A Life Among Gypsies and Wolves: Otto Alscher’s Quest for an Alternative to Modern Civilisation
In: Fractured BiographiesSearch for other papers by Axel Goodbody in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
The writings of Otto Alscher reflect the experience of a generation of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Born into the politically and culturally dominant minority of German-speakers on the South-Eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he published short stories and novels and worked as a literary journalist in Budapest. After 1918 he championed the cause of the increasingly marginalised Banat and Siebenbürgen Germans in Romania, but professional and political disappointments soon led to his withdrawal from social engagement to a life of farming, hunting and writing in the South Carpathian mountains. Alscher supported the Nazis, and died in a Romanian internment camp at the end of the Second World War. Despite their problematic ideological sub-text, his literary visions of authentic natural existence reveal a rare sensitivity to the natural environment, and he remains unsurpassed in the German language as a writer of wild animal stories.