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Jakob Wassermann, anti‐Semitism and German Politics
Author(s) -
Koester Rudolf
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1998.tb00104.x
Subject(s) - politics , judaism , nazism , irony , literature , classics , religious studies , german , history , art history , art , philosophy , theology , law , political science , archaeology
Anti‐Semitism pursued and preoccupied Wassermann from his childhood to the end of his life. When the author died, on New Year's Day 1934, the Nazis had been in power for less than a year. But their racial politics had already inflicted incalculable damage upon his literary career. Characterizations of anti‐Semitism and the Jewish experience can, of course, be traced throughout Wassermann's extensive novelistic oeuvre. However, it is in his (now) neglected essayistic writings that his abiding concern with this problem receives its most poignant and personal expression. This study surveys the novelist's always moving, sometimes controversial, accounts of the Jewish dilemma from the early “Das Los der Juden'’(1904) to Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921) and other (later) texts. In most of the essays the writer derives his conclusions from an interfusion of personal experience, events of past history and contemporary politics. Over the years his pessimism increased, but his commitment to justice never flagged (“In memoriam Walther Rathenau,'’“Rassenantagonismus,’“Der Jude in der Kunst,’“Selbstschau am Ende des sechsten Jahrzehnts.”) There is a final irony. During 1933 (the last year of Wassermann's life) a bizarre concatenation of political circumstances managed to produce a rift between the (by then) world‐renowned Jewish novelist and his Jewish publishing house, S. Fischer, whose founder and guiding light, Samuel Fischer, had been the author's lifelong friend.