In the novel, which in 2011 won the 25,000 Euro prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize at the 35th Festival of German Literature in Klagenfurt, the author Maia Haderlap, a poet, has taken a much-needed literary theme: the Austria's only militarily organized resistance against National Socialism - the Carinthian minority - Slovenians. And that is by no means a compulsory exercise in so-called "overcoming the past", no thesis novel, but an authentic narration, the story of a grown woman who moves into her childhood and her experiences with the knowledge of today, as the present. As a silent observer, the author as a young girl wants to understand the local people in Lepena suffering from their past. On 13 November 1943, her grandma was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp...
In the novel, which in 2011 won the 25,000 Euro prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize at the 35th Festival of German Literature in Klagenfurt, the author Maia Haderlap, a poet, has taken a much-needed literary theme: the Austria's only militarily organized resistance against National Socialism - the Carinthian minority - Slovenians. And that is by no means a compulsory exercise in so-called "overcoming the past", no thesis novel, but an authentic narration, the story of a grown woman who moves into her childhood and her experiences with the knowledge of today, as the present. As a silent observer, the author as a young girl wants to understand the local people in Lepena suffering from their past. On 13 November 1943, her grandma was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp...