Karl Emil Franzos wrote about the Eastern Jewish cultural landscape with all its contradictions. At the turn of the 20th century, his novel «Der Pojaz» tells the story of a world that is on the verge of collapse.
The writer Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904) in a photograph taken around 1885.
In his autobiography, the philologist Victor Klemperer, who has rightly become famous for his “Diaries 1933–45”, writes how in 1907 Ludwig Geiger, publisher of the “Yearbook for Jewish History and Culture”, invited him to a series of lectures. From his biography one also learns what topics he was lecturing on at the time: “I spoke about Jewish figures in Spielhagen and Heyse, about Schnitzler, about Ludwig Jacobowski, about the French [. . .]. The strongest appeal [. . .] found the French [. . .] and whenever I read a few pages from the ‘Pojaz’, there was loud applause.”
Klemperer himself tries to explain his audience’s preference as follows: “All these people were drawn to Germanness, sometimes more than they wanted to admit. Wasn’t it characteristic that my Frenchman found so much applause everywhere? In this Pojaz, who as a tragic hero from the narrow ghetto strives to become German, they saw their ideal figure and a little bit of themselves.» Klemperer probably too, who considered the gap between Eastern Jews and assimilated Western Jews unbridgeable and was nevertheless able to write: “Is there a better German than Franzos’ Pojaz, who is led by longing from half Asia to Germany?”
The will to illusion is stronger than all the hurdles on the way out, the model of Shylock from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” is stronger than the Jewish ideal figure of Nathan. The sarcastic realism of this program of disillusionment creates an energy of “despite everything” and not, as is so often the case, a murky mixture of crudity and melodrama.
It starts with the naming, about which the novel published posthumously in 1905 records: “The hero of this story [. . .] also had a heroic first name. His name was ‘Sender’, in which suppressed, as it were cooked form, the proud name of Alexander, which the Jews had taken over from the Hellenes in a glorious period of their history, lives on among their tormented, enslaved descendants in Eastern Europe. His surname sounds less heroic: Glatteis, which some coincidence or the whim of an official assigned to his grandfather.»
That leaves the nickname “Pojaz”, for which the people of the town of “Barnow” (the fictional name for Franzos’ Galician place of origin Czortkow) are responsible. The corrupted word for “Bajazzo” is also a signal that points to a comic novel.
In the unholy city
Franzos, proclaimed by Klemperer with his own neologism as a «poet of half Asia», uses the vague topographical outline primarily as a counterpart to the controversial concept of semi-education. In a cultural picture that describes a train journey from Vienna to Chernivtsi, different stations of the civilization process are reached and undercut again. The white tablecloth becomes a fetish for progress that is by no means linear.
The view from the railway coupe is intended to ensure ethnographic diversity, with the speed of perception undermining the detailed realism of the descriptions of the condition. The text with the destination Chernivtsi counteracts such insecurities with a strong current event: the “culture festival” of the opening of the Chernivtsi University in 1875 as the eastern counterpart to the Strasbourg University newly founded in 1872.
«Der Pojaz» also escapes the naivety of the descriptive literature by leading the hero onto the slippery slope of the semi-Asian multiplicity of languages. Czernowitz is the predestined place for this. In the words of Pojaz, who turns off there with his travel companion: He “doesn’t even notice until we’re finally over the Prut Bridge and in the suburb, the Wassergasse. Then, of course, he begins to scream that he has no business being in the unholy city, where the Jews speak High German and eat pork.” This is not a good omen for an illiterate who is preparing to learn to speak, read and write there in order to become an actor in the theatre.
