This is what someone who was badly marked by primitive German anti-Semitism writes about himself: “I had a straight nose and was quiet and modest.”
Photo: dpa
The man is almost forgotten, even though at the beginning of the 20th century he was what would be called a best-selling author today: Jakob Wassermann. In the period between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Weimar Republic, he was one of the most widely read German-language storytellers, corresponded with colleagues such as Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and wrote several thick, successful novels one after the other, the most famous of which was “The Gänsemännchen” (1915). and “The Mauritius Case” (1927). Today hardly anyone remembers the author and his work, apart from a handful of literary scholars.
In 1921 – when the novelist, who was also highly respected abroad, was 48 years old – his autobiographical book “My Way as a German and Jew” was published, in which he recorded the formative experiences he had throughout his life with the everyday anti-Semitism of his compatriots had made. Even if this knowledge may be viewed as common knowledge today, it is clear from these records that a deep-seated hostility towards everything supposedly Jewish was already firmly anchored in everyday German life in the Wilhelmine era. Wassermann, for example, reported hostility that began in his childhood and youth: “A mocking shout from street boys, a poisonous look, a dismissive expression, a certain recurring contempt, that was everyday.”
According to the writer, anyone who has not had this experience of exclusion and rejection can hardly “assess how primitive non-Jews are in their assessment of what is Jewish and what they consider to be Jewish.” The crowd’s “racial hatred” is “fed by the grossest externals.”
Even Wassermann’s own thinking was not free from anti-Semitic clichés and obsessions about how one should imagine a “Jewish physiognomy,” but was obviously contaminated by the same distorted images and stereotypes that were omnipresent in everyday life and in the cultural industry products of his time: “I had a straight nose and was quiet and modest,” he writes about himself. And about a Jewish childhood friend it says: “He was penetratingly Jewish Mind given.”
The environment in which Wassermann grew up, between “dirty factory water”, “dreary villages”, “ugly quarries” and narrow-minded provincial people, did not seem particularly designed to awaken joy in life: “Suffocating in its unity and desolation, the gardenless city, city of Soot, the thousand chimneys, the pounding of machines and hammers, the beer pubs, the dogged greed for business and gain Close together of small and petty people, the air of poverty and lovelessness in my father’s house.
»For the first time I encountered that dull, rigid, almost speechless hatred that had penetrated the people’s body. He is (…) a special German phenomenon.«
Jakob Wassermann about his military service
Aquarius, born in Fürth as the son of a frustrated and unsuccessful, increasingly impoverished Jewish businessman, had to struggle with rejection at an early age in his own parents’ home. The father reacted primarily with reluctance and disgust to the son’s emerging literary aspirations and artistic inclinations and his desire to become a writer and tried to suppress the 15-year-old’s “misguided inclinations”: “There were bad scenes, accusations , threats, insults, mockery.”
The father developed into a “relentless pursuer” of his son, so that at some point the son even found himself forced to get up at night to write secretly and write in the moonlight “at the window, in a passionate inner state, sheet by sheet.”
Even in his youth, the writer saw religion and its practical practice as a meaningless “business” or “drill”: “To me it was all hollow noise, the killing of devotion, the misuse of big words, unfounded lamentations.” He took part in religious rites and activities therefore only disinterested and indifferent part. But the anti-Semitic resentments of the majority of the population seemed to be completely independent of whether a Jew was religious or not: “If you look closely, you were a Jew only in name and through the hostility, alienation or rejection of the Christian environment, which in turn only contributed to this a word, a phrase, a false fact.”
When Wassermann finally joined the army to complete his military service, he was already used to the experience of always being perceived as not belonging and alien, but the anti-Semitism he experienced there had a new quality: “For the first time I encountered it that dull, rigid, almost speechless hatred that has penetrated the national body (…) In such a combination and subtlety, it is a special German phenomenon. It’s a German hatred.”
As a result, the aspiring author, who practiced various professions, continually encountered people who always turned away from him at the very moment when Wassermann found himself in the position of having to reveal his religious affiliation. Even those who initially appeared to him as cosmopolitan or progressive-minded suddenly saw him exclusively as a Jew. However, Wassermann did not want to make sense of the German blood-and-soil way of thinking and the idea that Jews were “of a different moral character.”
Ultimately, his astonishment was all the greater when he confided in a friend and the friend tried to calm him down by pointing out that the hostility of the non-Jewish Germans was not directed at Wassermann personally, but rather at his “ancestry, his belonging to a foreign body within the nation.”
The successful author, who always saw himself as both German and Jew, eventually had to become convinced: “It is in vain to invoke the people of poets and thinkers in the name of their poets and thinkers. Every prejudice that one thinks has been dismissed, like carrion brings worms to light, brings to light a thousand new ones. It is in vain to turn the right cheek when the left has been struck. It doesn’t worry them in the least, it doesn’t move them, it doesn’t disarm them: they also hit the right one.”
After reading Wassermann’s autobiographical essay, Thomas Mann, who was still a national conservative in 1921, was of the opinion that he was dealing with self-pity and exaggeration, was unable to recognize the anti-Semitism he complained about and referred his fellow writer to “cosmopolitan” Germany . In a letter he wrote: “A national life from which one tried to exclude the Jew, in respect of which one could show distrust, does that even exist?”
The reaction of Hermann Hesse, on the other hand, was completely different, as he wrote a postcard to Wassermann in the same year in which he spoke of the Germans as an “endangered and sick people”: “I see the German’s inability to have a positive relationship with the Jews find, one of the main symptoms of the infantile-neurotic character that the German people seem to have.”
Just a few years later, in 1933, when the Nazis were elected to power, Jakob Wassermann’s resignation from the Academy of Arts forestalled the new rulers who wanted to remove him from it. “He no longer had to experience the effects of what Jakob Wassermann suspected of bestiality in German idealism” (Bayerischer Rundfunk). The writer died on New Year’s Day 1934.
Jakob Wassermann: “My path as a German and a Jew.” Wallstein, born, 192 pages, €26.
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