Auerbach, BERTHOLD

Auerbach, BERTHOLD, German novelist, was born, of Jewish parentage, at Nordstetten, in the Württemberg Black Forest, 28th February 1812. He received his education at the Talmud school of Hechingen, at Carlsruhe, at Stuttgart gymnasium, and at the universities of Tübingen, Munich, and Heidelberg, in 1836 suffering several months' imprisonment in the fortress of Hohensasperg as a member of the students' Burschenschaft. He had been destined for the synagogue, but had early abandoned theology for law, then law for history and philosophy—the philosophy, above all, of the great thinker of his race, Spinoza. A biographical romance, based on Spinoza's life, succeeded in 1837 his earliest work, Das Judentum und die neueste Litteratur (1836), and itself was followed by a translation of Spinoza's works (5 vols. 1841). In the first series of his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (1843), on which his fame chiefly rests, he gives charming pictures of Black Forest life, though his peasants too often are peasant Spinozas. The longer stories—Barfüssele (1856), Joseph im Schnee (1861), and Edelweiss (1861)—are good, but not so good; and the three-volume didactic romances of the third and last period of his literary career, though clever of course, are tedious to a degree. These were Auf der Höhe (1865), Das Landhaus am Rhein (1869), Waldfried (1874), &c.—'philosophical novels, in which,' in his own words, he 'undertook to treat problems of speculative ethics, and dealt not so much with events and actual conflicts in life as with conversations and the unfolding of definite objects of thought.' Many of Auerbach's works, which in German fill nearly 40 volumes, have been translated, not over well, into English. After a restless life, passed at Frankfurt, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, &c., he died at Cannes, 8th February 1882. See Berthold Auerbach, in Gedenkblatt (1882), and two volumes of his Correspondence (1884).