Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

by Ernst Weiss, Joel Rotenberg (Translator)

“Ernst Weiss is in fact one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Franz Kafka...The book belongs to the very most interesting that I have come across in years. . . . One is filled with impressions, excited and gripped by striking existent but unforgettably cast images, characters, and events. By the way: it is all very Austrian.”—Thomas Mann

“I wonder why Weiss isn’t better known here. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew about the body as well as the heart, and you can trust him when he describes how each can act on the other.”—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a tragicomic and harrowing portrait of a morally defective mind. Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, this unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath: the scientist-hero (or scientist-villain) is tried, sentenced, and deported to a remote island where he is privileged to work as an epidemiologist. He seeks redemption in science, but in spite of himself he is a man of feeling. The book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced The Man Without Qualities and The Sleepwalkers; like those modernist classics and the works of Ernst Weiss’ friend, Franz Kafka, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a prescient depiction of a profoundly unsettled society.

Ernst Weiss (1882–1940), born in Brunn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic), spoke and wrote in German. He was a trained physician and surgeon and served as a ship’s doctor for many years. He met Kafka in Berlin in 1913, and was convinced to write full-time. Weiss, a Jew, committed suicide in Paris when the Nazis entered the city in 1940.

Joel Rotenberg translated Chess Story and The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Genres: Fiction, Classics, German Literature, Unfinished, Literature

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

Ernst Weiss was born in Brno, Moravia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now the Czech Republic) to the family of a prosperous Jewish cloth merchant. After his father died when he was four, he was brought up by his mother Berta, née Weinberg, who led him to art. However after completing his secondary education in Brno, Litoměřice and Hostinné, he came to Prague to study medicine. In 1908 he finished his studies in Vienna and became a surgeon. He practiced in Berne, Vienna, and Berlin but he got tuberculosis and tried to recover as a ship doctor on a trip to India and Japan in 1912. In 1913 he met Rahel Sanzara, a dancer and actress and their relationship lasted until she died of cancer in 1936. In the same year he met Franz Kafka and they became close friends. Kafka wrote in his Diaries 1914: "January 2. A lot of time well spent with Dr. Weiss". Weiss was in touch with a lot of other writers of Prague Circle such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Johannes Urzidil. In 1914 Weiss returned to Austria to start a military physician career. Near the end of World War I he received a golden cross for bravery. After the war he lived in Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia. He gave up medical career in 1920 when he finished working in a Prague hospital. In 1921 he moved to Berlin but in 1933 he returned to Prague to care for his dying mother. He could not enter Nazi Germany and so he left for Paris in 1934. There he lived a poor life dependent on the help from authors such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. He applied for, but did not receive, a grant from the so-called American guild for German cultural freedom. He committed suicide on 14 June 1940 when German troops invaded the city.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like maybe I was a tad bit generous in rating the book. I can't help thinking of this book a lot like a really attractive girl who is kind of quirky and sort of interesting and more importantly likes you. And at first it is really great, because she is so attractive, and she is kind of quirky and well sort of interesting, but then after a week or so you start finding that she really isn't that interesting. She kind of tried to hard first, well not tried to hard, and it's not that she is an awful person or anything, it's just that she's kind of average in the interest department. And soon you realize that all she really likes to do is sit at home in the evening watching Friends re-runs while laughing out of her nose at the 6 million dollar per episode hilarity. Interjected every now and then during a commercial break some devil horns and screaming, "I'm weird, blah!!!" And you think my god, how was I fooled by this twit! And you think wow she is attractive though, and she did fool me at the beginning into thinking she was intelligent and interesting. And since she is a person and not a book you probably end up marrying her because she is so pretty and she likes you even though she appears to be growing exponentially dumber everyday, till the guy you used to drink with sometimes in college with the nickname Box of Rocks you suspect at having more than double her IQ and you start to seriously wonder if this person you are now sharing a life with has enough going on upstairs to even carry out the basic lower brain functions needed to keep the heart pumping. But she is still so pretty, so you put up with living with the human equivalent of a simple protein.

