Uwe Tellkamp - So blunt, so radical, so void of illusion—life in the GDR has never before been portrayed in such a meticulous way... The struggle for materials, the camp mentality, and the ubiquitous mistrust: the GDR rises again in all of its now-almost-forgotten facets.”

Uwe Tellkamp, The Tower, Trans. by Michael Mitchell, Allen Lane, 2014.


excerpt

In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989.

"A lush tapestry of characters, composed of a thousand scenes and situations, and punctuated by poetic digressions, The Tower brings a German ghost to life . . . The Tower stands as a monument against forgetting." —Le Monde

“So blunt, so radical, so void of illusion—life in the GDR has never before been portrayed in such a meticulous way. . . The struggle for materials, the camp mentality, and the ubiquitous mistrust: the GDR rises again in all of its now-almost-forgotten facets.” —Die Zeit

"Der Turm is a novel that overflows and overpowers: it is rendered in sentences as baroque as the old Dresden Tellkamp’s characters long for. Memories and impressions grow wild across the lattice of the plot, bringing the symphonic book to -- but never over -- the brink of cacophony." - Jane Yager

‘The Tower stands as a monument against forgetting’ claimed Le Monde. A bold statement if ever there was one, and I had my doubts as to whether the novel could really be this powerful. The fact that it won the German Book Prize in 2008 suggested that it could be. For the 25th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin wall, Uwe Tellkamp’s monumental work has been translated and published in English for the first time, and is an apt and historically important novel that truly captures the essence East German experience.

The Tower follows the lives of four family members – mother, father, son and uncle – living in Dresden’s middle class tower district in the run up to the 9th of November 1989. The first five pages that form the overture could put the reader off, the amount of description used is at first overwhelming. However, the short chapters keep the book moving along quickly and the book became easily readable.

Tellkamp’s writing is superb; the spaces described vividly came to life with very little effort. The third person narrative also worked extremely well; despite becoming emotionally connected to the characters, there remained a constant feeling of being an outsider looking in. The implication being that unless you had actually lived in the GDR, it was difficult to imagine the strain of life under the soviet regime.

The novel takes time to get into, and to fully connect with the characters. However, after the initial few pages, I began to form a bond, and by the end of the novel these people seemed so real I was surprised to look up from the final pages and find them no longer with me.

The novel provides an acute insight into the realities of living in the GDR in 1989; from the anxieties about informers, as many different characters are accused of being throughout, to restrictions on what was acceptable to talk about, evident from the very beginning of the novel with Anne’s warning to Richard that he should not speak so loudly of politics.

At a thousand pages long, this book is not one you would want to turn to for a bit of light reading. It is a novel that would requires investment over a considerable amount of time. However, it is worth every single second. The importance of remembering the difficulty ordinary people faced in simply trying to live their lives under any oppressive regime cannot be overstated, and this novel manages to accomplish this task perfectly. There is simply no way to recommend The Tower enough.

Joanna Whitney


A critically acclaimed national bestseller in Germany, The Tower received some attention in England but practically none in the U.S. upon its English-language release on December 30, 2014 (perhaps only in Canada and the U.K.). This is a shame because The Tower is a unique, sweeping, and lyrical novel that chronicles the lives and misfortunes of an upper middle-class family of intellectuals in East Germany during the last years of communism. In my experience, at least, it is unusual to encounter a novel about this era, evoking the Stasi and bread lines, that reads in part like one of Mark Helprin’s more fantastical creations. Gritty realism occurs within a context of a tradition of high culture and dinner parties, no less urgent from that perspective. Christian Hoffman, a conscript in the National People’s Army, comes home to see his parents and soon thereafter his uncle Meno fall afoul of the authorities. From there the novel opens up in unexpected and interesting ways. Epic in scope, The Tower is a classic in every sense, and Tellkamp is unafraid to unleash the power of poetic passages. “Searching, the Great River seemed to tauten in the approaching night, its skin crinkled and cracked, as if it were trying to anticipate the wind…” - Jeff VanderMeer

A mere quarter-century ago, the Berlin Wall opened. Soon after, the Soviet empire fell. Yet much of that cataclysmic history has already faded into kitsch and platitude. Happily, literature can resurrect a reality beyond the scope of official commemorations. Three novels from authors who grew up in the lost world of East Germany - all brought to us in outstanding translations - anchor that obliterated landscape to intimate memories, beliefs and emotions. Fiction can dig the tunnel that takes us under the Wall and back through time.

