Life Goes On: A Novel
In this autobiographical first novel, Keilson captures the mood of Germany after WWI as the country’s economy collapses, its politics turn ugly, and the prospects for its citizens darken. Herr Seldersen returns unharmed from the Great War to continue operating his textile shop only to find his customers losing jobs and his trade dwindling. Despite his strict financial management, the shopkeeper’s business continues in a downward spiral, and his despair deepens. Meanwhile, Seldersen’s son, Albrecht, a university student in Berlin who suffers with his parents and watches the repeated failures of his best friend, feels adrift in the world and comes to believe that his only escape from a sense of shame is to become political. Banned in Germany in 1934, the year after it was published, this novel is unrelentingly depressing in describing the climate in which Nazism began to flourish. Together with Keilson’s other two novels (Comedy in a Minor Key,1947, and The Death of the Adversary, 1959), reprinted in English translation in 2010, this book illuminates the entire life of the renowned author, who died, at age 101, in 2011. --Michele Leber