Anyway, this book is really like that. It's a good book, I think it should be maybe three and a half starts out strongly, but then it kind of doesn't know what to do with itself. If it did, then this would have been something like Camus's The Stranger about thirty years before Camus had a French-Algerian kill an Arab on the beach. Or maybe this could be thought of as a non-culturally saturated 1920's version of American Psycho, showing the way a man can become so alienated with himself that even murder is permissible. Or something. I don't know. The first half I liked, but then the book sort of goes a little screwy, and then it was ok, but just not as good. Maybe if the book ended right after the boat part everything would have been great. Which, I liked. I liked the boat part, even the boat story within the boat story I liked, which goes to show how good Ernst Weiss can be, because normally a boat comes bobbing along on the currents of a narrative and my attention goes drifting off in the opposite direction.

[Merl Fluin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I pulled this one down from the shelf without knowing anything about it except that a friend had read and liked it. Oh boy, was it ever the wrong book at the wrong time. It's superbly done, simultaneously grim and lush, with a compellingly horrible atmosphere. But as the global coronavirus lockdown started to bite, a character study of a narcissistic psychopath in the midst of a deadly epidemic was definitely not what I felt like reading.

[Monica Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salonica World Lit
Hypocratic What?
Current Theme: Eastern Europe

How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training, of certain philosophical aspirations, let myself be so far carried away as to commit this crime of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife?

And that is Ernst Weiss' opening sentence to his 560 page novel, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer. Weiss was an Austrian born Jew, a physician, a ship's doctor and longtime friend of Franz Kafka. A man who witnessed enough of life's harsh realities, he settled into writing as a search for the meaning of life and it's unpredictable challenges to our ethics as individuals. When you begin a novel with a crime, or admission to a crime, you know that you are in store for a psychological journey into the heart and mind of the character. Highly influenced by the Expressionist movement, Ernst Weiss places under the microscope the emotional life of Georg Letham for us to examine. With this microscopic eye, the reader is presented with a reductive persona, a sketch in black and white, who morphs into a complex character full of emotional variegation and contradictions. Pulled in by Weiss' imaginative prowess, each character introduced seems to be the beginning of novel that is equally compelling as the one we are reading. The rich characters and their association with Georg gives us a constantly changing perception of an unreliable narrator. What isn't more compelling than the unsteady voice of a murderer who suppresses his guilt complex? Whose arrogance is so overwhelming at the onset that we are once repulsed and fascinated? A character so indifferent to his own fate that we are forced to care about it for him? Characters like this throw down in front of us the literary gauntlet - can you read about my egregious behavior, quickly learn to hate me and still stick with me until I have told my side of the story? We certainly can. True, Weiss' work could have been edited and trimmed of a hundred pages. But the novel in the end doesn't suffer from the narrative fat because of the strength of Weiss' narrator.

Weiss paints Georg in the beginning as a non-emotional bacteriologist who is focused solely on his lab work. He makes a somewhat decent living as a doctor in a small community, he marries a woman older than him, and he has a woman on the side for pleasure. He begins gambling and he spirals deeper and deeper into debt. His intellect is no match for fate and he begins to lose patients at his clinic, his mistress becomes distraught and his lab work suffers. The only way out seems to be to kill his wife for her money. Of course he does, and of course he gets caught. This is a man who knows nothing of love or ethics:

I was happy. But not at ease. In the bedroom I turned on the light once more and got a clean hand towel from my wife's small bathroom, which was charmingly done in almond green and pale pink. I spread it over the still uncovered part of my dead wife's face. Then I turned back the coverlet and spread the towel over her throat and chest as well. The window was still open, the hot, moist breeze caught in the dry, bright linen, lifting it where it swelled over the curves of the chest. Rhythmic rising and falling. But I knew what was what. I turned out the light. In a built-in wardrobe, the wood suddenly contracted with a sharp crack.

But how did he get this way? With a cargo ship full of father issues, Georg is set up to easily be steered down the road of deviant behavior. His mother dies early and his left with his older brother and sister, his oppressive father(also a physician), and a desire to connect with someone. During his childhood, he doesn't find anyone who piques his interest until he meets Walter, a handsome and intelligent fellow student in his medical classes. He has a old-fashioned man crush on Walter, who figures more prominently later in the novel:

In the strangest way, for which there are no words, I felt attracted toward this student Walter. As the patient beyond saving is to the doctor, perhaps. But what does one have to do with the other? Nothing. Beyond saving...doctor. God could not make sense of it.

