Word: wassermann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...very good to know that contemporary to oneself, in the midst of all that may seem mediocre and so much but mere dross, there is at least one great spirit, living and suffering, pondering and creating. In Jacob Wassermann there can be seen a great master in the very process of development. Each new book discovers him with a firmer grasp of the technique of his craft, with clearer vision of moral truth. Paradoxically, although it is not as great a book, "Wedlock" is a distinct improvement upon the "World's Illusion...
...ever Wassermann is concerned with the problems of good an evil. With a slight tendency to run off into mystic symbolism, his books are all highly and openly philosophic; only his Viennese delicacy and finesse have saved him from the bogs and fogs which beset most German writers. He pictures a group of people, the life of whom is calm and ordered; but somewhere in this group there is the ferment of evil. In the path of each little insignificant wrong, punishment subtly folows sin. Nemesis pursues Man--Oedipus, Christian Wahnschaffe--, Man, who must act and yet knows...
...must be kept in mind that Wassermann is a sort of first child of the Twentieth Century, strong and vigourous and mercilessly sure in his judgment of the world into which he was born, that of Huysmans and Wilde and Anatole France, a world in which avarice and hatred have been more obvious than usual, a world tired and emasculated, "decadent." Against this he has struggled, like a "Titan," as the jacket puts it. Probably he felt much freer in writing "Mein Weg als Deutcher und Jude." This propagandizing and sociologizing mars all his work except the "World's Illusion...
...Wassermann has a peculiarly contemporary appeal; yet Christian Wahnsschaffe and Eva Sorel, Friedrich and Pia Laudin are universal; Christian Wahnschaffe will always be lost in the wilderness of evil, searching with blind eyes for a remote Justice. Jacob Wassermann will not die with his enemy and victim, "fin de siecle...
...woodwinds of psychoanalysis, the percussives of aristocracy, the bass viols of biology, the brass of anthropology, the muted strings of art and mysticism, are assigned various parts. The players include-besides several German savants little known in the U. S. -Havelock Ellis, Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Frobenius, Jakob Wassermann, C. G. Jung, Alfred Adler, Beatrice Hinkle. Some of the titles on their scores are: "The Genesis of Marriage," "The Indian Ideal," "The Chinese Conception," "Bourgeois Marriage," "The Marriage of the Future," "Marriage as a Task," "Love as an Art," "Marriage as a Fetter," "Marriage as a Sacrament." All these improvisations follow...