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Prague, Vienna, Tel Aviv-The Life and Work of Leo Perutz (1882-1957)
125 years since his subject's birth and fifty years since his death, Professor Hans-Harald Müller reacquaints us with Leo Perutz - a fitting opportunity to see these excellent novels back in print? The Sergeant Schramek whose downfall I am going to tell you about shot himself with his service rifle in the following manner: he fastened a piece of cord to the trigger and wound it round the iron bars of his bed, then he pressed the muzzle of the rifle against his body and pulled. The discharge tore his chest apart and threw him to the ground… The projectile, however, was not so easily stopped; it went on to cause all kinds of additional damage and misfortune, crossing the room and passing straight through the portrait of the Emperor on the wall before flying through the large dormitory of the 'barracks' where it hit the leg of Hruska Michael, a Ruthenian recruit, who leapt out of his bed screaming… Even in this, his first short story (Sergeant Schramek, 1907) Leo Perutz succeeds in providing two incompatible explanations for a single event. The bullet that tears Schramek's chest to shreds passes, so to speak, through two separate worlds in its flight. This idea, that events can have unforeseeable consequences and be embedded in many diverse contexts, was one that guided Leo Perutz throughout his novels and short stories. Perutz was born in Prague, where this story is set, on 2 November 1882, but had been living in Vienna since 1898. Prague was the scene of his youth, a staging post for his upwardly mobile Jewish family. In Vienna he finished his schooling, and there too, with two other young Prague authors, he founded a literary circle called 'Open Air' (Freilicht) about which he later wrote: Twenty young people would meet in a little cafe opposite the university, where they would read to each other their lyric poems, their novellas, their draft tragedies, and their 'Fragments of an Unfinished Novel'. The poems all sounded as if they had been written by some secretary of Rilke, the tragedies were modelled on Strindberg, Knut Hamsun had been recruited to serve as the involuntary godfather of the novellas, and the fragments of unfinished novels had Buddenbrooks, which had just been published, to thank for their paltry existence. Perutz's first novel, The Third Bullet, was not published until 1915. The writing is modelled on the clear style of Arthur Schnitzler, whom Perutz always admired. While the story-line is that of a historical novel, its thematic core is drawn from the motifs of Viennese modernism. It involves identity loss, experiences of psychological discontinuity, mystic expansions of the boundaries of the self - in short, a crisis of self-identity. The stories of the two first-person narrators are linked together so intricately that it is not clear whether the novel presents us with two different stories or the life story of a single person. It is up to the reader to decide which is the case. The first positive reviews of the novel reached Perutz when he was an infantryman in the First World War. On 4 July 1916, he sustained a life-threatening injury when he was shot in the lungs on the Eastern Front in Galicia. However, the bullet was removed some days later, and Perutz survived to take up a position at the Military Press Headquarters, home to the Austrian literary élite during the war. It included figures such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, and Egon Erwin Kisch, who unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Leo Perutz, his friend from their days in Prague, to support the bolshevist cause. The years from 1918 to 1933 were the most productive literary period in Perutz's life. The gripping contemporary novel Between Nine and Nine was published as Freedom in 1918. Master of the Day of Judgement appeared in 1923, the historical novel Turlupin in 1924. His popularity peaked in 1928 when the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the most widely circulated publication of its kind on the Continent, printed his novel Little Apple in instalments. These progressively intensified the tension leading up to the end of the pursuit depicted in the novel, and even became a topic of Berlin conversation. In addition to his literary activity, Perutz had a keen interest in theatre and the new medium of film. His novel The Marquis of Bolibar and short story The Birth of the Antichrist were turned into films as early as the 1920s. Despite this readiness to innovate, Perutz went on writing his short stories and novels. He wrote them down in exercise-books using a wooden penholder, dipping its nib in an inkwell at regular intervals. He immediately started a new page if he made a mistake or was unhappy with what he had written. The floor of his study was, he once wrote, usually covered 'with pages of manuscript that had been torn apart before being crumpled up'. The author Paul Frank tells us that 'his urge to revise knew no limits. I would say that he worked with something approaching the zeal of a monk'. The establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany had drastic consequences for Perutz. The deliberate creation of mass hysteria plays an important role in his contemporary novel Saint Peter's Snow. By the beginning of 1933, distribution of the book in Germany had shrunk to a trickle. Soon afterwards, all the novels of this Jewish author were boycotted. When Nazi troops marched into Vienna on 13 March 1938, he knew that he had no choice but to emigrate. He left Vienna with his family and departed for Tel Aviv from Venice by sea in September 1938. He described the endless frustrating and humiliating formalities of departure with sarcastic humour in the novel fragment May Night in Vienna. In Tel Aviv he felt neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. In February 1939 he wrote to a friend that 'the life of a Jew is like that of an earthworm that has been chopped into three pieces (by two world wars). The last piece wriggles a bit, groans, complains to Jehova, digs itself in, and goes on living'. However, he was granted a success he could never have hoped for when a married couple he knew, also emigrants from Vienna, opened a literacy agency in Argentina. The most important consequence for Perutz was that Jorge Luis Borges included the novel Master of the Day of Judgement in El Septimo Circulo, a series of classic crime novels. Not least because of this, Perutz's name is still a familiar one in literature in Spanish today. Perutz's work in Palestine was focused on completing a novel he had begun in Vienna as long ago as 1924. Legend from the Ghetto was published in the Neuer Merkur in 1925 as a chapter of a novel set in Prague. Today, with the title By Night under the Stone Bridge, it is his best-known novel and arguably the finest novel in the German language to be set in Prague. When he had eventually finished it in 1951 he wrote to his friends in Argentina: 'I think the book has turned out really rather well; it's just a shame that I didn't write it twenty years ago. Kisch and Werfel would have appreciated it, but where are they now!' Kisch and Werfel were dead, the literary epoch of 'Young Vienna' had gone. In a dramatic scene in Saraband, another of the novellas that finally made up the same book, to save an arrogant aristocrat from death by exhaustion, High Rabbi Löw makes an Ecce Homo image appear on a house wall. The Ecce Homo, however, does not show Christ but an image of Judaism. This made the novel far from a popular success in immediate postwar Vienna, but much more appreciated in Tel Aviv. Max Brod who was living there wrote: 'I heard Perutz himself read parts of this moving book, quietly and without the slightest attempt at drawing attention to himself'. Recalling these readings, Brod had the impression that it was 'as if the last rays of literary Prague were flickering in Tel Aviv. The sun of Prague was setting on the Mediterranean Sea'. During the last years of his life (he died in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl on 25 August 1957) Perutz passed the winter and spring months in Tel Aviv, and the summer and autumn months in Europe. When working, he spent his time on a novel set in fifteenth-century Milan and devoted to a twentieth-century problem. Leonardo's Judas was published posthumously; it is concerned with the autonomy of art-and the high price to be paid for it. In 1946 Perutz wrote to a friend: 'Actually, the problem of my life would be solved if I could build a little house where one could see the Omar Mosque through the front windows and the Kahlenberg through the back ones'. He came very close to solving this problem in his literary work.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s many of Leo Perutz's works were published by The Harvill Press, London, and Arcade Publishing, New York, in translations by Eric Mosbacher and John Brownjohn -they are all currently out of print.
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