Oliver Bottini:

I visited Eastern Croatia and northern Bosnia during my research tour in spring 2007, in which I explored the relic of Danube Swabian settlement in the region. Their history was to be the subject matter of my third detective novel, which starts out in Swabian Freiburg and ends in Croat Slavonia.
Following intensive preparation in Germany in the museums and institutes concerned, as well as personal discussions, I started out in Osijek on the Drau and drove across Slavonia and to Bosnia for three weeks with a "chauffeur" and interpreter. For the first time, I saw formerly "German" villages with their typical Danube Swabian architecture, visited cemeteries with German "sections" and spoke with local people of German descent.
In doing so, I encountered a tragic, barbaric and sensitive episode of European history: derided as Hitler’s „fifth column“, the Danube Swabians were expropriated, expelled and imprisoned in camps by Tito’s partisans at the end of World War II. There was no question of personal guilt or innocence. Nazi Germany had been too brutal in its subjugation of Yugoslavia, and too barbaric had been the crimes perpetrated by the SS division "Prinz Eugen", which had been made up of Danube Swabians, in the Balkans, for the new Yugoslav leadership to be prepared to make such distinctions. Perpetrators and victims, victims and perpetrators... one of the insights gained from this voyage was that people, groups, nations can be both at the same time, and that neither the one or the other should ever be lost sight of.
Quite by coincidence, this tour into Germany’s south-eastern past also became a voyage into the contemporary trauma of the Balkans – the Yugoslav wars of secession. Especially in Slavonia (never mind Bosnia) the war is still very present. There were bombed villages everywhere, walls with bullet holes in the cities, entire regions are still mined, and access to them remains impossible. The biography of most people in Slavonia was shaped by the war, and dislike for their Serb neighbors is passed on to the next generation either in reserved or passionate form.
A voyage I shall never forget, that was shaped by the wounds, simplicity, power, good humor and joy in life of a region previously unknown to me and that persuaded me to spend another two months in Osijek to finish writing my novel.

Im Auftrag der Väter (novel), Scherz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, hardback, 444 pp., €14.90 [Germany] / €15.40 [Austria] / SFR26.80 [Switzerland], ISBN: 3-502-11009-3