Farewell Summer / Cutting Ties
It all happened one summer, fourteen years after the war
Flensburg, 1959: Gustav spends his summer holidays on a campsite at the Baltic Sea. He can’t get his mind off Johanna, the daughter of a corsetière originally from East Prussia. If only he hadn’t slapped her out of jealousy ... He feels guilty, but what does guilt mean for him? His art teacher is the painter Gerhard Fritz Hensel, whose sister Hedwig was married to Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höß, though nobody knows about it. In everyday life, tales of people escaping from East Prussia and Silesia are more common – and popular – than stories about the Third Reich. More and more, Gustav gets to the bottom of abominable things, both great and small.
- Jochen Missfeldt’s most autobiographical novel yet shines a light on universal questions of memory, identity and heritage
- »Jochen Missfeldt tells a story. He always finds the right words for everything. His language is rich and concise, perhaps because he started out as a poet. Every word has been weighed carefully. Even when his prose is expansive, it is by design.« – Volker Zastrow, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
- For readers of Per Petterson, Kent Haruf and Annie Proulx
Jochen Missfeldt, born in 1941 in Satrup in Silensia, was an aviation officer for the German Air Force and went on to study Musicology and Philosophy. He has published several novels, short stories and poems as well as a biography about Theodor Storm. Jochen Missfeldt has won a number of literary awards and lives in North Frisia.
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