Tadellser und Wolff.

Tadellöser & Wolff: 1992 WALTER KEMPOWSKI'S TADELLÖSER & WOLFF- The autobiographical novel, Tadellöser & Wolff, first published in 1971, tells the story of a family living through the events of the Third Reich and WW II in the port city of Rostock, Germany. In 1938, the boy Walter, age ten, walks past the burnt-out synagogue on the way to school and notes nothing more than that the six-sided star has been broken and that some little dogs are barking. The Jews disappear gradually. The Kempowski family tries to enjoy a vacation to the Harz Mountain region at the time of the German march into Poland in 1939. A playmate of Walter's at the resort tells him about traveling by train across the Polish Corridor, the window blinds shut against the reality of the Invasion. At their vacation destination the Kempowskis experience bitter disappointment at their reception as merely ordinary guests instead of the important people they imagine themselves to be. Their trivial concerns at a time when their country had just commenced waging pre-emptive war against its neighbor seems remarkable, odd, even comical. A Danish guestworker in the father's shipping firm marries Ulla, Walter's beloved older sister, and takes her away to safety in Denmark. The father, initially rejected for service, is drafted. Rostock, a strategically important harbor on the Baltic Sea, is bombed twice in 1942. The older brother, Robert, is also drafted and sent to the Russian front. Walter endures the trials of the Gymnasium (the academic high school) and the Hitler Youth. He rebels against Nazi discipline and is punished with a year's detention. Sent to putative safety in Hamburg, he instead experiences the Allied bombing there. The Russians enter Rostock and, as the novel ends, the father is missing in action on the eastern front. The future looks dark indeed. Tadellöser & Wolff is not a Bildsroman.