BERTHOLD AUERBACH

(1812-1882)

The author of ‘Black Forest Village Stories’ and ‘On the Heights’ stands out in honorable individuality among modern German novelists, even if the latest fashions in fiction make his work already a little antiquated.  Auerbach’s biography is one of industry rather than of incident.  His birth was humble.  His life was long.  He wrote voluminously and was widely popular, to be half forgotten within a decade after his death.  He may perhaps be reckoned the founder of a contemporary German school of tendenz novel writers; a school now so much diminished that Spielhagen—­who, however, wears Auerbach’s mantle with a difference—­is its only survivor.

Of Jewish parentage, his birthplace being Nordstetten, Wuertemberg (1812), Auerbach drifted from preparation for the synagogue toward law, philosophy, and literature.  The study of Spinoza (whose works he translated) gave form to his convictions concerning human life.  It led him to spend his literary talents on materials so various as the homely simplicity of peasant scenes and peasant souls, on the one hand, and on the other the popularization of a high social and ethical philosophy, specially inculcated through his larger fictions.  His college education was obtained at Tuebingen, Munich, and Heidelberg.

Necessity rather than ambition prompted him to write, and he wrote as long as he lived.  A partial list of his works begins with a pseudonymous ‘Life of Frederick the Great’ (1834-36), and ’Das Judenthum und der Neuste Literatur’ (The Jew Element in Recent Literature:  1836), and passes to the semi-biographic novel ‘Spinoza’ (1837), afterward supplemented with ‘Ein Denkerleben’ (A Thinker’s Life), ’Dichter und Kaufman’ (Poet and Merchant:  1839),—­stories belonging to the ’Ghetto Series,’ embodying Jewish and German life in the time of Moses Mendelssohn; the translation in five volumes of Spinoza’s philosophy, with a critical biography, 1841; and in 1842 another work intended to popularize philosophy, ’Der Gebildete Buerger:  ein Buch fuer den Denkenden Menschen’ (The Clever Townsman:  a Book for Thinking Men).

[Illustration:  BERTHOLD AUERBACH]

In 1843 came the first set of the famous ‘Schwarzwaelder Dorfgeschichten’ (Black Forest Village Stories), followed by a second group in 1848.  These won instant and wide favor, and were widely translated.  They rank among the author’s most pleasing and successful productions, stamped as they are with that truth which a writer like Auerbach, or a painter like Defregger or Schmidt, can express when sitting down to deal with the scenes and folk which from early youth have been photographed upon his heart and memory.  In 1856 there followed in the same descriptive field his ‘Barfuessele’ (Little Barefoot), ‘Joseph im Schnee’ (Joseph in the Snow:  1861), and ‘Edelweiss’ (1861).  His writings of this date—­tales, sketches journalistic, political, and dramatic, and other papers—­reveal Auerbach’s varying moods or enthusiasms, chronicle his residence in different German or Austrian cities, and are comparatively insignificant among his forty or more volumes.  Nor is much to be said of his first long fiction, ‘Neues Leben’ (New Life).