Last Confession of Pattaya

Pastor Konrad Fromm is thirty-four years old, has been in office for four years, and is exceptionally good at his job. He sits with the dying who would otherwise die alone. He conducts funerals after which the bereaved hold his hand for just a little too long. In an Eifel village with eight hundred and twenty inhabitants, they were fortunate to have him.One afternoon in April, he reads a poorly printed circular. A missionary organization is looking for staff for a social center in Pattaya. He reads the box three times, and what he thinks is not: There I could do what I am not allowed to do here. No one thinks that. What he thinks is: No one knows me there.It is a sentence one can live inside.In Thailand, Konrad Fromm ends up doing both, simultaneously and with the same devotion. He feeds one hundred and twenty people a day. For fourteen months, he fights to obtain birth certificates for three stateless children because a twelve-year-old girl wants to learn to read. He builds a school roof in Isaan that is still standing today. And at night, in the equipment shed, he drills his consecrated wooden cross into a pipe, carefully, with two cloths to prevent pressure marks in the woodit is the finest piece of craftsmanship of his life.He takes money that others donated for children. At three o'clock in the morning, he says a sentence to a twenty-four-year-old woman from Buriram that he truly means and will not keep. He arranges for the only fellow priest who might have held him accountable to disappear from his life within four monthswithout a single unkind word.When the Thai police extradite him to Germany, the scandal everyone expects is not waiting. The charges concern bank statements. And while in pretrial detention, a prison doctor discovers what Konrad Fromm has known for ten years and has never told another living soulbecause speaking would have meant ending up in a file.A novel about a man convinced that secrecy is the same thing as innocence. About an institution that looks once, writes a note, and files it away. About a seventy-six-year-old nun who has been handing out rice for thirty-one years and asks no questionsexcept one, and she asks it only once.*The Last Confession of Pattaya* tells the story of a priest's downfall with dry wit and without the slightest trace of gloating. The book neither condemns its protagonist nor redeems him. It shows a man who did good and did evil, in the same week, with the same handsand claims that one does not get to choose between those truths.