The defeat of Nazi Germany sounded like a well-justified punishment. And based on this, black pages of an atrocious world continued to be written. A world that advanced in parallel with the spirit of liberation, its music and its parades. Perhaps that is why this novel appears so original, because almost no historical narrator usually addresses the moral decline that comes immediately after any conflict. And so many intrahistories loaded with astonishing certainty about human animosity beyond periods of war are silenced.
East Prussia, January 1945. The exodus of Germans fleeing west from the advance of the Red Army has begun. On their way, several of them will find refuge in Georgenhof, the privileged estate where Katharina von Globig lives, in the absence of her husband, with her son Peter and a distant aunt who acts as a nosy housekeeper.
People of very diverse origins will parade through the house: a Nazi violinist, an economist, a Baltic aristocrat or even a Jewish fugitive; Each of the testimonies of these visitors reveals a different point of view on war, Nazism, the enemy or the future. In the hacienda the views of ordinary Germans about their own history resonate as tragedy looms over the family.
Unpublished in Spanish to date, Walter Kempowski is one of the great German writers of the second half of the 2006th century. This ambitious novel, published in XNUMX, is considered a literary landmark for its exploration of a period of German history long silenced in German literature. Kempowski's rich panorama masterfully portrays, without trial and with documentary rigor, the suffering, complicities and denials of the German people in the face of the fall of the Third Reich.
You can now buy the novel "All in vain", a book by Walter Kempowski, here: