Daniel Zipfel: Walküre

In the organizer's words:

In the midst of the chaotic conditions of the refugee movement in 2015, Benjamin Weiß works as a lawyer in an advice center for refugees. When he takes on the case of a Syrian accused of war crimes, he finds himself in a moral dilemma: should he conceal or reveal incriminating truths?
At the same time, his German grandmother moves to Vienna for health reasons. The repressed Nazi past of his own family returns with her. Daniel Zipfel tells a precise and penetrating story of everyday life in asylum law, of the coldness of bureaucracy, of timeless guilt and perpetration - and of how political circumstances touch the innermost depths of human relationships.

Daniel Zipfel, born in Freiburg in 1983, lives and works in Vienna as an author and lawyer advising on asylum law. His novel "Eine Handvoll Rosinen" (Kremayr & Scheriau 2015) was recognized as a "particularly successful debut" by the Cultural Department of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and received a book prize from the City of Vienna, as did his second novel "Die Wahrheit der anderen" (Kremayr & Scheriau 2020). "Nothing but Paper" was published by Leykem in 2023.