Ernst Weiss

Dr Ernst Weiss (German: Weiß, August 28, 1882 – June 15, 1940) was an Austrian physician and author of Jewish descent. He is the author of Ich, der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), a novel dealing with the Hitler period.

Biography

Ernst Weiss was born in Brünn, Moravia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Brno in the Czech Republic) to the family of a prosperous Jewish cloth merchant. After his father died when he was four, he was brought up by his mother Berta, née Weinberg, who led him to art. However, after completing his secondary education in Brno, Litoměřice and Hostinné, he came to Prague to study medicine. In 1908 he finished his studies in Vienna and became a surgeon. He practiced in Bern, Vienna, and Berlin but he developed tuberculosis and tried to recover as a ship doctor on a trip to India and Japan in 1912. In 1913 he met Rahel Sanzara, a dancer, actress and, later, novelist, and their relationship lasted until she died of cancer in 1936. In the same year he met Franz Kafka and they became close friends. Kafka wrote in his Diaries 1914: "January 2. A lot of time well spent with Dr. Weiss". Weiss was in touch with other writers of the Prague Circle such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Johannes Urzidil. In 1914 Weiss returned to Austria to start a military physician career. He served for the duration of World War I on the Eastern Front, ultimately earning a golden cross for bravery. After the war he lived in Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia. He gave up his medical career in 1920 when he finished working in a Prague hospital. In 1921 he moved to Berlin, and began his most prolific period of writing, publishing nearly a novel a year. This period came to an end when, in 1933, he returned to Prague to care for his dying mother. He could not enter Nazi Germany and so he left for Paris in 1934. There he lived a poor life dependent on help from authors such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. He applied for, but did not receive, a grant from the American guild for German cultural freedom.