»[With his language] Hartmann succeeds in striking a soft chord, and he also manages to describe the horror [of war camps].«

»A masterful balancing act.«

»The Swiss author, who repeatedly shows in his novels that the present cannot exist without the past, lambastes his homeland for self-righteously extolling itself as a bastion of democracy throughout history.«

»[. . .] the book’s real strength lies in its unspoken topicality, this recurring conflict between humanity and a rationally comprehensible yet often cruel political pragmatism.«

»Through these characters, Hartmann asks questions of history, of the Switzerland from that time, and of his readers too. He doesn’t answer them. And that’s exactly as it should be.«

»On the occasion of the author’s anniversary, Lukas Hartmann presents his compatriots with a novel which is both gripping and bitterly angry.«

»Joseph Schmidt’s voice did not leave anyone cold, and nor does this novel about the tenor’s life.«

»This is an exemplary piece of genre fiction, which records a tragic life dispassionately and without intrusive moral judgement.«

»Hartmann dispenses with any pathos and bias, making his realistic novel even more gripping in the process.«