WASSERMANN,JAKOB

born March 10, 1873, Frth, Bavaria died Jan. 1, 1934, Altaussee, Austria German novelist who is frequently compared to Fyodor Dostoyevsky in both his moral fervour and his tendency toward sensationalism; his popularity was greatest in the 1920s and '30s. After an unsettled youth, Wassermann achieved success with his second novel, Die Juden von Zirndorf (1897; "The Jews of Zirndorf"; Eng. trans. The Dark Pilgrimage), a study of Jews longing for the messiah. He established his reputation with Caspar Hauser (1908), the fact-based story of a strange boy, apparently unfamiliar with the ordinary world, who was found in Nrnberg in 1828 and whose identity and subsequent murder or suicide remained a mystery. Wassermann uses the story to castigate bourgeois numbness of heart and lack of imagination in dealing with anything out of the ordinary. In Christian Wahnschaffe (1919; The World's Illusion), one of his most popular works, a millionaire's son, after experiencing all that high life, love, travel, and art have to offer, dedicates himself to the service of humanity. Perhaps Wassermann's most enduring work is Der Fall Maurizius (1928; The Maurizius Case), which treats the theme of justice with the carefully plotted suspense of a detective story. It introduced the character Etzel Andergast, whose questioning of the judgment of his cold-hearted jurist father and whose own detective work eventually prove the innocence of a man his father had condemned. Etzel became a symbol of post-World War I German youth by rejecting the authority of the past and finding his own truth by trial-and-error, doggedly following elusive clues. This work was extended into a trilogy including Etzel Andergast (1931) and Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (1934; Kerkhoven's Third Existence). Wassermann's autobiography is entitled Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921; My Life as German and Jew).