Ernst Kaiser grew up in Vienna, attended high school, passed the Matura, did his military service and studied German.
When the war began Kaiser was interned "and then served for almost six years in the British Army in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany; afterwards in the military government in Hamburg as an interpreter with the rank of sergeant.
[1] Kaiser applied to the Bollingen Foundation in New York in 1947 for a grant to write the second part of his novel Die Geschichte eines Mordes.
They translated authors such as Robert Musil, Goethe, Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Wiechert, Kokoschka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heimito von Doderer and Siegfried Lenz, as well as letters by Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.
On 28 October 1949 Kaiser and Wilkins published a front page essay about Musil in the Times Literary Supplement, praising him as "the most important novelist writing in German in this half-century".
In the period from 1954 to 1965, Kaiser and Wilkins were able to live in Rome for a total of eleven years thanks to several grants from the foundation to view and evaluate Musil's estate.
Their findings led to a several years-long disagreement with Adolf Frisé, who had published a complete edition of the works of Robert Musil through Rowohlt.
In Die Zeit from 21 April 1967, one could read: "The long-standing arguments about the Musil edition, fueled by the inheritance investigations by Eithne Kaiser-Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, have finally found a happy ending.
"[4] Kaiser and Wilkins also played a key role in the relocation of Robert Musil's estate from Rome to Austria, where these materials are now archived in the Austrian National Library.
Kaiser then sent the manuscript to Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, with whom he had been in personal contact for three years regarding the revision of the Musil edition.
Bachér returned to Germany and Ernst Kaiser and his wife moved back to Great Britain in 1966.
There was no Kaiser estate in Reading and Eithne Wilkins' brother refused to provide any information.
Bachér reported on Ernst Kaiser, his wife and his missing texts at two forums of the Else Lasker-Schüler Society.
In the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach there were numerous references to Kaiser, correspondence with writers, trade journals and publishers.
Bachér went to Marbach and read the text "Das große Haus" and many letters between Kaiser and Bausinger in the archive.
After reading the entire manuscript, Braun suggested publishing the first part of the text as Die Geschichte eines Mordes.
Ingrid Bachér took it upon herself, as promised at the time, to "make the text objectively usable" in Kaiser's sense, to "tighten and shorten" it.
There is now a "readable text" that tells of a man who becomes surreally embroiled in a murder case, falling into a trap of reality and fiction.