author
Ernst Weiss
1882–1940
A doctor by training and a novelist by calling, he wrote sharp, psychologically intense fiction shaped by exile, war, and the collapse of Europe around him. His best-known work, The Eyewitness, stands as one of the haunting literary responses to the Hitler era.
2 Audiobooks
Die Verdorrten
by Ernst Weiss
Der Fall Vukobrankovics
by Ernst Weiss
About the author
Born in Brno in 1882, Ernst Weiss was a German-speaking Austrian writer and physician of Jewish descent. He studied medicine in Prague and Vienna, worked as a ship's doctor and later as a surgeon, and moved in the wider Central European literary world that included Franz Kafka and other Prague writers.
His fiction is known for its psychological pressure, moral tension, and close attention to people under extreme strain. Alongside his medical career, he wrote novels, stories, essays, and plays; among the best known is The Eyewitness, a novel linked to the rise of Hitler and published after his death.
After the Nazi rise to power, Weiss lived in exile, including time in Prague and Paris. In June 1940, shortly after German troops entered Paris, he died there, ending a life marked by displacement but also by a remarkable body of work that has continued to attract readers interested in modern European literature.