Zum blauen Affen / Der elfte Finger. Kriminalgeschichten.

by Walter Serner

“Serner was so naïve as to think he could find sympathizers in the world of art. After turning his back on the art world—the very art world that would later use his ideas like a brand of laundry detergent—he glorified a world of swindlers in which everybody deceives everybody.”—Hans RichterWalter Serner’s first story collection, published in German in 1921, brought to narrative form the essential philosophy he espoused in his earlier Dada manifesto/handbook, Last A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Who Wish to Be One—life is a con job and demands the skills of a swindler. With its depiction of a world of appearances in which nothing can be trusted, At the Blue Monkey helped establish the ex-doctor and renounced Dadaist as a literary "Maupaussant of crime" and offers in this first English translation thirty-three stories of criminals, con artists, prostitutes, and gadabouts engaged in a variety of forms of financial insolvency, embezzlement, sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal diseases and drugs. With a mordant humor that renders the criminal code into something nearly occult, Serner offers a bevy of hoodlums, pimps, and swindlers utilizing a potpourri of European argot to disquieting effect, waging a secret war against anything crossing their paths—especially in affairs of the ultimate confidence scheme, the heart. Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms where human animals are either on unsavory display or on the make, these short tales are presented to the reader like so many three-card Montes in which the reader too late comes to realize that they may well themselves be the literary mark.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, German Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Walter Serner was born Walter Eduard Seligmann in Carlsbad, Bohemia (then Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic). In 1913 he studied promotion law in the Austro-Hungarian capital of Vienna and completed his doctorate in the University of Greifswald.

With the outbreak of World War I, he escaped to Switzerland in 1914 and participated in Dada activities in Zürich, Geneva, and Paris until 1920. During World War I he was the editor of the magazines Sirius and Zeltweg and a writer for Die Aktion. In 1921 Serner stayed in Italy with the artist Christian Schad. Beginning in 1923 he began living in various European cities, including Barcelona, Bern, Vienna, Carlsbad, and Prague.

From 1925, Serner became the target of anti-Semitism. Serner had been born Jewish and had converted to Catholicism in 1913.

His play Posada premiered in Berlin in 1927, but his other planned shows were forbidden. In 1933 Serner's books were banned by the government of Nazi Germany.

In 1938 Serner married his partner Dorothea Herz in Prague, where he was working as a private teacher. When war broke out, they had no chance to escape from the occupied country. In 1942 he and his wife were interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and three weeks later were moved in the direction of "the East", where they perished somewhere near Minsk.

Walter Serner's most successful novel Die Tigerin (The Tigress) was made into an English-language feature film by writer/director Karin Howard and released in 1992. At that time the novel was re-published in Germany where Serner's books enjoy a cult following. The film was shot in Berlin and Carlsbad.

Reviews

[Tosh]

Reading this collection of short stories by Walter Serner reminds me very much of Damon Runyon. Both authors dwell in the criminal/hustler world, except Serner is very much part of the early Weimer era in Germany. And both have a certain sense of language that is very specific to the class and time of its citizens. A very interesting book, on a historical social level as well as being one of the off-shoots of the DADA world as well.

[AB]

I've been picking at this for a while now, and will continue to come back to it. However, I might as well put down my thoughts. I've been getting into interwar German lit recently and noticed this unusual little book. Unusual is the perfect description. The stories within are hardly stories. Scenes are a more apt description. The scenes are often disorientating. You're drawn into the middle of some action without explanation and set there to watch things unfold. There's a wit that you have to pay really close attention to in order to appreciate. Something which I feel has been the victim of being lost in the translation. The style of the stories reminds me of Gary Lutz, just without the finely crafted sentences.

Something interesting to pick up every once in a while but not something I'd widely recommend.

[Jared]

A collection of enigmatic vignettes that provide glimpses of the underworld universe in which the slice of life narratives (or perhaps "scenes") exist. Serner's prose is simultaneously dense and specific (and sometimes frustratingly thick with slang and non sequitors), and each story is written as if related to you by an acquaintance. I have a feeling it will take some re-reading to better appreciate Serner's stories, but they are mostly enjoyable on a surface level as well.

Favorite stories were "A Procurer of Note," "Philipp Wants Revenge," "Kuhle's Strange Lesson," "The Bralasuring Saravala," "The Seduction of Mizzi," "The Revenge of Calenovich the Serb," and "The Enchantment of the Excentrique Fanoche."

[Mike Wenzel]

An absurd walk on the wild side.

[Dylan Rock]

A collection of witty stories from underworld of post World War One Germany and Paris. Imagine a prose version of "The City" Frans masereel or "M" by Fritz lang with a hint of early William Burroughs