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The remarkable An Ordinary Youth (now available for the first time in English in a translation by Michael Lipkin), an autobiographical novel by Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), opens with a fictionalized version of his family moving into its new apartment in Rostock, a formerly Hanseatic port on Germany's Baltic coast.1 The plants on the balcony include "Jew's beard geraniums." It is 1938.
Judenbart is a name by which Saxifraga stolonifera still goes in Germany. In 1938, no one would have thought about it twice, but Kempowski mentions it again, still on the balcony, as Walter, his mother, and grandfather sit awaiting the Red Army, seven years later.
An Ordinary Youth was first published in West Germany in 1971 as Tadelloser & Wolff and Kempowski may have seen that plant as one of this book's equivalents of the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones), the small bronze plaques that since 1992 have been embedded in streets and sidewalks in Germany and many other countries it occupied during the Second World War. They are placed near the last residence of victims of Nazi persecution, typically recording their name, date of birth, deportation, and, if known, death-something to "stumble" across, sudden, jolting reminders of the past.
Kempowski may have considered such Stolpersteine necessary in a novel set on the German home front (it is based on his own childhood and adolescence) and published when many Germans' thinking about their own wartime suffering took less account of the Holocaust than it does today. On a visit to his grandfather in Hamburg, Walter watches him read the newspaper and then comments:
There were always interesting stories in the Miscellaneous section: a fire in a room caused by neglect; a slip and fall; a story of a little boy in São Paolo who was killed by a wild swarm of bees; and in Auschwitz, at Kattowitz, a bloody marital drama had played out in the street.
This is the sole time Auschwitz is mentioned. Kempowski has explained that he included it as an antidote to any self-pity his readers might feel as they thought of the bombing of Hamburg. The aftermath of a raid-possibly a preamble to the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah-is described shortly afterwards.
The reference to an obscure town near Kattowitz (Katowice in...