An Offering for the Dead

An Offering for the Dead is a 1947 novel by the German writer Hans Erich Nossack. It follows the lone survivor of an unexplained doomsday event as he wakes up with amnesia in an empty city and struggles with identity and dreams. It was Nossack's debut novel and published by Wolfgang Krüger in Hamburg.
Written from 1943 to 1946, the book uses magic realist techniques to process the experience of indiscriminate bombings of German cities during World War II. Nossack had witnessed and survived the bombing of Hamburg, his hometown. The same experience was the basis for his autobiographical essay , published in 1948. Nekyia—the original title of An Offering for the Dead—is an ancient Greek word for a necromantic rite.
When An Offering for the Dead was published in English in 1992, Publishers Weekly called it a "hypnotic short novel" that "testifies to an extraordinary artistic sensibility" and avoids becoming self-indulgent through its "disciplined prose style". The scholar calls it one of Nossack's most complex works and groups it with The City beyond the River by Hermann Kasack, with which it shares a post-war "transcendence of contemporary history".