Time and the ironies of history chime like the novel’s many clocks through The Tower, Uwe Tellkamp’s mammoth saga of middle-class family life in the German Democratic Republic (translated by Mike Mitchell; Allen Lane, £25). Winner of the German Book Prize, this 1000-page chronicle of a medical and literary clan in 1980s Dresden does for the professional elite of “socialist” Saxony what Thomas Mann did for the merchant class of Lubeck in his Buddenbrooks. Along with a vividly-drawn crowd of relatives, friends and colleagues, surgeon Richard Hoffmann; his wife Anne, a nurse; her brother, the publisher Meno; and the Hoffmanns’ rebel son Christian people this immersive, panoramic portrait of Dresden life.

Between 1982 and 1989, the Party “gerontocracy” slowly loses the plot, while the “chemical empire” of the GDR chokes on its industrial toxins. Stage by stage, the city’s elite shift from whispered cynicism to outspoken dissent: from Brezhnev’s unlamented death via the nuclear nervousness of 1983, that “year of the apocalypse”, through post-Chernobyl environmental calamities and the growth of organised opposition. Beyond his flair for densely-textured realism, Tellkamp’s inner monologues and close-up chamber dramas also owe a debt to the sort of “decadent” writers Meno and his fellow literati love to read but fear to praise – Joyce, Proust, Musil. This cornucopian novel also finds space for social comedy, marital upheaval, teenage rebellion and lyrical intermezzi. Time passes, seasons change, and the “music of the river” Elbe endures, for all the noxious filth dumped into it.

Tellkamp excels at edgy set-pieces, from the 50th birthday party at which Richard and his chums say that “Reagan’s got the right idea” (and then worry who might report them) to the trial that sentences Christian – now an army draftee – for public defamation of “this shitty state”. A surgeon by training, the author observes Richard’s operations (often impaired by power-cuts) with the same close-up zest he devotes to Meno’s literary wrangles with censors, Party hacks and diehard Communist idealists. A love of music unites this cultivated, somewhat conservative middle-class, stranded under state socialism. For eccentric GP Niklas, “the present seemed to be one possibility among others in which one could live, and not the most pleasant”.

Grumblers, dreamers, nostalgists, practitioners of “inner emigration”, Tellkamp’s men occupy centre-stage. Yet their womenfolk take the most decisive steps towards change. Like dissenter Regine, they seek to escape the bureaucratic prison of the GDR; like Josta, Richard’s mistress, they end an affair that confines them in other ways; like Anne herself, they move from passive complaint to public protest.

In the manner of some super-intelligent soap, The Tower puts a small group of related characters under the microscope. Not coincidentally, Meno is a keen zoologist. It also zooms out to dramatise the wider forces that will gather to drown this “island” of bourgeois life within a dying system. If this domestic epic calls for stamina, its rapid shifts of voice and viewpoint banish monotony. Tellkamp deserves readers like Christian, who “loved long books”, and thinks that “at 500 pages the ocean began, anything less than that was paddling in a brook”.

Whereas Tellkamp covers eight years in 1000 pages, Jenny Erpenbeck spans a century of transformation in little more than 200. In her previous novels, the writer has honed an extraordinary gift for focusing the sweep of European history into intimate moments, captured in prose of a haunting beauty and tenderness. The End of Days (trans. Susan Bernofsky; Portobello, £12.99) compresses almost 100 years of war, exile, revolution and persecution into rapt snapshots from a single life. Born in 1902 to a Jewish mother and Christian father in a backwater of the Habsburg empire, Erpenbeck’s heroine meets, but dodges, the various fates that might have killed her - from the fragile baby’s cradle in a harsh Galician winter through starving Vienna after the Great War to Stalin’s purges in late-1930s Moscow and the random accident that might have felled this defiant child of the century - now a garlanded Communist author - in the GDR.

