Pippins Tochters Taschentuch

Would Josef and Frederika Seifert have been better off not getting married? The place is Kitzingen on the Main, it is the late twenties. Josef is a war veteran and teacher, very much into the metaphysical, Frederika is a furiously frustrated singer, a furiously frustrated femme fatale, who, incapable of her husband's spiritual sublimations, begins an affair with his best friend just a few weeks after the wedding. Is this fling to blame for everything that will follow?that is what Lucy, the eldest daughter, asks in letters to her sister (or is it her half-sister?) half a century later. Would her mother have had to put her foot down about Richard Wagner's music for everything to turn out differently? And did the fact that Frederika's lover was Jewish further inflame Josef's fascination with National Socialism?Rosmarie Waldrop has written an agile, subtle and crude novel. About an ailing family in the swelling National Socialism. About longings, disappointments and betrayals. About small causes and large effects. And about the persistent ambivalence of a past that cannot really be overcome.