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The Furies of Misfortune

The Steinbrecher sisters are named Veronika, Doris, Katinka, Emmy, Pauline, Rosa and Dorothea after their grandmothers and great-aunts. On their mother's side, the family can be traced back a long way. It is said that almost all the girls follow their mother's eccentric father Elisabeth, Betty for short. The spendthrift and bigamist Emil Britsch married the pietistic and modest Pauline Schäufele.

The Schäufele family, as the saying goes, is a family of Swabian blacksmiths and farmers. Speculating is out of the question. The lineage has been branching out in the Württemberg-Baden border region since the plague of 1357. Since then means from time immemorial. Schäufeles have always lived in Ö...

The paternal line is lost in poverty. Patriarch Anton Steinbrecher was descended from serfs who had no success in the freedom of the 19th century. Although not even a bourgeois element mingled with the precariat of origin, Anton fantasizes about a knight among his ancestors.

In the beet winter of 1915, nothing worked at all. Things hardly got any better after that. In 1917, a herring once dangled over the kitchen table in the Steinbrechers' household. The children were allowed to suck on the fin. In the end, the fish went to the man on whose work everything depended. Anton's father was too old to go to the front. Nevertheless, he died before the end of the war. 

Anton, an old man almost in the presence of the story, watches television with general's view. He wears his nightshirt day and night. During the day, he tucks the shirt under extra-wide suspenders into the extra-long Schiesser fine-rib underpants that he wears all year round.For dinner, we had diametrically cut sandwiches, gherkins and mixed pickles. The sour cauliflower made Anton tell the story of the herring. A sofa groans under his weight.

Keno makes himself comfortable on a seat at ground level. Every evening, the grandson experiences witches' sabbaths, exorcisms and pagan blessings in the realm of his ancestors. With ham, meat and Waldorf salad, Bündner Fleisch, cold roast pork (the pepper crust extra hot), black pudding, Leberkäse and chicken thighs, Anton and his wife Betty combat the vegetarian spirit of their daughter Doris, who is hunted by the furies of misfortune. Doris is Keno's mother.

While Keno enjoys the privileges of an heir to the throne in the patriarch's castle, Doris atones for the hubris of stubbornness in the converted barn loft. Doris is prone to sore throats and a self-confidence irritated by every bump. She swears by a mixture of tragacanth, honeysuckle, chrysanthemum, wolfberry and ginseng.