ABSTRACT
Lind’s Ahasverus-like wanderings from Vienna to Holland, Germany (where he survived the Second World War under a false identity), Israel and London, where he has lived since 1954, are traced in his autobiographies (which appeared first in English, then in his own translation) Counting My Steps (1969) (Selbstporträt (1974)) and Numbers (1972) (Nahaufnahme (1973)). For him writing is a form of therapy, and the grotesque effects produced by the deformation of reality in his work reflect the traumas of his early life; but they also emerge from the adoption of the point of view of insane and crippled characters such as the lame, one-legged and epileptic figures pursued by a Nazi thug in the title-story of the collection Eine Seele aus Holz (1962). However, not only the victims are deformed; so too are the Nazi thug and the corresponding figures in the novels Landschaft in Beton (1963) and Eine bessere Welt (1966, dramatized in English as Ergo (1967)), the latter a satire on post-war conditions in Austria. After Der Ofen. Eine Erzählung und sieben Legenden (1973) Lind offered in Travels to the Emu (1982) (Reise zu den Emu (1983)) in the form of a Pacific island a dystopia loosely modelled on Gulliver’s Travels, to whose author the book is dedicated.
