"Reisen, um heimatlos zu werden", schreibt Henri Michaux. Der sterreicher Josef Winkler ist whrend der Niederschrift seiner Romane ber sein Heimatland Krnten immer wieder nach Italien gereist, spter nach Indien und dann auch nach Mexiko, im Gepck die Erzhlungen anderer Autoren, aus denen er kurze Zitate als Intarsien in seine poetologischen Reportagen einsetzt: von Reisen, die ihn zu seiner eigenen berraschung mit Variationen eines Bildes aus der Kindheit - ein am Straenrand liegendes, bereits mit Packpapier abgedecktes, berfahrenes Kind - heimholen. Zuletzt in Klagenfurt, wo bei...

In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches, he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a...

In 1979, Josef Winkler appeared on the literary horizon as if from nowhere, collecting numerous honors and the praise of the most prominent critical voices in Germany and Austria. Throughout the 1980s, he chronicled the malevolence, dissipation, and unregenerate Nazism endemic to Austrian village life in an increasingly trenchant and hallucinatory series of novels. At the decade's end, fearing the silence that always lurks over the writer's shoulder, he abandoned the Hell of Austria for Rome: not to flee, but to come closer to the darkness. There, he passes his days and nights among the...