Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years.

This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

Jeremy Adler is Emeritus Professor of German and Senior Research Fellow at King's College London. A specialist in comparative studies, he has published widely on Baroque literature, Romanticism, and Modernism and has written critical biographies of Goethe and Kafka. He is the editor of the collected edition of Franz Baermann Steiner's poetry.