Němci – Katalpa Jakuba (2012)

The main heroine and narrator of the novel lives in London, where she moved after November 1989 for work and where she is now expecting her first child. The upcoming motherhood brings her thoughts back to her childhood in communist Czechoslovakia and evokes a buried memory of packages full of sweets she received from some grandmother in West Germany... The third novel by young author Jakuba Katalpa takes the reader back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Grandmother Klára Kolmannová is still alive, and we follow her fate from her birth in 1910. The author vividly and plastically depicts the life of a middle-class German family at the beginning of the century, the hardships of World War I, and later the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the great history plays only a marginal role compared to family relationships. There is Klára's mentally unstable mother, a debauched father, as well as other relatives and servants. After the outbreak of World War II, Klára, a fresh graduate of a teacher training institute, goes to Berlin and then finds herself in the Czech borderlands. Here, she becomes close to a local race, which attracts her with its animalistic physicality and rough nature...