Ernst Kaiser

Ernst David Kaiser (3 October 1911 – 1 January 1972) was an Austrian writer and translator.

Ernst David Kaiser was born in Vienna.

His father, a Jewish merchant, came from the Slovak part of Hungary, and his mother from Brno.

At birth he was Hungarian, but his father later opted to be Austrian.

Ernst Kaiser grew up in Vienna, attended high school, passed the Matura, did his military service and studied German.

Austria was annexed by the German Reich on 12 March 1938, before he was able to complete his doctorate.

A few months later Kaiser fled to Poland via Prague and from there by ship to Southampton in the United Kingdom.

He settled in London.

He found a job in a slaughterhouse where he dragged pork and sides of beef in cold storage.

When the war began Kaiser was interned "and then served for almost six years in the British Army in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany; afterwards in the military government in Hamburg as an interpreter with the rank of sergeant."

Later, he wrote that he had fought against Germany in Germany.

In Petersfield in 1941, he married Eithne Wilkins (1914–75), a Germanic Studies scholar, translator and poet from New Zealand, and the sister of Nobel laureate Maurice Wilkins.

Kaiser's first book, Schattenmann, a novella, was published in Hamburg in 1946 by the Hans Dulk publishing house.

By 1947, they were living in London; Kaiser had gained British citizenship and Eithne Wilkins worked as a lecturer at the University of London.

Kaiser applied to the Bollingen Foundation in New York in 1947 for a grant to write the second part of his novel Die Geschichte eines Mordes.

The writer Hermann Broch examined the first 480 pages of the manuscript for the Foundation.

Broch was full of praise and recommended promoting Kaiser.

He was aware that it would be difficult to find a publisher for the bulky book.

He made the suggestion of founding a library for collecting manuscripts worth publishing, for which no publisher can initially be found, so that they are not forgotten or lost.

Despite Broch's efforts, the Foundation refused to support Kaiser.

He wrote the second part of his novel without funding, as well as a series of novellas and short stories in the following years.

Together with his wife he translated books from German into English.

They are regarded as exceptionally good translators who worked for top publishers in the United States and the United Kingdom.

They translated authors such as Robert Musil, Goethe, Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Wiechert, Kokoschka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heimito von Doderer and Siegfried Lenz, as well as letters by Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.

On 28 October 1949 Kaiser and Wilkins published a front page essay about Musil in the Times Literary Supplement, praising him as "the most important novelist writing in German in this half-century".

Their translations of several works of Robert Musil were groundbreaking, including The Man Without Qualities, which they not only translated, but also edited in a new version for the estate.

Their work on Robert Musil was their main activity after 1950; they published numerous articles on Musil's work in journals and anthologies, including the 1962 extensive volume ''Robert Musil.

Eine Einführung in das Werk'' in Stuttgart.

Their relationship with the Bollingen Foundation became helpful.

In the period from 1954 to 1965, Kaiser and Wilkins were able to live in Rome for a total of eleven years thanks to several grants from the foundation to view and evaluate Musil's estate.

Their findings led to a several years-long disagreement with Adolf Frisé, who had published a complete edition of the works of Robert Musil through Rowohlt.

Frisé had not included some texts from the Musil estate in Rome.

After intense public discourse and publication of an English translation of the novel by Kaiser and Wilkins, Rowohlt issued a new edition.

In Die Zeit from 21 April 1967, one could read: "The long-standing arguments about the Musil edition, fueled by the inheritance investigations by Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, have finally found a happy ending. The Rowohlt publishing house announced that a new edition of his works was now being tackled. 1968 appear ... and the new edition of "The Man Without Qualities" prepared by Frisé in association with the Kaisers ... So that it seems as if one of the few outstanding German writers of this century would come up with a proper edition of his work after all."

Kaiser and Wilkins also played a key role in the relocation of Robert Musil's estate from Rome to Austria, where these materials are now archived in the Austrian National Library.

Ernst Kaiser tried several times to get his second book, Die Geschichte eines Mordes, published by German publishers.

Friends, like the Germanist Wilhelm Bausinger, tried to support him.

The manuscript lay with Suhrkamp Verlag for almost three years, where they signalled their willingness to publish it several times.

Kaiser was asked, however, to significantly shorten the text.

He refused; not because he didn't want to make any cuts, but because he felt that the work had to be "made objectively usable".