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The novel The Blinded spans from the end of World War I through the seething 1920s and 1930s, through the Nazi era and the postwar period, and into the 1950s. These are the family stories of former aristocrats caught up in the turmoil of the times and whose fates are inextricably linked to those of those who were once their servants, cooks, nurses or soldiers. Loss of property, dispossession, war wounds, trauma, misery and famine point their way almost compulsively to National Socialism. Anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews and racial laws reach deep into family constellations and destroy them mercilessly. Flight and emigration are the result. After the war, the displaced, those who fled at the risk of their lives, return and encounter those from whom they fled and whom they had to abandon. I was almost intoxicated by the tone Franz Winter found for his characters in each case, and I felt transported to a strange time, to a long-lost in-between realm. And this in-between realm, found linguistically in every sentence, has made me a fanatical reader of this book. Otto Schenk on The Difficult.