Little Jaco is on the run with his mother and is hoping for a refuge at a monastery. But the abbot refuses any help – and thus gives a first impression of the unchristian behavior of the church, which is partly to blame for the Thirty Years’ War. Hanna also felt the cruelty of the religious war drastically in the first few hours after her birth: she narrowly escaped the attempted murder of her Protestant grandmother, who did not accept the baby of a Catholic and unceremoniously laid Hanna by the open window one winter night.
Using several narrative threads that have not yet been linked, Marianne Hacker lets the readers immerse themselves in the childhood of the characters in the adventure novel “Der alten Wald”. The author describes the daily (survival) life during the war in an exciting and dense way. A good decade later, Hanna and Jaco get to know each other in the novel. With a group of young people, she ends up fleeing an attack by the Swedes, who are meddling in the war, in an Allgäu manor house hidden in the forest. There, the young people are reasonably safe from new attacks, but they are also completely cut off from the outside world and dependent on one another. Loves and antipathies develop. The perspective of the young protagonists determines the plot and thus limits what is told for adult readers, but makes the book exciting reading for young readers.
Some threads of the plot are only unraveled in the last few pages. Here the author demands the attention of the reader, who has to remember details from the first half of the book in order to be able to follow the resolution at the end. In return, he can be happy with Hanna and Jaco about surviving the war: the time of the daily struggle for survival is finally over, life is suddenly unusually easy and exhilarating.
Marianne Hacker: “The Old Forest”, publisher Tobias Dannheimer Kempten, 297 pages, 15 euros