Widely known as a friend of Franz Kafka (q. v.), Ernst Weiss – also a German-speaking Jew from Prague – was a talented author whose novels, stories and literary essays have not yet received their deserved acclaim. Like Russian Anton Chekhov (q. v.) and fellow Austrian Jew Arthur Schnitzler (q. v.), Weiss was a physician as well as a creative writer. Many of his novels take as their concern illness, medical careers, and medical ethics, as well as criminal psychology. They explore human biology and drives, often including a passionate, sometimes dangerously uncontrollable drive for knowledge. His first novel revealed his remarkably early insight that x-rays can cause cancer; in his last novel, based on a real incident, a physician treats a young Adolf Hitler (q. v.) for hysterical…
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Citation: Saur, Pamela S.. "Ernst Weiss". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 September 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11735, accessed 23 November 2024.]
