Karl Emil Franzos - Work

Work

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 a post-Holocaust perspective. He believed, following the example of Friedrich 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.

Galicia and Bukovina were the most backward, the poorest provinces of the Austrian 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 Why this novel, which Franzos regarded as his major work, remained unpublished during his lifetime, is a mystery.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 antisemitic 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).

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.”

His works include:

• Aus Halb-Asien (1876)
• Land and Leute des östlichen 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)