In 1933, Nelly is four years old and lives in Landsberg. Nelly’s family believes in Hitler’s new order: her father joins the party, and she, as a matter of course, joins the Nazi youth organisations. In school Nelly learns of racial purity and the Jewish threat, and when the local synagogue burns, she feels not pity, only fear of an alien race. No voice of objection is raised, not even when the euthanasia programme dooms Nelly’s simple-minded Aunt Dottie. It is only much later, when her family is fleeing westward before the advancing Russian army, that Nelly, now in her teens, tries to come to terms with the shattering of the fundamental values of her childhood.
In her fourth novel, Christa Wolf explores the experience of Nazism as it was lived by ordinary people in an ordinary town. In doing so, she has created a great novel which is also a plea to remember and to learn from the past.
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