Who would have thought that one could discover beauty in the war-torn Germany of 1945? Not the terrible beauty of W.B. Yeats, not even the austere beauty of Primo Levi or Elias Canetti whose impeccable styles offset their grim subjects — but the beauty of remembrance coupled with affection for the land, ancestral spirit, and nuanced lives of ordinary Germans lost in the shadow of the Nazi war machine?

That Beatrix Ost’s memoir, “My Father’s House: A Childhood in Wartime Bavaria” (Helen Marx Books, 338 pages, $16.85), recovers these pockets of beauty from the rubble of the Third Reich is no small achievement. It is all the more impressive because it is her first foray as a writer (she is an established visual artist and film producer) and because (although she writes from America, her adopted home since 1975) her German prose shows her to be a remarkable storyteller. In poised, delicately wrought sentences, she reconstructs the story of her sensitive, intelligent family and their life on the estate of Goldachhof, near Munich. Told in the voice of the young Beatrix, it emerges as an “insular framework of order” — a world filled with heirlooms and rituals, with scents of the farm and the accents of Olga, the Russian cook, and Jasta, the Yugoslavian chambermaid — but also a world invaded by air raids and interrogations, by American soldiers and liberated Dachau inmates headed East.

This picture of a beautiful, if decentered, world is reflected in the book’s fragmentary structure. Its short mosaic-like chapters range from discreet incidents (“I Bit My Tongue,” “Secrets”) to lyric evocations of place (“Breath of a House,” “Father’s Garden”) and childhood metaphysics (“God,” “Heaven and Hell”). In his introduction, Andrew Solomon calls the chapters “impressionistic,” and sees them consistent with its “accrual of anecdote.” Yet their expressionist touch also makes them part of the opposite — of the centrifugal force of atomization and dispersal found in the emotive canvases of Oscar Kokoschka (with whom Ms. Ost studied in Salzburg).

Ms. Ost’s complex structure is not altogether seamless. The narrator seems to falter in the introductory chapter, “Letters,” with its repeated motif of the Minotaur guarding “her parents’ secret,” recalling Anaïs Nin’s often heavyhanded symbolism. But the translation — an outstanding job by Jonathan McVity in collaboration with the author — makes it hard to gauge this cursory flaw, just as it makes hard to judge how accurately the book’s instances of southern drawl reproduce Ms. Ost’s renditions of the Bavarian dialect.

Somewhere toward the middle of “My Father’s House” a thematic consistency emerges in a series of epiphanies. In “Jitterbug” and “Bavarian Blues,” American soldiers take up with Olga and Jasta, which leads to a meditation on loss in “Tales of Parting.” As both women are about to leave, Ms. Ost recalls their “kitchen odor, sweat, unwashed hair, country smells, body musk” — elements of the irreplaceable Eden of childhood, now yielding to time. With a near-Proustian intensity, she learns that “there is a death in parting” and that “everything repeats itself, gets replaced; that only the form alters.”

This realization is foreshadowed by the previous chapter, “Espionage,” in which Olga and Anton, the errant fiancé of Ms. Ost’s aunt Julia, are alleged to have been working for the Russians during the war. Ms. Ost, who first doubts her former reality, soon doubts her doubts, concluding that not only the past is unreliable, retrospection is, too, along with language itself. Anton’s shifting identity is “words, words, all meaningless as if he were a double agent.”

Which brings us to the question that goes to the heart of Ms. Ost’s book: Who is her father, Fritz Ost? Empathetic yet stern, a pessimistic humanist, a disenchanted soldier and a militaristic master of the manor; a veteran who craves for “the blessing of distance” — he, too, has a looming mystery in his past. How come, while serving under Field Marshal Rommel in Africa, he escapes being court-marshaled having bluntly told him that “the war is lost”? How does he manage to quit “the Party” with impunity? And why does he join it in the first place — he who openly despises what he calls “the Aryan madness of Adolf Schicklgruber.”

Although most of these sensitive questions will be answered (Fritz enters the Party, she learns retrospectively, in order to protect Jews using his position) — she leaves enough blanks for doubts to hover. This is not evasiveness: Rather, Mrs. Ost’s insight that not all of the wartime dilemmas are resolvable translates into a form that defies resolution — like those faded photographs that intersperse her chapters, where a swastika-filled arm band is followed by the smile of a family man. If moral redemption seems moot, they seem to say, there is still the aesthetic redemption of recapturing — not time lost — but time lived, and, in the author’s case, a childhood taken hostage by war.

Mr. Fayngold is a painter and a lecturer in Russian and comparative literature at Baruch College.