Deep, already clearly in the second half of Silvia Tschui's second album “Der Wod”, one suddenly finds oneself in a Bern studio, in which an unnamed woman is busy interweaving lines, light blue, brown-green, red.

Of course it is a Norn, a fiction of storytelling that arranges, separates and brings together storylines and strands of life - somewhere outside of the story, “in another place and in another time”.

Tschui's novel, a German-Swiss family saga spanning four generations, is spoken and written from this Bernese beyond.

For him, drive is the secret or, to put it precisely: the occult.

At this point, you think you already know the woman with the red-brown hair: Right at the beginning of the narrative stream she appears - a high priestess of the Templar order, who is just recently appointed to the Reich Propaganda Ministry and has fallen into a trance Julius during an initiation ritual with the colorful ribbons through the chest draws about which fate will henceforth be written.

Relationship between lust and violence

The mesalliance of occultism and storytelling makes you think, it is not a coincidence, but a program that Tschui had already tried out in her debut “Jakobs Ross” (2014). When "Der Wod" once again firmly interweaves the dark arts into its poetic matrix, then it is not about showmanship, but about a promise: You are given historical meaning - the price for this is the blood sacrifice, the "scarlet shadow", in which lust and death are combined and which will henceforth lay over Julius' descendants.

In a text that is not exactly poor in scenicly condensed episodes, such a shadow easily gets out of sight, because “Der Wod” can supposedly be read and understood without it. What happens: Julius fathered three children with two women. The eldest, Lilli, bears the genealogy and geography of the novel: Her fate leads her from the North Sea via the Bernese Oberland to Zurich, where, in unscrupulous change, she will bring both her daughter and her granddaughter out of their biological fathers, sexual abuse strategically imputing as well as tolerating. The brothers Nis and Karl, on the other hand, work on their father's image: Nis takes his position early on, proves himself to be a master of camouflage and acquisition in the last days of the war and consequently pursues a career with the German secret service.

The youngest, Karl, on the other hand, manages the horror: it is he who is told the story of “Wod” and his wild hunt and is thus given a powerful interpretative model for this family novel.

Even as a boy, despised and terrorized by his older brother, Karl recognized the curse and rejection of his gender, crime and punishment, visitation and signs of doom.

Anyone who has ever seen the Wüetisheer knows about the connection between lust and violence (which Karl sees in the corpse of a violated woman) and seeks protection.

This person will go to the monastery and later get involved in church services in drug help.

His Caritas applies to those who have got stuck in the middle, there, where the Wod can bring them to itself at any time.