To Die in Spring Audiobook By Ralf Rothmann, Shaun Whiteside cover art

To Die in Spring

A Novel

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To Die in Spring

By: Ralf Rothmann, Shaun Whiteside
Narrated by: Tim Bruce
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Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son - the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel - is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father's early life.

This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, 17-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and, in many ways, the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable.

©2015 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin; translation copyright 2017 by Shaun Whiteside (P)2017 Tantor 20th Century Coming of Age Genre Fiction Historical Fiction War & Military

Critic reviews

"Directly confronting issues of responsibility, accountability, and legacy, this is an undeniably powerful work." ( Publishers Weekly, starred review)
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The writer clearly states the plight of his father’s generation without pulling any punches regarding its stark fatalism. The complete disintegration of the landscape and the fabricated purpose of an entire people is brought to life just so the reader can watch it all rot away.

Masterful prose in this English version, and the story retains the cutting defeat that Nazism built for itself, a defeat not only of its disgusting motives but of its own people. Very glad to read any author of the period who doesn’t attempt to impose a foolish lost cause myth.

Decay of the third reich

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