Scott Denham’s essay, Friedrich Torberg: An Introduction appeared in NER 20.4 (1999):
Friedrich Torberg (1908—1979) was very much a part of the Prague and Viennese literary café scenes in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote a wicked schoolboy novel, Der Schüler Gerber hat absolviert (Berlin, 1930) [The Examination (London, 1932)]—the only one of his works which appears to have been translated in English-which catapulted him into the limelight of the café Herrenhof scene of Max Brod, Ernst Polak, and Alfred Polgar; in Vienna he associated with Karl Kraus, Franz Werfel, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and others. Three more novels published before the war were all well-enough received, but did not succeed in getting the critics past their notion of him as a bad boy cynic and lampooner.