Franzos, Karl Emil
FRANZOS, KARL EMIL
FRANZOS, KARL EMIL (1848–1904), Austrian novelist and journalist. Franzos' oeuvre reflects the identity crisis of emancipated European Jewry. His writings stage this crisis as a conflict between Western and Eastern Jews, between the Haskalah ideal of a transgressive "culture" and the inbred religious traditions of the shtetl. Born in the Galician town of Czortkow and raised in Czernowitz, he was brought up within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. After studying law in Vienna and Graz he returned to Galicia only a few years later – as a correspondent for the influential Viennese paper Neue Freie Presse. Defining his task as "to accompany the spirit of 'Bildung' and of progress in its war in the east as a humble, but honest correspondent," Franzos fleshed out various scenes of this "cultural war" in several tales and reports from the land of "darkness," which were published in two volumes under the title Aus Halb-Asien ("From Half-Asia") in 1876. His writings targeted Hasidism, considering it a harsh and brutal dictatorship of ignorance that prevented Eastern Jewry from leaving the halakhic paths and joining the process of Jewish acculturation and emancipation. On the other hand, it was Franzos' intention to produce a detailed impression of shtetl life and therefore his descriptions are also imbued with compassion and belie his fascination with the world whose structures are supposed to be struck down by the Enlightenment. Within these constellations, Franzos created his own particular kind of narrative within the genre of the so-called "ghetto novella," which he demonstrated first in his story collection Die Juden von Barnow (1877). The center of these novellas could be seen in the conflict between two laws (i.e., torot), between halakhah – as a law that has become insufficient to solve the daily problems of galut existence – and culture – as a new and superior law that is capable of making decisions that do not contradict ethical and moral values in order to find justice. The tragedy of this conflict is shaped in Franzos' novels Moschkovon Parm (1880), Judith Trachtenberg (1889), and his famous Der Pojaz (published posthumously in 1905), which tells the story of the young Eastern Jew Sender Glatteis, who tries to get on the track of German culture in order to become an actor but who is finally not able to surmount the barriers of shtetl society with its restrictions.
For a long time the double-edged sense of Franzos' writings was overlooked, but in recent years it has become more and more clear that the crisis of Eastern Jewry diagnosed by his oeuvre mirrors the crisis of Western Jewry. The success of Franzos' writings at the end of the 19th century therefore points to the ambivalent status of German and Austrian Jewish society at the peak of the emancipation process: the enthusiastic reception of Franzos becomes a paradigm for the secular interpretation of Judaism as representing a longing for stabile cultural patterns of "Jewishness" as well.
Regarding his non-Jewish readers, Franzos saw himself always in the position of a mediator, whose mission was to explain the circumstances and conditions of East Jewish socialization, the effort it took for an Eastern Jew to bridge the gap between religious traditions and the sphere of the big humanist project which he identified with German culture. His ideal of a forthcoming German-Jewish symbiosis made him a sedulous fighter against any form of antisemitism. Franzos himself proved the value of Jewish participation in German cultural life – in 1879 he published the first edition of Georg Buechner's collected works.
bibliography:
F. Sommer, Halb-Asien. German Nationalism and the Eastern European works of Karl Emil Franzos (1984); C. Steiner, Karl Emil Franzos: 1848–1904. Emancipator and Assimilationist (1990); P. Theisohn, Eruv. Herkunft und Spiel an den Grenzen der Aufklärung in K.E. Franzos' "Der Pojaz," in: D. Bischoff et al. (eds.), Herkuenfte (2004), 171–90.
[Philipp Theisohn (2nd ed.)]