IN HIS TREATISE SITTENGESCHICHTE DES WELTKRIEGS (A Moral History of the World War, 1930) Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld noted how belles lettres had been far readier than clinical medicine to examine the impact of wartime injuries on the sexual and psychological life of the victims. Some well-remembered examples of that readiness are works by Ernst Toller (Hinkemann, 1924), Sean O'Casey (The Silver Tassie, 1927), and D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928), all of which deal with soldiers rendered sexually impotent by their wounds. Much less well known is Ernst Weiss's story “Franta Zlin,” first published in the Munich periodical Genius in 1919. Although “Franta Zlin” has only rarely been the subject of scholarly investigation (and is therefore typical of Ernst Weiss's oeuvre as a whole), it is a work of great and occasionally shocking power, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki recently included in his extended collection of German literature provocatively entitled Der Kanon.

In this radically compressed third-person narrative of fewer than twenty pages Weiss confronts the reader with scenes of suicide, rape, pillage, murder, and the unmanning of Zlin, a thirty-year-old Viennese goldsmith and married man who, in the course of his military service (between autumn 1914 and summer 1915) mutates from “sanfter Mensch” (gentle man) into monster. Although this metamorphosis may reflect Nietzschean notions of the brute in man, more than likely it reflects the author's artistic and personal relationship to Franz Kafka.