Mars in Aries

Mars in Aries (a literal translation of the German original title, Mars im Widder) is the most widely known novel by the Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia. It was written during the winter of 1939–1940 and is about the author's combat experience during the invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht at the start of World War II. The novel draws its disturbing quality from an intimate interlacing of precisely described authentic combat episodes with a concept of a pervasive Otherworld that merges with our reality in a way that makes it difficult to determine whether one has already transgressed its borders. It stands in the tradition of the early 20th-century Austrian psychological novel genre of which Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story and Leo Perutz' The Master of the Day of Judgement are other famous examples. Mars in Aries was recognised as a Penguin Modern Classic with a 2025 edition.

Plot summary

As Count Wallmoden, an Austrian World War I veteran and lieutenant of the reserve, readies himself for a four-week military exercise which is scheduled to start on August 15, 1939, he experiences the first of several derealization episodes. Later, during an idle evening spent in talk with his fellow officers, as the discussion touches on the topic of spiritism, his regimental commander half-jokingly promises Wallmoden that whenever they meet he would indicate whether he is still alive or already dead because that might not be immediately apparent to a living person. During a training attack near the village of Würmla Wallmoden has an apparition of naked ghosts swirling around him. He keeps this vision to himself until much later when he reports it to a military physician, who tells him that there is nothing necessarily wrong with him, as hallucinations in the sane are not uncommon as most people believe.

While spending an off-duty evening in Vienna Wallmoden socially meets people who, as it eventually turns out, are not quite what they seem and might in fact be members of the Austrian resistance. Among them is a strange aristocratic lady, Baroness Pistohlkors, who states that she is German by birth but lived in Sioux Falls as a child before coming to Austria.