Leppin guides his readers into an underworld that's right around the corner. --
The Prague PillLeppin was the truly chosen bard of the painfully disappearing old Prague. --
Max BrodThe King of Bohemia. -- Else Lasker-Schuler
In a city where you can hardly walk a block before passing a statue or plaque dedicated to a writer or artist, Leppin offers a stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, especially Franz Kafka, who has been all but canonized by city officials in the past decade. Perhaps Leppin's Prague, a world of tainted prostitutes, rotgut wine and syphilis, is less marketable to tourists than Kafka's depictions of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. But maybe Leppin would have preferred it this way. --Stephan Delbos,
The Prague PostBlaugast's increasing debilitation may be read as a metaphor for the decline of Europe in the wake of World War I and during the years of the Nazis' consolidation of power, which eventually culminated in a second world war. ... This translation is a tremendous breakthrough for the study of German and central European literature. --Kirsten Lodge,
Slavic and East European Journal In these pages we find the ultimate, amorphous horror of mere existence depicted in the most graphic way. --
Stride MagazineThe whole geography of the novel is filthy. The picture of Prague created by Leppin is a city in moral crisis. --Annie Clarkson,
BookmunchOr perhaps one should approach Leppin's dark work beneath the watchful eye of the sun, both for the sake of one's sanity and because Leppin is the sun's dark cousin. Where the sun brings light to the world, Leppin revels in exploring the strange light that exists in the depths of his characters' depraved souls. --
Rain Taxi Review of BooksBlaugast is, in effect, the clearest expression of Leppin's archetypal character: a man who abandons his staid, predictable life to throw himself into dreams, into the expectation of sensual or emotional fulfillment, especially in the anticipated apotheosis of erotic love. It is only within these dreams that spaces tend to open up, colors become vivid, textures soften. --Karl Korner,
The Prague RevueBlaugast's astonishingly violent decline, from bourgeois life into the most savagely depicted human degradation I can remember encountering in fiction, is so couched that everything he experiences must be understood literally: even Prague itself. Here is the rag and bone shop of true urban fantasy. --John Clute,
InterzoneEven by the standards of a movement that glorified decadence, [Leppin's] fiction is excessive. Swarming with prostitutes, anarchists, extortionists, infanticides, child molesters, and exhibitionists, it delves into the deepest layers of depravity and moral and sexual humiliation. -- Tess Lewis,
BookforumA frighteningly unsentimental novel of human degradation with echoes of both Kafka and Dostoyevsky. Written in the 1930s (the author died in 1945), the novel anatomizes the humiliation and decline of Klaudius Blaugast in the seamy underside of Prague. The story begins with the title character accidentally meeting Schobotzki, an old school acquaintance, in the streets of Prague. Schobotzki, a charismatic but nasty piece of work (and later termed "the most corrupt, the most evil ... the Devil incarnate"), startles Blaugast by inquiring about his interest in "the science of decay" and in "catastrophes." It turns out the decay he refers to is primarily sexual, for Schobotzki introduces Blaugast to Wanda, a prostitute specializing in degradation and debasement-not that Blaugast, a self-described "pilgrim in the mire," needs tutoring in these areas. We're introduced to memories from Blaugast's early sexual education, out of which he comes to the staggering revelation that "guilt, guilt, guilt was life, guilt that rose up, delirious, in convulsions, to break down, tortured." Blaugast's journey borders on despair, for on some level he's looking for God and love, both of whom seem to have deserted him in his "depravity and wickedness." Blaugast's abasement eventually becomes an obsession, so much so that to the disgust of Wanda he quits his job and thus deprives her of one reason for her leechlike attachment. Johanna, a girl from Wanda's "stable" (and with a proverbial heart of gold), steps into the breech, a Sonja figure who, in taking care of Blaugast, finds herself "slowly submerged into a realm far removed from the mundane-a realm she had hungered for her entire life." It is a spiritual rather than a carnal union with Blaugast. While Leppin's style is not as spare as Kafka's, the nightmare he chronicles reminds us of our own connection to what Leppin calls the "Ur-forest," the dark realm of our repressed selves. --
Kirkus Reviews
Paul Leppin was born in Prague on November 27, 1878, the second son of a poor Sudeten-German family. After completing secondary school, he began a career as a civil servant at the Postal and Telegraphic Office. His first novel, The Doors of Life was published in 1902. At this time Leppin was already an important figure in Prague literary circles, and was a spokesman of a younger generation of Prague German writers. Leppin, whose decadent lifestyle reflected his horror of bourgeois existence, was described by Max Brod as "the German-Bohemian Baudelaire." A scandal followed the publication of his novel Daniel Jesus (1905), which was considered blasphemous and obscene. By the first decade of the 20th century many of the writers Leppin was associated with, such as Rilke and Victor Hadwiger, had left Prague. Leppin stayed and his relationship to the city was expressed in several works, most famously his 1914 novel Severin's Journey into the Dark. Severin, whose name is taken from the protagonist of Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is tormented by his daily existence in the office and by the erotic chimeras he pursues by night. A similarly erotic theme is also at the center of his last work, the partly autobiographical novel Blaugast. Leppin suffered a series of personal tragedies in the 1930s, as well as receiving various recognitions for his life's work (e.g., the Schiller Memorial Prize in 1934). In 1937 his only son died, and in 1939 he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo after the Germans had occupied the city. Upon his release, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. He died on April 10, 1945.
