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, characterized his fiction as "Edelschmarren" (gilded junk). Wassermann is today chiefly remembered as a one-book author. Whenever the short list of highbrow German detective novels is recited, it includes his Der Fall Maurizius (1928; translated as The Maurizius Case, 1929), the suspenseful story of a tragic miscarriage of justice. For many of his contemporaries, as well as for the history of German literature, however, his primary importance is based on his treatment, in much of his best and worst writing, of anti-Semitism and the Jew's quest for cultural assimilation while maintaining his Jewish identity.

The son of Adolf and Henriette Traub Wassermann, Karl Jakob Wassermann was born in Fürth on 3 March 1873. His...