Hanser Literaturverlage

Vienna from deep within - the beauty and strangeness of a foreign city.

On the third floor of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, in a glass case, there is a cardboard box full of memories: toys, notes, photos, film programmes, postcards, a diary… Franz and Anni Bial, a Jewish couple, packed this box for their daughter Lilli, who escaped to England; her parents were deported and murdered.

Like a magnet, this legacy draws Jula Fink from Switzerland to Vienna, where she starts to trace others who disappeared, leaving only fragments of their lives behind: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Alma-Johanna Koenig, Viktor Ullman. She finds former lovers, Sidonie Nádherny and Karl Kraus, Marie Zimmermann and Gustav Klimt; and, looking through her eyes, we see Vienna in a new light. The Aspangbahnhof, departure point, in those terrible times, for the deportation trains; the Leopoldstadt quarter; all the city's beauty and strangeness. And Jula Fink searches for Lilli Bial, the missing daughter.

As in a kaleidoscope, the fragments of these investigations are reassembled into new images. Katharina Geiser's first book is a moving exploration of the past, sometimes reminiscent of W.G. Sebald's haunted prose.

"Katharina Geiser's writing touches all senses." – Peter von Matt

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