This odd and remarkable and nearly inaccessible novel affected me deeply for reasons that have nothing to do with the story or the writing. "Inaccessible" I mean quite literally--Langgässer, born in 1899, wrote from a philosophical/religious perspective that feels distant and alien. The intellectual striving that undergirds every sentence in the novel gave me the feeling as I read that I was studying an artifact rather than reading literature. But what an interesting artifact.

The novel is in part a German/Catholic reckoning with the German defeat and social collapse following WWII. Langgässer was raised in a Catholic family; her father was a convert from Judaism and Langgässer was classified as non-Aryan after the rise of the 3rd Reich until she married an SS officer, after which she was re-classified as Aryan; her daughter, however, was classified a "Jew" and sent to Auschwitz (and survived). Not surprisingly there are threads of guilt and suffering and retribution throughout the novel and there is also an obscurity in the prose--nothing is simple at all in this novel.

There are easier ways back to this past, in fiction. What comes to my mind immediately are [b:Feldafing|6466343|Feldafing|Simon Schochet|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|6656828] by Simon Schochet (I can't believe this book is out of print, a crime) and the novels and stories of Heinrich Böll (which are sometimes labeled Trümmerliteratur). This novel took me to a place where the author was so affected by events that the writing itself feels like Trümmer, but that is somehow appropriate given the author's life and times. ( )