Description

‘Essential reading’ Telegraph

‘A rare masterpiece’ Rachel Seiffert

A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of First World War trauma

Hans, an esteemed surgeon, has just returned from the hellish battlefields of the First World War. But everything in his home feels alien, even his wife Grete. As he tries to regain a sense of normality, he is haunted by nightmarish visions and a profound sense of dissociation. Has the war turned him into someone else? Or has another man wormed his way into Hans’s life?

Told in a feverish monologue, A Shadow of Myself is a vivid, hallucinatory immersion in an unsettled mind. First published in 1926 and rediscovered in Germany only last year, this lightning-bolt of a war classic is now appearing in English for the first time.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand picked from around the globe.

Translated by Simon Pare

Peter Flamm, whose real name was Erich Mosse (1891-1963), was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. He began writing columns and short stories for the newspapers belonging to his uncle, Rudolf Mosse, while still a medical student. A Shadow of Myself was his debut novel, and it met with huge acclaim when it was first published in 1926. In the following years, he published three further novels while continuing to practise as a doctor until he was forced to flee Germany in 1933. He settled in New York and worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, treating William Faulkner, among others.

Publisher Review

Essential reading… Eerie… [Flamm’s] portrait of a suffering veteran was radical… Cause not only for literary celebration, but also for historical reflection * Telegraph * Unsettling… Creates a picture of a tormented mind, and evokes the profound dislocation felt by veterans returning home from a savage conflict * The Times * Flamm’s captivating style and inner monologue create a fascinating, intoxicating flow that does not lose force until the last page * Tagesspiegel * A significant rediscovery * Welt am Sonntag * Like a heavy, concentrated red wine, it lingers for an extremely long time * Deutschlandfunk Kultur *