by Jan Weiss
Space travel, a standard trope of science fiction, is another futuristic theme Weiss adopts — with a difference: like the entire house of a thousand floors, it eventually turns out to be the product of a hallucinating soldier's feverish mind, and within that dream — or nightmare — the space travel industry is shown to be a lie, a cruel trick played on the inhabitants of Mullerdom by Universe Company. Their desire to "travel to the stars" makes them victims of Muller's henchmen who strip them of their possessions, enslave them or kill them in what becomes a terrible prophecy of real horrors to come. And it is here that Weiss predicts the Holocaust with its transports, gas chambers and piles of pedantically categorised belongings, in much the same way as Capek foresaw the use of atomic weapons in his 1922 novel Krakatit.
The novel works with an array of themes favoured by Weiss's contemporaries: part dystopian fantasy, part science fiction, part fairytale with a dash of the crime genre, it is primarily a work of social criticism, less akin to pure science fiction on the one hand and to literary works exploring the Freudian theories of human psychology and the subconscious that became popular at the time on the other — like, for example, another less known Central European classic revolving around the blurred line between dream and reality, Caliph the Stork by Weiss's Hungarian contemporary Mihály Babits. Oscillating between hyperreal dream and nightmarish reality, the main storyline of the dream eventually gives in to the reality of a semi-conscious, dying soldier who is rescued and brought back from the dimly lit, louse-ridden camp barracks to a hospital with its soothing, clean white bed, white ceiling and white uniforms of the doctors and "sisters of mercy" who save his life, as if in an act of redemption, just as he wakes from a dream in which he had committed a murder and brought the entire house of a thousand floors crashing down.
With its humanistic message and imaginative power, The House of a Thousand Floors is a modern classic that still speaks to readers today as it continues to gather layers of meaning in an ever-extending framework of literary and historical references. It is a unique novel, a masterpiece of more than one genre, unusual and still fresh, that has withstood the test of time for close to a century now.
Alexandra Büchler
Table of Contents
Translator's note
The House of a Thousand Floors
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
Afterword
