To the unknown hero

by Hans Erich Nossack

Hans Erich Nossack belongs to the extraordinary lineage of German writers that includes Hesse, Kafka, Rilke, and Novalis. Jean-Paul Sartre has called him ‘the most interesting contemporary German writer.’ TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, the third of his novels to be published in English, shows Nossack’s inimitable wry conscience in a comic mood that promises to delight the reader. The book is both an adventure story and a proof of the limitations of historiography. ‘Professor Precise,’ German pedant, had early in his in academic career written a 200-page treatise called ‘To the Unknown Hero,’ about a bit of German history, ten event-filled days in 1919 that paved the way to the Weimar Republic. The hero of this brief revolution, praised as a tactical and political genius, was a man known only as Comrade Hein, a mysterious figure who disappeared from the midst of the first assembly of victorious revolutionaries and was never heard from again. ‘Professor Precise,’ with filial pride, had presented his middle-class, grocer father with a copy of his published book - with surprising results, for the father clearly knew a great deal more about Comrade Rein than the son dreamed could be known. For a long time, however, the implication of his father’s knowledge was not clear to the arrogant scholar; and then, reluctantly but inevitably, he realizes that his search for the truth about Comrade Hein has only just begun and that it is his obligation to embark on a new investigation of his once lionized hero. The suspense of the story and the skill with which Nossack has woven together its complex elements give this book the succinctness and resonance of a parable of modern and revolutionary times. The Times Literary Supplement, in reviewing the German edition, said: ‘Nossack has written a splendidly humorous book in which the comic - and at times almost burlesque - element brilliantly focuses the essential discontinuity in life. He has always evinced a predilection for the comic and dramatic in his works, but never before have they been so overt.’ Nossack’s brisk prose style has been admirably re-created by Ralph Manheim.

154 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Hans Erich Nossack war ein deutscher Schriftsteller, der zunächst als Lyriker und Dramatiker, später jedoch vor allem als Prosaautor in Erscheinung trat.