Im Kreis treibt die Zeit

Sigrid Damm's new book is a posthumous love letter to her father. Throughout her life, she was in conflict with him and rejected him. It was only shortly before his death that a tentative rapprochement occurred. More than twenty years later, she begins to trace her father's life path. Papers and old photos that had been stored in the basement for many years are examined; alongside this, the historical events that shaped his life are described. Born in Gotha in 1903 and having died there in 1993, he witnessed the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi rule, the GDR regime, and the Federal Republic. The narrative recounts the father's childhood in a middle-class Jugendstil house, where Sigrid Damm also grew up. It covers the end of World War I and the fifteen-year-old's entry as an apprentice in a Jewish bank, as well as his professional rise there. A reprimand due to his closeness to his superiors disturbs him.