ABSTRACT
Thelen, one of the more eccentric figures of his literary generation, settled in Majorca in 1931, where he became secretary of the diarist and connoisseur Harry Graf Kessler. During the Spanish Civil War he moved to France, then on the outbreak of the Second World War to Portugal, where he found refuge with the mystical poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, whose works he proceeded to translate. From 1947 he lived in the Netherlands and from 1954 in Switzerland. Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts (1953) is a picaresque novel based on the lives of Thelen and his wife during their five years in Majorca, introducing the real persons Kessler, Graf Keyserling and Robert Graves, who employs Thelen to type I Claudius, and a host of colourful minor figures including revolutionaries, tourists and matadors. The couple are eventually forced to move on when Franco’s Falange takes over the island and German exiles are threatened with deportation. The sequel Der schwarze Herr Bahβetupp (1956)—both works were originally intended to form part of a larger autobiographical sequence-finds Thelen’s persona in Amsterdam employed as interpreter/secretary to the title-figure, who claims to be a professor of law attending a conference. Together they make a comic journey of discovery through Dutch society.
