BOOKS

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The narrative in Klaus P. Kinast’s coming-of-age stories in post-war Germany sheds light on the emotional, intellectual, and physical challenges of children of that era. While painting a lovingly detailed backdrop of everyday life, the stories are filled with parables and enchanting allegories originating from the mind of a very imaginative, thoughtful young boy.
Blessed by benign adult negligence during the rebuilding efforts after WWII, and embedded in the complex social structure of a small farming community, the stories’ cheeky main character enjoys the intensity of minute yet deeply sensual details of a boyhood far removed from adult supervision.
It’s the Little Prince meets Huckleberry Finn in adventures somewhat reminiscent of the character and mores of Wilhelm Busch.

The adventures are indeed (somewhat hair-raising, from today's point of view) autobiographical, with fictional elements added as required for story-telling purposes. Caution: Sneaky history lessons may be included!

A MAN OF SIX COUNTRIES

A MAN OF SIX COUNTRIES is the latest book by the author.

" HE TAUGHT ME THAT HISTORY IS A LIVING ENTITY.
IT ORIGINATES IN THE PAST, MAKES ITS HOME IN THE PRESENT, AND AFFECTS ALL OUR FUTURE ."

Some sixty-five years ago, when I was eight years old, I had a series of conversations with a very old man over a period of about two weeks. Up to the moment of my encounter with him, I had always truly lived in the moment, in a state of constant immediateness, in a condition where only the Now mattered - a condition presently desired by many; a blessed state, at least for children. After only a few days with him, I began to regard the state of an unvarying Now with some suspicion. I came to understand that living in the moment meant that one had to bar events which had happened in the past or might happen in the future from intruding into one’s present life. I would soon come to understand that adults were never free to simply disregard the past, nor the many versions of a possibly unpleasant future. To do so would not only be short-sighted but potentially dangerous for themselves as well as for others. Throughout my later life I met many who tried to find their personal version of the Now within ignorance, forgetfulness, or irresponsibility, often using various types of drugs as chemical lubricants to slide unimpeded by bothersome societal demands into mental oblivion.
On the other hand, every single one of the many images the old man had conjured up within my mind during our acquaintance were either colourful and joyous or dark and painful. Only much later, as an adult, did I come to understand that had he tried to exorcise the unpleasant parts of his life, he would also have eradicated the blissful ones. The old man had brought his past along like a heavy trunk full of memories, and he had opened that trunk for me so I could look inside at what it contained. He had in fact been another Pandora opening a box; but whereas Pandora had only been left with Hope, the old man’s trunk had been filled to the brim with beauty.

Germany, 1955. A young boy befriends a very old man, whose remarkable unremarkable life spans more than nine decades. Extending from the time of Napoleon III, when the individual small states throughout German lands were still ruled by aristocratic families, through the industrial revolution, a series of wars culminating in the devastation of WWI and the disastrous rise of the Nazi regime, all the way to the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany, the old man’s very personal reflection on his humble life sheds light on that period’s immense political and societal shifts, the vain glory, heartbreak, and ultimate futility of war, and the loss of communal identity.
Through the story of the old man told over just a few days, the young boy, who grows up in a post-war environment and has thus far experienced life in a very immediate manner, comes to understand that history is in fact the lived experience of ordinary people. During this time of intellectual growth, the boy develops empathy, grapples with the concept of time and aging, and is deeply affected by the ambiguity of the human essence.

You can find the book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087CBV3CF
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-man-of-six-countries-klaus-kinast/1136816778?ean=2940162976653