Many times in the novel, Georg is faced with and often plays with homosexual leanings. He doesn't condone it and he doesn't condemn it and perhaps even exploits it. Weiss doesn't emphatically make it known that this is a psychological reaction to the cold indifference exhibited by his father, but the equation that Weiss lays out definitely offers this as a possible answer. Frequently, he is empathetic towards March who is homosexual and his closest friend during his prison term. Since this novel was written in the early 20th century, the frankness with which Weiss deals with homosexuality is daring. March, whom Georg nicknames Gummi Bear(!), is in prison for accidentally murdering a cadet that he loved. Georg then becomes the object of his affection and his devoted servant. Georg accepts this and even canoodles with March, admitting that it makes him feel better. Georg also makes derisive comment about March and his proclivities, but then immediately feels remorse for doing so. This highlights the contradiction in his character, a cold and calculating physician and murderer, and also shows the evolution of Georg's capacity for emotion.

It would be faulty to feel completely manipulated by the plot...and Weiss tells us so:

I will now be extremely brief, despite the fact that what follows, what I wish to get out of the way in this chapter, the eleventh, is the bread and butter of that literary genre considered the most enthralling in our era, namely, the detective novel. What I am actually concerned with is facts, facts such as the facts of the "torpedo," which date back at least fifteen years now and which my father plays a starring role, and then facts that did not come to light until after my sentencing, and those later facts surrounding, the figure of that friend (as I have actually only been able to call him since he ceased to be one) of my youth, Walter.

Most of the novel is about Georg's prison life on colony 'C' where yellow fever kills many of it's inhabitants. Put to work in the hospital to treat yellow fever patients, Georg is works under the direction of Dr. Carolus and strangely enough, his old friend Walter. Georg gets March to work alongside him as the team of four tries to figure out the destructive nature of the virus. Even with the horrific settings he is forced to live in, he is unfettered in his desire to work in the lab and to find the cure for the virus:

A stench for which there is no name, so nauseating and intolerable that the demonic imagination of a Dante could not have conceived it, assaulted us from the small, electrically lighted, relatively cool underground room. March clutched me with a low cry. Even the leathery, phlegmatic Carolus trembled all over. Only Walter and I did not lose our composure.

Through the unrelenting battle to figure out this disease, many things happen in the lives of these men, and obviously, particularly Georg. There are not tremendous external events, but mostly shifts in his emotional life that allow the reader to consider granting redemption to Georg Letham. Thematically, we are bombarded with the presence of rats and ethics. Not only using rats as a subject of experimentation, but even providing a story in which rats rebel against humans and only Georg's father (and two others) survives. All the characters ethics are challenged and in such a way that it becomes difficult to discern right or wrong. Even when we know they have done wrong, we are led to believe that their ethics are still basically in tact and that their behavior will change.

Weiss fled to Paris to escape the Nazis, but killed himself once the city had been invaded in 1940. And perhaps because Weiss couldn't escape who he was, a Jewish man, then that is why his novels seemed to mirror the struggle for the character to escape who they are. What makes Georg Letham so fascinating is not that he is a murderer, but that he knows this and is still plagued with a compulsion to contribute to humanity by curing the yellow fever virus. He kills for money, but when stripped of the need for money and forced to live, he becomes more of a human being.

This novel belongs with the luminaries of Expressionist literature, namely Kafka. Amongst the riches of life, Georg Letham murders. Amidst the miserable poverty of life, he discovers his soul. We are challenged to believe or not believe, but in the end it doesn't matter because we are convinced he deserves to live.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being the adventures of a crazed mind and wife killer. Goes a little crazy at the end pages but brilliantly realized from Weiss, The physician speak and parts of the book are excellent and apparently he was a physician/writer. I would LOVE to read more by him.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

another of those lovely square Archipelago Press books that Karen put me on to (see also The waitress was New) has turned up at the library. Thanks Karen.

I had a strange, mixed reaction to this book, partly delighted, well no, swept away, partly bored...

