Comedy in a Minor Key

About Hans Keilson

Hans Keilson (1909-2011) was a German-Dutch novelist poet psychoanalyst and child psychologist. Keilson studied pharmacology in Berlin but was prevented from working in the field by the Nazi law prohibiting Jews from employment. He published his first novel in 1933 which was banned by the Nazis the following year. In 1936 he fled Germany for the Netherlands where he later became active in the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It was this experience that inspired his novel Comedy in a Minor Key first published in German in 1947. Keilson went on to become a psychiatrist specialising in children's war trauma and achieved great international recognition as a writer shortly before his death at the age of 101.