Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin Elephant", that every magician of the 20th century was "haunted" by Robert-Houdin, "…who cast an enormous shadow over their generation." American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) was so impressed by Robert-Houdin that, after reading his autobiography in 1890, Ehrich adopted the stage name of "Houdini" in honour of Robert-Houdin. He incorrectly believed that an "i" on the end of a name meant "like" in French; but Houdini, his own career and reputation established by that time, later lost his youthful respect for Robert-Houdin, believing that he took undue credit for other magicians' innovations, and wrote "The
Peter Weiss Name of the Law, 1957), "Was machen wir jetzt?" (What Do We Do Now?, 1958). In 1959 he directed his only full length (experimental) film "Hägringen" "(The Disappeared"). In the early 1950s, Weiss had begun to write again, producing a number of prose works, some in German, others in Swedish. Most are short, intense, surrealist text which suggest the influence of Kafka (whose work Weiss would later adapt for the stage). The most important of these prose texts is "Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers" ("The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman", 1952). It is a nearly hermetic experimental