The short novel
Brand’s Haide[
Brand’s Heath] was Arno Schmidt’s second book publication. Written in large part in 1949 and published in 1951 by Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg together with the story
Schwarze Spiegel[
Dark Mirrors], it belongs thematically to a sub-genre of post-1945 German novels, the “Heimkehrer”- and “Flüchtlingsroman”, the “repatriate” and “refugee” novels which dealt with the fate of German soldiers released from POW camps and with millions of East Germans fleeing westward in fear of the Red Army.
In Leviathan, Schmidt’s first published work, the first-person narrator jumps to his death, but the protagonist in Brand’s Haide survives the war and is released from a British POW camp in March of 1946 and finds himself assigned to a small village on
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Citation: Menke, Timm. "Brand’s Haide. Zwei Erzählungen. Contains Brand’s Haide and Schwarze Spiegel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 September 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28120, accessed 21 November 2024.]