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A Dutch biography of the Jewish-German-Dutch psychoanalyst and literary writer Hans Keilson (1909–2011) has recently been written by Jos Versteegen. A German translation will be published shortly. Keilson is of iconic importance for post-war Dutch and German psychoanalysis. This is underpinned by his literary oeuvre in the German language consisting of a series of three novels (Life Goes On, A Comedy in Moll and The Death of the Adversary). It also includes several collections of poetry and essays.
The well-written biography is captivating because Hans Keilson was a man of many talents, whose colourful life has been marked by the dramatic European history of the first half of the twentieth century. He was able to sublimate in his work the destructiveness of which he was one of the countless victims. Yet he himself was deeply wounded, and this wound did not heal in his “new lives”.
Keilson grew up in a liberal middle-class Jewish family in a small town in the heart of former East Prussia. After the takeover of power by the Nazis, he barely managed to get his first novel published by S. Fischer in 1933. Then, a few years later he had to abandon his medical studies. As a qualified physical education teacher, he subsequently devoted himself to coaching Jewish children in Berlin. Following the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws, he fled to the Netherlands in 1936.
In 1939 he persuaded his parents to leave Germany to join him. Both parents were “abtransportiert” in 1943 and subsequently murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Keilson himself survived the war by hiding. Although the existence of the gas chambers was known in the Netherlands by 1944, many remained hopeful that their loved ones would return. The biography aptly describes the dismay in 1945 when it became clear that this would not be the case.
Keilson remained in the Netherlands after the war. He qualified as a medical doctor, specializing as a psychiatrist and then as a psychoanalyst. As a (child and a