It famously starts with the admission of murder,and he is so cold and creepy and nasty it was hard to keep reading, before murdering her he marries his rich masochistic wife for money, and then proceeds to use her and abuse her:

I hurled myself upon her, I at last gave voice to the cruellest, most hurtful words, I balled my fists, I did for her both mentally and physically everything that one person can do to another without causing lasting damage - brutal but within the law. She doubled over in pain, her enamelled mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet...she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her the more blissful she became

So your sympathy is not with him, but the writing compelling enough to keep going, and then there are wonderful chapters on waiting to be deported to the penal colony (this is the 20s), the prisoners shackled together and frying in the heat, and later on the boat, and another chapter about his dad's expedition to the North Pole and how his ship is overrun with rats. His father (Georg Letham Sr) tries to exterminate them with arsenic poisoning - succeeding in making many of the sailors ill, and they get off the ship to wait on the ice for the poison to take effect, going back on after a week or so, expecting to find the rodents all dead:

The beasts are there as always on the provision lockers and barrels, nibbling at things with their protruding teeth or cleaning themselves, staring insolently into the light from the lantern. And the birdlike cheeping of the young rats is heard not just from one spot, but from many, indeed from every corner of the storeroom.

His father becomes obsessed with defeating rats and later buys an infested house so that he can experiment with ways to kill them, involving his son Georg Letham Jr, building bizarre traps and spending years on his quest. This same doggedness and un-squeamishness is passed onto our narrator as we see later.

But at the penal colony (where he seems to be allowed to wander around the hospital and grounds like a free man) he gets involved in experiments to discover the source and carriers of Yellow Fever which involve infecting themselves (him, other prisoners and physicians) via mosquito bite, and there's a lot of dry medical information to get through, of this kind:

C., date, year and so forth, Dr Walter, 42 years old.. inoculated by Stegomyia fasciata B3 four days ago, sudden onset of illness with chill, temperature 39.9 degrees C, pulse 120, very strong heart sounds

(this example is quite mild, but have to take book back so can't search for others)

There's a lot of retching and fever, stench and bodily corruption (eg he helps a woman give birth and green amniotic liquid pours from her). You need a strong-ish stomach. Ultimately they are successful:

We gradually cleaned up an area larger than Europe. We brought mortality down to a fraction of what it had been. We stamped out Yellow Fever here.

But it's here, in the colony, Georg develops a kind of conscience as he watches despairingly - in love, he thinks - a Potuguese girl die. Is he a paedophile? Not sure. His sexuality is ambivalent, he seems to hate women: he deliberately lets his colleague and friend's wife get infected with Y.F. and then doesn't seem to understand why she is angry and shuns him. His poor wife may be an 'enamelled' masochist but doesn't deserve to die. He feels much more affection for Walter, his colleague, and March (nicknaming him 'Gummi Bear'), homosexual and the deportee he is shackled to on the ship and who later becomes his devoted companion. He allows displays of affection between them and admits it makes him feel better but won't get any more intimate. Anyway this may be part of the cause of his coldness towards most women (of course the girl he falls for is dying and doesn't speak so he can fantasise about her innocence).

I admit to finding the last half a bit of a chore in places (this may be because I had to return the book and had to rush it a bit), I felt that it could lose 100 pages easily (it is 560 pages long). But the chapter on the rats, and the ones where the prisoners wait in the heat to be deported and the later descriptions of his fevered state are quite wonderful.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The classic symptoms of a sociopath are a wanton disregard for right and wrong and an inability to care about the feelings of others or the tenets of law or societal norms. Most sociopaths can be defined fairly early in life by their behavior and attitude.
With this in mind, I began what I thought was a story about a sociopath. In Georg Letham, Physican and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, the main character Letham is a classically trained physician who specializes in research in the distasteful specialization of vivisection. In the initial chapters he confesses his role in the murder of his wife with no apparent remorse. In fact, he only did it because he needed her money and she refused to "voluntarily" die of her own volition. He complains about his wife and his father, both of whom held the key to his financial betterment:

"Neither of them could give me what I yearned for in the depths of my soul, but there was one medicine that they could have given me to ease my suffering: the original medicine, money."

Circumstances after the murder unravel and his perfect plan fails spectacularly. He ends up carted off as a 'common' criminal to a life sentence, a fate made more demeaning by the extremely high opinion he had of himself. As he acclimates to incarceration and is transported to a tropical prison camp, he explains more of his childhood and more of his relationship with his father. He reveals in slow and painful detail exactly what his father did to make him a strong man, and suddenly the diagnosis of classic schizophrenic becomes vague. Because while he clearly was influenced by his father's hateful and moral deficiencies, he never outright blames him or uses him as an excuse. He accepts all responsibility himself for his crime and also acknowledges his own moral failure. A true schizophrenic never accepts blame. Throughout this first half of the book to this point, the reading has been complicated and painful; the details were horrifying and unsettling.

