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Abstract
This article juxtaposes two aspects of the career of Karl-Emil Franzos (1848-1904): his editorship of Georg Büchners dramatic fragment Woyzeck, which Franzos misread as Wozzeck, thereby bestowing the incorrect name on Alba,n Bergs 1925 opera; and his work as a leading German-language chronicler of Jewish life in late nineteenth-century Galicia and Bukovina. It is apparent in Fmnzoss fiction that his sense of melodrama informed his editorial decisions in shaping Büchners manuscript. His misreading of Woyzeck as Wozzeck, by the same token, suggests both the linguistic and the perceptual limitations of describing eastern European ethnic groups from the perspective of the imperial (Germain) language. Fmnzoss approach to the fragmentation, alternately, of Büchners manuscript and of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire anticipates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno around the concept of the Trauerspiel (play of mourning) with which this discussion opens.
Key words: Karl-Emil Franzos, German Jewish literature, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trauerspiel
The world premier of Alban Bergs operatic masterpiece Wozzeck took place on December 14, 1925, in Berlin, but it was the operas second performance, one week later, that marked a signal event in the creation and conceptualization of German modernism. Bergs opera depicts an ordinary foot soldier exploited, brutalized, and driven insane by the malicious contempt of his commanding officer, the ludicrously sadistic medical experiments to which his doctor subjects him, and the betrayal of his common-law wife with a drum major, culminating in the protagonist's murder of her.1 Indeed, with its grand theme of proletarian oppression and its dramatic crime of passion, the opera fits as sensationally into the culture of the Berlin avant-garde as any Zeitoper (opera of current events),2 even though the composer had fashioned its libretto from Woyzeck, a drama by Georg Büchner (1813-37) left unfinished at the time of the author's early death, which was first published in 1877 under the editorship of KarlEmil Franzos.
One and One-Half Wandering Jews
In the audience at the opera's second performance were two young men, Walter Benjamin and Teddie Wiesengrund, better known as Theodor W. Adorno-"one and one-half wandering Jews," in Paul Simon's suggestive phrasing3-at the threshold of their careers.4 Commenting on the opera in print soon afterward, Adorno offered a precis of Benjamin's work-in-progress on the baroque Trauerspiel...