Just look at Konrad, the architect. When he and Dora moved into the house, she was expecting; eleven years later she has left him together with their daughter Katharina. At 16, Katharina moves in again, and Konrad fills the fridge for her. And he brings out a model of his dream house, built in his lonesome years. Konrad doesn’t see that his daughter is disappearing in front of his eyes because she stopped eating. He also doesn’t see Marie, the doctor living downstairs, who falls in love with him and finds Katharina after her breakdown. This story and all the others in this book open on two sides, just like doors leading from one room to another. Gudrun Seidenauer opens the doors to a whole universe within confined spaces, merging past and present. In brilliant style and with a keen sense for the psychology of humans, she tells the stories a house would tell if it were more than a silent witness.

“Hermann is dead, now I can remember precisely.” The husband of Marianne fell down the stairs and broke his neck – an accident. She knows exactly when it happened: She wrote it down on a piece of paper in order not to forget, not like she uses to forget lunch sometimes or her neighbor’s name or her pills. Marianne suffers from Alzheimer; she is losing her memories, now she has lost her husband, too. “She’s crying ‘cause she knows that it’s too late, although he’s dead.” An accident? Friederike, Marianne’s daughter, has her doubts. Did her mother have to become a murderer to break free? While Friederike finds herself forced by her father’s death to take care for her mother, the latter withdraws herself bit by bit: she withdraws into her past, into a time when she was only a child, when she did not need bags and notes to prevent herself from forgetting. “Unraveled Days” is Gudrun Seidenauer’s second novel: cautious, touching and full of empathy, nevertheless not at the expense of the author’s linguistic accuracy.

Eisner is not who he pretends to be. As a high-ranking associate of the SS organisation "Ahnenerbe", his name is Josef Engler. In 1945 he creates a new identity for himself. As Josef Eisner, he commits himself to humanistic principles. He grows to be a renowned literary scholar who is eager to correct the murderous errors of his first life to the exclusion of his personal history. When Engler's cover is blown, his former assistant Roland Klement starts searching for answers. What does it mean to have to distrust? Where does it lead one who was taught to keep things at a certain distance, when his model and patron lets him down? What remains, when life stories cannot be combined anymore, when the assumptions one has got used to are not valid any longer, and when the flight to hasty judgements becomes as impossible as a clear bottom line? While being distant and, likewise, empathetic, in her astonishingly sovereign debut Gudrun Seidenauer manages to confront herself and her readership with a chapter in the past that has by no means been worked off yet.