“Silently, the Forest Stands” by Wolfram Fleischhauer

Forest student Anja Grimm has an internship in the Upper Palatinate Forest District Forest Munich, near the Czech border. With her colleague Michel Obermüller, 45, she scours the past three weeks, the districts Faunried, Leybach, Hain Gries and rear Weiher, rams every fifty meters metal rods into the ground, take soil samples, examine the composition of the soil layers, determines the water balance, the results of analyzes on the computer out.

The area Anja is not unknown. Twenty years earlier, she had spent with her parents twice the summer holidays in Faunried.

then John and Helene Grimm and her eight-year-old rented, the late seventies, a bed and breakfast in the courtyard of Golla family. With their sons Luke and Rupert Anja romped unconcerned about fields and meadows. But the second stay John Grimm disappeared. The police investigated for weeks. For a time, was suspected Xaver Leybach, the “village idiot” to have killed him, but had the event at the end of undissolved as probable hiking accident shall be filed.

At that time Anja recalled only vaguely. Their reunion with the village courtyards, surrounded by the “rolling landscapes,” she overcome conflicting feelings between suspicion and longing. In its commission with Michel Anja is, however, fully fascinated by the pristine, deserted nature, ” silence in the woods. ” Dense spruce growth, including vermoderndes deadwood and rampant thorn bushes blackberry and blackthorn – unique to this, enchanted “enchanted forest” has created hand for years no one. Lonely it is here; once they observed someone stealthily through binoculars

In a plot in Hain Gries keeps surprising occupied.

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Your old card clearly has a spruce forest from here, but what they see is a field with high seat at the edge of the forest, a “Wild meadow”. While she indulges her thoughts to them approaches a crude, neglected-looking old man in curiously presentation. Firm, dark forest clothing in post-war style, a cap with flash fertilizer Advertising in stark contrast, and over the shoulder straps on a gun drilling, no doubt ready to fire. Furious, he reigns Anja, and Michel snaps back. What the two men said in their dialect, Anja does not understand, but at the same time they recognize the bearded old man at his mangled fingers. “Xavier?” She asks. “I am yet only. The Grimm Anja.” At that time he had three times as old, but not quite right in the head, played with her and the other children together peacefully. he could do any harm a fly. Still angry, he trots now it. For this time.

The Wildwiese irritated Anja also again the next day. Your soil samples show inconsistencies in the profile. Construction waste or toxic waste was deposited here, and later cleared everything and then created the meadow? Anja could calmly deal with it, they would not have to expect to encounter traces of her father. The day before his disappearance, she was still with him in the woods. The certainty that something was buried his had, drives them, can hardly think straight, especially after Xaver threatened in the meadow again with his rifle: “.. No one is allowed here his father has forbidden it” the next day, dangling Xaver Leybachs motionless body height of three meters from the ladder to the high seat, and in the stable of Leybachhofs one finds the bloodied corpse of his mother, Anna, apparently beaten to death with a spade.

For years she had need of care located in her bed, and Xavier had taken care of it within its means. Xaver had now actually lost control of his aggression, as Anna and Michel had already feared on the Wildwiese? But he had wanted to kill his helpless old mother, there would have been more convenient methods, as they only grind in the barn “In silence is the forest.” – the title plays with the expectations of a pathetic home tearjerker. But Wolfram Fleischhauer’s novel is a completely unromantic, rational thriller that takes the reader from the first line to be caught. He leads us in a rough area that seems to have fallen out of time. Besides modest agriculture, forestry one hopes on tourism as a source of income. However, because of their remoteness and backwardness many rarely finds the media attention.

The author describes the austere atmosphere of the eastern Upper Palatinate, vividly describes the dilapidated old farms with their smoky, low kitchens and gloomy, assembled from ancient beams stables and barns. The extensive forests evoke, even if they are managed, rejects a spell of untouched originality of everything foreign located Fleischhauer an act, which spans several decades and the reader never let go. What looks at first for a thriller about the unsolved crimes of a psychopath, expands rapidly when the family history that shaped it, is spread. Even further in the past – and in the depths of the soil – slumber abyss of violence affecting several families and wants to keep a tight-knit community of men to the present day under a coat iron silence hidden.

Now comes one. young thing therefore – supposedly to the area to be mapped – and brings unrest as once her father, “a left spinner” who claimed the fir trees are sick, until one day he disappeared, never to return. Despite the then Aufsehens for miles around it was possible the relevant men in cooperation with the police to cover up their secrets, and they will go all out that “this thing” they do not still catch up after so many years.

Much more must not be revealed here. While plot and characters are fictitious, but sad lie, but little-known historical truths based on which the author has thoroughly researched. In his extremely exciting novel he developed not only unusual personalities and biographies, but also works on the real story, and by the way, we learn how questions of law, law and morality were answered differently depending on the time and perspective.

The author himself abstains from its judgment butcher narrative style has no profiling features but is very interesting what he can be included on knowledge of flora, fauna and forestry. Its main mediator is the protagonist who, moreover, not by chance that the last name Grimm: You “reads the forest like none of us”, and where but already reminiscent of the Roman title of the standard topos of the German fairy tale, it is not surprising that their ( and us) also a fascinating psychological interpretation about the “enchanted forest” principle and the “Hansel and Gretel” method is given.