Almost an English Author: Robert Neumann’s English‐language Novels

This article traces Robert Neumann’s emergence as an ‘English’ novelist in the 1940s and his rediscovery in Germany through the German translations of his English‐language novels. Arriving in Britain in 1933, Neumann continued to write and publish in German, though his work was also translated into English. The pattern of his publications up to 1939 illustrates his increasing dependence on the English market and therefore on the translator. His first novel in English, Scene in Passing (1942), demonstrated a remarkable facility in his adopted language which subsequent novels The Inquest (1944) and Children of Vienna (1946) confirmed . The article assesses these novels as English texts by an author whose concerns remained largely Central European, going on to compare them to the German translations which appeared in 1948–50. Two of the novels were later re‐published in new translations prepared by Neumann himself: Treibgut (The Inquest) (1960) and Kinder von Wien (1974). Although Neumann’s English‐language novels were widely and favourably reviewed when they appeared, they are now forgotten and long out of print. In Germany and Austria he is equally forgotten, remembered only as the brilliant parodist of the 1920s.