However, in his new location in the tropics, a change occurs in his life that confirms that Georg Letham is no sociopath. He is allowed to work in the medical field again, this time doing research to find a cure for the deadly Yellow Fever that haunts the tropical regions. A parallel is drawn between the rats his father abhorred and tried forever to eliminate with Georg's efforts to find a remedy for this similarly persistent and deadly danger. While his father was led into the depths of moral depravity because of his inability to control the deadly rodents, Georg rises morally by putting himself at risk for the welfare of others by trying to have some effect on the deadly disease. Throughout the second half of the book we see him change, yet he never transforms completely. That would be too easy and too unrealistic.

A fascinating part of the text is the medical aspects of the study of disease, and how diseases like Yellow Fever are transmitted. This is a far more interesting way to learn about biology than high school science! No details are omitted in the search for a cure, and Weiss never dumbs down the medical language. Reading about the treatment of criminals in the early twentieth century as well as the service of military doctors and their dedication in this time period is absorbing.

This is not an easy read. Details of the animal testing are gruesome. His own attitude is obnoxious, but changes to more of a snarky sensibleness as events progress. His father's heartlessness is painful, and many events are described so brutally that you may cringe and have to put the book down for a few minutes. One thing is constant: Georg is honest even when it would suit him to be less so. And despite the difficulties, this book is something you can't put down and certainly won't want to.

[Darryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4-1/2 stars:] Ernst Weiss (1882-1940) was an Austrian surgeon of Jewish descent who gave up his medical career to become a writer, after contracting TB and working as a ship doctor and a military physician. He became close friends with Franz Kafka, and eventually moved to Paris in 1934 to escape from the Nazis. There he lived in poverty, with support from Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, until he committed suicide as the Nazis invaded the city. His novel Georg Letham. Arzt und Mörder was written in 1931. It did not appear in English translation until Archipelago Books published it in January of this year.

Georg Letham is a physician and bacteriologist who finds himself in a state of desperation, as he is trapped in a marriage to a wealthy woman he does not love, and he is out of money, as he has neglected his clinical practice to focus on his research of the toxin that causes scarlet fever. In an act that is both planned and spontaneous, he murders his wife, but is soon caught, after he confesses to his father.

Letham seems to lack remorse during his trial, and is quickly convicted of his crime, but is spared the death penalty thanks to former colleagues who spoke on his behalf. He is given a life sentence of hard labor on an island off the coast of Brazil, and is transported alongside other prisoners on a steamer. He bribes an officer on the ship, and is permitted to treat other prisoners in the ship's sick bay that have become afflicted with typhus. After an arduous journey, the ship arrives at the unnamed island, and he is designated for work at a hospital that specializes in the care of those infected with yellow fever. The cause of yellow fever was not known at that time, and Letham soon learns that several of his physician colleagues from Vienna have also come to investigate this plague. He is permitted to assist the researchers, and soon becomes a member of the team. The researchers hypothesize that the illness is transmitted from bites of infected mosquitoes, but it appears that only monkeys and humans are affected by the disease. The researchers decide to undertake a risky research study, by infecting themselves with mosquitoes that are allowed to bite patients hospitalized with yellow fever, which is an untreatable and often fatal illness.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is told from the view of Letham, a most unreliable narrator, whose motivations and rationale for his actions reveal his depravity. He claims that his father, a despicable man whose story is described in detail, is the cause of his amoral character anrd personal failure. He seems to be unable or unwilling to care about anyone else, except for a young girl who succumbs to yellow fever under his care. His decision to participate in the study of yellow fever initially seems heroic and noble, but this is not the case. The story is a frame for the study of a man of medicine and science in the early 20th century, a time in which ethical behavior and the compassionate care of the patient were of little or no importance, and greed, egotism, and personal recognition or reward were sought instead. Letham's behaviors and motivations may seem extreme to our modern sensibilities, but the history of medicine is filled with similar and even more depraved men.

