Jakob Wassermann, The Jew Of The Determinaton. A Writer Of The Group ？Young Vienna？ Between The Poles Jewish And German Identity

Jakob Wassermann was a German writer and a novelist of Jewish origin. Contemporary to famous writers such as Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Sigmund Freud, he managed to live among Jewish people on German ground. In Wassermann’s life, the most problematic fact was perhaps the case of his Jewish origin and the German society in which he grew up. Wassermann’s general idea, the conception of mankind and his worldview differs from views of many other authors, especially without a Jewish origin. The aim of this paper is to show and understand Jakob Wassermann’s avowal to Judaism and/or his thoughts about being a German. Thus, different essays, non-fictional texts, his autobiography and different speeches of Wassermann have been analysed and shown – mostly chronologically – in this paper