A small intellectual disappointment caused by a temptation towards tidy solutions. Bukovina was the homeland of Robert Flinker, a psychiatrist and a writer influenced by Kafka, the author – in German – of stories and novels about enigmatical trials, obscure guilts and mysterious tribunals. Despite his obvious debt to Kafka, he was both personal and disquieting as a writer. Flinker was a Jew, and during the Nazi occupation he lived in hiding. When the Liberation came, in 1945, he killed himself. I had been fascinated by this man’s fate. I imagined someone who could stand up to the very imminence of death, but eventually finds himself unaccustomed to freedom and the end of the nightmare, or else someone who could endure Nazism as Evil, but not Stalinism as the smiling face of Liberation; one who, faced with the notion that the alternative to Hitler was Stalin, takes his life.
But Wolfgang Kraus has informed me that Flinker killed himself for love, on account of an infatuation and a jilting that affected him like a schoolboy. A potential novel about the novelist thus goes up in smoke. But, on the other hand, could it not all come to the same thing? When someone is weary of life he gets rid of it by choosing methods that are even unconscious and indirect, such as cancer or a heart-attack. Why not an unhappy love-affair? Unable to come to the point at once, and kill himself because freedom was identified with Stalin, Flinker may have required some intermediary, and for this reason taken a girl at random, but one able to give him that little extra shove that was all he needed.