The untouched

The Untouched is a novel by Robert Schneider , which was published as the last volume in the Rhine Valley trilogy in 2000 by Knaus-Verlag .

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The story of the “Untouched” begins in 1922 in the small village of St. Damian in the Vorarlberg Rhine Valley . Seven-year-old Antonia grows up with her three sisters in a rural ambience marked by poverty . The hardship and sadness of this life, however, are thwarted by two sides: on the one hand, the tenderness of the father, who adores his beloved women so much that he tries to read their every wish from their lips, on the other hand, by Antonia's exuberant imagination, which produces from within what the outside world cannot offer. In addition, Antonia is blessed with another gift that does not want to fit into the rural environment: with a graceful and crystal clear soprano voice .

The meager and yet rich world is finally broken by the father's demands to meet those of his wife and daughters. The finally heavily indebted father disappears overnight, the farm is auctioned off, the mother dies, and Antonia is sold to a human trafficker . After this turn of events, which was already surprising because of the trade in children that was still common in Germany and Austria in the 20th century , the village idyll is now exchanged for an odyssey , an adventure journey that Antonia finally brings to New York .

There the heroine of the story experiences the urban variant of misery together with Balthasar, whom she met on the journey. In New York, the girl from Vorarlberg is now fighting for survival in prostitution, homelessness and partial anesthesia with intoxicants. The dirt and the dark abyss of human behavior, which in retrospect makes rural poverty appear paradisiacal, is counteracted by Schneider's language, which is able to create elaborate and lush images that seem to be of unique beauty precisely in capturing misery and despair.