The Maimed (Paperback)

A little investigating suggested there really weren't that many literary types writing prose fiction clearly fitting the Expressionist mold. Those who undoubtedly were oriented that way, the poets and playwrights, actually published quite a lot in Europe during the second two decades of the last century. What the most famous prose writers of the time were producing, on the other hand, were a lot of highly cultivated and cerebral or quasi-mystical works (Thomas Mann and Robert Musil come to mind) rather than the wildly spontaneous and emotion driven works we associate with Expressionism. Kafka hovers somewhere around the periphery, more a surrealist than anything else though, in reality, representing a stylistic mode all his own.

How exciting, then, to come across a novel, newly (and expertly) translated into English, by one of those few fiction writers who clearly advanced the Expressionist program.

Hermann Ungar's novel, The Maimed, written in 1921/22, first appeared in print in its entirety in 1923. The author, born in 1893 to a well-off Jewish family in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, obtained a law degree in 1918 and thereafter took up acting and writing for the theater. His first published work, a short story collection (Boys and Murderers) appeared in 1920 and caused a minor sensation garnering praise from the likes of Thomas Mann and the director Berthold Viertel. Ungar himself initially had serious reservations about going ahead with publication of The Maimed in 1922, fearing a scandal, and his publisher's reluctance to risk obscenity charges led to its being withdrawn until a second publisher brought it out, uneventfully, the following year. Ungar's subsequent literary career was brief and not especially noteworthy: some journalistic reportage and a second novel, The Class (1927). In 1929 he died of acute appendicitis at the age of thirty-six.

The Maimed is a disturbing book. It's a raw and jarring depiction of childhood trauma, poverty, sexual depravity, neurotic obsession and violence. Originally begun as a first person narrative, Ungar switched to the third person so as to minimize the chance of being identified with his protagonist, Franz Polzer, a severely repressed and neurotic survivor of child abuse who as an adult is as much a victim of internal demons as outside forces. Following the compulsively ordered Franz slowly losing his grip on his world as the circumstances and events of his life increasingly fly out of control, the story and its language become correspondingly fractured and unreal ratcheting up the tension as things move along. The Expressionists were really the first great portrayers of 20th century angst and this is most definitely the kind of thing Ungar serves up here. Lurid? Yes, but in a most artfully controlled and psychologically penetrating fashion. Indeed, the book is rife with detailed explorations of the subterranean recesses of Franz's subconscious and Freudian implications abound.

It's fascinating to examine the parallels between this kind of writing and the Expressionist paintings we're familiar with, especially the tortured images of Egon Schiele or the wry caricatures of George Grosz. Like both of those artists, Ungar's canvas is very much urban and underclass. He indulges a taste for the grotesque in the form of Franz's best friend Karl, a disease-riddled, multiple amputee who wallows in mocking self pity and he teeters on the edge of vulgarity in his unflattering descriptions of the bovine qualities of the sexual predator, Klara, Franz's landlady. Virtually any page of the book might serve as subject matter for the imaginations of a whole host of Expressionist painters and as the destructive elements of the story multiply, Ungar progressively and fittingly distorts his verbal palette.

This is not to say the book is entirely without artistic faults but these are minor and one is reluctant to quibble when examples of this kind of literature are so rare. After its first publication, there apparently were some who were dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the ending and the present translation includes a fragment Ungar added to later editions to clear things up. It is known, however, that Ungar preferred the original and I, having found it just fine myself, avoided reading the addition and so, can't comment on it. Recommended to anyone looking for something a bit twisted or who loves any of the painters mentioned.