The Unfinished

A profound novel detailing the brutal legacy of Nazism on four generations of a family in Germany. Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four womenâ€seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hannaâ€s daughter Annaâ€are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the local train station. They are given thirty minutesâ€the “wild expulsionsâ€. of Sudeten Germans have begun. But where is Anna.  Witnessing the revenge lynching of SS and suspected collaborators on her walk home, she arrives in Komotau to find her family gone. The trek takes the older women via Munich, then Dresden and Magdeburg, to an outpost in the far northwest of the Soviet zone where they settle as farm laborers. Once united again, their hope of one day returning to the heimatâ€homelandâ€is both a source of strength and a burden, choking attachments to new surroundings and neighbors. This conflict will prove to be the story of their lives, as well as both the joy and ruin of Annaâ€s son.  A tale of four generations told in Reinhard Jirglâ€s unique and subversively expressive idiom, The Unfinished plays out between the ruins of Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of communist East Germany, the birth of the Berlin Republic, and the shadow of a new millennium. Â