Siehst du mich?

"I don't know my father." This is the only sentence Nina, in her late thirties, heard from her mother the last time they met. Now her mother is dead, and Nina returns to her hometown of St. Georgen an der Gusen in Upper Austria's Mühlviertel to keep vigil for one night with her elderly great-aunt Resl. At her mother's coffin, Nina, who has suffered all her life under the silence and emotional coldness of her family, seeks clarity about her origins. A struggle for the truth unfolds between the two very different women. Gradually, a family history emerges that is tragically linked to events from the Nazi era. Through flashbacks, Barbara Stengl narrates the biographies of grandmother, mother, and daughter, revealing a little-noticed chapter of Austrian Nazi history. She impressively connects the silence of the individual to collective repression, illustrating how one fosters the other. This is a clever, linguistically captivating novel about how far familial and historical lies cast their shadows into the present and poison the lives of all involved until they free themselves from these lies.