Jakov Lind

Heinz Jakov Landwirth (Jakov Lind), writer: born Vienna 10 February 1927; twice married (one son, one daughter); died London 16 February 2007.

The writer Jakov Lind chronicled the nightmare of Nazi Germany. He once defined himself as one of "the literary unicorns who worked in two languages like Beckett, Nabokov and Conrad", having written dazzlingly original works first in his native German and later in an idiosyncratic English. His collection of short stories Eine Seele aus Holz (Soul of Wood) does indeed place him in that exalted company through its blend of surrealistic humour and narrative power. It should be compulsory reading for anyone seeking insight into the sources of political sadism.

He was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth in Vienna in 1927, to an assimilated Jewish family, and grew up under the shadow of the swastika. The songs he recalled from childhood, the subject of a memorable radio broadcast, were a cacophony of sentimental melodies and strident marching songs - socialist and Communist, Zionist and Nazi. After the annexation of Austria his parents sent the 11-year-old on a Kindertransport to the Netherlands, where he was placed in a Zionist training camp to prepare for emigration to Palestine.

Lind's early adventures are described in the first volume of his autobiography, Counting My Steps, published in 1969. Here he recalls both the impact of the German occupation and his revulsion when Dutch Jews meekly allowed themselves to be deported. Lind himself went "underground", acquiring false papers (and various aliases) and surviving the Second World War disguised as a Dutch deckhand on a German barge. When the Rhine and Ruhr valleys were targeted by Allied bombers, he experienced an apocalypse:

We had just tied the barge down, lying deep in the water with coal. It was lunchtime. The alarm seemed like a whistle for lunch break. You could see them against the light blue sky, against the sun. Tiny silver wings fluttered high up in the heavens. The earth exploded.

Since the saturation bombing of Germany has so often been condemned, it is important to recall the moral drawn by Lind:

The Allied bombers were the doves of peace. The bombs and only the bombs destroyed the arrogance of the burgher who had believed for far too long that one can get away with murder. Nothing in the history of modern Germany equalled this catharsis straight from heaven; it made Germany more democratic than it has ever been, and more pacifist than anyone can recall.

Given his early Zionist training, Lind's first move after the collapse of Nazi Germany was to catch a steamer to Haifa. Details of the events of the next five years, including his first marriage, are rather sketchy, but it is clear that the Zionist enthusiasms did not last. He took part as an air traffic controller in the war of 1948, which forms the theme of his first published work, "The Diary of Hanan Malinek", a short novel written in German but published in Hebrew translation (under the name Jakov Landwirth) in January 1949.

Readers who expect a celebration of victory are in for a surprise. The main character is a 20-year-old Holocaust survivor who arrives in Palestine on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war. After a short spell of training he joins the fighting in the Negev Desert and is killed in battle. The author claims to have found Malinek's diary half buried in the sand, and it is this that constitutes the bulk of the text. The "diary" records an artillery attack, during which infants in a Jewish children's home are buried alive. In modern warfare, we read, there is no scope for "impractical doctrines of humanity". It is only with irony that Malinek can recall those bygone days when life consisted of "delicate feelings". The present consists of "flies, dust and dirty underwear".

After leaving Israel and spending three years as a drama student in Vienna, Lind settled in London in autumn 1954. It was there that he would be based for the rest of his life and there that he became a professional author, encouraged by his second wife, Faith Henry, a literary agent, whom he married in 1955.

Still writing in German, he published two compelling books that settle accounts with National Socialism. The situation of Jews in Nazi Austria forms the theme of the title story of the collection Eine Seele aus Holz (1962; translated as Soul of Wood, 1964). The main character is Hermann Wohlbrecht, a veteran with a wooden leg, who in exchange for the Viennese apartment of a threatened Jewish family agrees to shelter their invalid son. The child has a grotesquely enlarged head, symbolising the over-cerebral culture of German Jews.

The most striking episode is set in an asylum for the insane, where patients are subjected to "special treatment". One of the doctors, we are told, sat in his shirtsleeves and held his syringe aloft like a sceptre. Strapped to their wheelchairs, the patients were rolled past him one by one. Cursing his boss in the most obscene terms, he thrust the needle in with practised hand.

When this story was first published, those scenes appeared grotesque. But research on Nazi doctors has revealed the factual basis of Lind's narrative - the so-called "euthanasia" programme, in which physicians killed those seen as "unfit for life", mainly by lethal injection. The fact that after the Second World War many of those criminals went unpunished gives Lind's story its final sting.

This bleak vision of Austria was followed by a novel about the madness of Nazi Germany, Landschaft in Beton (1963: Landscape in Concrete, 1966). There are echoes of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik in Lind's creation of the mock-heroic German soldier Gauthier Bachmann. Like Schweik, Bachmann appears to be patriotic, but, having been classed as "mentally disturbed", he is excluded from the comradeship for which he longs. A series of grotesque episodes explore the question, is this poor bloody infantryman really mad? Or does the madness lie with the whole apparatus of modern warfare? Within this framework the novel demolishes the myth that it is possible to commit mass murder and remain - in your own mind - a moral person.

As memories of those horrific events receded, Lind turned his attention to lighter themes. His experiences in Vienna and in London are reflected in two further volumes of autobiography, Numbers (1972) and Crossing (1991). In England he finally felt at home, attributing this to the "dull, uneventful, peaceful English way of life", where "everyone can relax - and feel safe and free - especially foreigners like myself". For the first time he settled down to a relatively stable social life, living with Faith in Hampstead and raising two children. They acquired a stimulating circle of friends, including the exiled authors Elias Canetti and Erich Fried and the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing.

During the following decades Lind enjoyed great international success. He decided the time had come to reinvent himself as an English author, by switching from German to English. Whether this was a wise decision has been questioned by contributors to the most comprehensive account of his work, Writing after Hitler: the work of Jakov Lind (edited by Andrea Hammel, Silke Hassler and Edward Timms, 2000). If the dark past of Nazi Germany had been his inspiration, the books he published in English during the 1980s are by contrast rather colourless. English social life failed to grip his imagination, and his late works Travels to the Enu (1985) and The Inventor (1987) are fanciful satires set in remote regions.

Lind was belatedly rediscovered in Austria, where his major works are back in print. But in London the unpublished typescripts were piling up on his desk, together with rejection slips from publishers. As his health began to fail, he was running out of ideas. Faith's departure had left him without a literary agent, and, although his unpublished stories about life in London, Paris and Amsterdam are vivid and amusing, their zany humour is unlikely to appeal to modern audiences.

It is for his satires on National Socialism that Jakov Lind will be remembered, together with an autobiography that charts the progress of one of the most idiosyncratic writers of the 20th century.

Edward Timms