[Osore Misanthrope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Психо-крими-готик трилер са само неколико реченица у управном говору. Ich-form живописни напети натурализам, телесни хорор и очијукање са ондашњим жанром “научне романсе”. Аутопортрет експериментатора-радозналца, атеисте са комплексом оца (човекомрсца), анаграмом Хамлета и теретом (наслеђене) кривице и благе психопатије: расуђивачко образлагање поступака, али уз недовољно (са)осећања.
🦟
У вишеслојности, противречност:
• Антропоцентричност и студије животиња: malzoan праксе (вивисекције, пуцање на делфине из забаве, дератизација) – животиња као штеточина и средство/објекат, а не субјекат. Мит о освајачу – колонизација.
• Соц-дарвинизам, психосоматски утицај климе на човека и његова (не)моћ: “Зар је могао човек да тријумфује над природом? Никад. Па човек је само један експеримент природе, и то страшан.”
• Биоетика и екоготика: (не)информисани пристанак, жртва за човечанство и медицинско опирање природној селекцији. Медицина као најподмуклија милосрдница која ствара малтузијанске услове за колонизацију и екоциде: “Ми, обични смртни људи, нисмо поштеђени да као оптужени или сведоци учествујемо у несавршеном светском збивању. (…) А притом, идиотски велико расипање природних богатстава у овом, најуређенијем од свих светова. Ко би све то могао да разуме?”
• Квир студије: анахроно/дијахроно – (де)криминализована хомосексуалност и педофилија; конкретно: да ли наратор и/или писац потискују/пројектују, има ли аутоцензуре; трагична опресија хомофобичног патријархата и друштвена (не)прихватљивост привлачности према четрнаестогодишњакињи – нормирање и дисциплиновање.
• Епистемокритика: Поред комараца рода Aedes и Hemagogus, и резус мајмуни и људи су носиоци вируса жуте грознице. Уобичајене огледне животиње (глодари, кунићи) не оболевају јер нису специфични домаћин за вирус; мишеви оболе само кад им се убризга крв оболелог интракранијално. Вирус је први пут изолован 1927. год. филтрацијом крви оболелих (кроз филтере који не пропуштају бактерије), а како још није постојао електронски микроскоп, узрочник је био невидљив (то није Leptospira sp. како се у роману тврди).

[EmBe]

Ein Roman aus der Weimarer Republik, ich glaube man könnte in grob zur "Neuen Sachlichkeit" rechnen, denn ich habe den Stil nüchtern und präzise in Erinnnerung. Die titelgebende Figur ist ein Arzt, der zum Mörder wird. Ich mochte den Roman, Letham (->Hamlet), der seine Geschichte selbst erzählt, war mir alles andere als gleichgültig.

Interessante Note am Rande: Ernst Weiss, Jude, war selbst Arzt und im Ersten Weltkrieg Militärarzt. Einer seiner Patienten war Adolf Hitler.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some real striking scenes in this book

[Dwight]

My review

As you can tell from the list of sections in this post the focus of Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer goes well beyond the murder and trial of his wife. After Georg’s conviction for the murder of his wife he is exiled to the penal colony of C. (somewhere in South America). While there he becomes an integral member of a medical team searching for the cause and a cure for yellow fever. Among the many characters we meet are Georg’s misanthropic father, fellow-prisoner March with a tremendous crush on Georg, Georg’s classmate Walter heading the medical team on C., and the young yellow-fever patient Monica with whom Georg falls in love. Yet the account “of such a life”, the task of this particular modern novel, covers so much more than a simple recap would provide.



The novel is a modern horror story, a worthy descendant of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Georg’s mind, fate arranges the circumstances leading to the murder of his wife and makes the outcome preordained. The reader realizes otherwise, of course, and the events continue to unfold in a gruesome manner. To make the novel more intense there are several similar horror tales. Some are subtle, such as the torture the prisoners endure while waiting to board the ship which will take them to the penal colony in addition to the ongoing tension once onboard. While working on yellow fever research Georg watches a horrific event unfold, doing nothing to halt it, the results of which could have been comparable to his wife’s murder. That’s the appeal of the book and the part that makes it horrifying—here is a man, morally detached from humanity, operating in fields with life or death implications for patients and subjects. Georg introduces the book as his study into why he did what he did, noting his unreliability as a narrator.



