Wie ich lernte, bei mir selbst Kind zu sein (2019)

Twelve-year-old Paul Silberstein comes from a long-established Austrian dynasty of confectioners. Educated and eloquent, Paul grows up in Austria in the late 1950s amid a wealthy family life devoid of mutual affection. His father, Roman Silberstein, is a Jewish Viennese confectionery manufacturer who converted to Catholicism, an eccentric and despotic patriarch who was driven into exile by the Nazis as a staunch opponent of Adolf Hitler. After returning, he tries to take revenge, but his anger turns into bitter cynicism, which he takes out on his wife and children. Only his youngest son, Paul, dares to defy him, and his father then banishes him to the Jesuit boarding school at Attweg. To Paul, the school is a prison, and he tries to escape into his own world with the help of his imagination and dreams. One day, his distant mother unexpectedly appears at the school and tells him that his father has died. At the funeral, he meets his three uncles: Uncle “Louis” from Louisiana, Uncle “Bel” from Belfast, and Uncle Monte from Montevideo. He subsequently learns more about the Silberstein family history and comes to know and understand his father and his life story a little better.