Karl Emil Franzos
Encyclopedia
Karl Emil Franzos was a German (Austrian) novelist.
Karl Emil Franzos was a popular German author of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His works, both reportage and fiction, concentrate on the multi-ethnic corner of eastern Europe, now largely in Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met. This area became so closely associated with his name that one critic called it “Franzos country”. A number of his books were translated into English, and Gladstone
is said to have been among his admirers.
The main focus of his writing is the relationships between the different nationalities of the region—Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Jews—and his sympathies clearly lie with the oppressed groups, in particular the Ukrainian peasants and shtetl Jews. He insisted that he was free from racial prejudice and that his attacks on particular nationalities were because they oppressed others:
He also “spoke out” against the rigid attitudes and practices of orthodox religion, and in this his attacks were directed above all at his fellow Jews:
Franzos’s family came from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition to Holland and later settled in Lorraine. Around 1770 his great-grandfather established a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia. This was the time when the Austrian administration insisted on all Jews having “proper” surnames, so that “Franzos” became his grandfather’s name, from his French background, even though he regarded himself as German.
Franzos’s father was a highly respected doctor in Czortkow (Ukrainian Chortkiv). He regarded himself as German, a term which at the time had mainly linguistic and cultural meaning, there being no state called “Germany”. He was steeped in the humanistic ideals of the German Enlightenment as expressed by Kant, Lessing and, especially, Schiller. This brought a certain isolation: for the Poles and Ukrainians he was German, for the Germans a Jew and for the Jews a renegade, a deutsch. In the first half of the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism went hand in hand, and Franzos’s father was one of the first Jews to join the student fraternity whose ideal was a German nation state with a liberal constitution. It is ironic that by the time Franzos, who shared his father’s ideals, went to university, the German student fraternities had “dejudaised” themselves.
Karl Emil Franzos was born in 1848. His father died when he was ten and his mother moved to Czernowitz (Chernivsty). The first languages he spoke were Ukrainian and Polish, learnt from his nurse; his first school was attached to the local Dominican abbey, where the teaching was in Latin and Polish; in Czernowitz he attended the German Gymnasium, graduating with honours in 1867. By now the family was in reduced circumstances and he supported himself by giving lessons, later, as a student, from his writing.
He would have liked to study classical philology with the aim of becoming a teacher, but no scholarship was forthcoming. Jews were not eligible for teaching posts, and even though he was non-religious, he refused to convert to advance his career. An additional reason for the refusal of a scholarship was that he did not attempt to conceal his liberal outlook, having, for example, tried to organise a celebration for the liberal poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath
.
He studied law, that being a shorter course. When he graduated, he found himself in a similar situation: he did not want to become an advocate, and a position as judge was closed to him as a Jew. Having had a number of pieces published while he was a student, he went into journalism and worked for newspapers and magazines for the rest of his life, at first in Vienna, after 1886 in Berlin. The move was caused as much by the greater opportunities for publishing there as by his “Germanic” tendencies. Indeed, the increasing virulence of anti-semitism in Germany meant that later on he had difficulty placing pieces which were felt to be too pro-Jewish—which was often another way of saying “not sufficiently anti-Jewish”.
Galicia was the most backward, the poorest province of the Habsburg Empire, so that Franzos saw his promotion of Germanisation as part of an attempt to improve conditions there politically and economically as well as culturally and socially. Jews made up some 12% of the population, the largest proportion of any province; two-thirds of the Empire’s Jews lived in Galicia. Besides being mostly poor, the shtetl Jews were strict, conservative Hasidim, shutting themselves off as far as possible from their Christian neighbours, who responded in kind. Poor orthodox Jews from the east were a not uncommon sight in Vienna and were probably regarded with even greater hostility by many of the westernised Jews of the city than by the Christian population.
The rigidity with which the eastern Jewish communities shut themselves off from outside influences is the theme of Franzos’s most ambitious work, Der Pojaz, completed in 1893, but not published until after his death in 1905. Why this novel, which Franzos regarded as his major work, remained unpublished during his lifetime, is a mystery. It is possible that he thought his critical portrayal of the ghetto might be exploited by anti-semitic elements which were becoming increasingly active in Germany in the 1890s.
