Fathers

His father, born in 1933, only talks about the Nazi era when Paul asks him about it. About the National Political Institute of Education, the Napola, about the Jewish furrier at the market and about his uncle. Uncle Paul, after whom the son is named and who was a district manager for the NSDAP. The son, born in 1980 as the youngest of eight children, finds only a slim file in the Federal Archives. But the questions keep playing on his mind: How do National Socialist influences continue to survive in his family? Which inherited ideals, which patriarchal ideas have been inscribed in him and are perhaps even passed on by him? In which conflicts do they still come to light today? He realises how challenging it is to find his role as a progressive father in dealing with his own children, especially since he lacks clear role models for this.

In his novel Fathers, Paul Brodowsky talks about a century of German history. He condenses memories, research and reflections into a picture of West Germany after National Socialism – and deals with things that are kept secret in many families to this day, drawing an arc from the 1930s to the present. An unsparing self-examination and a search for traces of how children are shaped by their grandfathers and fathers.

»Paul Brodowsky‘s meditation on fatherhood and being a man today, on transgenerational influences and the continued existence of the past in the present, is a disarmingly honest, highly ambitious work of prose that consciously crosses all formal limits and categories.« Tagesspiegel

»Brodowsky has found a literary language for fathers, one that shows them as caring and that is historically reflected. A language that is all too rare in contemporary literature.« Michael Eggers, WDR 3

»Stylistically confident, eloquent, fast-paced.« Hans-Peter Kunisch, Die Zeit on Die blinde Fotografin