Swiss Review 3/2020

Swiss Review / June 2020 / No.3 16 Literature Like the protagonist in his first novel, Legras lovedGerman culture. He began writing in German, targeting a Ger- man-speaking audience. Legras would actually have be- come a sailor had a physical impediment not prevented him fromdoing so. However, hemade themost of his protracted semester breaks by travelling as a passenger on the high seas instead. His first major voyage took him to Chile. Leg- ras indulged his wanderlust so consistently thereafter that his companions nicknamed him “The devil of the sea”. These travels were to find eloquent expression in Legras’ novels. Their portrayals of the sea and seafaring are par- ticularly impressive, while their white-knuckle narratives mirror themany journeys that the author experienced travelling alone on small cargo vessels. Loss of German readership Legras’ works had attracted an en- thusiastic following in Germany by the mid-1930s. Following Hit- ler’s seizure of power, however, he lost both his prominent Berlin publisher andhis readership.With himbeingmarried to a Jew, we can only guess howmuchNazi Germa- ny’s anti-Semitic and racist laws contributed to him forfeiting the support of his German publisher. By the time Henri Legras-Herm died on 1 November 1948 in Fri- bourg aged 66, he had already been largely forgotten as an author. He even failed to find a publisher for his final book “Als die Nor- mandie noch ein Museum war” (When Normandy was still a mu- seum), despite regarding thiswork as his literary legacy. CHARLES LINSMAYER IS A LITERARY SCHOLAR AND JOURNALIST IN ZÜRICH CHARLES LINSMAYER The French son of a shipowner falls head over heels for Ger- man literature and music before marrying a German girl. At the outbreak of the FirstWorldWar, the youngman looks on in horror as the cathedrals that symbolise Christian Eu- ropean culture are destroyed by themutual hatred that has torn the continent asunder. Aiming to rescue France and save Germany from the hubris of the Prussian aristocracy, he volunteers to fight in the French trenches. After the war, however, our hero – now a shipowner himself – uses his métier to promote international reconciliation. Seafarer, adventurer and rebel This is the story of “Dome im Feuer” (Cathedrals on fire), a novel published by the Berlin publisher Grote in 1926 – and written in a style suggesting that the author originally grew up speaking French. The writer called himself Heinrich Herm and, according to the book sleeve, lived in Switzer- land. After this inaugural publication came sevenmore nov- els, set in every imaginable location except Switzerland. “DämonMeer” (The demon sea), 1927, and “Moira”, 1932, are exciting seafaring stories. “Begegnung imUrwald” (Jun- gle encounter), 1934, takes the reader to a world far from civilisation, and “Die Trikolore” (The tricolore), 1937, a cen- tury and a half back to the FrenchRevolution. The open seas make a comeback in “Die Dämonen des Djemaa el Fnaa” (The demons of Jemaa el-Fnaa), 1943, and “Kapitän Hage- dorns Fahrt ins Licht” (CaptainHagedorn’s journey into the light), 1944. Whodunnit “Die Mitgift” (The Dowry), 1941, juxtaposes the author’s passion for seafaringwith the crim- inologically adroit portrayal of a court case. This work is a relative outlier, but no coincidence: “Heinrich Herm” was the pseudonym for a university professor who taught Ro- man law and the history of law – something only insiders knew. The professor who liked to travel Heinrich Herm was none other than Henri Legras in real life. Born in 1882 in the French city of Rouen, Legras stud- ied in Rennes, Caen and Paris before taking up the post of professor at the University of Fribourg in 1912. He married German national Gertrud Schlesinger and became a citi- zen of Portalban on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel. His friends called him “Devil of the sea” The novels of lawyer Heinrich Herm injected an expansive sense of adventure into the otherwise patriotism-fuelled literature of pre-war Switzerland. “Outside, a tall crane’s electric searchlights quivered to and fro in constant rhythm. An iron-ore steamer was loaded. As the dark cloak of the night gradually dissipated into grey ash, a black flue slowly glided past behind the bare trees. Pushed down to the water line, like a soul weighed down by worldly feats, the ship sailed through the canal guarding the harbour exit before heading out into the storms of the Nordic seas. Despite its weight amid the winter storm, it refused to sink.” (Excerpt from “Die Mitgift” (The Dowry), Francke-Verlag, Berne, 1941; out of print)