Ein Spalt Luft

Shortly after he was born, his mother suffers from a psychosis for the first time. She increasingly withdraws from the outside world with the toddler, cuts off all contact with friends and family, and rarely leaves their two-room apartment. Meanwhile, his father fights for sole custody. When the son is finally taken in by his father's new family, contact with the mother is severed. Almost twenty years later, he relies on the testimonies of others—court records, audio recordings, stories, and memories of the family—to learn what happened back then. He imagines what that time could have been like, and is haunted by a surreal, nightmarish world. In "A Breath of Air," Mischa Mangel sensitively narrates the life of a young man who circles around his own story as well as that of his family. He weaves together various voices: the bureaucratic language of psychological reports and studies, fairy tales, dreams, psychotic rants, narrative and poetic sequences—a skillful collage, a polyphonic literary debut.