Everything, we don´t remember

Germany in the 1970s: Children are sitting under a table. Above them the adults are sighing, eating canapés, and talking about their lost homeland. They transmit their injuries and nightmares to the next generation. What remains today of the fates of those who fled? How do families, how do societies, Germans, Poles, and Czechs deal with it? On her journey, Christiane Hoffmann is looking for the presence of the past. She struggles through hailstorms and swampy forests. She sits in churches, kitchens, and living rooms. She talks – with other people and with herself. Her book translates recollections of fleeing and being deported into the twenty-first century and warns readers of the horrors of war. It interweaves her family story with history, eyewitness accounts with the encounters she has on her journey. But above all it is a very personal book written in a literary language, a search for a father and his history.