After a reading in Bad Aussee in 2005, a woman came up to Renate Welsh and gave her books. The author had just finished her autobiographical children’s book, which had been published three years earlier Dieda or The Strange Child read, it talks about Buchteln, which the “girl” who was the author at the time always got from a nice neighbor. But that’s not the only re-encounter that comes from it. In the subsequent conversation, it turns out that the woman lives in the house where Renate Welsh spent her holidays as a child, and even more so, where she grew up largely after the early death of her biological mother and where she experienced the end of the war as a seven-year-old in 1945. The past described in the children’s book once again becomes a challenging reality – the new book now, twenty years later, deals with the experience again, supplemented by a reflective, commenting level that also deals with the impact of literature.
