Portrait of a Danish Conman

Book excerpt: Frantz Leander Hansen has written a brilliant book about Otto Stein (Martin Zerlang, University of Copenhagen, reviewing the Danish edition in Scandinavian Studies, University of Illinois Press, Vol. 92, No. 2). Jacob Paludan's Danish classic novel Jørgen Stein (1933) includes the subordinate character Otto Stein, a man about town in the roaring 1920s and a promising barrister. Involvement in small-time crime leads to large-scale confidence trickery which ends in decline, fall and suicide. This literary portrait of an epoch of deceit and fraud as a cultural phenomenon brings to the fore the economics and criminal psychology of the period. Otto Stein is viewed as an ultra-topical figure of our time, someone whose impact on the modern world is important and felt within the spheres of literature, philosophy, jurisprudence, and criminal investigation of contemporary fraudulent behaviour. Inquiry focuses on the path that leads to his suicide. Literary sources of inspiration that contributed to the moulding of the character of Otto Stein are investigated, especially those of Herman Bang, Thomas Mann and Fjodor Dostojevskij. Relevant are Jacob Paludan's other five novels that were published prior to Jørgen Stein, where seeds to Otto's character are sown. Critical to understanding the novel and the character is the scam that deprived Paludan of a financial inheritance. Herewith a superb novelistic example of how a writer merges the historical with the contemporary to reveal a psychology of exploitation dangerously meaningful to us all.