¿Yo?

This novel was a major bestseller in Weimar Germany; praised at the time for its stylistic modernity and profound content, it fell into obscurity following the Nazi book burnings and the author’s emigration to New York. It took nearly a century for the work to resurface: it was reissued in the original language—once again to great acclaim—in 2023, and its Spanish translation coincides with the centenary of its initial publication. On the final day of the Great War, a soldier—Wilhelm Bettuch, a baker by trade—steals a dead man’s passport in a bid to escape the trenches as quickly as possible. He boards a train and sets off, only to find himself—inexplicably—recognized upon arrival as the man whose identity he has assumed: Dr. Hans Stern, an officer and renowned Berlin surgeon. He moves into the doctor’s home and embraces a new life complete with an elegant bourgeois household, a loving wife, an adorable baby, a devoted mother, and even a mistress—alongside a bustling medical practice where, inexplicably, he proves adept at performing treatments and surgeries. Everything seems to be going smoothly, save for the dog: while in the *Odyssey* the dog is the one to recognize its master’s return from war, here it is the only creature to harbor suspicions, growling and snapping at the imposter. That is, until he is called upon to serve as a forensic expert in a court case, and his past life comes back to haunt him... Through a torrential stream of consciousness, the protagonist’s mind blends his new daily experiences with memories of his former identity—and, in a move that was groundbreaking for its time, with a depiction of war trauma that predates canonical works such as *All Quiet on the Western Front* (1929).