Gunzenhausen

This fictional autobiography of J.D. Salinger combines facts and fiction to create a fascinating puzzle, a novel, and a portrait of an era. J.D. Salinger is one of the great unknowns of literature; he revealed little about his life and deliberately left misleading clues. Piet de Moor approaches him in his novel by allowing Salinger to speak for himself and tell his story. At the boundary between fiction and factual biography, Piet de Moor engages in a virtuosic game. The focus of this life account is primarily on Salinger's time during and shortly after World War II. As a young man, he participated in the Allied landing in Normandy, and after the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the German surrender, he served as an intelligence officer in Gunzenhausen, Franconia. In addition to reflecting on his past life and his romances, this fictional Salinger also recounts his life in a small town, the Germans and their excuses during interrogations, conveyed through encounters with Victor Klemperer, Erich Kästner, or Stefan Heym and Papa Hemingway about the state of culture in this zero hour - a vivid picture of a German small town during that time. He also carries his own manuscript, which would later become "The Catcher in the Rye," along with his typewriter. Driven by the desire to survive, he attempts to complete his novel. A novel full of energy, written with much wit - yet it also shows how the atrocities that people inflict upon one another can resonate for decades to come.