An Ordinary Youth

Michael Lipkin will present his new translation of Walter Kempowski's first novel and engage Lauren Wolfe and Corey Robin in a discussion about the remarkable life and career of one of Germany’s most renowned post-war writers.
Register An Ordinary Youth is Walter Kempowski’s first novel, an immediate bestseller when it came out in Germany in 1971 as Tadellöser & Wolff. To this day, it is the best known of Kempowski's novels in Germany. Now, for the first time, An Ordinary Youth, published by New York Review Books, is available in English in a translation by Michael Lipkin.

Kempowski (1929–2007) was born in Hamburg. During World War II, he was made to serve in a penalty unit of the Hitler Youth due to his association with the rebellious Swingjugend movement of jazz lovers. After the war he settled in West Germany. On a 1948 visit to Rostock, his hometown, in East Germany, Walter, his brother Robert and their mother were arrested for espionage; a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, of which he served eight at the notorious “Yellow Misery” prison in Bautzen. His first success as an author was the autobiographical novel Tadellöser & Wolff (1971), part of his acclaimed German Chronicle series of novels. In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, gathering firsthand accounts, diaries, letters, and memoirs of World War II, which he collated and curated into ten volumes published over twenty years, and which is considered a modern classic.


Michael Lipkin is a translator and scholar of German literature with a focus on realism. His writing has appeared in The New Left Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The Paris Review, among others. He is currently a visiting professor of German Studies at Hamilton College.


Corey Robin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, and, most recently, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.


Lauren K. Wolfe is Associate Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses in German and Austrian literature and cultural history. Her translations have been published by Dalkey Archive Press, University of Minnesota Press, MIT Press, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Barricade—A Journal of Antifascism and Translation. 



This event is co-presented by New York Review Books and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.