The section I found most effective in the horror mode was Georg’s father’s expedition to the North Pole (one of the many shadows of Frankenstein). Let’s just say there is a reason a rat is on the cover of the book. Wait, make that more than one reason. I found I couldn’t put the book down during this section. Another reflection of Frankenstein includes the focus of science separated from morality. As mentioned in the introductory post, Georg viewed wealth and knowledge as the only things that could give a person a foothold in the world. Since wealth was denied him while married and inaccessible in prison he focuses solely on knowledge. His clinical approach in the attempt of scientific progress adds to the reader’s revulsion toward Georg as he shows little mercy toward anyone or anything while advancing his cause. Georg's rationalization for his behavior includes his belief that man is an experiment on the part of nature so his actions are a natural continuation of that dynamic. I have seen the book described as an allegory for fascist mentality for just this separation of actions from morality as well as his search for the greater good regardless of cost, which it is, but it is also so much more.



The novel is also a story of redemption—one of the haunting questions is whether or not the reader believes Georg achieved it. His service in finding the source of yellow fever proves to be admirable but there are several moral bumps along the way. The complexity Weiss provides makes any judgment a hazardous guess. Georg pins his redemption on science and what he can achieve, but his methods and actions make his intentions problematic. Early in his narration he reveals the level of his interest in science and mankind which follows for most of the book: “Illnesses interested me, the ill did not.”



The novel is also part love story, although almost all of the relationships are unhealthy. Maybe it would be more correct to say that Weiss highlights the power of love's absence. Georg’s emotional arrestment, fostered in part by his father’s misanthropic behavior, shapes a man unable to connect with anyone else. His descriptions of his relationship with his wife are as horrific as other parts of the novel. A fellow prisoner, March, falls in love with Georg but is crudely and consistently used to Georg’s advantage. The one relationship that could have had redemptive qualities—Georg’s feelings for the yellow fever patient Monica—proves to have its own problems. Georg’s disdain for those with “loving hearts” permeates the novel as he openly shows contempt for those that think they can provide comfort and love. Paradoxically he displays and desires such benefits when he longs to see his brother on the day he boards the Mimosa for the penal colony or when he sees his love for Monica as part of his redemption (and there are more examples). Such is the complex nature of Georg and the novel.



Highly recommended.



Previous post: Unfinished human beings in an unfinished world

[ManOfLaBook.com]

Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss is a fic­tional book and a Ger­man clas­sic. The book has been recently trans­lated to Eng­lish by Joel Roten­berg.

Georg Letham is unhappy in his mar­riage but happy in his research. When the oppor­tu­nity knocks he injects his older, wealth­ier and well insured wife with the lethal poi­son Agent Y. How­ever, as good as a physi­cian as Georg is he botches up the cover-up. Not only does he leave the syringe in the crime scene but also con­fesses to his father, an offi­cial in the Aus­trian bureaucracy.

Letham gets sen­tenced to a penal colony and con­tin­ues to research yel­low fever being allowed to use meth­ods he would never have been able to use in civil­ian life.

I was rec­om­mended Georg Letham: Physi­cian and Mur­derer by Ernst Weiss, a Ger­man speak­ing Aus­trian Jew, by a fel­low book blog­ger, Amy from The Black Sheep Dances. I have great respect for Amy and her taste is sim­i­lar to mine, com­bine that with the fact that the book was pub­lished by Arch­i­pel­ago Books and that the book was praised by giants of lit­er­a­ture, it was a no brainer.

How­ever, I had to admit that I had trou­ble to get through the sec­ond quar­ter of the book. I even had to put it down for a bit, read another book and get back to it. I have been try­ing to fig­ure out why – maybe my mind wasn’t into it, maybe it was the dis­qui­et­ing nar­ra­tive, the prose, I had no idea why.

I could only read this book in small sec­tions. It was inter­est­ing for 75–100 pages or so and then I sim­ply had to put it down.
This book was dis­turb­ing.

After I fin­ished, I didn’t sit down and write my thoughts imme­di­ately, I rarely do that any­way, but I let the novel sink in and then it donned on me – this novel is psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror at its best. Not the hor­ror nov­els one thinks about these days, but psychological-Gothic hor­ror which could hold its own against such mas­ters as Poe and Kafka.

