All for Nothing

A wealthy family tries--and fails--to seal themselves off from the chaos of post-World War II life surrounding them in this stunning novel by one of Germany's most important post-war writers.

The last novel by one of Germany's most important post-war writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before the author's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-45, as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair. "Auntie" runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the Germany army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife Katharina and her bookish twelve-year-old son Peter. As the road beside the house fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof receives strange visitors--a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee--but life continues in the main as banal, wondrous, and complicit as ever for the main characters, until their caution, their hedged bets and provisions, their wondering, and their denial are answered by the wholly expected, events they haven't allowed themselves to imagine.

Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) was one of Germany's most important post-war writers. He settled after the war in Hamburg, but on returning to his home town of Rostock in the late 1940s he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for espionage by a Soviet military tribunal, of which he served eight years, in Bautzen. In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, gathering together first hand accounts, diaries, letters and memoirs of the second world war, which he collated and curated into ten volumes published over 20 years, and which is considered a modern classic.

Anthea Bell is a translator from the German, French, and Danish, and the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, and, three times over, the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation. For NYRB Classics, Bell has translated Stefan Zweig's Confusion and Journey Into the Past, and for The New York Review Children's Collection, Otfried Preussler's Krabat and the Sorcerer's Mill, The Little Water Sprite, The Little Witch, and The Robber Hotzenplotz.

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of several works of fiction, including The Book of Words, Visitation, The End of Days, and the forthcoming Go, Went, Gone (September 2017).