Engel des Vergessens

In the novel, which in 2011 won the 25,000 Euro prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize at the 35th Festival of German Literature in Klagenfurt, the author Maia Haderlap, a poet, has taken a much-needed literary theme: the Austria's only militarily organized resistance against National Socialism - the Carinthian minority - Slovenians. And that is by no means a compulsory exercise in so-called "overcoming the past", no thesis novel, but an authentic narration, the story of a grown woman who moves into her childhood and her experiences with the knowledge of today, as the present. As a silent observer, the author as a young girl wants to understand the local people in Lepena suffering from their past. On 13 November 1943, her grandma was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp...