A Shadow of Myself (Pushkin Press Classics) - Softcover

Flamm, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1805332287 ISBN 13: 9781805332282

Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics, 2027

Synopsis

A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of World War I trauma, translated into English for the first time.

"Unsettling... Creates a picture of a tormented mind, and evokes the profound dislocation felt by veterans returning home from a savage conflict." —The Times

In this searingly poetic novel, we are plunged into the disturbed consciousness of an ex-soldier suffering post-traumatic stress. It is a world in which nothing is stable—not even the identity of the narrator.

Hans, an esteemed surgeon, has just returned from the hellish battlefields of World War I. Shaken by his experiences and severely doubtful of the promised bright future after the war, he returns to the life of a Berlin doctor that he left 4 years ago. But now, 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 in his absence? Tormented by doubts about even the simplest facts, the troubled Hans grows increasingly convinced that neither he nor those around him are who they believe themselves to be. 

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 in a stunning translation by Simon Pare.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Flamm, whose real name was Erich Mosse (1891-1963), was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. A Shadow of Myself was his debut novel, and it met with huge acclaim on publication in 1926. He subsequently published three further novels while continuing to practice 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.

Simon Pare is a translator from French and German who lives near Zurich. His translation of The Flying Mountain by Christoph Ransmayr was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and he was part of the team that translated Angela Merkel’s memoirs, Freedom, into English.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It is not me, your honours, but a dead man speaking through my lips. It’s not me standing here, not my arm raised, not my hair that has turned white, not of my doing, none of my doing.

You won’t understand. You think this must be a living person, this is a human being speaking—or a madman. I’m not mad, I just don’t know. But I’ve been lying in the ground for ten years, my limbs rotted, my bones grey powder, my breath… I have no breath. It’s all silent. It’s all over. I’m lying in the ground near Verdun. Up above are the ruins of Douaumont, the wind’s blowing across abandoned graves, abandoned ground, the abandoned dead. Go there, dig into the sand, burrow away in the large shell crater to the left with water in it, maybe soft mud. Don’t be afraid—the war’s over, no shell will fall and splatter you to bits, no screams ring out now, no limbs fly through the air, no blood, no shredded bodies. It’s quiet. Not a sound. For evermore. Now you bend down. You scrape away a bit of earth. And you find… me. Yes, bones and skull and dust and my name which is not my name and yet is, my destiny that belongs not to me but to someone else, though it has now befallen me, every bit as suffocating as my own.

How am I supposed to relate this with a tongue not mine in a mouth not mine? How are you supposed to believe me when I don’t even believe myself ? But that’s how it was, that’s what happened, it was real, it was a day like many others—no, not like many others, because Lieutenant Basch told us there was a revolution, a revolution in Munich and Berlin, the war was over, after four years it was over, no more shells, no death, no mud, no obligation, no laws, no shrapnel, no pressure: everything seemed to be dissolving, falling apart. A new era, a new life.
I was drunk, we were all drunk. Something was singing inside me, surging up inside me, so I climbed out of the trench, my senses reeling—there was no way it could be over so suddenly, we’d been waiting for so long that we’d given up believing it would ever end. Now, a new opening, a new life, we wouldn’t lie around in muck any more, we’d be back in a room on white sheets, we’d have a future. A future? We’d work, we’d need to start again from scratch, where are the white sheets, we’ll be at the front in the muck again with the generals in the rear, the generals are always in the rear, those rich guys driving cars, stealing all the glory, the grub and the women, while the others croak, while we…

I clambered out of the dugout, tripped over mounds and holes, stumbled over corpses and tree trunks; it was a cold night, the moon was shining, music trickling from the dugout, fever boiling my blood, I was so tired I could have toppled over and yet I was driven, driven forwards, driven on by fear… suddenly something was lying in front of me, a dark mass, I almost fell over it. I made to walk on, back to the dugout… why was I out here anyway instead of with my comrades, singing with them, celebrating, what had lured me out here in the middle of the night, alone among wrecked carts and collapsed walls, alone among… the dead? Yes, it was a dead man, I knew, obviously, he’d gone out on patrol yesterday, twenty-four hours before the end, the war was over, and he’d been killed a day before, even the final bullet struck a mother, couldn’t we have stopped a day earlier, so stupid, now he was dead, lying there, the doctor, an ‘educated’ man, though what good was his education to him now, he was only a sergeant like me, ought to have been a lieuten-ant… now he was dead, and I… My hand patted down his body. I didn’t mean to, it just happened automatically, I’d walked here automatically—had I meant to, had I known? Automatically. How? My trembling hand groped its way over the body, mud, sticky blood, I turned on my torch, its small, blunt beam creeping spookily through the shadows; then two eyes were staring up at me, dead empty eyes twinkling between sunken lids, I recoiled, my hand was shaking… wasn’t the head nodding, wasn’t there a mischievous grin on those cold, blue lips? I was lost; back in the dugout I clutched my hands to my chest, my heart beating like mad, but over the pounding I felt, with a strange, ecstatic thrill, the small grey booklet, the passport I’d taken from the dead man, his passport, his name—and his destiny.

I didn’t know at the time. No one asked you amid the hurrahs for the revolution, who asks for papers, who checks them, who knows a name? We’re all human, we’re all broth-ers, and the other guy was dead, he didn’t care, rotting in the mud with twinkling eyes, bones and dust, eugh!

I was sitting on the train, an express train, first class of course, how easy it is to get used to, how strange too that all the agitation was gone, quite natural the whole thing. Did I use to stand by the oven door and get up in the middle of the night? And the dough was risen and hard, and through the door the embers caught you right in the face, singed your skin, and young Hennings burnt his apron and one hand and screamed so loud… no way, no way, that wasn’t me, that isn’t me, I was on this train, an elegant, educated man, a rich man reclining on a red-cushioned seat, first class, of course you can pity the others packed into fourth class like animals, like cattle, unable to even sit down and so tired, their knees shaking, but they have to stand, all of them, even the small, thin dragoon, pale-faced beneath his black parted hair, who stared and stared at me earlier with so much pain in his eyes until suddenly he fell over, all white in the face. Or did I only dream it or see a picture once, and it’s a memory of something that may or may not be real?

‘When you reach Berlin,’ says the fat baldie on the cush-ioned seat opposite. ‘Revolution—who’d have believed it! You are going to Berlin?’

‘Is this train going to Berlin? It is? Yes. I actually meant to… Of course I’m going to Berlin.’
Of course? Why did I go? I didn’t mean to, but I was sucked there. I thought it was my choice, but how then could I forget my mother and my sister in Frankfurt, how could I? Hadn’t seen them for a year, but all the same—Berlin now? Berlin, of course. It wasn’t even difficult, it wasn’t even an issue. I smiled, I had to smile the whole time, but there was still a darkness on my soul, a strange, hovering shadow, heavy and smothering.

Outside in the corridor a man was leaning against the window, watching the landscape flash past. I couldn’t see his face, but his narrow back, his slanted shoulders, the left pulled higher than the right, and the curious tension in his neck all seemed familiar; something came bubbling up inside me, a peculiar agitation, an unprecedented hatred, an almost physical revulsion. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Was I hypnotized? I was travelling first class and I knew no one here! Why should I hate a stranger, a neck, a back, with such pointless, unprovoked hatred? What was he to me?

Now the back turned, the neck creased with diagonal folds, now the head turned into profile—a stranger. But I knew him: all the blood came rushing to my forehead, there was a darkness there that scared me, it was like a blow to the head, my thoughts became confused, I wanted to stand up, turn away; but the man had noticed me now and swivelled his body abruptly in my direction, a pair of eyes stared hard and fierce until the whites looked as if they might pop out, the nostrils began to quake, the hand started to clench into a fist, for a second it looked as if the fist was going to rise and punch the narrow, thin pane of glass between our faces—then with a jolt he lowered it, turned away contemptuously and disappeared with rapid, spasmodic movements.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
• Publication date: 2027
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1805332287
• ISBN 13: 9781805332282
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160