Karl Emil Franzos
| Karl Emil Franzos | |
|---|---|
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Franzos in 1891
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| Born |
October 25, 1848 Czortkow (Chortkiv), Galicia, Austrian Empire |
| Died | January 28, 1904 (aged 55) Berlin, German Empire |
| Occupation | Writer, journalist |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Spouse | Ottilie Benedikt |
Karl Emil Franzos (October 25, 1848 – January 28, 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 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.
Karl Emil Franzos was born near the town of Czortkow (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 Czortkow. 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.
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