Inniger Schiffbruch

The narrator of Frank Witzel's autobiographical novel, while dealing with the estate of his deceased father, recalls a childhood in which television invents the early evening. A childhood filled with disciplinary measures such as house arrest, bans on tape recorders and television, where parents unknowingly pass on the terror of the separation they once endured as a constant threat to their child. A childhood in which a Sunday is clearly structured, the apron is essential for the housewife, and the moon landing imagined by adults is a horror scenario akin to that of the Mainz Carnival. The interplay between individual experiences and collective memories becomes evident when Witzel examines not the staged images from the family album "Our Child," but rather the discarded photos, questioning whether these might reveal how things truly were. In his persistent doubt about the truthfulness of his own memories, Frank Witzel emerges once again as an approachable yet gifted storyteller, managing to capture the state of a post-war society in the new Federal Republic of Germany through the personal.