The original title of Christa Wolf's novel, Kindheitsmuster, could mean something like 'a pattern of childhood', but her translators have rightly gone for a more idiomatic expression. In turning the noun into an attributive adjective, they've stressed the idea of an exemplary upbringing, and that is wholly apt. The career of Nelly Jordan is normative, within a certain German (though here specifically Nazi) tradition. Furthermore, she stands for a generation, and for part of a race. Whilst there's no suggestion that the pattern will in any way be replicated under very different political conditions, the book does present the German experience in the Hitler era as something intelligible, even logical. There is play with the notion of Verfall ('decay', but also 'forfeit', 'lapse'): 'No other language knows verfallen in the sense of "irretrievably lost, because enslaved by one's own, deep-down consent".' What this consent amounts to is at the heart of a powerful and finely sustained novel.

LRB 1 April 1982 | PDF Download