Jakob Wassermann – författare

My First Wife is Jakob Wassermann's intense, powerful account of a marriage - and its ruinous collapse - translated by the award-winning translator of Alone in Berlin, Michael Hofmann. It is the story of Alexander Herzog, a young writer, who goes to Vienna to escape his debts and a failed love affair. There he is pursued by book-loving Ganna: giddy, girlish, clumsy, eccentric and wild. Dazzled and unnerved by her devotion to him, and attracted to the large dowry offered by her wealthy father, he thinks he can mould Ganna into what he wants. But no-one can control her troubling passions. As their marriage starts to self-destruct, Herzog will discover that Ganna has resources and determination of which he had no idea - and that he can never escape her.Posthumously published in 1934 and based on the author Jakob Wassermann's own ruinous marriage, My First Wife bears the unmistakable aura of true and bitter experience. It is a tragic masterpiece that unfolds in shocking detail. Now this story of rare intensity and drama is brought to English readers in a powerful new translation by Michael Hofmann.Reviews:'The candour and extremity and intelligence of My First Wife are profoundly affecting ... This is a literary masterwork of a vanished kind, but through the remarkable Hofmann it is born again as a story for our age. Hogmann has the rare ability to refresh the very heart of a text in translating it, to increase its connections to life' Rachel Cusk, Guardian'Like something out of Chekhov - it's all there, the ennui, the preening etiquette, the intellectual posturing ... painfully heartfelt ... My First Wife is a devastating indictment of the choices we make out of convenience against our hearts and instincts, and the tragedies that ensue' Independent'You won't find a more agonising, fascinating literary account of a marriage hitting the rocks' Mail Online

This novel is considered by most European critics the finest and most important of Wassermann’s novels. It now makes its first appearance in English. Caspar Hauser, that strange figure which puzzled Europe in the years from 1823, when he first appeared, to 1833, when he met his inexplicable death, has remained an unsolved mystery to this day. There is a considerable body of literature in all languages on the subject; bitter and violent sides have been taken as to who he was; yet the evidence is in complete confusion. On the one hand it is claimed that he was a deliberate imposter, while many others maintain that he was the Crown Prince of Baden and that he was victimized by the family of the ruler’s morganatic wife who desired to secure the succession. An unkempt young man of about seventeen, dressed as a peasant, wandered into Nuremberg in the fall of 1828. Although it later turned out that he had an acute mind, he was at that time so undeveloped that he could speak only a few broken words and his recollections were only of a small dark room and of one man who provided him with water during the night. His strange existence from then on and his final death at the hand of a mysterious assassin, five years later, makes one of the most mysterious and fascinating episodes in all history.