The writer and journalist Richard A. Bermann, alias Arnold Höllriegel, travelled extensively between 1923 and 1926. His first journey took him via Trieste and Alexandria to Cairo. Later, he wrote reports for the newspapers Der Tag, Berliner Tageblatt and Prager Tagblatt from Palestine, and, at the end of 1923 and the beginning of 1924, from Beaulieu, Nice, Monte Carlo and Cap Ferrat. His natural inquisitiveness eventually led him to the Amazon. In his most-reviewed and most popular bookDas Urwaldschiff [The forest ship, a book of the Amazon, 1930], Bermann explores the opposition between a yearning for one’s home and a feeling of rootedness on the one hand, and travel and the feeling of never actually arriving on the other.

Returning to Austria from his travels around the world, Bermann published an article, Heimkehr nach Österreich [Returning Home to Austria], in which he wrote that the Austria he had returned home, while certainly a charming country, was somewhat too wild and primitive for him (in: Der Tag, 4 April 1926).

While during this period these changes of scenery were still voluntary and Bermann always returned back to his homeland of Austria, the situation changed there in the thirties. When the Austrian parliament was eliminated on 7 March 1933 and the emergency decree established, censorship was introduced and the journalist Bermann was only able to publish under restricted freedom of the press. The daily newspaper Der Tag, in which Bermann’s newspaper article “Heimkehr” (Returning Home) had appeared in April 1926 increasingly lost its left-liberal alignment.

Twelve years later, in March 1938, Bermann fled that country forever. He recorded his experiences in a report Meine Flucht aus Österreich [My Escape from Austria] in 1938.