Josef Haslinger

The protagonist Rupert Kramer, nicknamed Ratz, is a failure. For nights on end, he works on a computer game in which you can kill your father. His father Helmut, a corrupt social-democratic transport minister, leaves his wife and later falls from grace. The mother comes from a rural, very conservative background, and because of that her parents were always opposed to her relationship with Kramer. Mimi, classmate from his youth, asks Ratz to fit out a cellar in New York. In this cellar her great uncle, a Nazi war criminal, has been hiding for years. Piece by piece, the three family stories, which couldn’t be more different politically, combine. What develops is a grand mosaic of Austrian history.