Mars in Aries

Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things – including the ‘military exercise’ – are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe – and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors.

Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book’s entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author’s proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s finest and most celebrated novels.