Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer. This item is unavailable.Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, Ernst Weiss' unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath. The hero (or villain) is tried, sentenced and deported to a remote island. He seeks redemption from his crimes in science, but eventually learns that in spite of himself he is a man of feeling. Weiss' book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced Musil's The Man Without Qualities (Picador, 1930) and, like many other modernist classics, it is a prescient description of a profoundly unsettled society.

Ernst Weiss, born in 1882 in Bruunn, Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a trained physician. His years as a ship's doctor are apparent in much of the detail in Georg Letham. Weiss' work emerges from an expressionist background but belongs with the modernist classics.

Joel Rotenberg translated Chess Story and The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letter for the New York Review Books Classics series.