Hinterland

Traumatized by five years of war, Veit has no sympathy for the Nazis. For almost a year he is able to avoid being sent back to the front, as he falls in love with Margot, who has travelled to Mondsee to escape the bombing in her home town of Dramastadt in Germany.

Entries from Veit's journal and letters from his acquaintances and associates create a chorus of voices from the peripheries of war: in stories of relatives lost to bombing, schoolboys forced to man anti-aircraft stations in the final months of the fighting, the scarcity of food, and attempts at normality in the midst of turmoil and vioulence.

While life in the village in wartime is strangely ordinary, Veit's experience as a young man drawn into fighting a war with which he has no sympathy ahs been anything but. In the contrast between the lives of villagers and outsiders lies Hinterland's remarkable power.

If Veit himself brings to mind the soldiers of All Quiet on the Western Front, Geiger's sympathetic depiction of his characters' domestic, everyday existence as the world falls apart around them recalls Alone in Berlin. In Hinterland, Arno Geiger has produced his masterpiece.