Jakob Schaffner

Jakob Schaffner (14 November 1875 – 23 September 1944) was a leading Swiss novelist who became a supporter of Nazism.

Born on 14 November 1875 in Basel, both his father and his mother, a native of the State of Baden, died when he was young, leaving him to be reared in an orphanage. His early experiences inspired his most celebrated novel Johannes (sometimes known as Roman einer Jugend), which was published in 1922 and was a semi-autobiographical story of life in an orphanage. He initially worked as a shoemaker before turning to writing and held a number of other jobs throughout his life whilst an author. As a young shoemaker Schaffner travelled extensively as a journeyman in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, which heavily influenced his later writing, much of which was concerned with travel.

He studied at the University of Basel, and wrote his early works in Basel. In his very early days Schaffner was sympathetic to communism but he would switch at an early age to nationalism.

In 1912, Schaffner moved to Charlottenburg, near Berlin, Germany, after marrying a German woman and was driven by his German ethnic identity. His native spoken tongue was the Alemannic German dialect but seeking to rid himself of regional peculiarities and become what he described as an "all-German" he consciously adopted north German forms and expressions in his writing. He was strongly critical not only of Judaism but also of Christianity, dismissing the Bible as "a foreign collection of texts".

He later returned to Switzerland and from 1936 to 1938 was active on behalf of the National Front, leaving the movement along with Rolf Henne and Hans Oehler. For a time Schaffner was a member of the Bund Treuer Eidgenossen Nationalsozialistischer Weltanschauung, a pro-Nazism group established by Henne, Oehler and others on the extreme wing of the National Front. Schaffner had initially been a sceptic about Nazism but soon became a strong supporter of Adolf Hitler, feeling that he could spearhead a renovation of Europe.

...
Wikipedia