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Jakob Wassermann

Penguin Classics My First Wife Hardcover – International Edition, September 25, 2012

by Jakob Wassermann (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

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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

Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Classic
Publication date

September 25, 2012
Dimensions

5.43 x 1.14 x 8.03 inches
ISBN-10

0141389354
ISBN-13

978-0141389356
See all details

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classic (September 25, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141389354
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141389356
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.43 x 1.14 x 8.03 inches

Customer Reviews:
32 ratings

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5 star		38%
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Lost John

Exquisitely painful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2013

In his afterword, translator Michael Hofmann tells us that this 'fiction' is in fact a very close account of Jakob Wassermann's own first marriage. Names have been changed and his fictional self and wife have three children together, whilst the actuality was four, but most other detail, large and small, is very much as it really was.

Wassermann names his alter ego Alexander Herzog. He is a young German writer who moves to Vienna just before the opening of the 20th century. Ganna, a bookish but highly strung and energetic younger daughter of a professor of law, determines to marry him. She secures his agreement by threatening to jump 20 feet from a balcony overhanging a lake. "She was certainly capable of it", Herzog observes.

OK, he should at that point have looked for a way out, or at least insisted that she see an appropriate specialist - her father's university colleague, the 44 year old neuropathology lecturer Sigmund Freud, perhaps - without committing himself to marriage. He knew of the difficulties Ganna had made for herself and her family as she was growing up, and of the "twice-weekly prophylactic beatings" she received at the hands of her father. But we are post-Freudians, Herzog was not and, like many a young man before and since, Herzog thought he could mould Ganna to be the wife that he desired.

By Herzog's own account, he was unfaithful within his marriage, often lived and worked away from home for extended periods, frequently lacked resolve, and in his own way was as unrealistic about keeping the household functioning as was Ganna. She had many talents, was and always remained a genuine admirer of his writing, was personally supportive, prepared to tolerate his lifestyle and infidelities, and to sustain their home with the interest earned by her dowry and, over time, the capital too. But even after divorce, especially after divorce, she was manically obsessed with what she saw as her rights over Herzog and all that was his.

In the background, the First World War inflicts its own destruction on lives, livelihoods, property and the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. If this were truly fiction, we would admire Wassermann for his use of the historic conflict as a backdrop to his tale of the cataclysmic destruction of a marriage. But this is exactly as it was for Wassermann, as were the crippling and future-conflict-breeding reparations exacted of Herzog, most appropriately placed by Wassermann alongside those of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

Wassermann's prose is carefully trimmed and shaped (and obviously we are indebted to the translator too for what we read in English), but the subject matter is no less painful for that. This fine piece of writing can only be advised if your own emotional state is in robust good health - or you are in a mood to be really spiteful!

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Lily Ann

Compulsive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

I find it hard to believe this is autobiographical yet we are assured that it is! The author displays himself as a weak, greedy man without principles. His prospective father in law (who has taken to beating his daughter twice a week) bribes him to marry his "difficult" daughter. As the book progresses, the marriage breaks down - not because the wife is particularly crazy - but because the author is a self-serving fornicator. All the usual excuses used by errant husbands are wheeled out, so this nineteenth century story has a distinctly modern feel.

3 people found this helpful

Tony Barber

Chilling portrayal of a failed marriage and a wife from hell

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 20, 2015

Verified Purchase

Very few works of modern European literature explore the nightmare of a marriage gone wrong with the intensity and depth of detail achieved by Wassermann in this compelling, disturbing novel. Ganna, the monstrous, malevolent wife, is a thoroughly credible character. Only the lack of a proper resolution of the novel's issues at the end robs this chilling work of a 5-star rating.

P. Millar

A relationship in disintegration ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 11, 2013

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Apparently this novel is only vaguely fictional, the names have been changed but the events are largely as they happened. Culled from another novel by Wasserman, 'Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz', which, in turn, is the third part of a trilogy (also including 'Der Fall Maurizius' and 'Etzel Andergast'), it details the coming together and then ripping apart of Alexander Herzog (a writer just starting to make a name for himself) and Ganna (the eponymous first wife and artistic groupie) in the years before, during and after the First World War.

The first part of the novel details how they came to meet and get married, although still masterfully written I found this the weakest section but it is needed as the set-up for the painful (the literary equivalent of slowly peeling away a scab) disintegration in the relationship which follows. The second part is essentially a three-way character study between Herzog, Ganna and his 'mistress' Bettina, with Herzog caught in-between Ganna's machinations and Bettina's frustrations.

