»Now they were all mere playthings in the grasping arms of a state order such as had never existed before. An order that could only be destroyed from the outside by lightning and thunder.«

At the centre of this report is a woman from humble beginnings and her experiences in the Third Reich until the fall of Dresden in 1945: Dora W. (modelled after the author’s grandmother) comes to Dresden from Lower Silesia, where she was first a goat herder in the countryside, then a shop girl and a gardener’s assistant in a small town. She finds the man of her dreams, the butcher’s assistant Oskar, and follows him to Dresden to start a family. She only spent a brief time there, her golden years, as it seems, but then the perspective collapses. Like everyone else, the war overtakes her and with it comes the downfall of Dresden.

With her story, the author follows an individual fate in the historical context before and after National Socialism’s invasion of each individual life. What does dictatorship do to people who are barely able to cope with its demands and yet struggle through? In the process, the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1910, which fuelled doomsday fantasies, takes on a symbolic significance for the destruction of the Saxon metropolis in the firestorm of February 1945.

Grünbein consistently builds his account from the internal perspective of the main character, chooses the simple language of his ancestor to depict the various stations of her life, her hopes, insights and confusion, and the rare comments on what is told are made with restraint. The example of Dora W. is used to tell how history happens to those without a history, ultimately as horror and belated realisation.

»What depresses me most is the obliteration of the traces of what actually happened to my ancestors in the first place.«

For the Dying Calves