The blinded

The novel "The Blinded" spans from the end of World War I through the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s, the era of National Socialism, and the post-war period into the 1950s. It tells the family stories of former aristocrats who become ensnared in the upheavals of the time, their fates inextricably linked to those of their former servants, cooks, nurses, or soldiers. Loss of property, expropriations, war injuries, trauma, misery, and famine almost compulsively lead them into National Socialism. Anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, and racial laws deeply penetrate family structures and destroy them mercilessly. Flight and emigration are the consequences. After the war, the displaced, those who fled at the risk of their lives, return and confront those from whom they fled and whom they had to leave behind. I was utterly captivated by the tone that Franz Winter found for his characters, and I felt transported to a strange time, to a long-lost in-between realm. And this in-between realm, which is linguistically present in every sentence, turned me into a fervent reader of this book. Otto Schenk on "The Difficult Ones.".