The relations between the Christian and Jewish communities come into sharpest focus in sexual matters—as a young man Franzos fell in love with a Christian girl but renounced her because of the barrier between the two groups. This problem forms the subject of a number of his works, including two of his best novels, Judith Trachtenberg (1890) and Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child (1896).
Franzos showed the attitudes of the 19th-century assimilated Jew in their best light. His conviction that Germanisation was the way forward was based on the idealistic strain in German culture and will have looked very different in his day to our post-Holocaust perspective. He believed, following the example of Schiller, that literature should have an ethical purpose, but he managed to express that purpose through a range of vivid characters who still have the power to move the modern reader.
His works include:
play Woyzeck
. Franzos completed his edition in 1879. The manuscript of Woyzeck
was difficult to decipher, and had to be treated with chemicals in order to bring the ink up to the surface of the paper, and many of the pages were kept and later destroyed by Büchner's widow, who survived him by four decades. But Franzos's edition was for many years the authoritative version, until the late 1910s when a revival of Büchner's works began in Europe and the many errors in Franzos' edition came to light. These errors include the misspelling of the title, as Wozzeck instead of "Woyzeck", an alternate ending that involves Wozzeck drowning in lieu of Büchner's incomplete manuscript, and a fragmented plot without connections between the scenes. Although the play is often performed in newer versions, Franzos' edition has been immortalized in the form of Alban Berg
's opera Wozzeck
, which uses the Franzos edition as its base.
Karl Emil Franzos was a popular German author of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His works, both reportage and fiction, concentrate on the multi-ethnic corner of eastern Europe, now largely in Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met. This area became so closely associated with his name that one critic called it “Franzos country”. A number of his books were translated into English, and Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...
is said to have been among his admirers.
The main focus of his writing is the relationships between the different nationalities of the region—Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Jews—and his sympathies clearly lie with the oppressed groups, in particular the Ukrainian peasants and shtetl Jews. He insisted that he was free from racial prejudice and that his attacks on particular nationalities were because they oppressed others:
“I spoke out against the oppression of the Ukrainians and Poles by the Russians, but where the Poles do the same, as is the case in Galicia, then I speak out against their oppression of the Ukrainians, Jews and Germans.”
He also “spoke out” against the rigid attitudes and practices of orthodox religion, and in this his attacks were directed above all at his fellow Jews:
“I stand up for the Jews because they are enslaved, but I attack the slavery the orthodox Jews impose on the liberal members of their faith.”
Franzos’s family came from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition to Holland and later settled in Lorraine. Around 1770 his great-grandfather established a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia. This was the time when the Austrian administration insisted on all Jews having “proper” surnames, so that “Franzos” became his grandfather’s name, from his French background, even though he regarded himself as German.
Franzos’s father was a highly respected doctor in Czortkow (Ukrainian Chortkiv). He regarded himself as German, a term which at the time had mainly linguistic and cultural meaning, there being no state called “Germany”. He was steeped in the humanistic ideals of the German Enlightenment as expressed by Kant, Lessing and, especially, Schiller. This brought a certain isolation: for the Poles and Ukrainians he was German, for the Germans a Jew and for the Jews a renegade, a deutsch. In the first half of the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism went hand in hand, and Franzos’s father was one of the first Jews to join the student fraternity whose ideal was a German nation state with a liberal constitution. It is ironic that by the time Franzos, who shared his father’s ideals, went to university, the German student fraternities had “dejudaised” themselves.
Karl Emil Franzos was born in 1848. His father died when he was ten and his mother moved to Czernowitz (Chernivsty). The first languages he spoke were Ukrainian and Polish, learnt from his nurse; his first school was attached to the local Dominican abbey, where the teaching was in Latin and Polish; in Czernowitz he attended the German Gymnasium, graduating with honours in 1867. By now the family was in reduced circumstances and he supported himself by giving lessons, later, as a student, from his writing.
He would have liked to study classical philology with the aim of becoming a teacher, but no scholarship was forthcoming. Jews were not eligible for teaching posts, and even though he was non-religious, he refused to convert to advance his career. An additional reason for the refusal of a scholarship was that he did not attempt to conceal his liberal outlook, having, for example, tried to organise a celebration for the liberal poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath
Ferdinand Freiligrath
Ferdinand Freiligrath was a German poet, translator and liberal agitator.-Biography:Freiligrath was born in Detmold, Principality of Lippe. His father was a teacher. He left a Detmold gymnasium at 16 to be trained for a commercial career in Soest...
