review
A life story that stretches from the aftermath of the First World War into late old age, Gstrein’s novel follows its central character as he moves through a century shaped, and misshapen, by mass violence. Opening with a brutal act that spares him military service, it leaves him carrying both the physical consequence and the moral question of that reprieve.
The book is built as a sequence of intense encounters, each section orbiting a person who alters the protagonist’s path and forces him to look again at what he thought he understood. A friendship with a disfigured veteran becomes an education in shame and public cruelty. Later, as a teacher, he is confronted by a former pupil whose matter-of-fact confession reveals the everyday mechanics of atrocity, and collapses the comfortable distance between ‘history’ and the present tense of responsibility.
In the later sections the frame shifts to Britain, where another family story reopens old wounds, this time around a soldier executed for desertion and the long, private aftermath of official verdicts. The English setting sharpens the book’s interest in how nations narrate violence, and how the living learn to live with what they cannot put right.
Gstrein’s approach is deliberately unsentimental. The central character is passive in a way that feels psychologically truthful, a man who often cannot act, but cannot stop watching, and replaying. The novel’s moral weight comes through accumulation rather than declaration, with memory itself treated as unstable, sometimes consoling, and sometimes treacherous.
The three main sections are substantial and carefully balanced, with a shorter final coda that catches the protagonist in old age as public reckonings return in new forms. This underlines the book’s central idea that a life can feel like something you witness as much as something you steer.
This serious, readable war novel avoids heroics and focuses instead on complicity, silence, and the quiet ways people excuse themselves. Readers of Ralf Rothmann’s To Die in Spring (tr. Shaun Whiteside) and Arno Geiger’s We Are Doing Fine (tr. Maria Poglitsch Bauer) will recognise the same interest in private lives crushed, and shaped, by the politics of the twentieth century.
Find out more: https://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/en/buch/norbert-gstrein-im-ersten-licht-9783446282971-t-5846
All recommendations from Spring 2026