Balances of a Dual Spirit: Karl Emil Franzos

Abstract

The article is devoted to the work of the German-language writer of the second half of the nineteenth century Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904), who originated from Eastern Galicia and grew up in Chernivtsi. He sought to balance his Jewish-German identity, striving to achieve a certain cultural synthesis. Aspects of this complex identity are especially evident in his biography and in some of his works – for example, in the essay Ein Culturfest (“A Festival of Culture”), written on the occasion of the founding of Chernivtsi University, and in the novel Der Pojaz (“The Jester”). Although after his death the writer did not avoid partial oblivion, he is considered a pioneer of German-Jewish literature in Eastern Galicia and Bukovyna. Today, representatives of this tradition include such well-known twentieth-century German-language authors as Rose Ausländer, Paul Celan, Gregor von Rezzori, Alfred Gong, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Erwin Chargaff, Soma Morgenstern, and Joseph Roth. Franzos lived in Berlin for nearly twenty years, supported Russian Jews expelled from their homes by pogroms, and died in the capital of the Reich, where salon-style imperial antisemitism set the dominant tone. Through his work, Franzos pointed the way toward developments whose consequences the writer himself managed to avoid. His grave is located in what is probably the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe – Berlin-Weißensee. Attempts at a German-Jewish cultural symbiosis, even when they remained one-sided, were merely benevolent approaches to the necessary diversity that had functioned in the German-speaking world for centuries but for a long time failed to penetrate general consciousness.