.
He studied law, that being a shorter course. When he graduated, he found himself in a similar situation: he did not want to become an advocate, and a position as judge was closed to him as a Jew. Having had a number of pieces published while he was a student, he went into journalism and worked for newspapers and magazines for the rest of his life, at first in Vienna, after 1886 in Berlin. The move was caused as much by the greater opportunities for publishing there as by his “Germanic” tendencies. Indeed, the increasing virulence of anti-semitism in Germany meant that later on he had difficulty placing pieces which were felt to be too pro-Jewish—which was often another way of saying “not sufficiently anti-Jewish”.
Galicia was the most backward, the poorest province of the Habsburg Empire, so that Franzos saw his promotion of Germanisation as part of an attempt to improve conditions there politically and economically as well as culturally and socially. Jews made up some 12% of the population, the largest proportion of any province; two-thirds of the Empire’s Jews lived in Galicia. Besides being mostly poor, the shtetl Jews were strict, conservative Hasidim, shutting themselves off as far as possible from their Christian neighbours, who responded in kind. Poor orthodox Jews from the east were a not uncommon sight in Vienna and were probably regarded with even greater hostility by many of the westernised Jews of the city than by the Christian population.
The rigidity with which the eastern Jewish communities shut themselves off from outside influences is the theme of Franzos’s most ambitious work, Der Pojaz, completed in 1893, but not published until after his death in 1905. Why this novel, which Franzos regarded as his major work, remained unpublished during his lifetime, is a mystery. It is possible that he thought his critical portrayal of the ghetto might be exploited by anti-semitic elements which were becoming increasingly active in Germany in the 1890s.
The relations between the Christian and Jewish communities come into sharpest focus in sexual matters—as a young man Franzos fell in love with a Christian girl but renounced her because of the barrier between the two groups. This problem forms the subject of a number of his works, including two of his best novels, Judith Trachtenberg (1890) and Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child (1896).
Franzos showed the attitudes of the 19th-century assimilated Jew in their best light. His conviction that Germanisation was the way forward was based on the idealistic strain in German culture and will have looked very different in his day to our post-Holocaust perspective. He believed, following the example of Schiller, that literature should have an ethical purpose, but he managed to express that purpose through a range of vivid characters who still have the power to move the modern reader.
His works include:
- Aus Halb-Asien(1876)
- Land and Leute des ostlichen Europas (1876)
- Die Juden von Barnow (1877)
- Junge Liebe (1878)
- Stille Geschichten (1880)
- Moschko von Parma (1880)
- Ein Kampf um's Recht (1882)
- Der President (1884)
- Judith Trachtenberg (1890)
- Der Pojaz (1893)
- Deutsche Fahrten. Reise- und Kulturbilder. Erste Reihe: Aus Anhalt und Thüringen (1903/2. Aufl. 1905)
- Der Wahrheitsucher (1904)
Woyzeck
Franzos is also well-known for being the first to publish an edition of the Georg BüchnerGeorg Büchner
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...
play Woyzeck
Woyzeck
Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner. He left the work incomplete at his death, but it has been variously and posthumously "finished" by a variety of authors, editors and translators. Woyzeck has become one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre...
. Franzos completed his edition in 1879. The manuscript of Woyzeck
Woyzeck
Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner. He left the work incomplete at his death, but it has been variously and posthumously "finished" by a variety of authors, editors and translators. Woyzeck has become one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre...
was difficult to decipher, and had to be treated with chemicals in order to bring the ink up to the surface of the paper, and many of the pages were kept and later destroyed by Büchner's widow, who survived him by four decades. But Franzos's edition was for many years the authoritative version, until the late 1910s when a revival of Büchner's works began in Europe and the many errors in Franzos' edition came to light. These errors include the misspelling of the title, as Wozzeck instead of "Woyzeck", an alternate ending that involves Wozzeck drowning in lieu of Büchner's incomplete manuscript, and a fragmented plot without connections between the scenes. Although the play is often performed in newer versions, Franzos' edition has been immortalized in the form of Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
's opera Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...
, which uses the Franzos edition as its base.