THE HILARITY OF DEATH

If I could choose a heaven in which to spend eternity, I would have it look like the town of my childhood. My heavenly town would not be big, and filled with people or souls who, despite their many flaws and fallacies, would be deeply human and touchable. I would be a child again or, more precisely, a boy between the age of eight and twelve. My parents would 'shower' me once more with their own brand of benign neglect, feeling that after the dangers of war anything encountered by me would be a paradise of safety and good-will. I would again have many friends and playmates, exactly as I did the first time around. But I also could, if I wanted to, and without anyone questioning me, retreat into solitude in order to think about things, or deal with for me new and unsettling emotions. I would swim again in the nearby waterlogged gravel pit, or else in the crowded, noise-filled public pool, and afterwards I would lie on my prickly woolen blanket, waiting for the sun to warm my goose-bumped skin. In the winter, I would once more toboggan down the steep slope of an out-of-operation quarry while the cold, snow-crystal filled air would whip my face and fill my lungs.
Back then I did not know that I already lived in a sort of heaven, albeit it was a heaven where children sometimes died in either accidents or else from nowadays preventable diseases and illnesses. Perhaps it was not the kind of heaven our pastor talked about, full of holiness, angels, and benevolence. Perhaps an older, more basic, more savage heaven had sprung a leak, and by so doing had poured at least some of its noisy, lustful, and humble essence into the pastor's heaven, in which faded, anemic souls fluttered aimlessly around all day - souls without soul, dressed in white gowns, singing pious hymns. My heaven was, and hopefully will be again, dirty, loud, boisterous, and full of earthly 'sin', which had made it so delightful when I had first been in it, and to which, if it exists, I hope to return one day.

You can find the book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hilarity-of-death-klaus-kinast/1136758674?ean=2940162775232
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087HG2DKV

CONVERSING WITH WHITE NOSE

A White Nose was a child, mostly a girl-child, who either knew or thought she knew more than anyone else, and who was as a result of her assumed superior knowledge always right. A female White Nose knew certainly more than any boy ever could, and would prattle on endlessly about the abominable stupidity of boys.

The encounter that inspired me to write about White Nose occurred over sixty years ago. As I grew older, I occasionally saw White Nose because our town was so small, but we never talked to each other again. As time passed, she became first a pretty teenager, and later a graceful young woman, and still we did not talk. She was what was then called a 'higher daughter', and the social divide that separated us had become unbridgeable. And then, one day, I left our town, never to return, and I did not see her again.
However, sometimes the image of White Nose arises before my inner eye, and then she becomes visible to me once more. I am convinced that it was she who inspired me, perhaps even tempted me, to deal intellectually with the irrationality and inconsistencies of religion, and at times the notion that Eve may still live within her is very comforting to me. Yes, I am glad that she tempted me that day the way Eve had tempted Adam so metaphorically long ago, and that I, too, like Adam, was permanently expelled from the beautiful garden of utter ignorance. I don't know if White Nose, no, Nose Wise, ever thought of me again, or whether the passage of time erased all traces of me from her memory. I, however, will forever treasure our mutual summer afternoon, encased in a magical world of gold and blue, a quintessential world of the living, when we children, at the beginning of our journey, contemplated, inspired by the passing of one old man, the nature of death, sin, and God.

You can find the book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/conversing-with-white-nose-klaus-kinast/1136755752?ean=2940162774853
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087FD2B9X

THE AMAZING MAZE OF MIRRORS AND MYSTERIES

I have used the Maze, a House of Mirrors at the Hanover Marksmen festival, to which my parents have taken me around the age of seven, as a device to shed light on some of the emotional, intellectual, and physical challenges of a boy of my generation, and the images in the mirrors to answer at least some of the questions I had when I was a child. Questions about life, death, reality, wealth, poverty, injustice, and my role in the world. I have always asked those questions, and as I got older, I began to ask more. To most of them I never received satisfactory explanations, and now, in my seventies, I have far more questions than I ever had. But I do not mind. I have come to see that it is those unresolved questions that make me want to get up in the morning in order to discover their answer.
Marksmen festivals are the present-day leftovers of century-old para-military militia training exercises. At that time most of the small cities and towns of what later would become Germany would have had such militias. Many of those then-independent political entities were minuscule, often no more than a few kilometres across. Those inconsequential entities could be Principalities, Duke-, Earl- or Petty Kingdoms, Archbishoprics, or free cities. Dynastic and military alliances shifted frequently, and every minor noble would wage war on his neighbor if there was even the slightest indication of weakness. The ‘marksmen’ or ‘citizen watches’ were usually members of the solid middle class, since only they had the necessary funds to equip themselves with horses, armor, and arms. The Dutch painter Rembrandt captured such marksmen beautifully in his famous painting ‘The Night Watch’. With the emergence of strong kingdoms like Prussia the city-based marksmen militia lost their military relevance.
By the time I was a boy, the marksmen festivals were nothing more than joyous carnivals, where men of all ages dressed in fancy green dress uniforms and fired old, outdated rifles at wooden targets. The winner of those shooting competitions would be declared the ‘Marksmen King’, and it was his duty to lead the drinking bout that inevitably followed. For the rest of the population the fairs were just raucous affairs, which lasted anywhere from a few days to a week, depending on the size of the town. The fairgrounds would be a jumble of carousels, side-show attractions, candy-huts, and beer tents. It must be said, though, that even after centuries of irrelevance, the mounted marksmen always take center stage at the grand parades, which always proceed the opening of those fairs.

