Dalmatia forms the historical and geographical backdrop for Anna Baar’s second novel ‚Als ob sie träumend gingen‘ (2017) – first during the occupation by Italian and German fascists (1941–1944), then in the Croatian War (1991–1995). The focus is not history, however. It is on the memories of an old man who remembers his life. The stream of consciousness, which is only fragmentary, associative and almost delirious, due to the protagonist’s illness and dementia, is represented by allusive, metaphorical, dreamlike narrative methods. Pablo Klee, the name of the protagonist, and the reference to a poem by Paul Klee, combined with the old man’s vision of his childhood love Lily as an angel, suggests that Paul Klee’s watercolour ‚Angelus novus‘ (1920) inspired the backward-looking perspective of the novel.