The Silence After the Song

Falk Margraf is famous: as the recalcitrant offspring of a traditional and aristocratic Bayreuth family, he traded in Wagner for rock music, and composed a song which encapsulated and even shaped the zeitgeist of a rebellious generation. So it is hardly surprising that the young female singer Alex regards it as the chance of a lifetime when she runs into him in the early 80s and clearly catches his eye. Alex decides to abandon her attempt to scale the treacherous ladder of success in favour of a considerably more comfortable life with Falk.

Seventeen years later she is much the wiser: Falk is dead and she is sitting alone in Berlin with her two illegitimate children, nursing a fully-fledged trauma and devoid of any real purpose in life. She is now ostracised by Falk’s sister, Isolde Margraf, who blames her for her brother’s death; only Falk’s mother, the head of the now heavily decimated Margraf clan, maintains contact with her. After all, Alex’s daughter Wanda is her only grandchild.

In her exquisitely structured novel The Silence After the Singing Katharina Döbler presents a vivid portrait of an entire generation whose idealistic and rebellious principles became buried beneath endless pragmatic compromises and charts the downfall of an educated bourgeoisie elite which once represented Germany’s cultural alternative aristocracy.

A brilliant literary debut about a woman, who gives up everything for a man, and who, following his death, struggles to find her true identity.