Walter Kempowski Alles umsonst (All for Nothing) Knaus Verlag, August 2006, 384 pp ISBN: 3-8135-0264-3 A new novel by Walter Kempowski is an event, and in Alles umsonst he poses a particularly difficult and interesting question: How to write about war? Or, more specifically, how to write about war as experienced by a child? His novel traces the steady disintegration of a German family during the years from 1939 to 1945, and focuses particularly on Peter and his mother Katharina who are the reader's companions throughout. Katharina is a very beautiful but dreamy young woman who allows herself to drift like flotsam on the current of popular opinion, and although she shows compassion and shelters strangers in her home during the winter blizzards, she naively remains caught up in her own far-away thoughts even as the Russians advance. The boy, Peter, flees with an aunt when his mother is deported, but the ordeal doesn't end there. A study of reaction and passivity that prompts the nagging question: 'Well, what would you have done?'