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The parallel stories of Ilse and Arno begin on East Prussian farms that they are later forced to flee as Soviet forces push into the region late in the war.

While she understands the alienation that underpins Thomas Bernhard’s sardonic use of “Kant’s little East Prussian head” as a metaphor for the ultimate futility of literature, she rejects it.

Kaliningrad, formerly the East Prussian outpost of Königsberg, is currently in the public eye as one of the venues for the football World Cup.

Kempowski’s novel, a work of lyrical melancholy originally published in German in 2006, conjures a privileged East Prussian family who must decide whether to join the exodus.

Five years earlier, Günter Grass had published “Crabwalk,” a fictionalized account of the 1945 sinking of a ship bearing thousands of East Prussian refugees.