Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897–1976) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, among the most original German-speaking writers of the twentieth century. His novella Baron Bagge, set during the Great War in the Hungarian borderlands, drifts into hallucinatory atmosphere and has become a cult modernist classic.

A member of the Austrian aristocracy and a veteran of the First World War, Lernet-Holenia led a life shadowed by exile from Nazi rule and by the collapse of empires. His metallic, precise prose, his metaphysics of border and dream, and his refusal of both realism and sentiment make him a rediscovered master of Austrian literature.