The Soul of André Garaine by Marietta Eidlitz. A German youth novel in the age of psychoanalysis.
Ein deutscher Jugendroman im Zeitalter der Psychoanalyse
Keywords:
youth novel, psychoanalysis, Artur Wolf Verlag, Nazi persecution, family history, girls’ secondary school, Prague, PlzeňAbstract
In 1930, a girl by the name of Marietta Eidlitz, born in 1912 in Prague and attending secondary school in the west Bohemian city of Plzeň, published a youth novel in a Vienna publishing house that she had written when she was only 16. The Soul of André Garaine tells the story of a young man who grew up in foster care, went through all the trials and tribulations of adolescence and gradually became a grown-up. The novel received little public attention after it came out and was, not because of the author’s “notoriety” but because of its psychoanalytical theme, placed on the first index of banned books by the Nazis (1935). The following article traces the biography of the author (and her husband) until her death in the United States in 2009 and takes a closer look at the novel’s content and themes.