Book of the month 2003

© Luchterhand

Das Umstellformat depicts the narrator's search for her grandmother who died in the early 1940s. Together with her mother, the young Austrian doctor commences on a journey that brings them to three psychiatric hospitals in which the grandmother was kept as a patient until her death in 1943, in Germany. The unestablished cause of her death suggested in itself that she became the victim of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme for the mentally disabled.

Their journey through Germany and their visits to the former hospitals confront the two women with a family taboo. Whilst the mother has to cope with the re-emerging memories of her childhood and adolescence, the daughter slowly learns about a woman who is virtually unknown to her, but whose resemblence to her is eerie.

In the hospitals the mother and daughter gain access to archived correspondence, official documents and medical reports which largely deal with the progress of the patient's illness. Even though very documentative in style they mirror the increasing hope- and helplessness with which the closest family members are confronted.

Parallel to the story about the grandmother runs the granddaughter's diary entry about a visit to a befriended Norwegian family in 1998. During her visit Far, the father of the family, tells her about his past and that he had been a member of the Nazi party during WW2. Further, the historical context puts the present into concrete forms as Far's wife is suffering of Alzheimer's disease and is living in a nursing home. Thus a direct comparison to the grandmother's fate 50 years earlier is drawn.

In Das Umstellformat Breznik uses various narrative modes: Letters, official correspondence, diary entries and tape recordings. It is this multidimensional interaction and the various narrative perspectives which make the book a loving but painful and distressing account of a search for an unknown grandmother and mother.

AK

Bibliografic Details
German	English Translation
Hardcover: Breznik, Melitta: Das Umstellformat. Luchterhand, München 2002 ISBN 3-630-87128-3 EUR 15,00	Hardcover: Not available yet.
Paperback: Not available yet.	Paperback: Not available yet.
Audio-CD: Not available yet.	Audio-CD: Not available yet.