Der Berg der Läuterung

by Emil Ertl

"Der Berg der Läuterung" by Emil Ertl is a collection of stories written in the early 20th century. Framed by a Dantean motif of trial and purification, it portrays post–World War I Viennese lives tested by vanity, poverty, and moral choice. The pieces follow elegant and fallen households, clerks and craftsmen, and the uneasy bargains between love, pride, and survival, with figures such as Aimée, her estranged husband Harry, the widowed Berta Larisch, and the ruined friends Ziervogel and Bock at the center. The opening of the book first presents Die Sofapuppe: Aimée, a wealthy young wife, is unsettled by a Japanese doll that seems to speak, then tracks its maker to a cold attic where she finds her former friend Berta—now a dignified, impoverished war widow with a small son—quietly surviving by crafting luxury puppets. Stirred by shame and impulse, Aimée secretly leaves her diamond rivière in Berta’s sewing basket, only to face her husband’s cold vanity and later receive the necklace back, intact. The next piece, Das Rotkehlchen, shifts to the retired confectioner Ziervogel and his dour friend Bock, ground down by inflation, theft, and merciless bureaucracy; alongside Anna’s tender wish to free a pet robin and her visits to a sick child upstairs, the two men weather a day of petty humiliations that ends with a grim pact to end their lives in the Danube once fair weather comes, even as they bicker about their children and an old, almost comic childhood feud.