Karl Emil Franzos (25 October 184828 January 1904) was a popular Austrian novelist of the late 19th century. His works, both reportage and fiction, concentrate on the multi-ethnic corner of Galicia, Podolia and Bukovina, now largely in western Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met. This area became so closely associated with his name that one critic called it "Franzos country". A number of his books were translated into English, and Gladstone is said to have been among his admirers.

Life

Karl Emil Franzos was born near the town of Czortków (Chortkiv) in the eastern, Podolian region of the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia. His family came from Sephardi Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition to Holland and later settled in Lorraine. In the 1770s his great-grandfather established a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia, part of the Habsburg monarchy since the First Partition of Poland in 1772. When the Austrian administration required Jews to adopt surnames, "Franzos" became his grandfather's name, from his French background, even though he regarded himself as German.

Franzos's father Heinrich (1808–1858) was a highly respected doctor in Czortków. His German identity at the time had mainly linguistic and cultural meaning, there being no state called "Germany", just a loose German Confederation. He was steeped in the humanistic ideals of the German Enlightenment as expressed by Kant, Lessing and, especially, Schiller. This brought a certain isolation: for local Poles and Ukrainians he was German, for Germans a Jew and for Jews a renegade, a deutsch. In the Vormärz era of the first half of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism went hand in hand, and Franzos's father was one of the first Jews to join a Burschenschaft student fraternity whose ideal was a German nation state with a liberal constitution. It is ironic that by the time Franzos, who shared his father's ideals, went to university, the German student fraternities had "dejudaised" themselves.

His father died when he was ten and his mother moved to the Bukovina capital Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). The city's multiculturalism, representative of the Habsburg Empire, strongly influenced his youth and character. The first languages he spoke were Ukrainian and Polish, learnt from his nurse; his first school was attached to the Czortków Dominican abbey, where the teaching was in Latin and Polish; and he attended private lessons in Hebrew. In Czernowitz he attended the German gymnasium, passing the Matura exam with honours in 1867. By now the family was in reduced circumstances and he supported himself by giving lessons, later, as a student, from his writing. During his time in Bukovina, he developed a deep appreciation for the Romanian people and their culture, becoming a constant supporter of it in the German-speaking world.

He would have liked to study classical philology with the aim of becoming a teacher, but no scholarship was forthcoming. Jews were not eligible for teaching posts, and even though he was non-religious, he refused to convert to advance his career. An additional reason for the refusal of a scholarship was that he did not attempt to conceal his liberal outlook, having, for example, tried to organise a celebration for the liberal poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath. He studied law at the universities of Vienna and Graz,

  • Aus Halb-Asien (1876)
  • Land und Leute des östlichen Europas (1876)
  • Die Juden von Barnow (1877)
  • Junge Liebe (1878)
  • Stille Geschichten (1880)
  • Moschko von Parma (1880)
  • Ein Kampf um's Recht (1882)
  • Der Präsident (1884)
  • Judith Trachtenberg (1890)
  • Der Pojaz (1893)
  • Deutsche Fahrten. Reise- und Kulturbilder. Erste Reihe: Aus Anhalt und Thüringen (1903/2. Aufl. 1905)
  • Der Wahrheitsucher (1904)

Woyzeck

thumb|[[Title page of Franzos's Büchner edition]]

Franzos is also well known for being the first to publish an edition of Georg Büchner's work, which was vital for the rediscovery of the Vormärz author. Franzos completed his edition in 1879, including plays like Danton's Death and Leonce and Lena. The manuscript of Büchner's drama Woyzeck was difficult to decipher, and had to be treated with chemicals in order to bring the ink up to the surface of the paper, and many of the pages were kept and later destroyed by Büchner's widow, who survived him by four decades. But Franzos's edition was for many years the authoritative version, until the late 1910s when a revival of Büchner's works began in Europe and the many errors in Franzos' edition came to light. These errors include the misspelling of the title, as "Wozzeck" instead of "Woyzeck", an alternate ending that involves Wozzeck drowning in lieu of Büchner's incomplete manuscript, and a fragmented plot without connections between the scenes. Although the play is often performed in newer versions, Franzos' edition has been immortalized in the form of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, which uses the Franzos edition as its base.

References

  • Selected short stories of Karl Emil Franzos English translation (2025) of 'Der Bart des Abraham Weinkaefer' and other tales