Erpenbeck shows how chance and accident may outsmart destiny - even for a revolutionary who believes in historical inevitability. Throughout, collective tragedy leaves scars deep in mind and body. The narrative reveals how historical circumstances and “events of general nature... can infiltrate a private face”. From anti-Semitic pogroms to the paranoid terror of Stalin’s Moscow and the bureaucratic socialism of the GDR, The End of Days traces this “constant translation between far outside and deep within” via a series of hypnotically involving scenes. History might always have turned out otherwise, even down to the fall of the Wall in 1989, “flattened, breached and scorned” as an entire system is “wiped off the map”.

Both Tellkamp and Erpenbeck spent all their youth within the GDR; Julia Franck, along with millions of other East Germans, fled to the West as a child with her mother and brother. That experience informs her novel West (trans. Anthea Bell; Harvill Secker, £12.99), first published in German a decade ago. In flight from her partner’s death and under suspicious scrutiny by the regime (in part for her Jewish origins), scientist Nelly Senff crosses the Wall only to languish with her children in the limbo of the Marienfelde refugee camp. In this twilight zone of surveillance and interrogation, Nelly remembers and survives, her troubled family story enriched by the voices of Polish migrant Krystyna and CIA spy John. As abstract liberty dwindles into claustrophobic half-life, Nelly loses her “sense of the meaning of freedom”. The promised land has shrunk into a bugged waiting-room.

As much as for Tellkamp and Erpenbeck, Franck’s vision of the German, and European, past encompasses the Third Reich as well as the Warsaw Pact. Obliquely, all three of these novels imagine the GDR as a home-grown allergic reaction to Hitler’s tyranny as much as the imposed offshoot of Soviet Communism. We should bear that longer legacy in mind as celebrations mark 25 years of a reunited Germany. Spare a toast, too, for the first-rate translators who have guided us safely and stylishly through the walls of language. - Boyd Tonkin

The Tower, by Uwe Tellkamp, may appear to be a monolithic, singularly heroic literary act by a surgeon and survivor of the indignities of the German Democratic Republic. This man, who lived to tell the tale, so to speak, penned an epic about a bourgeois family which has retreated into a kind of inner emigration in the crumbling but stately villas of the posh Weißer Hirsch neighborhood in Dresden. But The Tower is much more complex than that, and intellectually rich. The story, with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, focuses on three men of various ages and various levels of complicity with the putrefying system of 1980s GDR, and it is now (finally!) available in print in English translation.

Who are these three men? Christian is a pimply and ambitious young student who dreams of following his father, Richard, into the field of medicine; he ultimately signs up for three years of military service in the hopes of securing a spot as a medical student. His efforts to mimic Party loyalty are largely successful until his collapse as a soldier. His father Richard’s 50th birthday party opens the novel and initially Richard appears equally eloquent and morally blameless. However, numerous affairs and a secret second family make him a pawn in the hands of the Stasi. Finally, Meno, Christian’s maternal uncle—something of a mentor to the teenage boy, and a former botanist—works as an editor at one of the GDR’s few high-quality imprints that frequently ran short on paper, rounding out the trio of protagonists.

Tellkamp’s multi-faceted book not only documents the slow demise of this once-illustrious family, it records the state of affairs in a country that no longer exists—a “lost” country—without slipping into misplaced nostalgia. In part, this is accomplished by emphasizing the brutality of army life and the willingness to repress the mounting protests in 1989. Christian is no longer able to maintain his façade of party allegiance after his unit is ordered to attack a group of demonstrators that October, which includes his mother. Those well-versed in GDR cultural history may be able to read The Tower as a roman à clef—the Old Man of the Mountain strongly resembles Franz Führmann—but special cultural or historical knowledge is not required to appreciate the impressive and occasionally surreal collage of scenes and character studies from a country that is not mourned but most certainly vanished.

