanies the catastrophe.