Josef Bierbichler

Autobiographical? Of course this book is not autobiographical, otherwise it would contain a watertight confession to murder and Josef Bierbichler would have to go straight to gaol.(…) A great deal of historical and experienced reality has congealed in this book, making it a work that becomes a riveting novel the more Bierbichler uses his imagination. Mittelreich – the Middle Kingdom – is the title of this novel. Most of it is set at an inn in Amach by Lake Starnberg, where Bierbichler was born and grew up. (…) In the course of 80 years, all sorts of things that are worth recording happen at such an inn. The family itself provides the characters and conflicts for stories, as do the menial labourers, lodgers, holidaymakers and the surrounding village. Bierbichler puts these stories together to make a chronologically ordered collage of ordinary and extraordinary destinies. (…) Thus, Mittelreich is a historical novel, the story of a twentieth-century community. And as they say about historical works, if they are successful: It is to the author’s great credit that he reconstructed this story. And that he did so with such passion

Rudolf Neumaier: „Die Untergeher“
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 September 2011