Martin Walser's newest work, Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (The Defense of Childhood), truly a magnum opus, is a book of fiction—or is it rather a biography? If so, then we read a double biography: namely, the life of ill-fated Alfred Dorn, painful hero of the impossible, and that of East and West Germany in the fore- or background. The novel, then, might be read—and would be misread—as a historical or political text alone, but its author goes far beyond such worthwhile yet trivial intentions. Despite the rather traditional epic narrative likely to make the book a favorite with foreign audiences (translations into all major languages are under way), Walser has really created a work of painful poetic vision. While reading I could not free myself from the vague concept of a “reverse developmental novel,” a term to be defined.

Walser's novel is a study of belonging, love, and dissolution, a “sickness unto death” presented as progress. Alfred Dorn's life is described with the uttermost care, precision, and patience, until the reader reaches the conclusion that such an existence is quite impossible in our time and place. Since the time is the period from around 1950 until Dorn's death in 1987, and since the places are his native Dresden, then the city of his student days, Berlin, then Wiesbaden, the site of his professional career, this “impossible life” runs parallel to all present-day Germans and takes its eerie quality alone from this fact. The novel's hero is an antihero of the impossible, its theme that of a Parzival for our times; it is a novel of innocence, of its loss and of the quest to regain it. To place such a story into the context of the Cold War, to make such a tenderness of vision acutely political, precise to the smallest detail, verifiable in all aspects, yet retain its poetry (not just its prose)—who else among Walser's contemporaries could have achieved such a triumph?

Who exactly is Alfred Dorn? He is a German, born in Dresden in 1929 to a dentist and a mother filled with the grandest expectations for her son. Alfred attends the famous Kreuzgymnasium, and the major traumatic event of his young life is the bombardment of Dresden. In a way, the entire novel hinges on that event, one of human and material loss for the Dorn family, one that bonds mother and son in a love exceeding all limits. Alfred will henceforth—subconsciously at first, as a sole and conscious obsession later—try to reconstitute and preserve his world of childhood, i.e. the world as it existed for him before the night of the bombing. The newly emerging GDR, however, with its insistence on society and realism, proves to be a bad place for dreamers like Alfred. At Leipzig University he fails his examinations because he “does not understand the state's role.” Therefore he feels obligated to move to the West, to Berlin, in 1953 in order to complete his law studies there. Only when Dorn enters the West does Walser's novel begin in a proper sense, but the prehistory, unfolded in haunting passages, obviously forms the book's foundation.

To sum up a long story, every page of which makes for unforgettable reading and instruction in German-German history, Alfred never returns to the East except for short visits, which the political reality increasingly complicates. There are few texts in German literature that show in a more honest or effective way the frailty of the individual caught between power blocs, and there is surely no novel of such high quality and epic proportion on this major theme. Alfred's mother, upon falling ill, moves to West Berlin to be with her son. She dies there and is buried in the Zellendorfer Waldfriedhof. With her death, Alfred is truly alone in this world, where no one, certainly not his father, understands completely his obsession with childhood and the past. The only project he now considers worth living for is the rebuilding of his childhood: “Wenn man nach zweitausend Jahren den Pergamon-Altar wieder aufbauen konnte, kann man auch seine Kindheit wieder aufbauen!” Naturally, one cannot.

Alfred collects every item, letter, and photograph relating to his past. His endeavors collapse necessarily at every attempted crossing of the “border.” He remains a loner with a monotonous government job in Wiesbaden. Just as the progress of time makes his dream of reconstructing his childhood impossible, so the power blocs deny him access to the turf of his memories. During the final seven years of his life, Alfred the collector becomes a writer of diaries, tracking down every moment of his days and every thought crossing his mind. His human relationships remain unsatisfying, his goals move farther into the distance. His death is tragic; whether it is accidental or self-inflicted, the reader knows that Alfred is a victim.

One could extract a psychiatric case study from Die Verteidigung der Kindheit that encompasses absurdity, perversion, and madness exactly as represented by German-German postwar history. German critics have time and again hailed the “great contemporary German novel.” Martin Walser has called the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of the two Germanies “das ihm liebste Politische, seit er lebe.” The peacefulness of those developments has overwhelmed many, including the author himself. Peaceful, frail, doomed—such are the traits of poor Alfred Dorn, and the “great contemporary German novel” will have to consist of these very elements, whether critics like it or not. Walser's novel is a major literary event.