By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In August 1912, in Neue Rundschau, Stephan Zweig analyzed the work of notable new writers who had appeared in German literature: “Apart from Thomas Mann, certainly the one with the greatest hope of creating a truly German novel, two writers, Heinrich Mann and Jacob Wasserman have already shown with their books that they have broken free of the German tradition.”
Jacob Wassermann was born on March 10, 1873, in Fürth, Bavaria, to a bourgeois Jewish family, soon after the establishment of Jewish emancipation in the newly united Germany. He is the author of 17 novels, five plays, and dozens of short stories and essays. He was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1926, and in 1933, after the Nazi coup, he resigned and his books were banned.
Wasserman was an advocate of the assimilation of the Jews. He called Zionism a “mistaken, criminal and suicidal” ideology. In his opinion, it is better for Jews to perish or be expelled than to abandon “their mission and destiny” as Germans. The author believed that a writer’s creations are defined only by his place of birth and residence, not by his national or religious affiliation. After moving to Austria, he confessed, “I could never shake off a certain amount of shame. I was ashamed of the behavior of the Jews, of their manners, […] at times my shame overwhelmed me so much that it turned into despair and disgust.”
Wasserman wrote: “I am German and I am Jewish, fully German and fully Jewish. One cannot be separated from the other.” Zweig wrote of the complicated relationship of colleague and tribesman to Germans and Jews: “Delving deeper into Wasserman’s books, one can understand how painfully he suffered because of his innate duality, one can sense his passionate desire to find the direct person.” Martin Buber, in Jewry and Humanity, wrote of the duality of Jewry: “Jewry is neither simple nor unequivocal, it is filled with contradictions. It is a polar phenomenon.” In defense of the thesis philosopher refers to the words of Wasserman: “One thing is true: the charlatan and a natural man, sensitive to beauty and hostile to it, voluptuous and ascetic, charlatan and gambler, fanatic and cowardly slave – all this is in the Jew.” Buber comments on the writer’s statement: “These words of Jacob Wasserman express what I perceive as the main problem of Jewry, the mysterious, strange and creative contradiction of its existence – its bifurcation. […] No other nation has such fiery players and traitors, no other nation has produced such sublime prophets and liberators. […] No one, like the Jew, can understand what it means to be seduced by oneself.”
Like Zweig, for years Wasserman denied Jewish solidarity and considered Eastern European Jews an alien people: “If I talked to a Polish or Galician Jew and tried to understand his way of life and thinking, I could feel compassion and sorrow, but no sense of brotherhood. He was a complete stranger to me, and when a sense of sympathy was lacking, even repulsive.”
In his memoirs of 1921, Wasserman describes the attitude of commanders in the army toward the Jewish soldier: “Although I tried with all my heart and with all my strength to fulfill my soldierly duty, reaching the required level, I failed to gain the recognition of my commanders.” He felt that the officers treated him and other Jewish soldiers with contempt. In the army, during World War I, the writer experienced monstrous antisemitism: “From the very beginning I encountered the blunt, rigid, almost wordless hatred that pervaded the common people. […] The name ‘antisemitism’ could hardly define its character, source, depth or purpose. […] There is something specifically German about it. […] It is German hatred.”
In 1921, the writer wrote his autobiography, My Way as a German and a Jew. There he wrote: “I would like, prompted by an inner need and the demand of the time, to give myself an account of the most problematic part of my life, the part which concerns my Jewish origin and my existence as a Jew; not just a Jew, but a German Jew – two concepts which even for a naive person uncover the fullness of misunderstanding, tragedy, controversy, strife and suffering. […] I am irresistibly drawn to shed light on the essence of the disharmony that has passed through my entire creative work and existence, and over the years it has become more and more painfully felt and recognized.”
The heartache of the writer’s inescapable dual perception takes the form of despair precisely when the Jews have equal rights with the Germans: “We plead in vain for a nation of poets and thinkers on behalf of its poets and philosophers. Any prejudice that seemed to disappear from the modern world grows thousands of new ones, like carrion breeds worms. […] In vain do we interrupt with logic their mad cries. They say: does he dare open his mouth? Strangle him! In vain do we behave in an exemplary manner. […] We ask in vain for namelessness. They say: coward! He crawls to the shelter, haunted by a corrupted conscience. […] We help them in vain to remove the chains of bondage. They say: Surely, he has found some use in it. […] We live and die for them in vain. They say: he is a Jew.” Wasserman noted bitterly, “I grieve more for the Germans than for the Jews. Should we not grieve most for those whose love is deep, though unrequited?”
Wasserman belonged to the category of Jews who loved Germany unilaterally and unrequitedly, such as Berthold Auerbach, Walter Rathenau, Ernst Lissauer, Albert Ballin, Fritz Haber, and Leon Jessel. He confused his native language with his homeland. Wasserman, with his rich novelist imagination, lived for some time in a virtual world, passing off a wishful Germany as real. He was deceived by the emancipation of the Jews. Germany, not yet Nazi, but nationalist, left him no right to be German. In the last year of the writer’s life, his colleague Lion Feuchtwanger wrote the novel The Opperman Family (1933), in which the Jewish protagonists are shocked by the treachery of Germany toward them, its citizens, natives: “Their homeland, their Germany, proved to be a traitor. They had stood so firmly on the soil of their homeland, established themselves on it for centuries, and now suddenly it is slipping from under their feet.” The burning of the Jews from their undivided love of Germany was an ominous prelude to their burning in the ovens of the Holocaust.
The severity of the Jewish question crushed Wasserman, preventing him from becoming a great writer. There was a time when he was compared to Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. The latter convinced the writer that the enormous success of his works proved that there was no serious antisemitism. Wasserman rejected Mann’s argument. He reminded Mann that he and his wife hide their Jewish heritage from their children: Thomas Mann’s wife was a baptized Jew. Wasserman wrote to Mann, “How would you feel if you were rejected because of your Lübeck background? In reality you feel the opposite: you are respected for your background. Until today, in spite of all my successes, in spite of all the books I’ve written, I keep bumping into the same old wall, the same ridiculous fears; I keep feeling the traditional disgust that cuts to the stomach and strikes at the inner self of man.”
Wasserman laid bare his soul wounded by anti-Semitism and rejection of German and Austrian society.
On May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned thousands of books by unwanted writers, among them the works of Wasserman. He sensed a bitter truth: despite intense attempts to become German, a Jew cannot ignore his Jewishness. The grindstone of antisemitism pulverized the great talent of the writer. The artist could not create at a high level with weights on his soul, with continuous anxiety over his inability to write fully and create works of literature of a people who did not accept him.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.