One reason for The Tower’s length (unusual even by German standards) is Tellkamp’s tendency to describe these scenes in minute detail, using nebulously lyrical, almost flowery language. The novel spans seven years, but like Proust’s Recherche, devotes long stretches to single anecdotes. Michael Mitchell does a masterful job of translating Tellkamp’s prose in a nuanced and balanced manner without sacrificing reading fluidity. His sensitive rendering also makes it possible to follow Tellkamp’s stylistic shift from a kind of bourgeois realism à la Thomas Mann in the first half of the novel (“The Pedagogical Province”) to echoes of so-called socialist realism in the second (“Gravity”).

Under this socialist-realist sensibility falls the short Chapter 53 (page 750), devoted to the mechanics and aesthetics of the laundry wringer:

The ironing-woman, full-bosomed with piggy eyes and reddish down on the backs of her fingers and her upper lip, brusquely instructed them in how to operate the machine, after she’d checked their time in a notebook and ticked them off with a sharp pencil stroke […] Anne nodded, pressed a second button and now it sounded as if someone—or something—were being tortured, torment and pain were flying over the solid beechwood, worn by decades of use, of the wringer, shuttling to and fro, the boulders in the box thundering and rattling, a convulsive tremor from the transmission belts running over driving wheels on the side of the machine, obeying the blind, unfeeling voltage commands of a motor. For a moment there was nothing to do.

On the other hand, one of Meno’s diary entries, reminiscing of better times, falls distinctly into a bourgeois realist camp:

It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating the Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions—Classics!

Although Uwe Tellkamp became a household name in Germany after The Tower was awarded the German Book Prize in 2008, it was not at all assured that his thousand-page epic would ever be translated into English. The vagaries of the Anglophone publishing industry were such that all the major publishers took a glance and then decided it probably would not be worth it. Only after the up-and-coming eBook publisher Frisch & Co. had received Mitchell’s translation did Penguin purchase the rights to a print edition. The likely and deserved success of The Tower in English should serve as a lesson for publishers hesitant to commission translations of long and complex novels. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is a remarkable remembrance of a country lost to history—a great Christmas gift or a tome to tide you over through a long winter. - Bradley Schmidt 

