Digging into the past

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entrance 8 euros, pupils and students free of charge

In their novels, Petra Klabouchová, who comes from Prachatice in southern Bohemia, and Patricia Holland Moritz, who was born in Chemnitz, then Karl-Marx-Stadt, explore the question of how the history of Central European border regions affects the lives of their inhabitants. In her Šumava crime thriller Prameny Vltavy (2021, tr. Vltava Springs), Petra Klabouchová traces the background to the murder of a schoolgirl who is found dead in striped pyjamas with a Jewish star back to the time of the Second World War, interweaving real events with fiction. The name "Moldauquellen" also stands for a top-secret camp for Soviet prisoners of war, who were allegedly supposed to build an underground weapons factory during the Second World War. Patricia Holland Moritz, who has also written crime novels, paints a picture of an industrial town in the mid-1970s at the foot of the Ore Mountains, at the end of the world so to speak, in her social novel Kaßbergen (2021) about the girl Ulrike. When her boyfriend Gonzo, a punk who refuses to conform, is arrested, she too has to come to terms with her family's past and her town in order to find her own way.