Winter 1944/45: Konrad, a member of the Hitler Youth organisation, is drafted into the Wehrmacht. He dreads active service but through a series of incidences, the war turns the coward into a hero; he’s even awarded the Iron Cross. He brags about it in letters to his distant comrades. But at the end of the war, the world is a very different place. Konrad is profoundly ashamed of his military exploits and is determined to keep them secret – especially when (with the support of a former resistance fighter) he is appointed lecturer of philosophy, with ethics as his special field.
Now a professor, Konrad finds himself in leftwing circles in Frankfurt, caught up in the turmoil of the student movement. When the East German Stasi uncovers compromising information about him through a war comrade, things become especially precarious. But Sunday’s child Konrad manages to pull his head out of the hangman’s noose.
Only after his death will his son discover the boastful letters his father wrote as a young man. He is confronted with a man he doesn’t know and resolves to uncover his true identity.
Based on the story of his own father, Koneffke has written a monumental novel that tells of German history from World War II to the fall of the Berlin wall, and is simultaneously a large-scale attempt to describe the generation of Günter Grass, Walter Jens, Helmut Schmidt, etc.
"A relentlessly enjoyable reading experience." Günter Grass about An Unforgotten Story
