A highly political novel about the eventful life of a war criminal, his atrocious deeds and successful attempts to evade all responsibility after 1945.
Up until his death at the end of the nineteen-fifties, Bitter had always managed to get away with his crimes, remaining completely unscathed. Now, he is finally brought to trial through this act of narration. In several variations of pitch, Ludwig Laher traces – meticulously researched – the remarkable career and private development of the Vienna-Neustadt Gestapo boss and Charkow mass-murderer. Sometimes the narrator keeps his distance like a chronicler; at other times he comes up so close to the action that he almost appears to be inside the head of his protagonist. Then, unable to stand the close proximity, he breaks out again to regain his breath.
»There is no doubt of the underlying moral judgement, and yet Laher’s narrative approach allows us to observe this man and the conditions under which he committed his monstrous deeds at close quarters.
Ludwig Laher is a »cicerone of contemporary history«.
Christiane Zintzen, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Ludwig Laher was born in 1955, studied German, English and classical philology in Salzburg. Since 1988 Laher has lived in St. Pantaleon and Vienna, where he works as a full-time freelance writer. His works have been translated into English, French, Japanese, Croatian and Spanish. Laher has received a large number of literary prizes; in 2011 he was nominated for the German Book Prize. His last publications were the novels »Herzfleischentartung« (Heart Flesh Degeneration, paperback, 2009), »Einleben« (Settling Down, 2009), »Verfahren« (Procedure, 2011) and the volume of prose »Kein Schluß geht nicht« (No Such Thing as no Ending, 2012).
