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 Tadellöser & 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
