A01=Peter Flamm
Author_Peter Flamm
Category=FBC
Category=FJMF
divided self
dual identity
eq_bestseller
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
First World War
German literature
identity loss
mental health fiction
mistaken identity
modernism war
modernist classics
rediscovered classics
return from war
split identity
stream of consciousness
war trauma
World War One novel
Product details
- ISBN 9781805332268
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 23 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Pushkin Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of First World War trauma
Hans, an esteemed surgeon, has just returned from the hellish battlefields of the First World War. But everything in his home feels alien, even his wife Grete. As he tries to regain a sense of normality, he is haunted by nightmarish visions and a profound sense of dissociation. Has the war turned him into someone else? Or has another man wormed his way into Hans's life?
Told in a feverish monologue, A Shadow of Myself is a vivid, hallucinatory immersion in an unsettled mind. First published in 1926 and rediscovered in Germany only last year, this lightning-bolt of a war classic is now appearing in English for the first time.
Peter Flamm, whose real name was Erich Mosse (1891-1963), was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. He began writing columns and short stories for the newspapers belonging to his uncle, Rudolf Mosse, while still a medical student. A Shadow of Myself was his debut novel, and it met with huge acclaim when it was first published in 1926. In the following years, he published three further novels while continuing to practise as a doctor until he was forced to flee Germany in 1933. He settled in New York and worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, treating William Faulkner, among others.
