Ernst Kaiser

Ernst David Kaiser (3 October 1911 – 1 January 1972) was an Austrian writer and translator.

Early life Ernst David Kaiser was born in Vienna. His father, a Jewish merchant, came from the Slovak part of Hungary, and his mother from Brno. At birth he was Hungarian, but his father later opted to be Austrian. Ernst Kaiser grew up in Vienna, attended high school, passed the Matura, did his military service and studied German. Austria was annexed by the German Reich on 12 March 1938, before he was able to complete his doctorate. A few months later Kaiser fled to Poland via Prague and from there by ship to Southampton in the United Kingdom. He settled in London. He found a job in a slaughterhouse where he dragged pork and sides of beef in cold storage. When the war began Kaiser was interned "and then served for almost six years in the British Army in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany; afterwards in the military government in Hamburg as an interpreter with the rank of sergeant." Later, he wrote that he had fought against Germany in Germany.

In Petersfield in 1941, he married Eithne Wilkins (1914–75), a Germanic Studies scholar, translator and poet from New Zealand, and the sister of Nobel laureate Maurice Wilkins.

Postwar period

Kaiser's first book, Schattenmann, a novella, was published in Hamburg in 1946 by the Hans Dulk publishing house. By 1947, they were living in London; Kaiser had gained British citizenship and Eithne Wilkins worked as a lecturer at the University of London.

Kaiser and Wilkins also played a key role in the relocation of Robert Musil's estate from Rome to Austria, where these materials are now archived in the Austrian National Library.

Attempts to publish Die Geschichte eines Mordes

Ernst Kaiser tried several times to get his second book, Die Geschichte eines Mordes, published by German publishers. Friends, like the Germanist Wilhelm Bausinger, tried to support him. The manuscript lay with Suhrkamp Verlag for almost three years, where they signalled their willingness to publish it several times. Kaiser was asked, however, to significantly shorten the text. He refused; not because he didn't want to make any cuts, but because he felt that the work had to be "made objectively usable". He hoped "es lebe ein Gott zu kürzen und zu straffen". In November 1960, Suhrkamp returned the manuscript without comment. Kaiser then sent the manuscript to Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, with whom he had been in personal contact for three years regarding the revision of the Musil edition. Ledig-Rowohlt initially considered the prospect of the novel being published, but also insisted on cuts. In a letter to Bausinger, Kaiser agreed; however, he explained to Ledig-Rowohlt that he could not carry out the revision. First, it has been ten years since he completed the work; he was not in a position to find his way back into his text in time and secondly, the novel came from a period of life that he had completed and to which he did not want to return. However, he gave the publisher free rein to cut, even to cut significantly. Kaiser was all the more astonished when his manuscript was returned by a publisher's secretary two months later without any comment.

The writer Ingrid Bachér, who now lives in Düsseldorf, lived in Rome in the first half of the 1960s. She got to know Kaiser and Wilkins and a friendship developed. She also offered to present Die Geschichte eines Mordes to her publishers. Ernst Kaiser also gave her free rein to revise the text. Their efforts were also unsuccessful at the time. Bachér returned to Germany and Ernst Kaiser and his wife moved back to Great Britain in 1966. Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins received a professorship at the University of Reading in the spring of 1968. Kaiser was made an honorary research fellow and headed the Musil Research Unit at the university with his wife. The Kaisers stayed in touch with Bachér by letter.

In 1969 Ernst Kaiser published a second book, the Paracelsus book in Rowohlt's Monographien series. It is currently not known why the author was interested in Paracelsus. It may have been a commissioned work for the publisher, made for purely financial reasons.

Vanished estate On 1 January 1972 Ernst Kaiser died in Reading. Just two years later, at the end of 1974, Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins also died. A short time later, Kaiser-Wilkins' former assistant at the university contacted Ingrid Bachér and wrote that the Kaisers had ordered all of Ernst Kaiser's manuscripts to be handed over to Bachér, with the request that she try to publish them. Bachér promptly replied that she was willing to take on the texts. However, the texts never arrived. All attempts to clarify the whereabouts of the package were unsuccessful and the assistant could no longer be reached. There was no Kaiser estate in Reading and Eithne Wilkins' brother refused to provide any information. The texts by the writer Ernst David Kaiser were considered lost. In one of her novels, Ingrid Bachér wrote about the fate of Kaiser and his manuscripts. The unknown author thus became a literary figure.

Bachér reported on Ernst Kaiser, his wife and his missing texts at two forums of the Else Lasker-Schüler Society. In 2001, a young man approached her and offered to do some research. In the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach there were numerous references to Kaiser, correspondence with writers, trade journals and publishers. Hermann Bausinger had also handed over to the archive, as part of his legacy, the legacy of his brother Wilhelm, who had died in an accident in 1966. This includes an extensive correspondence between Wilhelm Bausinger and Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins. In addition, there are also manuscripts by Kaiser in the Bausinger inventory, including a carbon copy of a typewritten manuscript of the novel Die Geschichte eines Mordes, totaling over 1,000 pages, the first part of which is titled "Das große Haus".

Bachér went to Marbach and read the text "Das große Haus" and many letters between Kaiser and Bausinger in the archive. She had the manuscript copied and looked for a publisher. Again for years it was not possible to persuade a publisher to print the novel Die Geschichte eines Mordes. And this despite the fact that great interest in a publication was signalled again and again. It was not until the spring of 2008 that she found two who were willing to publish the novel through personal acquaintance with the publisher Ralf Liebe and his program director Helmut Braun. After reading the entire manuscript, Braun suggested publishing the first part of the text as Die Geschichte eines Mordes. Since the second part, "Das weiße Haus", is far removed from the narrative of the first part and the only continuity is the character of the protagonist, it is justified to speak of two novels that can be published separately. Ingrid Bachér took it upon herself, as promised at the time, to "make the text objectively usable" in Kaiser's sense, to "tighten and shorten" it. She did this carefully and without stylistic interference. The necessary transcription - the creation of a file - and its correction led to a careful alignment with our current spelling and punctuation without affecting the peculiarities of Kaiser's spelling. There is now a "readable text" that tells of a man who becomes surreally embroiled in a murder case, falling into a trap of reality and fiction.

Kaiser's literary archive is now with a niece of Eithne Wilkins, in London. The archive includes unpublished manuscripts, correspondence and original artwork.