Gudnatz, the Grafter

Anton Gudnatz earns a tidy profit as a middleman profiteering in the post-war black market, but will his conscience catch up with him and save him before it is too late?

"That's what you get when you help people so that they don't starve," he murmured, drew on his cigar, saw that it had gone out, and threw it away. "But Anton Gudnatz is not a good man, and hasn't been natty in a long time."

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933); appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926); and also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

"He investigates the oppositions in the inner life not by that which separates them, by which they just become oppositions - but rather by that which brings them close to one another. ... He does not try to make comprehensible why a man acts in some way, instead he simply depicts the animated urge from which he must act in a certain way." - Arthur Moeller-Bruck