An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski

Author:Walter Kempowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

None the less, we couldn’t use them. They’d both already sunk off the coast from Toulon. It was a real shame. Though, in the grand scheme of things, we admitted it was also something of a blessing. The cannons on the French ships had a completely different calibre from the German ones. We would have had to make extra factories for the munitions. No one would have been able to handle that.

•

The water was crafted using silver foil, though we all felt that glass would have been better. We added another lighthouse here, a heap of coal there. For the battles, we lowered our eyes to the map’s surface and looked around as though through a periscope. (‘Just a little further left . . . Great!’)

But we couldn’t really do a lot with the ships. There was too little sea. One time we pretended the German fleet had broken through into the Channel. Then, since we didn’t know what to do with them, the ships all sat there on the wharf, doing nothing.

If we’d had a film camera we could have taken a photo, moved the ship over a little, and taken another photo. We could have darkened some cotton wool with graphite and set it over the smokestacks. Then we could have shown the film and used the admission money to buy new models. But those would just end up lying around doing nothing, too.

(‘Did you all see New York on the newsreel?’)

•

There was a dictionary on Fat Krahl’s nightstand. We asked whether he had already looked up ‘embryo’? (‘And what about “pregnant” and “abortion”?’) ‘Arse’ wasn’t in there, unfortunately, and the description under ‘fuck’ only said ‘rub back and forth quickly, north German’.

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Greif, meanwhile, had a health textbook. Open mouths coloured with dark spots showed diptheria and tonsillitis. The caption noted how diptheria also gave the breath a putrid, vinous scent.

‘How to get a foreign body out of your eye’: the images demonstrated how you should flip the lid over a match (the man in the pictures wore a moustache). Further towards the back of the volume they showed something falling down towards a pregnant woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes. In the series of images, she kneels down to protect the foetus and ensure it isn’t crushed. (‘Does she shit the kid out?’)

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‘There’s tons of filth in Heinrich Zille too,’ said Manfred. (‘Mother, do I have breasts yet?’ said the caption beneath one picture.) Unfortunately the book was in his father’s desk, so he couldn’t bring it along. We didn’t believe what he said was in there.

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‘Have you guys seen a rubber yet?’ You had to put them on or else it’d hurt all over, and you’d get bloody. Blausiegel or Fromm’s were the best brands. (‘Men protect their health.’)

Manfred had watched a man who was walking bow-legged: he’d definitely been fucking, maybe somewhere in the cellar or in the attic. He was breathing heavily and staring with a glassy expression.

And the women! They couldn’t walk for an hour afterwards! And even then, they had to do so very carefully.

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