Kurt Palm: Trockenes Feld (Dry field)

Kurt Palm © Minitta Kandlbauer

“My parents were expelled from Yugoslavia and we are glad that we have such a beautiful living room,” writes Kurt Palm in his school notebook in 1964. His mother had to flee in 1943 on a horse-drawn cart from Suhopolje in Croatia, destination: unknown. His father was sent from the pigsty to the front as an 18-year-old to fight partisans in Slovenia and France in a German uniform. Nevertheless, the biography of the parents had hardly any meaning for the adolescent son, they were simply his parents. Only after her death does he begin to think about his origin, about experiences of flight, about perpetrating and followership.

Kurt Palm writes about his family history for the first time in this book. Which coincidences determine our origin and our stories? And what traumas are inscribed to us and our lives?

Kurt Palm,
Born in 1955 in Vöcklabruck, lives as a writer and director in Vienna. Palm became known with the celebrated TV production “Phettbergs Nette Leit Show” (1994-96). His bestseller “Bad Fucking” (Residence 2010) was awarded the Friedrich Glauser Prize for the best German-language crime thriller of the year in 2011 and was also successful as a film. Most recently, his novel “The Shark in the System” (Leykam 2022) was published, which was awarded the Leo Perutz Prize.

Musical accompaniment Christoph Wundrak (Tuba)

Christoph Wundrak

The Styrian Christoph Wundrak is a brass player, composer, and arranger as well as instrumental teacher. As an instrumentalist, he has been serving high and deep brass instruments in jazz, rock, blues, cabaret, theatre, music/literature and free improv formations in the greater Belgium to China, as well as the Netherlands to Italy since the 1980s. Cooperation with venerated colleagues such as Alan Praskin, Lee Harper, Ewald Oberleitner, Dieter Glawischnig, Leo Lukas, Wolfram Dix, Reinhard P. Gruber, Irene S., Berndt Luef, Erhard ‘Ishi’ Koren etc.

He remains active as a commissioned music writer for various ensembles from the chamber music duo to the symphony orchestra and runs several of his own ensembles, including the wind project ‘Smart Metal Hornets’.