Friedrich Ani’s moving childhood story  A Foreign Home

The Munich-based writer Friedrich Ani has written a book about his childhood and his origins – it also explores how silence led him to writing and to his literary voice.

Friedrich Ani became well known through his crime novels featuring the taciturn investigator Tabor Süden, whose speciality is missing persons. He has also produced other crime series, for example with a former monk as chief inspector or with a blind investigator. In his works, which also include poetry, young adult novels and radio plays, Ani has proven to be an excellent observer of social milieus, especially of marginalised groups, and he has received numerous awards – for instance, in 2026 he was awarded the Literature Prize of the City of Munich for his “versatile, profound life’s work”.

Most recently, Ani published Schlupfwinkel (Bolthole). In this “fantasy about a foreign home,” as the paradoxical subtitle has it, he tells an autobiographically tinged story of a childhood in a small Bavarian village. This is Kochel am See, where Friedrich Ani grew up as the son of a Silesian woman and a Syrian doctor.

Two strangers conceive a local

Thanks to the language courses offered by the Goethe-Institut, which opened in Kochel am See in 1955 and existed until the 1970s, numerous “people of different backgrounds” came to the “village of 4,000 inhabitants” and mingled with the locals at Sunday “tea dances”. One of them was a Syrian medical student named Ali Ani. As a newcomer, he has a hard time and is disparagingly called a “camel driver”. He strikes up a relationship with a young woman who is herself displaced, originally from Silesia. At first, the two can hardly communicate – lacking a common language. Yet their relationship intensifies, at least for a time, and soon the young woman is pregnant – unintentionally. Later, the mother says of this pregnancy: “To this day … I cannot understand how THAT happened.”

Between the growing boy and his parents there is a deep sense of estrangement, which becomes a constant in his life. One cannot help thinking of Karl Valentin’s famous remark, albeit in a variation: in Ani’s work, the stranger is not only foreign in a foreign land. Of the father-mother-child relationship it is said: “A stranger fathered a local child with a stranger in a foreign land.” Yet: “Even after I had become at home, I spoke neither my father’s language nor my mother’s; I practised a German of my own and have never unlearnt it.” There remains a great distance between father and son throughout their lives; the two scarcely exchange a word. For the boy, his parents are his “superiors in life”, and he calls his father “my mother’s Syrian”. There are quarrels and shouting within the family and between the spouses, as well as reconciliation, but no tender moments: “Not once did I witness an embrace, a kiss, a touch born of unconditional affection.”

Silence as a fundamental virtue

Thus, the family offers no place of safety. Each person must seek their own hideaway. For the father, his small room – the parents do not live together – becomes the “new quiet corner”. For the boy, his room likewise becomes a refuge, but even more so writing: “Poetry became his new breath; he had breathed it into himself and now survived by it.” This continues in the author’s later life; he recalls his 60th birthday, which he spent on the North Sea, which he figuratively calls Blanker Hans, “another hideaway in which, I imagine, I could never lose myself”.

Silence is – as in Ani’s novels – another leading character. Yet silence too has its facets: “We were often silent, each of us in our own particular way.” At family gatherings, for instance, “my father practised his silence, with which, like a stethoscope, he listened in on the relatives”. Keeping silent “counts among the fundamental virtues in this family. And I became … the most virtuous among our kin.”

Not letting anger dissipate into nothing

Schlupfwinkel is a retrospective look at the relationship with his parents. Anger arises, yet Ani knows that anger comes to nothing if directed solely at others, for this only turns one into a helpless victim. Right in the prologue, as he stands by the deathbed of his father, who died in 2012, it says he felt “nothing but anger”, though not at his father or his mother, but at himself: “Because once again I allowed everything to happen.”

Friedrich Ani’s laconic sentences seem light, yet possess great precision and impact. That is precisely his particular art: to make what is heavy appear light. In Schlupfwinkel, one can learn not only where Ani comes from, but also how he found his language – born from silence – and how he became such an exceptional observer and storyteller.

June 2026