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walter serner
Walter Serner was born into a Jewish family as Walter Eduard Seligmann on January 15, 1889 in the Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad at that time).
His father, Berthold Seligmann, owned the town's major newspaper, the Karlsbader Zeitung. In 1909, he graduated from the gymnasium in Kadan, which was
attended by many Jewish students from the region, and soon thereafter matriculated at the University of Vienna's Law Faculty, formally converting to
Catholicism and changing his name to Serner. In 1911, he organized in Karlovy Vary's Café Park Schönbrunn a large exhibition of Oskar Kokoschka's work.
Serner left for Berlin in 1912 where he became a contributing writer for the avant-garde magazine Die Aktion. He finished his law degree at the
University of Greifswald. A staunch pacifist, with the outbreak of WWI he left for Switzerland and ended up in Zürich co-editing with Hugo Ball and Emmy
Hennings the magazine Der Mistral (where under the name Wladimir Senakowski he published his first prose) and participating in the Dada Cabaret Voltaire evenings,
for which he became notorious. Active as well in Geneva and Bern, Serner was one of the leading contributors to the literature and
arts monthly Sirius. In 1918 in Lugano he wrote his famous manifesto of Dada, Letzte Lockerung. Manifest Dada
(The Last Loosening: A Dada Manifesto), much of which was later plagiarized by Tristan Tzara for his Dada Manifesto. His first volume of crime stories appeared, and in 1920
he met with Breton in Paris, broke with Tzara, and now with a Czechoslovakian passport headed to Naples to join Christian Schad. By 1921 he was back in Germany and
working on his novel The Tigress, which came out in 1925 in Berlin, as well as publishing more volumes of short crime stories, but now not with his former
publisher Steegeman, who became so angered that he published a letter in the Prager Tagblatt calling Serner an "international con man," "pimp,"
and "whorehouse proprietor."
Serner wandered around Europe for the rest of the decade and seemed to drop out of sight, further giving credence to the myth that he had become part of the
criminal underworld. By the end of the 1920s he returned to Czechoslovakia, married his longtime girlfriend from Berlin, Dorothea Herz, and lived the quiet
life of a schoolteacher in Prague (Revolucni 30). The Nazis banned and burned his books once they took power in Germany.
When Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, Serner and his wife made numerous futile attempts to leave the
country for Shanghai. On August 10, 1942 they were deported to the Terezin concentration camp and ten days later, on August 20, put on transport No. Bb headed to the East.
It appears Serner and his wife died in Riga, though no one really knows.
Hans Richter noted: "Serner was so naïve as to think he could find sympathizers in the world of art. After he turned his back on the art world — the very art
world that later used his ideas like a brand of laundry detergent — Serner glorified a world of criminals in which everybody deceives everybody."
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Books by Walter Serner by Twisted Spoon:
The Last Loosening:
A Handbook for the Con Man
also by the author:
Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka!
The Tigress [film]
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