Jakob Wassermann

Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934) was a German novelist, born to a Jewish merchant family in Fürth. After a hard youth as a clerk and soldier he found work in Munich with the magazine Simplicissimus and published Die Juden von Zirndorf in 1897. His novels Caspar Hauser, The Goose Man, Christian Wahnschaffe, translated as The World's Illusion, and The Maurizius Case made him one of the most widely read German writers of the 1920s. His memoir My Life as German and Jew described the failure of assimilation with painful candor. His books were banned by the Nazis in 1933, and he died in Austria the next year.