Robert Schindel

Robert Schindels Gedichte handeln von der Liebe und den Begierden, von den Sü nden der Mächtigen und vom Alltäglichen, vom Verlassensein und Sich-Finden, vom Reisen in die Welt hinein und von den vielen Süchten, die Menschen miteinander teilen. In Liedern, Sonetten, Balladen, Elegien und - zuweilen auch - im politischen Gedicht fü hrt Schindel uns ins Reich seiner Erfahrungen, wo uns, mit ihm, nur eines bleibt: "Dazwischen vor / Jeglichem entzwei / Singen wir / Unser Dennoch."

Robert Schindel's Born-Where is a novel about origins, a novel about the wages of history. Its protagonists are contemporary Viennese and German Jews who are the children of those who were killed in the German extermination camps. The uneasy intertwining of their lives with contemporary Germans and Austrians constitutes the panoramic epic that the Viennese author unfolds with keen insight and mordant humor. The protagonist is a concentration-camp survivor, who is summoned back to Vienna to testify at a belated war-crimes trial. In the course of his reluctant return, he meets the past and the present in Austria, making readers aware of how things were and how much of history and of the legacy of racism still lingers on today. This confrontation/assimilation makes for, among other things, an intergenerational, psychological ghost story. Born-Where touches on every aspect of the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable relations between contemporary Germans/Austrians and Jews. One subtheme concerns the Left's resistance to Nazism. Another takes us inside the workings of contemporary Austrian bureaucracy. There are also the invariably impossible romantic relationships between Jews and Germans.

Roman de société. Roman historique.