Novelist, short-story writer, poet, and dramatist, Bruno Frank envisioned as his life's ideal the type of the "humane gentleman" represented by such writers as Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Friedrich Hölderlin--an ideal that suggested warm compassion, high artistic culture, and an aristocratic sense of universal justice. Many writers who knew Frank, among them his lifelong friend Thomas Mann, felt that he was the embodiment of these attributes, and that a "humane gentleman" was reflected in his own works just as much as it was in those of his literary models. Nothing was more foreign to Frank's way of thinking than German philistinism, whose narrow-mindedness he found worthy of a hearty laugh before it turned malicious and portended the ominous during the rise of fascism in the 1920s.

Born in Stuttgart on 13 June 1887 into a well-to-do family of German-Jewish bankers, Frank studied law, philosophy, and history at...