It's Sunday morning, so it's prime time for religion.

A conversation with the Polish bestselling author Szczepan Twardoch does not really fit in with this.

First, he is an atheist.

Secondly, a meeting with him is not an appointment for faith, but for doubt.

"I don't know": When he gives this answer, he sounds most confident.

There is no ignorance or listlessness behind it, on the contrary.

If you ask Twardoch how an idea for a novel came to him or what his background means to him, he thinks, sighs and answers with this sentence.

And then goes further to fill this lack of knowledge with as many ideas as possible.

"I only write about things I don't know," he says.

“The novel is a way of searching for answers.

I usually don't find them, but I always delve deeper into the question."

These attempts have turned into lengthy novels, so far there have been nine, five of which have been translated into German.

Born in 1979 near Gliwice in Silesia, Twardoch is one of the best-known Polish-language writers.

Most of its protagonists stumble over the tipping points of the story: the boxer Jakub Shapiro ("The Boxer", "The Black Kingdom") and the lieutenant Konstanty Willemann ("Morphin") stagger through Warsaw before and after the start of the war, it's always about big whole.

Who am I?

Where is my place right now?

Questions whose answers become unrecognizable in a frenzy of drugs, sex and violence.

A rise story?

It's similar with Alois Pokora, the protagonist and first-person narrator in Twardoch's new novel "Humility".

Pokora was born in 1891 as the son of a miner.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the life of the sons seems to have been mapped out: first the war, with luck the return home.

Then the mine, with even more luck a modest rise in the riser hierarchy.

The daughters are hardly worth mentioning.

Things are different for Alois.

The village priest saw his potential, took him out of his parents' house, financed his high school, taught him German and brought him books.

A rise story?

no way.

Rich classmates bully him, parts of his family see their "Lojzik" with pride.

Above all, however, he is met with suspicion.

Pokora doesn't fit in anywhere anymore and gets caught between all fronts after his service in the First World War.

He wakes up wounded in the post-war chaos in Berlin, finds shelter with the Spartacus League and later ends up with the German nationalists.

Polish independence movements form, Silesians insist on their language.

And Pokora?

He's in love, no, obsessed with a rich, mysterious Agnes.

According to their wishful thinking of him - or what Alois thinks it is - he aligns his identity,

whether in German, Polish or Silesian.

He doesn't care that Agnes plays with him.

He writes her letters, for her he humiliates himself.

In these passages you not only get close to Pokora, but also to the idea that characterizes the whole book for Twardoch: Dignity and the question of what happens to her when you climb the social ladder.

"I wonder if that's possible," he says, "especially within one generation.

Can you shed the burden of your working-class background?

My own grandfather was a miner, I'm an author.

My life is much more comfortable than his ever was.”

when you climb socially.

"I wonder if that's possible," he says, "especially within one generation.

Can you shed the burden of your working-class background?

My own grandfather was a miner, I'm an author.

My life is much more comfortable than his ever was.”

when you climb socially.

"I wonder if that's possible," he says, "especially within one generation.

Can you shed the burden of your working-class background?

My own grandfather was a miner, I'm an author.

My life is much more comfortable than his ever was.”

“Humility” follows a trend in contemporary literature in which changes in milieu are critically processed.

The story about Alois Pokora is neither angry accusation in the style of Édouard Louis' "Who Killed My Father?" nor distanced observation as in Deniz Ohde's "Strike Light".

Instead, readers accompany a young man who wants to find out who he is between a drag club, street fight and trench.