Soldier and architect

The Viennese Ernst Hortner fought in the First World War on the battlefields of the Balkans and the Italian Front. A well-read architecture student, he chose something special to accompany him in the years of his absence: a copy of Goethe’s “Faust” which was with him, in his own words, “on the winter campaigns throughout Serbia and into inland Montenegro, the mountains near Ipek, in the war years 1915/16”.