Siegfried Jacobsohn

Siegfried Jacobsohn (28 January 1881 – 3 December 1926) was a German writer and influential theatre critic.

Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, Jacobsohn decided at the age of 15 to become a theatre critic. In October 1897 he left school without gaining any diplomas and began studying at Friedrich-Wilhelm-University as it was then called. At the time it was still possible to gain entrance to university without any formal qualification. Among his teachers at university were Erich Schmidt, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Max Herrmann. However, he seemed to have learnt more by studying reviews written by Maximilian Harden, Fritz Mauthner and Paul Schlenther, whose reviews he considered exemplary. He also consulted actors such as Albert Bassermann, Jakob Tiedtke and Richard Leopold.

When he was still a student, Jacobsohn was hired by Hellmut von Gerlach as a theatre critic for the Berlin weekly Die Welt am Montag. In an interview with the Frankfurter Zeitung published on 8 November 1926, von Gerlach remembered that this sapling had spent literally every evening of his school days at the theatre. He knew every actor in every part and he knew the complete stage literature. Accompanied by an accurate sense of judgment hardly to be imagined by someone of his age. It was a phenomenon.

His first contribution in Die Welt am Montag was published in March 1901. In June 1902 he became editor of the magazine, his contract lasting for three years. In September 1902 he also assumed the role of theatre critic in Berlin for the Viennese daily Die Zeit.

Jacobsohn distinguished himself quickly as a harsh critic of dilettantism on the stage, and did not shrink from attacking the Berliner Tageblatt as a "seat of artistic corruption" in the controversy surrounding Hermann Sudermann's polemic Die Verrohung in der Theaterkritik (The Brutalisation of Theatre Criticism) in 1902. Two years later the editors of the feuilleton at the Berliner Tageblatt took revenge by accusing Jacobsohn of plagiarism in two cases. Jacobsohn explained the similarities of his texts with those of the theatre critic Alfred Gold that following working on his book Das Theater der Reichshauptstadt (The Theatre of the Imperial Capital) in his memory there "slumbered words, images, sentences and whole paragraphs of other authors, memories that could be awakened by the slightest association." Even though Maximilian Harden and Arthur Schnitzler spoke up for Jacobsohn since they did not believe in plagiarism in view of similarities with regards to common place expression, Jacobsohn was fired by Die Welt am Montag.

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