Discourse with Shadows

Discourse with Shadows, first published in 1958, is a stark, yet compassionate look at the lives of four Nazi concentration camp survivors and of a friend who returns to Frankfurt from England to locate a missing relative and her son Johann. Driven by their long-repressed anger, the group carries out the murder of a Nazi woman who often attended the tortures at the concentration camp; dire consequences follow which threaten the group of friends.

From the dustjacket: The scene is Frankfurt at the late war’s end: living there are four survivors of a Nazi concentration camp—and Franz Grünwald, who has spent the years since 1935 in England and has now returned to his former home town in search of a relative. We shall only add that the author displays here—in a first novel—such a power of sympathetic imagination as seems to us quite extraordinary. This is an extremely moving book; and while terror and wickedness are never far away, and no attempt is made to see things other than as they are, the total effect given is not only of compassion but also of beauty.