You can find the book at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-amazing-maze-of-mirrors-and-mysteries-ines-hanl/1136746350?ean=2940162746270
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087FG6HQ3

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEREGRINE FALCON

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I have never believed in a god who looks more or less like us, and sits in brooding judgement over his flawed creation. But just in case I am wrong, I
would like to thank that god for making me a child when he- or she- did. A time that was closer to the one of the late-medieval Flemish painter Peter
Bruegel than to the twenty-first century with its annoyingly intrusive connectivity, and its ever present, ubiquitous technical trinkets and
diversions. My childhood was a time still dominated by peasant dances, playing children, and hunters, who in mid-winter held large communal kettle hunts, of which I was often a part. My participation in those hunts was usually rewarded with the bloodied corpse of a hare, which my father skinned and my mother turned into a roast.

That world, my world, no longer exists. It has gone as extinct as the sabre-toothed cat or the Dodo bird. It only lives in my memories, but it still
sustains me. I see it in my dreams. I hear its sounds and I smell its smells. My friends are still boys, not ageing men, and my parents are still alive,
much younger than I am now. I still walk the halls of my school, filled with the ubiquitous screams and laughter of boisterous children.
A few years ago I went back to a town of the same name - but it was no longer my town. It is now only a faded shade of what it had once been, a ghost town peopled by my recollections. The fields and pastures are mostly gone, replaced by nondescript, cookie-cutter houses. Fox Creek has dried to a trickle that any five-year-old could jump, if five-year-olds actually still jumped across creeks today. The grazing horses are no longer there, their meadow was turned into a sprawling supermarket with an adjacent parking lot, designed for convenience. Boys and girls no longer look at the wider world but at tiny screens that restrict their vision.The manure pile on Mr. Wiedemann's farm is gone as well, along with the horses, cattle, pigs, goats, ,and chickens, made either redundant by market forces or else replaced by machinery. The hard-packed earth around the church has been covered up by an extensive green lawn, nice to look at but useless when it comes to playing marbles.
The medieval church is still there, of course, but even it has been spiffed up. Its formerly dark and foreboding wooden interior has been painted in
shades of cream and white, giving it a kind of out-of-place Rococo frivolity. Madam Kaiser's bakery still exists, but is now a coffee shop as well; and the war memorial has been moved, so that it is no longer at the center of the town. Children no longer play outdoors in my hometown, preferring instead to spend glorious summer days inside, facing a two-dimensional world instead of a three-dimensional one. It is no longer a world filled with fallen trees, and warm, fragrant meadows in which horses graze. The packets of Fizz are gone, along with the spring of clear water, and so is most of the dark, silent forest. Field lanes were paved over, creating more traffic, making them dangerous to either walk or play on. No more fences of barbed wire to rip one’s skin on, no more daring garden raids.
The world of my childhood no longer exists or, worse, was modernized. My town is no longer my town; it has changed beyond all recognition. It has
joined the twenty-first century, and by so doing, has left me behind. The god, who I know does not exist, has blessed me by making me a
member of one of the last generations of children, who actually still explored their surroundings, utterly unsupervised by the now ever-present
hordes of overanxious, fear-crippled adults. It was a world in which we could still climb trees and discover the magic and grandeur of life, symbolized by the noble majesty of a rescued Peregrine Falcon.

You can find the book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-adventure-of-the-peregrine-falcon-klaus-kinast/1136768394?ean=2940162831570
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JBFJ3W