My Life as German and Jew

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MY LIFE AS GERMAN AND JEW by JACOB WASSERMANN. Originally pblished in 1933. DISREGARDING my mental habit of moving among images and figures, impelled by an inner need and by the urgency of the times, I would render an account of the most perplexing side of my life, that which concerns my Jewishness and my existence as a Jew. Not as a Jew in the simple sense but as a German Jew a double concept which even to the disinterested lays bare copious misunderstandings, tragedies, conflicts, quarrels and sufferings. A delicate subject always, whether it was treated diffidently or freely or defiantly, one side seeking to extenuate, the other openly malicious. Today it is an incendiary focus. I am very anxious to present my point of view. Nor shall I take for granted anything that I previously regarded as demonstrated. Thus I shall depend on no proof, no vindication or in-dictment, nor any sort of constructive eloquence. I shall cite experience only. An imperative urge has driven me to seek a clear understanding of the nature of that discord which runs through all my activity and being, and of which the years have made me ever more painfully aware and conscious. While still im mature, man is much less susceptible to certain perplexities than in his maturity. Then, to the extent that he is devoted to a cause or an idea fundamentally the same thing he gradually escapes from that delirious state in which his ego possesses the magic of absoluteness and in which the world and humanity, by virtue of a pleasant and half - voluntary delusion, appear subservient to his dormant will in its condition of emotion born change. To the extent that ones own per son ceases to be a miracle and to constitute a purpose, until at last it becomes a scarcely per ceived intermediate element the shadow, so to speak, of a body unknown and unknowable to that extent does the difficulty and perilousness of life with and among men increase, as does the mystery of all that we call reality and ex perience. Ultimately, even in the most gifted and re ceptive minds, few distinctive signs remain to mark the road covered. How many unforget table and ineradicable traces persist in the soul depends on the breadth of ones destiny. I WAS born and raised in Fuerth, a predominantly Protestant manufacturing city of Middle Fran conia, with a large Jewish community consisting principally of artisans and tradesmen. The Jews formed about a twelfth of the total popu lation. Tradition has it that this is one of the oldest Jewish communities of Germany. Jewish set tlements are said to have existed there as far back as the ninth century. Probably, however, they began to increase and flourish only at the end of the fifteenth, when the Jews were expelled from the neighboring city of Nuremberg. Later another stream of refugees Jews driven out of Spain came across the Rhine into Franconia. Among these, I believe, were my maternal an cestors, who for centuries lived in villages in the valley of the Main, near Wiirzburg my ancestors on my fathers side lived in Fuerth, Roth am Sand, Schwabach, Bamberg and Zirndorf . Thirty or forty decades of living in this coun try must have given those Jews a close inner relationship to its soil, climate and people a relationship which must have been bred in their very bone, even though they resisted this in fluence and formed a distinctly alien element in the national organism. Until the middle of the nineteenth century oppressive restrictions were in force the registry law, inability to live wherever they pleased without paying special taxes, the prohibition of free choice as to trade or profession. My mothers father, a cultured man of noble gifts, was destroyed by these restrictions...