As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been rereading the Chalet School, which is a series of school stories set in Austria, beginning in the mid twenties and running more or less in real time. I’ve just finished the last one set before the Anschluss.

The biggest problems our heroes have to deal with are the coach trip from Salzburg being stuck overnight due to bad weather, and a minor fire caused by carelessness, but no-one is hurt and there isn’t even any serious property damage. The protags are settled and happy.

The next book opens immediately before the Anschluß, and includes Anti-Semitic violence, the Gestapo, fleeing the country, and the outbreak of war. We’re in a different sort of crisis...

but the sense of being suddenly overtaken by events you sort of saw coming (there are brief references in earlier books to street violence in Vienna and to the Nazis), but mostly didn’t because you were focussed on your own life has a strange new resonance.