Der Turm is set in Dresden, in the East Germany of the 1980s, then still the German Democratic Republic. The book covers the period right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, though it moves at varying speeds across these years, lingering over particular episodes and stretches, then leaping over longer periods.
       The 'Turm' (tower) of the title refers to a district of Dresden where most of the characters live. Not quite an island of intellectual escape, it is certainly far from representative of the workers' state. A central figure is Christian Hoffmann, a figure with some resemblance to the author, still in high school when the book begins, but eager to study medicine. His father, Richard, is a doctor, while his uncle (on his mother's side) is Meno Rohde, an editor at a publishing house specializing in fine editions.
       The arc of Christian's life is the central if not completely dominant one in the book. Political sensitivity is still very high, allegiance -- at least nominal -- to the party and nation essential if one is to have any hope of, for example, a university-spot, especially in a field such as medicine. Even minor high school outbursts and missteps can have grave consequences, and Christian barely scrapes by in this regard, his future hanging in the balance over such matters as being found with a Nazi book. Inescapable, too, is military service, which Christian embarks on before he is to begin university -- and here conditions and demands do crush him, preventing him from pursuing his dreams. He is not the only one who, by trying to maintain some personal integrity, is ruthlessly marginalized in a system that tolerates nothing that could be considered in any way subversive.
       The book begins with a lengthy description of the to-do around Richard's fiftieth birthday, and his situation suggests the possibility of getting by fairly comfortably in this society, as he has found considerable success and enjoys a few privileges. Yet he's also mired in an awkward affair that has no hopes of working out well, with gossip starting to reach his wife and the woman in question reacting poorly to their situation. Richard's half-hearted attempts to do the right thing don't work out particularly well. And while the doctors are held in considerable esteem, bureaucracy and the difficulties in getting supplies or necessary funds show the shortcomings of the socialist system in this area as well
       Meno is part of the local literary establishment -- based here closely on the actual local scene at the time, with a number of the writers only thinly disguised. His meetings at the local Writers' Union and his interaction with various figures make for a good overview of the difficulties faced by authors and publishers, and the compromises that were expected. The discussions get very frank, even as the amount of leeway the censor permits is limited. Meno is working on a lyrical work of his own, but it is the fate of an author he is drawn to and tries to take a bit under his wing, the very talented young Judith Schevola, that Tellkamp focusses on. Like Christian, she -- another promising member of the younger generation -- suffers most under the crushing weight of the regime and its demands.
       Tellkamp offers a vast survey of East German life, even as he keeps it within relatively limited areas: school, the workplace (the hospital and the publishing house), army life. For the most part, those whose lives are described are fairly well-to-do -- if not financially particularly well-off, at least relatively secure in their places, and certainly comfortable (even as that occasionally proves illusory). True, occasionally strangers are assigned a portion of their living spaces, as lines are redrawn in the houses and officialdom literally encroaches on their lives further, but most can get by relatively comfortably. Tellkamp does, however, pointedly describe the lives of the truly privileged, the nation's favoured sons, which some of the others catch a glimpse of -- an entirely different world.
       The official party line is the one thing that is sacred, as those who oppose it suffer Draconian punishments. Doubts about anyone being a good citizen -- defined largely on the basis of unquestioning support for the Soviet position -- can be devastating, while taking the step of filing an application to leave the country means burning all one's bridges in one quick and massive blaze.
       There is a great deal of period-detail here, such as the lines at shops that people get on even if it's unclear what will be on offer (the thinking being that any special delivery is worth getting one's hands on), or the amount of time involved in dealing with even the smallest bit of bureaucracy. It's not just far from a loving portrait, however: there's no Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old Eastern ways) here at all and, if anything, Tellkamp's version is almost too consistently sour.
       Christian is a self-conscious, acne-suffering teenager with incredible ambition and drive at the beginning of the book. He plows through books at a ridiculous pace, and barely seems to enjoy any leisure time, but there's also no sheer love of learning (or reading) here. It's all ambition -- and his choice of medicine as a field is also not fueled by his interest in helping others but simply because he wants fame and adulation. It's hard not to see Tellkamp in Christian, and it's hard not to see this book as the result of an only slightly more controlled ambition.
       "Mit 500 Seiten begannen die wirklichen Romane " ('Real novels started with at least 500 pages') Christian convinces himself, as if weight could equal worth, and there's little doubt that Tellkamp hasn't completely shaken that notion. At nearly a thousand pages Der Turm is well in the upper reaches of Thomas Mann territory, and there are points -- even stretches -- where one has to wonder why he didn't show more restraint. Der Turm is not a smooth-flowing narrative: the many, relatively short chapters may be Mann-like, but the overall result is a very different one. Certain chapters are true asides, excursions elsewhere, while others do follow a course of action in sequence. Tellkamp begins his book with a brief 'Overture' and closes it with a 'Finale' -- and music does play a small role in some of the characters' lives -- and there is something of a musical composition to the novel. Especially in those parts and passages that allow one or another instrument to show off a bit: Tellkamp has the writing chops and can't help but introduce a few flourishes -- but that doesn't always work to best effect.
       One of the writers notes:

"Wahrheit ! Als ob es in der Literatur um Wahrheit ging ! Romane sind keine Philosophieseminare. Romane lügen immer." 

 ["Truth ! As if literature had anything to do with the truth ! Novels aren't philosophy-seminars. Novels always lie." ]

       The argument doesn't go unchallenged, but despite all the talk Der Turm is as much documentary as philosophical, trying to get at truth less through analysis (though there is also some of that) than through precise depiction. And it is the scenes and dialogues that re-present everyday East German life where Tellkamp excels, these fully realised confrontations and unfolding of events -- suggesting that, because this is how it was (and it often feels he got that precisely right), that's also all there is to it -- a more dubious proposition.
       The many characters and storylines allow for a truly panoramic view of 1980s East Germany, yet with the book so heavily populated and moving in all these different directions the picture loses focus too. In part, that's also because it is not a true family saga, Christian's story too dominant yet not the whole story either.
       Yes, in many respects Der Turm is a glorious epic of that sad last decade of East German history, with some remarkable patches of writing and some very fine scenes. Yet it feels incomplete as a history, the pendulum swinging too far and spitefully back in a book that drips with contempt and feels too personal in its reckoning with an entire nation and system.
       An important book, and certainly an impressive accomplishment; a good but not a great novel. - The Complete Review

