ABSTRACT
A nephew of Alban Berg and an Austrian, Lebert was an opera-singer from 1935 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1950; from 1941 to 1945 he was forced into hiding after arrest for an anti-military offence. His work is limited in scope, but includes, after Ein Schiff im Gebirge (1955), two novels which deserve attention for their treatment of the heritage of the Third Reich and for the manner in which they transform the tradition of the Heimatroman. In Die Wolfshaut (1960) a sailor comes home to a remote Austrian village, brings to light a war crime committed by villagers in the last days of the Second World War, fails to bring the culprits to justice and leaves. In Der Feuerkreis (1971) the mythical dimension, present in the first novel in the motif of the werewolf, is more emphatic: Lebert draws on Wagner’s Ring to add resonance to the story of the confrontation between another home-comer and his half-sister who has been a concentration camp guard; having fallen under her erotic spell he shoots her on hearing her unrepentant revelations of her activities during the Third Reich. Such exposures of psychosocial complexes in rural environments devoid of idyllic features look forward to similar works by Thomas Bernhard and Gerhard Roth.
