Afterword: on translating The Seventh Well

Fred Wander called his recollections Das gute Leben,  The Good Life — good not in either of its narrow senses of virtuous or epicurean, but rich, full, kindly, generous.  Its alternate title is Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken — something like ‘remaining cheerful in the midst of horror. ’ He was born in Vienna in 1917,  and died there almost ninety years later,  in 2006. The horror was, if one may so put it,  in the midst of the cheerfulness. Between 1939 and 1945,  he was an inmate of twenty different Nazi camps in France, Germany, and Poland.  

As Das gute Leben relates, he did plenty of things besides  merely — merely — survive. He was born into a Jewish working-class family in Vienna; his father, an itinerant salesman, was often away, and, too much for his mother to manage, the young Fred grew up largely on the street. He left school at fourteen, kept himself by casual labour in Austria and, later, in Holland and France, was a vagrant, an autodidact. He was often hungry. As he beautifully puts it, he had an ‘ahasverisches Selbstver ständnis’ — he was, by instinct and conviction, a wandering Jew. After 1945, he returned to Vienna, as a self-taught photographer and reporter. In 1955, he took up an invitation to study at the newly created Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, in East Germany, where he lived with his second wife, Maxie Wander, and wrote books, including illustrated travel books and reportage (most notably about Corsica and the south of France, for which he felt a lifelong attachment). In 1983,  following Maxie’s death in 1977, he went to live in Vienna again, with a third wife, Susanne.

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