Karl Emil Franzos - Life

Life

Karl Emil Franzos was born near the town of Czortkow (Chortkiv) in the eastern, Podolian region of the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia. His family came from Sephardi Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition to Holland and later settled in Lorraine. In the 1770s his great-grandfather established a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia, part of the Habsburg Monarchy since the First Partition of Poland in 1772. This was the time when the Austrian administration under Emperor Joseph II 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 Heinrich (1808–1858) was a highly respected doctor in Czortkow. His German identity at the time had mainly linguistic and cultural meaning, there being no state called “Germany”, just a loose German Confederation. 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 local Poles and Ukrainians he was German, for Germans a Jew and for Jews a renegade, a deutsch. In the Vormärz era of the first half of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism went hand in hand, and Franzos’s father was one of the first Jews to join a Burschenschaft 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.

His father died when he was ten and his mother moved to the Bukovina capital Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). The city's multiculturalism, representative of the Habsburg Empire, strongly influenced his youth and character. The first languages he spoke were Ukrainian and Polish, learnt from his nurse; his first school was attached to the Czortkow Dominican abbey, where the teaching was in Latin and Polish; and he attended private lessons in Hebrew. In Czernowitz he attended the German gymnasium, passing the Matura exam 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 at the universities of Vienna and Graz, 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 Budapest and in Vienna as a travel writer of the Neue Freie Presse newspaper. In 1877 he married Ottilie Benedikt, a relative of editor Moriz Benedikt. From 1886 he lived in Berlin, capital of the German Empire. Franzos had acclaimed the 1871 German unification under Prussian leadership and advocated a Greater Germany including the Austrian territories. However, the move to the German capital was caused as much by the greater opportunities for publishing there as by his “Germanic” tendencies. Indeed, the increasing virulence of antisemitism 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”.

More and more under Jew-hatred attacks, Franzos suffering from heart trouble died at the age of 55 in Berlin, where he is buried in the Weißensee Cemetery.