Alice in Nightmareland: The Matchbox Girl, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
Vienna, 25 July 1934 is a significant date in Austria’s history. But in The Matchbox Girl, the big events happen offstage, the world seen entirely through the eyes of its youthful narrator. We focus not on the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss and a failed Nazi coup, but the children’s hospital, where 12-year-old Adelheid Brunner is waiting to be assessed for admission because she’s mute – designated ‘special’. Or, as her grandmother puts it, hopeless, ‘an idiot’. In the tall, shabby hospital, the young inmates are a protected community, closely observed by a team of specialist doctors, among them young Hans Asperger, later to find fame with his syndrome. Sister Victorine,
