Herbert Zand, who was drafted into the German army and severely wounded on the eastern front during World War II, wrote a war novel and a novel on postwar Vienna, and many of his essays and stories explore the effects of Hitler and the war on Austria. Zand is a thoroughly Austrian writer, at home in both rural and urban environments. Born and raised on a farm, Zand reveals in his writings an appreciation of nature and a bond with the land that link him to the tradition of "Heimat" (regional) literature; but he transcended the sentimental and even fascist tendencies of some "Heimat" literature, using the land to express a humanistic existentialist position. Zand eventually died of his war wounds at the age of forty-six, having carried shrapnel in his body for twenty-five years; his grisly fate makes him a distressing symbol of a past that will...