“Tadellöser & Wolff!”

Michael Lipkin

An Ordinary Youth, the 1971 novel by the German author Walter Kempowski, opens in 1938. Walter, the protagonist, is nine years old, living with his family in Rostock, a port city on the Baltic Sea. It closes in 1945, when Walter is seventeen, with the Red Army marching in amid Rostock’s smoking ashes and the Iron Curtain set to fall over East Germany for the next forty years. The seven years in between are narrated through a chorus of voices and textual fragments: song lyrics and ad copy; street signs and newspaper clippings; bits of high-, low-, and middle-brow literature; and the baroque vocabulary of National Socialism, a language unto itself. The novel is a Ulysses of conservative bourgeois life in the Third Reich that depicts the destruction, bomb by bomb, of the middle class’s unreflected comforts.

That is not to say, however, that the novel is mere recollection. Its great subject—which makes it both urgent reading today as well as nearly impossible to translate—is the dark partnership between language and ideology. To take just one example: three quarters of the way into the book, Walter is sent to stay with family friends on an estate in the country while Rostock is under bombardment from the Allies. Clowning around with his provincial friends, Walter blurts out: “Tadellöser & Wolff!” His friends are mystified. “Tadellöser & Wolff?” someone asks. "What’s that supposed to mean?” Walter isn’t quite sure himself. It’s simply something his family says—and the novel’s original German title. “It means everything’s great,” he explains. “That’s how people talk in the city.”

The phrase, a play on a popular cigar brand, is a bit of unclarified Kempowski family jargon that has cropped up several times already, and it is likely no less opaque to the German reader of 1971 than it is to the English reader of 2024.

How should the translator go about hitting a curveball like this one?

A native German speaker might be able to pick out the word tadellos, meaning flawless or impeccable. Given a bit of context, that reader would be able to infer that the phrase expressed the positivity of the kind all the book’s major characters are given to making, no matter how bleak their situation gets. The English phrase “fine and dandy!” might capture enough of the sentiment with no major loss of meaning.

In fact, the statement Tadellöser & Wolff has no meaning; like ideology itself, there is no real content to preserve, more speech act than speech per se. The phrase simply validates the existing order of things without saying anything about their nature or why they deserve validation. The novel is full of similar statements that seem, at first glance, to contain actual thought or content, but in reality have none at all—like Walter’s mother’s assertion during the height of the bombing, that “so long as no one has gallstones or TB we’re still golden.”

Any social order is full of statements like this one—“no pain, no gain,” for instance. They are incorrectly called “expressions,” since they lack all individuation and interiority, but rather speak themselves. It is no accident that Tadellöser & Wolff! migrates from one character to another: first from Walter’s father, a traumatized war veteran and supporter of the regime, then to his brother, who is conscripted as an air warden, and finally to Walter himself.

Though it moves through characters, the phrase has no character itself. It simply affirms what power dictates. Kempowski’s characters lack not just the thoughts, but the very words for the idea that things might conceivably be other than they are.

And yet—one so wants to keep it. The novel’s constant linguistic play and allusions, the sheer comic joy of its verbiage—some bits of which, like immerhinque (“anyhoo”) apparently caught on with the German reading public—is the source of its distinctive bleak humor. But more than this, its free-wheeling language gestures toward the idea that even the most all-powerful, most brutally enforced ideology has to pass through language to come into contact with the life-world. Consequently, it shows that ideology will always be subject to the slipperiness and ambiguity of the written and spoken word.

Indeed, no one in the Kempowski family is a convinced Nazi. Robert, the older brother listens to jazz and is showered with racial invective by passersby. Grete, Kempowski’s mother, successfully lodges a protest with the Gestapo when a young Danish man who works for the family business is arrested on absurd charges of espionage. And even the convinced Nazis, like Walter’s secondary school teachers and his Hitler Youth troop leaders, can’t seem to get the details right. So long as language lives and breathes, a zone of freedom—call it wiggle room—remains.

But some cursory research––the kind the translator is constantly called on to do and which transforms him into something of a repository for all the knowledge a novel contains––yields a suggestive bit of knowledge. The cigar brand in question, Löser & Wolff, was owned by a Jewish family and Aryanized in 1937. This bit of family jabber, then, possess political and historical trace. It stands as one slender tree in the forest of historical signs the novel’s characters wander through so blindly.

Like the Iserlohn tobacco box from the Seven Years War the family inherits from Walter’s grandfather, or the plaques commemorating the dead of the First World War, the everyday language and signage of An Ordinary Youth draws one connection after another between the comforts of bourgeois life and war. It shows, too, the connection between those things and fascism, which the characters prefer to think of as an aberration in Germany’s history, different from the storied imperial past they remember through rose-colored glasses.

We are all translators, the novel wants to say, of the signs all around us–signs containing lost memories of calamity and brutality, all waiting for interpretation, for redemption, and perhaps even some clue as to how we might thread the needle one more time. Can the reader of the present achieve feat of consciousness that the characters can’t—make it to the adequate historical consciousness in time to avert the present disaster?

Tellingly, the word “Auschwitz” appears only once throughout the whole book. Walter is visiting Hamburg to see his grandfather, a supporter of Hitler. He reads in the paper’s “Miscellaneous” section about a “bloody marital drama” that played out “in Auschwitz, at Kattowitz.” Walter flips past the item without giving it a second thought. What do we do?