Although written from Herzog's point of view it delves into Ganna's life and motivations and allows you to view the events happening from several points of view. It also invites several interpretations of the events taking place (possibly influenced by your own prejudices and predilections) - do you feel sorry for Alexander wriggling in the vice like grip of his 'first wife', or is he the villain of the piece getting his comeuppance? Is Ganna a vengeful woman spurned or is she refusing to be cowed by 'the man'? Who is the real victim and tormentor?

Overall an absolute masterpiece of prose which is an excellent addition to the Penguin Modern Classics oeuvre.

3 people found this helpful

Sandford

A mad woman, a poet and 40 divorce lawyers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 6, 2014

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

An intriguing but depressing tale of two personalities, Alexander and Ganna. Their distinct and differing psychopathologies result in mayhem and chaos, providing fuel for a barrage of divorce lawyers. Both are unable to deal with the exigencies of practical day to day reality, and it is obvious from the start that the dissonance between them can never be resolved.

This fated couple can never live harmoniously together. The predator and seductress Ganna seems to have a sociopathic disorder, and histrionics abound in all her relationships. She has an "overpowering will and dazzling sorcery". Despite her husband, Alexander the poet, having some intense intellectual insight into the processes of the dynamic between them, he is hopelessly bereft of any self awareness that can help him affect change. I have empathy for him, but not sympathy. Their marriage is wholly conditional, and Alexander is unwilling to confront the manipulative guiles of his wife, always rationalising his assessments of her omnipotent behaviour, and so acting accordingly, only to add fuel to her fires. Personally, I want to give her a slap.

Alexander's second wife Bettina has a more strongly defined personality that provides some degree of armour against financial demands and accompanying emotional onslaughts. Alexander is really unable to see beyond his rather narcissistic approach to life, procrastinating throughout. He only realises at the end that it is Bettina that has suffered in real terms more than anyone.

I enjoyed the book, being left with an impression of how useless it is to try and maintain a relationship when personalities are so diverse, and that a lack of self awareness is potentially so destructive.

Lost John

Exquisitely painful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 27, 2013

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

In his afterword, translator Michael Hofmann tells us that this 'fiction' is in fact a very close account of Jakob Wassermann's own first marriage. Names have been changed and his fictional self and wife have three children together, whilst the actuality was four, but most other detail, large and small, is very much as it really was.

Wassermann names his alter ego Alexander Herzog. He is a young German writer who moves to Vienna just before the opening of the 20th century. Ganna, a bookish but highly strung and energetic younger daughter of a professor of law, determines to marry him. She secures his agreement by threatening to jump 20 feet from a balcony overhanging a lake. "She was certainly capable of it", Herzog observes.

OK, he should at that point have looked for a way out, or at least insisted that she see an appropriate specialist - her father's university colleague, the 44 year old neuropathology lecturer Sigmund Freud, perhaps - without committing himself to marriage. He knew of the difficulties Ganna had made for herself and her family as she was growing up, and of the "twice-weekly prophylactic beatings" she received at the hands of her father. But we are post-Freudians, Herzog was not and, like many a young man before and since, Herzog thought he could mould Ganna to be the wife that he desired.

By Herzog's own account, he was unfaithful within his marriage, often lived and worked away from home for extended periods, frequently lacked resolve, and in his own way was as unrealistic about keeping the household functioning as was Ganna. She had many talents, was and always remained a genuine admirer of his writing, was personally supportive, prepared to tolerate his lifestyle and infidelities, and to sustain their home with the interest earned by her dowry and, over time, the capital too. But even after divorce, especially after divorce, she was manically obsessed with what she saw as her rights over Herzog and all that was his.

In the background, the First World War inflicts its own destruction on lives, livelihoods, property and the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. If this were truly fiction, we would admire Wassermann for his use of the historic conflict as a backdrop to his tale of the cataclysmic destruction of a marriage. But this is exactly as it was for Wassermann, as were the crippling and future-conflict-breeding reparations exacted of Herzog, most appropriately placed by Wassermann alongside those of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

Wassermann's prose is carefully trimmed and shaped (and obviously we are indebted to the translator too for what we read in English), but the subject matter is no less painful for that. This fine piece of writing can only be advised if your own emotional state is in robust good health - or you are in a mood to be really spiteful!

See all reviews