Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel

A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—&, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim & Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. 

This novella, first published in 1947 & now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, & brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth & Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany's prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring "the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological & spiritual ramifications."

Published to celebrate Keilson's hundredth birthday, Comedy in a Minor Key—& The Death of the Adversary, reissued in paperback—will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II & a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.

Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. He died in 2011 at the age of 101.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English.