Der Turm

A German critic wrote: “… if somebody wants to know how the last 10 years in the German Democratic Republic (the socialist part) were, give him this book. Read! …” He is partially right. Partially since Tellkamp describes only a niche of that vanished society. It is the niche of the petty bourgeoisie, doctors, scientists, publishers, authors, even certain members of the red nomenclature. You wouldn’t expect that it existed in a society where everybody was considered equal and where the cult of the proletarians was celebrated. But it existed and the “fictitious” community described in the book is easy to recognize” Dresden – Weißer Hirsch. Even some of the characters of the novel have obvious counterparts in the real world. At least for someone who grew up in that society. One of them, Manfred von Ardenne, was crucial in developing the nuclear bomb for the Russian and he had almost unlimited privileges in Eastern Germany.
A particularity of the described environment is the very culture-aware life in Dresden. Dresden was considered as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe but was destroyed in two nights of ferocious bombing in World War II. That is one why reason why the Dresdeners live in the past and retreat into a strict private life filled with all sorts of cultural activities. It is still the case. The author calls it: “… the sweet poison called yesterday ..”.
The scenes in the book, which affected me most, are when it deals how the main characters is recruited for the military service, and the treat during the service itself. It revived my own memories, they seemed an exact copy what I had experienced. I still consider my time in the army, the only wasted time in my life.
The book is so ambitious that it is sometimes compared with Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrocks”. I do not want to compare them, but I definitely like these big generation-spawning family novels. After 70 pages I could not stop anymore, I literally devoured the remaining 900 pages.