"My novel is about how man survives in a hostile environment," says Uwe Tellkamp, author of The Tower: Tales From A Lost Country, in an interview — his brave attempt to summarise this thousand-page epic set in 1980s East Germany, then still the pompously named German Democratic Republic or GDR. Tellkamp is a former surgeon who has become a prominent writer since The Tower was awarded a leading German prize in 2008.
What was he trying to do in this book, which has drawn comparisons with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks? Both novels begin with a celebration and close with the end of an era brought to its knees by inner decay. The mass of characters around Tellkamp's triangular set of protagonists is certainly Tolstoyan and many scenes burst with Kafkaesque madness. People queue up at shops just because everybody does so, even though no one has a clue what might be on offer inside. Bananas? Fabric? Tellkamp depicts the grotesque idiosyncrasies of the GDR's bureaucracy. He speaks with the slowness and sobriety that comes with growing up in a system where the wrong word at the wrong time can set one's existence ablaze.
If his protagonists Christian, Richard and Meno do not quite choose inner emigration, they are certainly very far removed from the hardship and humiliation most citizens of the GDR suffered from. Hence The Tower:  a social set retiring into an ivory tower, not wanting to see, not wanting to know whatever might be going on outside. The title also alludes to the Tower of Babel — man asking impossible things and stubbornly trying to achieve them against the odds. Finally the Tower, Der Turm, is a real neighbourhood of quiet, broad, leafy streets and crumbling, grand villas in Dresden. However, Tellkamp creates a fictive version of that still-beautiful city: divided by the River Elbe, his Dresden morphs into a new Eastern and Western Rome, where his characters live. Christian — the author's alter ego — is a pimply youth who writes poetry and dreams of becoming a doctor, like his father Richard. For this he has to display absolute loyalty to the Party, which he just about manages to do, until reality catches up with him in a most brutal manner during his military service. The pursuit of happiness and dreams while maintaining personal integrity was an almost insurmountable contradiction in the GDR. Richard himself, whose 50th birthday celebrations open the novel, seems to lead a fulfilled and happy life. He only discloses his dark secret and second private life when put under ultimate pressure by the Stasi, the omnipresent secret police. Last but not least, Meno, Christian's uncle on his mother's side, is an editor at a publishing house specialising in fine editions, struggling with both a lack of supplies such as good quality paper as well as with censorship and compromises. In his salon talk can get very candid — much too candid — and here Tellkamp displays masterfully the intellectual shackles and the sheer suffocation the younger generation of intellectuals must have felt in the twilight of the GDR.

Even though each of the men has their gripping story, Tellkamp devises his own system of time, which lingers on some episodes, just to speed up others and offer them relatively little space. If there is a plot it wears thin over the hundreds of anecdotes he weaves into the beautiful, rich and capricious language of his narrative. Though the heavily populated novel and its many directions threaten to lose focus, Tellkamp still offers a vast survey of life in the GDR, seeking a documentary as well as a philosophical truth. Nevertheless, he steers clear of "Ostalgie", nostalgia for the good old days of the GDR that some of its former citizens still feel. "There is no Ostalgie. That is something for the former hippies of the GDR, who could scrape by on next to nothing. The Social Democrats themselves feel no Ostalgie. They are energised, as they keenly feel their loss. Let us never forget what really caused the demise of this country: The SED [East German Communists] and the Soviet System," says Tellkamp. "Look at Bulgaria, look at Romania, who did not have a Federal Republic who was there to sort them out." Still, he chose "Tales of a lost country" as the book's subtitle. "It is a lost country. Its colours, its smells and fragrances, its sounds, brands, codes and ways of behaviour are forever gone. The period from after World War II, which ended in West Germany in the Wirtschaftswunder — the economic miracle of the '50s — just continued in the East until the end of the '80s."

