Fiction | Fiction
What Darkness Was
Inka Parei
© Schöffling & Co.
In late 1977, an old man moves into an apartment in a building that he has inherited from someone who, like him, was a soldier in the Second World War. Destroyed, exhausted and unnerved by the appearance of a stranger on the stairs, the protagonist lies in bed and loses himself in his memories. He is plagued by scenes of violence that include persecution and death. The author links these horror scenarios to the events prevailing in 1977: the terror attacks carried out by the Red Army Faction, an urban guerilla group in Germany. For the introduction to her novel-like study of the time and of the traces of violence that remain in the human soul, Inka Parei was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2023.
Translation sponsored by the Goethe-Institut