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An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother�s jazz records, his father�s fluctuating moods, and his mother�s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view�dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans�tell a different story. Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadell�ser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski's novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.