One more detail should be pointed out: In 1920, when Czernowitz was already under Romanian rule, Paul Celan was born in Wassergasse (Wassylko-Gasse). Ilana Shmueli, a friend from her youth at the time, wrote about the linguistic and social tensions in the 1920s and 1930s: “Czernowitz German, however, was disreputable because of its twisted language structures, its unusual vocabulary and its idioms. They mocked each other. Everyone pretended to speak better German. Intellectual demands were cranked up; the expectations for the children knew no bounds. [. . .] The upper middle class lived lavishly. There was a kind of social hierarchy that people tried to hide, but it caused tension. [. . .] The oppressive poverty of the Jewish alley received little attention and was dismissed with alms.” When nine-year-old Paul Celan was expelled from the house after a high-spirited child’s game, the mother of Ilana’s friend, who they were visiting, said that he did not belong to “our ‘society'”: “He lives in Wassylko-Gasse – and we live in the villa district.»
incitement to anti-Semitism
The Pojaz, who on arrival in Chernivtsi understands standard German very poorly, hears the word theater for the first time, “which has become the most important thing in my life, the only thing” sees a play there for the first time. The description of the Shakespeare performance from the perspective of the Pojaz takes advantage of all the exoticism effects that an uneducated encounter with a cultural institution throws up. Pojaz constantly confuses play and reality and feels compelled to change the ending of the Shakespearean play (which was common practice in the 19th century).
After reading “Nathan” in the ice-cold monastery library, he prefers the ambivalent Shylock character to Lessing’s noble Nathan. No one will want to deny that the shady or even rogue has a special aesthetic attraction that has far-reaching consequences for the Jewish figures in literature. The “good” Jew figures pale in comparison to the “rogue” Jew, even without bad intentions.
Poets from Galicia and Bukovina
rbl. · With this text about Karl Emil Franzos, we are continuing our series of portraits of German-speaking authors from Galicia and Bukovina. These are the two easternmost crown lands of the Habsburg monarchy – today large parts of this area belong to the Ukraine, including the former state capitals of Czernowitz (Tschernivzi) and Lemberg (Lviv). Around the turn of the century, world literature arose on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The carriers of German-speaking culture were mainly Jews. And although many authors also knew Ukrainian, Polish or Yiddish, some decided to write in German. Their biographies are almost always stories of flight and expulsion. The Nazis wiped out this unique cultural life. Here we present well-known as well as somewhat forgotten authors.
Karl Emil Franzos was born on October 25, 1848 and grew up in Chernivtsi. From 1867 he studied law in Vienna, went to Graz the following year and also did his doctorate, but immediately after his studies he became active in journalism and literature. In 1879 he published the works of Georg Büchner. From 1887 he lived in Berlin and devoted himself to literary work until his death on January 28, 1904. – Next week a portrait of the writer Walther Rode (1876–1934) will appear here.
But Shakespeare’s play was also deliberately tailored to stimulate anti-Semitism. The novel hints at this with the cynicism of the corrupt theater manager trying to win Pojaz over to his troupe. About the “Merchant of Venice” he says, “this is a play for Galicia. That interests Jud’ and Christ and both can be happy and angry to their heart’s content. The Shylock sells out everywhere.”
The commercial exploitation of the ambivalent is made evident in the novel with the double playbill for the performance of the play “Deborah” by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, which was much performed at the time. An indication of its former popularity, albeit rapidly declining around the turn of the century, can be seen in the dim memory of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”; The only thing he knows for sure is that his father saw this successful piece from the 19th century in Vienna.
A failing educational path
Pojaz’s longing to bring Shakespeare’s drama to a happy end for Shylock and at the same time to achieve his own emancipation remains unsatisfied. In a highly melodramatic ending, the aspiring actor dies of consumption, which was still considered a sign of the spiritual in the 19th century. The facial features and the theatrical speech of his great role model, the Polish-Jewish actor Bogumil Dawison, whom Pojaz last saw in the role of Shylock on the stage of the Lemberg Theater, are mixed into the feverish fantasies of the dying man.
Death isn’t everything, as Faulkner put it. And so around 1900 the history of identification with Pojaz and Shylock is far from over. The paradigm of his (failing) educational path from the ghetto to the supposedly enlightened West is shown by the fact that, despite all the harassment, he was tried again and again well into the 20th century. The autobiography of the actor Alexander Granach (1890-1945), which leads from the outskirts of Galicia via a Jewish theater group in Lemberg to the Reinhardt Theater in Berlin, is one of the most impressive sequels to the “Pojaz” project – it ended in exile; later attempts at expulsion and mass murder.
The literary scholar Carl Wagner was Professor of German Studies at the University of Zurich from 2003 and now lives in Vienna.