Jakob Wassermann
1873–1934
Biography
Jakob Wassermann was a German novelist, born on 10 March 1873 in Fürth in Bavaria, into a Jewish family. His father ran a shop, and his mother died while he was still a boy. He began publishing short pieces in small newspapers and, after a brief apprenticeship with a businessman in Vienna, decided that writing would be his life. In 1894 he moved to Munich, where he worked on the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, and there he came to know Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann.
His first novel, Melusine, appeared in 1896, and from 1898 he worked as a theatre critic in Vienna. In the early years of the twentieth century he was among the most widely read German-language novelists, with a long run of novels, novellas and stories behind him. He also wrote essays and an autobiography, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921), in which he examined the tension between being German and being Jewish. Critics most often single out The Maurizius Case, or Der Fall Maurizius (1928), the first volume of a trilogy about justice.
In 1926 he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. He resigned in 1933, avoiding expulsion by a narrow margin, and that same year his books were banned in Germany because of his Jewish ancestry. He died at his home in Altaussee, in Styria, on 1 January 1934. The site holds Caspar Hauser; oder, Die Trägheit des Herzens, Roman, his 1908 novel about the foundling usually called Kaspar Hauser, who turned up in Nuremberg in 1828 and could say little of his origins. It is written in German, so it suits readers who can read the original.
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Books
Caspar Hauser; oder, Die Trägheit des Herzens, Roman
by Jakob Wassermann
In 1828 a strange youth appears in Nuremberg, barely able to speak or walk, holding a letter that explains nothing. Wassermann's novel follows Caspar as teachers, officials and a mysterious English lord take him up, study him and use him, while rumours of noble birth gather…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.