The end of the '80s: a sad decade dominated by fear — how would things end? "We had no idea what would happen. Nobody expected it so soon, and nobody expected its utterly peaceful way." Have extra supplies of blood ready: this blunt message is sent in Tellkamp's novel from Berlin to Dresden, as the protests grow and grow. The end of Tellkamp's tale basks in light and hope: "All their faces showed the fear of the last few days . . . but also something new: they shone    . . . already full of pride that this directness was possible." He evokes the moment when the chant of the candle-lit Montagsmärsche — the peaceful demonstrations taking place in Leipzig and Dresden every Monday night — turns from "We are the people" to "We are a people." Here one almost wishes that the translator Michael Mitchell — and translating The Tower must have been a Herculean task which he has tackled bravely and diligently — had chosen the word "folk". The German original statement "Wir sind ein Volk" expresses in all its simplicity everything there was and is to say about the demise of the GDR and German reunification. - ELLEN ALPSTEN

On November 9 it will be 25 years to the day that the Berlin Wall came down. Published in English for the first time to coincide with that anniversary is The Tower, a 2008 novel by Uwe Tellkamp, who grew up in the former East Germany. It follows a Dresden family in the years before 1989, reconstructing the trials of everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, portrayed without nostalgia as a hyper-bureaucratic police state, farcical and sinister.

The focus is on three men. Meno is a zoologist who was never allowed to complete his doctorate because of his involvement in student protests during the Sixties. He works as an editor at a publishing house and part of the novel follows his encounters with writers he is obliged to censor against his own instincts.

Meno’s nephew, Christian, is a shy high-school student who hopes to study medicine. At school he struggles to keep his sceptical views about the GDR to himself; his two-word essay on socialist literature (“It lies”) doesn’t go down well. Tellkamp charts the harrowing process by which his ambitions are ground down when he’s drafted into the army, having hoped to defer.

Christian can’t do that because of his father, Richard, a philandering surgeon who sneaks away on his 50th birthday to visit the small daughter he has with another woman. It’s risky behaviour, especially when he hopes to wangle preferential treatment for his other family, and soon he finds himself blackmailed by faceless officials.

The novel’s main business is to describe a time of knicker shortages, power cuts and mounting suicides; a place where the state arbitrarily splits families or rehouses them with fewer bedrooms; where you exchange handwritten notes in a face-to-face conversation because you don’t know who might be listening in. It emerges that when Christian was younger, Richard hired an actor to train him how to lie in case of interrogation. When Christian tells his family there’s a girl at school he’d like to date, he is advised against it unless he’s sure she can be trusted (she can’t).

It’s this context that lifts the commonplace stories The Tower has to tell, of sentimental education and extramarital affairs. The ending isn’t a surprise – it isn’t that sort of book – but Tellkamp can’t quite resist putting a novelistic spin on events. Christian, now a soldier, is ordered to disrupt a protest in the autumn of 1989 and instead attacks a police officer whom he sees beating up his mother. This feels too neat: the moral crisis would have been just as explicit had Christian witnessed any other fellow citizen being beaten up. Nor would our dismaying realisation – that the purpose of his training was to enable him to fight his own countrymen – have lost any force.

Tellkamp was born and grew up in Dresden and I sense that his story shares much with Christian’s. He lost a place to study medicine because of his “political unreliability” and was arrested in 1989 (he later became a surgeon). In a note, he cautions us that the characters “live in my imagination and have as little in common with living people as a sculptor’s clay has with a sculpture” – which is finely put, not least when it comes after a dedication to someone named Meno.

In Mike Mitchell’s English, Tellkamp’s prose is polished, vivid and observationally acute. Little wonder that he racked up a four-figure page count: a painting of a loaf of bread has Richard examining its “chitin-brown, acorn-brown, double-bass-brown, tree-trunk-brown, rock-brown” crust.

But to accuse Tellkamp of prolixity would be to miss the point of a novel that marshals all its resources against the weakness of memory. - Anthony Cummins