The subject of the book is the village in St. Galler Rheintal, in which the narrator was born and grew up, and which he left just in time before the threatened “burial”. The report draws on topographical features (streams, mountains, meadows, roads, space, houses), which are used to forge a space for remembrance. Names and colloquial expressions, perhaps unique to this one village, and inextricably linked to things and people, also serve as an aide de memoire.

The ‘I’ takes itself on a tour of the different neighbourhoods, or, from a literary perspective, from Rösslein Hü to the Holy Trinity in the Apostles Creed and back, balanced by the sincere attempts of the author to allow gravity and joviality to weigh in equal measure.