Tadellöser & Wolff Add a review

An Ordinary Youth (German: Tadellöser & Wolff) is a semi-autobiographical novel by the German writer Walter Kempowski, first published in West Germany in 1971. It was first translated into English by Michael Lipkin for NYRB Classics in November 2023.

The novel follows a middle-class family with three children from Rostock, Germany, centered around the nine-year-old Walter Kempowski in 1938 until the end of World War II in 1945. The original German title is a pun on a cigar brand (Loeser & Wolff) and the word for impeccable (tadellos), a family saying meaning that "everything's perfect".