The specificity of the narrative structure of the story, which connects the memory as an element of a fictional autobiography with the forms of a diary and a “story in a story”, which is one of the most productive in the second half of the twentieth century in German literature, is considered. Based on a fragment of the unfinished novel by F. Werfel “Sella, or the Conqueror” and the novel by A. Okopenko “Kindernatsi”, built as memories of the Anschluss and the arrival of the Nazis in Austria, the principles of organizing a multilevel system author — focalizer — actant, the purpose of which is interweaving of historical, moral and religious, moral and ethical meanings are shown. It is studied how a specific historical plot (which has a real prototypical model for the story of Werfel and an autobiographical one for Okopenko) is filled with religious and existential meanings in Werfel, becomes a reflection of the crisis of identity — a key characteristic of the Austrian mentality — in Okopenko. Particular attention is paid to artistic techniques that complicate and destroy linear narrative: duplicity, with the help of which Werfel shows different ways of solving the same moral issues, and literary editing techniques, which gives Okopenko a fragmented character to the process of recollection and allows to reveal the integrity of the author’s moral and ethical positions at the deep-semantic level.