The German author Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) combined a romanticized psychoanalysis with an almost journalistic sensationalism. He used a narrative technique that verged at times on the surrealistic and was heavily laden with symbol and constructed...
During his lifetime Jakob Wassermann was much praised and much derided. His friend Thomas Mann, in one of his ironic compliments, called Wassermann a "Weltstar des Romans" (a world-best-selling novelist), while Oskar Loerke, his publisher's reader,...
WHEN JAKOB Heym (Robin Williams) is called before a Nazi police commandant in 1944 for breaking a curfew, he overhears something that might just change everything. In "Jakob the Liar," Jakob is the resident of an unspecified Jewish ghetto in Poland run by...
In "The Survivor," his great examination of the literature of the death camps, the late Terrence Des Pres observes, "Extremity makes bad art because events are too obviously symbolic. The structure of experience is so clear and complete that it appears to be deliberately...
In the following essay, Blankenagel catalogs such various fears as fear of death, fear of the loss of affection, fear of change, fear of the future, and fear of others in the works of Jakob Wassermann.