I am not a big fan of hor­ror or gore, I’ve seen enough in the army to last me a life­time but this kind of hor­ror is dif­fer­ent. The unease of revul­sion and shock which accom­pa­nies the inter­nal thoughts and con­flicts of a mur­der­ous man, not a mad man mind you, but a cal­cu­lat­ing, smart per­son whose first and fore­most thought is to ben­e­fit mankind, which, coin­ci­den­tally, he doesn’t even like and acknowl­edges his lack of sen­si­tiv­ity to his fel­low human beings.
If one could write a book about the inter­nal feel­ings of Hitler, Mus­solini, Stalin or any other man who brings night­mares to life – this would be it.

Mr. Weiss’ vision of his nar­ra­tor is social cri­tique at its best, a look­ing glass into the trans­for­ma­tion of soul of a man who believes he can­not win over nature, that he is sim­ply an exper­i­ment as are all of us humans and that we are no bet­ter than the rats he talks so much about. The author under­stood the con­cept of “herd men­tal­ity” and it’s cer­tainly some­thing to keep in mind this time of year when you rush through the doors of your favorite store to by some idi­otic toy.

The book, while long, is actu­ally a series of short sto­ries with some very dis­turb­ing scenes involv­ing dogs and mainly rats, and rats, and some more rats. The writ­ing style which involves sto­ries within sto­ries, when done right, could be bril­liant, how­ever the con­struc­tion of the story (not the trans­la­tion) is clunky but that could be on pur­pose due to the skep­ti­cal and ironic rela­tion­ship Georg Letham has with him­self. A cold, cal­cu­lat­ing man (imag­ine House or Holmes with­out the side­kicks which keep them grounded) who con­vinces him­self that he is in the right com­mit­ting crimes using pas­sion as his logic instead of rea­son and intel­lect for which he jus­ti­fies every­thing else.

Disclaimer: I got this book for free.

For more reviews and bookish thoughts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

[Brian]

This immense book is a gruesome tale fraught with meticulously disturbing detail and exactitude. George Letham, a physician and bacteriologist, murders his wife and throughout the story he tries to atone for his crime through suffering. The opening sentence, almost better than Mersault's in The Stranger, sets the tone of the novel, "How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training, of certain philosophical aspirations, let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife?". The unreliable narrator depicts scenes so haunting and disturbing while retaining a romance about them. Scenes that arouse disgust and beauty at the same time are found almost on every page.

The story is an early psychological novel that runs in the vein of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Georg, a man who has no regard for human life murders his wife for financial gain in order to conduct experiments. The rational of Georg is life is work and work is experimenting, therefore experimentation is the purpose of life. This man of scientific training uses reason to explain emotions such as passion and suffering. He is then convicted and exiled to the prison camp C. somewhere in South America for hard labor without parole, along with many other convicts. There in C. where Yellow Fever is rampant, he is administered to the hospital as another scientist to aid in finding the cure for the Yellow Fever pathogen. Georg, eventually inoculating himself with the deadly pathogen commences his suffering for atonement. The convicts, who partook in these series of experiments of self-inoculation, were given pardon for their crimes.

A succinct review of the book cannot cover the profundity of this story. Georg, an atheist and a true cynic, achieves, only briefly, his personal atonement, but never fully feels pardoned for his crimes. Weiss understood human nature and knew that for an individual to master himself was a difficult task. Essentially, Weiss is stating that through suffering one might be pardoned for his/ her crimes. Georg suffers but can never truly connect to actual human suffering; he inoculates himself in order to suffer, but it was an experiment, like the murder of his wife, so he never changes.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taken purely the perspective of skill in writing and character creation this should be a solid five star book.

That said, it is a SLOG to get through, and my enjoyment of it definitely knocks it down a star.

This is an interesting read though - originally published in Austria in 1931, it was touted by both Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, but not translated into English until the last few years. Just based on that scant information - and the title of the work - I was really excited to read this. And it is good, with moments of brilliance, and, as noted, the writing is excellent throughout. But it does seem to go on much too long, and I was more relieved to be finished with it then anything else.

Recommended as a curiosity, but it shouldn't be high on your list with so much else out there.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was outstanding!

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a classic, by a bohemian, kind of boring, and very fascinating confession of a murderer.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.