ABSTRACT
Born in Brno, Moravia, son of a Jewish cloth-merchant, Ernst Weiss studied medicine in Prague and Vienna and worked as a surgeon. From 1912 to 1913 he was a ship’s doctor, making several journeys to the Far East. He was friendly with Franz Kafka and supported him during the latter’s first disengagement from Felice Bauer. In 1913 he published his first novel, Die Galeere, an account of a pioneer in radiology who learns of love and failure. Weiss served between 1914 and 1918 in the army, and saw action on the Eastern Front. Tiere in Ketten (1918, with its sequel, Nahar (1922)) is expressionistic in style, a vivid and often violent portrayal of sexuality and (literally) bestial experience. Weiss’s most successful novel was Boëtius von Orlamünde (1928, retitled Der Aristokrat). The setting is a Belgian boarding-school for aristocrats; the action eschews the commonplaces of fiction and concentrates on three events, the breaking in of the stallion Cyrus, the destructive fire and the escape to Brussels, where the narrator becomes a factory-worker and is present at the death of his father. The tone is subdued, but the psychological penetration and the intensity are undeniable. (The novel was, amazingly, regarded as a ‘Sportroman’ and awarded the silver medal at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928, the German flag being flown in Weiss’s honour before some 25,000 spectators.) Weiss fled to Prague in 1933, and thence to Paris, where he lived until his suicide in June 1940, one day before the entry of German troops. The novel Ich-der Augenzeuge, published posthumously in 1963, depicts the life of a doctor during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and introduces as one of his patients a figure patently modelled on Hitler.
