SOURCE: Kamla, Thomas A. “Konrad Merz: Ein Mensch fällt aus Deutschland—The ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Exile of Youth.” In Confrontation with Exile: Studies in the German Novel, pp. 35-44. Bern: Herbert Lang/Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Kamla focuses on the ideas and career of Konrad Merz, an anti-fascist novelist who left Germany to write in exile.

Konrad Merz numbers among the younger writers who made their literary debut in exile. Written shortly after his flight to Holland in 1934, Ein Mensch fällt aus Deutschland (1936), an epistolary novel, describes the traumatic experiences of the uprooted emigrant who attempts to find some purpose to his new existence. The semi-integrated status in which Merz portrays his autobiographical hero at the end anticipates his own situation after 1945. Merz never returned to Germany to take up the law practice for which he had studied prior to his exile. A...