Jarmila (7 page)

There is a strong case for supposing that the author reshaped the last chapter of his story in the atmosphere of the latest batch of terrible news from the Third Reich. On the 12th March, 1938, German troops marched into Austria where some of the author’s relatives lived, and the next day the oppressed country was annexed by the Reich. At the beginning of October that year the Wehrmacht occupied Sudetenland, and subsequently Czechoslovakia, Weiss’ homeland, was gradually crushed. That meant the corresponding borders were indeed shut to him.

While this drastic political change took its course, Weiss was sitting over his “contemporary” novel,
Der Augenzeuge
(The Witness), in which he took up a clear
position
against Hitler and the barbarity. One of the stylistic devices of that significant work, the visual emphasising of leading phrases, appears to have swept into
Jarmila
too, an otherwise unpolitical work. The result is a novella firmly belonging to the final creative phase of the author, and his increasingly desperate situation, shortly before he falls silent.

PETER ENGEL

Translated by Rebecca Morrison

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