The Serf By Josef Winkler Translation and Afterword by Michael Mitchell

This novel belongs to the genre which has made a significant contribution to Austrian literature over the last twenty-five years, the Anti-Heimatroman, novels which attack the conventional idyllic view of rural life and reveal the restrictions and repressions of an impoverished and authoritarian society. The hero is a writer who has returned to the hell from which he thought he had escaped. His ability to write liberates him but also makes him an outsider, as does his homosexuality, seen as a stigma in this very conservative rural society, where attitudes from the Nazi past are often still there just below the surface. Through the intensity of his language Winkler turns this picture of a backward rural community into a dark account of the human condition, in which we are all serfs to Death.