Walter Serner

Walter Serner (1889–1942) helped found the Dada movement in Zurich and embodied its most cynical and anarchic aspects. After breaking with the movement, he began publishing crime stories as well as the 1925 novel The Tigress. Moving constantly across Europe, he eventually disappeared and was rumored to have vanished into the criminal milieu he wrote about; but he had in fact returned to Czechoslovakia, married, and become a schoolteacher. In 1942, he and his wife presumably died after being moved from a concentration camp, his books banned and burned by the Nazis.