Wilhelm Speyer's juvenile novel Die Stunde des Tigers [The Hour of the Tiger] initially appeared as a newspaper preprint in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in the summer of 1938. With the help of a subsidy granted by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, the author finally managed to complete the work he had begun in 1935. The edition shown here was published by Querido Verlag, Amsterdam, in 1939. It had only been on the market for a few months when the German occupying forces forcibly stopped the publishing company's work in May 1940.

The novel focuses on the friends Camillo and Yü, who are both members of an international pathfinder group in Switzerland. The friends fall out over a watch belonging to Camillo's father, who gave it to Yü. However, Yü cannot explain himself to Camillo since he had made a promise to Camillo's father. This promise was to put him in great danger.

In an analysis of the Chinese character Yü, literary scholar Dirk Krüger wrote that he "offered his knowledge and skills for the development of others. This had nothing to do with assimilation, with giving up his own identity or being subservient, but rather with being accepted as an acknowledged partner with equal rights and being able to live and develop in this kind of relationship" (cited according to Karrenbrock/Fähnders (ed.), Wilhelm Speyer, 2009). Speyer thus succeeds in using a story that can be read superficially as an adventure novel to portray the situation of exile as an experience which offers possibilities for action and can be turned into something productive despite all its difficulties.

Further reading:
Krüger, Dirk: Wilhelm Speyer im Exil: „Die Stunde des Tigers“, in: Karrenbrock, Helga/Fähnders, Walter (Hg.): Wilhelm Speyer (1887–1952). Zehn Beiträge zu seiner Wiederentdeckung, Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009, S. 175–190