Book Review: Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen translated into German by Ursel Allenstein

Childhood as a joyful, happy, comfortable, free of pain and evolving in an almost perfect family friendly environment is representative for a very small amount of people around the world. Particularly decades ago, growing up as a child in a Europe at the brink of wars, industrial revolutions and economic and social changes was far from being any where close of a Disney storytale.

The memoir of Tove Ditlevsen, one of the most famous Danish authors, who died by suicide in 1976, reveals serial realistic memories of growing up in Copenhague, as a second child of a working class family at the beginning of the 20th century. The first installment of the Copenhague Trilogy - which includes Childhood, Youth, and Dependency - is a candid yet thoughtful account of her beginning, until the age of 14 - shortly after the confirmation age.

I had access to the book, translated into German from Danish by Ursel Allenstein, in audiobook format, read by the actress Dagmar Manzel which offered an excellent rendition in terms of emotional interpretation of the content. 

The earliest memories start at the age of 5 and will be updated until the age of 14, when she is about to get a job as a literary contributor but her poetry is rejected because of its loaded erotic content. Besides the inerent sociological aspects of the writing - her father was a communist and therefore have been often left jobless, the times of social and economic insecurity, the gender-biased treatment of her and her brother etc., Ditlevsen´s account has the power of freeing her. Those memories of memories are a reflection of her changes, expectations and observations about her feelings and her body. As for this first part of the memoir, she is more adding up the observations than filtering the reality through sharp rational categories. Given the role of the writing at this stage, adding up words contributes to creating that feeling of freedom that may be at a certain point a counter-point to the sadness and dramatic way of reading the world.

Childhood is a book with strong social and socialist roots, realistic and politely direct. It does not break limits or aims at changing the world, but cannot avoid sharing the reality as it appears to her through her life experience and those of the people around her. 

Personally, I am curious about the rest of the trilogy as well and I am glad that I had the chance to start it somehow.

Rating: 4 stars