Inniger Schiffbruch

In the narrator of Frank Witzel's autobiographical novel, dealing with his deceased father's estate evokes memories of a childhood in which television invented the eve. A childhood full of disciplinary measures such as house arrest, tape and television bans, in which parents unwittingly pass on to their child the horror of the separation they themselves once suffered as an incessant threat. A childhood in which a Sunday is clearly structured, the smock apron is indispensable for the housewife, and Peterchen's moon ride, imagined by adults, is a horror scenario like that of the Mainz carnival. The extent to which the individually experienced and the collectively experienced interpenetrate is shown when Witzel does not take the staged pictures from the family album "Unser Kind" (Our Child), but rather the discarded photographs with the question of whether they are not the ones that can provide information about how something really was. In the constant doubt about the veracity of his own memories, Frank Witzel once again shows himself to be a narrator as close as he is gifted, who succeeds in capturing the constitution of a post-war society in the new FRG through the personal.