We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
In 1927 Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), then in his mid-fifties, undertook a triumphant lecture tour of the United States that lasted several months. He was at the height of his powers as a writer, and the tour of the USA confirmed that he had also advanced from being one of the most widely read novelists in Germany in the 1920s to become a “Welt-Star des Romans” (world star of the novel), as his fellow novelist and friend Thomas Mann dubbed him shortly after his death. All over America, crowds flocked to hear him speak, to the extent that the police had to be called to restore public order on the occasion of a lecture at Columbia University. Wassermann's global appeal seems to have been particularly strong to young people, with the effect he had on the younger generation of the 1920s being likened to Hermann Hesse's significance for the hippy generation of the 1960s.
Whilst in America, the workaholic Wassermann, who wrote more than a dozen novels as well as dozens of short stories and was also a prolific critic, essayist, and biographer, was working on the novel Der Fall Maurizius (The Maurizius Case) which on its publication the following year would confirm and enhance his reputation and readership both in Germany and abroad.
The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and fateful time in German history. Characterized by economic and political instability, polarization, and radicalism, the period witnessed the efforts of many German writers to play a leading political role, whether directly, in the chaotic years of 1918-1919, or indirectly, through their works. The novelists chosen range from such now-canonical authors as Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, and Heinrich Mann to bestselling writers of the time such as Erich Maria Remarque, B. Traven, Vicki Baum, and Hans Fallada. They also span the political spectrum, from the right-wing Ernst Jünger to pacifists such as Remarque. The journalistic engagement of Joseph Roth, otherwise well known as a novelist, and of the recently rediscovered writer Gabriele Tergit is also represented. Contributors: Paul Bishop, Roland Dollinger, Helen Chambers, Karin V. Gunnemann, David Midgley, Brian Murdoch, Fiona Sutton, Heather Valencia, Jenny Williams, Roger Woods. Karl Leydecker is Reader in German at the University of Kent.
AS Peter Gay observed in his classic study of the culture of the Weimar Republic, “For over a century Germans had looked upon politics with a mixture of fascination and aversion.” German writers and intellectuals, most notably those on the left of the political spectrum, had long dreamt of having a direct involvement in political events and affairs of the state. In the immediate aftermath of military defeat at the end of the First World War and the collapse of the monarchy, it appeared that those dreams were about to be realized. Indeed, some writers even briefly took political office in the politically turbulent first months of 1919, most notable amongst them the dramatist Ernst Toller, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, and the intellectual Gustav Landauer, who took leading roles in the short-lived Bavarian Republican government, an honor declined by Hermann Hesse, while Ret Marut, who would become better known as the novelist B. Traven, was also highly active in the Munich Republic. Certainly in no previous period of German history did writers and intellectuals engage so directly with political events and social forces and seek so actively to have a direct influence on them as they were to do during the Weimar Republic. Nor was this engagement confined to those on the left. Political and social developments forced even conservative middle-class writers, who generally had a conception of literature as high art that had no business dirtying its hands with politics, and who would therefore have preferred to remain above the fray, to abandon their Olympian detachment and enter the arena to try to shape events.