»Das Meer glänzte in seinem tiefsten Blau«

At first glance, the work of the Prague-born writer and musician Hermann Grab (1903-1949) has no particular affinity with the Mediterranean.Apart from a few journeys, there seem to be no explicit traces of a greater significance of the Mediterranean in his slender oeuvre.The short story The Murderer is an exception in this sense.It is a grotesque, highly allusive four-sided literary study of murder, fear, cowardice and opportunism in the face of the strengthening of Nazism in Europe.Against the setting of the Mediterranean, Grab weaves the symbolic and metaphorical dimensions of the sea into a small dialectic of Mediterranean culture and history.