What makes Kempowski's All for Nothing so surprising and unusual

A little farther along in Walter Kempowski's great German-languish novel All for Nothing (2006), which looks at the final year (1945)  of World War II as experienced by a bourgeois family living in relative comfort in what was soon to become East Germany. What makes this novel so surprising and unusual (and accessible I should add) is that the focus remains on this family, though we get different perspectives from each chapter, as the focus w/in the family estate shifts around - from the mother (Katherina) to the Auntie to the 12-year-old son, and sometimes to a particular episode or visitor or local setting, which all told gives us a sense of the broad scope in this era but with a grounding a specific time, place, community, and family. We would expect to approach this family w/ little or no sympathy, but WK succeeds in helping us understand this family but not to judge them too harshly. It's hard to sympathize with them, as they are naive about the world around them and indifferent to the fate of others, but we recognize their limitations - and we see them as a window into a turbulent and uncertain time. The family home includes various little portraits of Hitler, but the seem to have no knowledge or understanding of or even interest in or sympathy for the Nazi party and its atrocities; there is a "labor camp" nearby, but they seem to have no awareness of the systematic murder of Jews and others. The foolishly believe the local cant, that the German army is standing tall and will prevail in this war - yet there are rumblings all around about a possible, or likely, attack from the Russians. They do nothing about this, other than stupidly blog out some images of Hitler on a collection of stamps. They worry and fret - should they have evacuated the family to one of the major cities (which are by this time all destroyed); should they take steps to get their young son farther away from the front - but they seem to have no extent of the futility of these thoughts at the end of the war. They try to go on with their lives, with luxuries far beyond the reach of any of the people on the "housing" in their small city and they never think for a second about the suffering of others. So in a way they are pathetic and contemptible, yet did they deserve their likely fate? Could they in any way have avoided it? For those who hate all Germans who lived in peace and ignorance through the Nazi era will despise these people, and who can blame them? But the novel does provoke us into thinking about fate, resistance, courage, perspicacity - and how we ourselves would stand up against tyranny and racial terrorism.