Karl Emil Franzos

Karl Emil Franzos (October 25, 1848 – January 28, 1904) was a German (Austrian) novelist.

Franzos was born of Sephardic father and Odessan mother of Jewish parentage in Ukraine Podolia, and spent his early years in the shtetl of Czortków in Galicia.

His father, a district physician, died early, and the boy, after attending the gymnasium of Czernowitz, Bukovina, was obliged to teach in order to support himself and prepare for academic study. He studied law at the universities of Vienna and Graz, but after passing the examination for employment in the state judicial service abandoned, this career and, becoming a journalist, travelled extensively in south Europe, and visited Asia and Egypt. In 1877 he returned to Vienna, where from 1884 to 1886 he edited the Neue illustrierte Zeitung. In 1887 he removed to Berlin and founded the fortnightly review Deutsche Dichtung. Franzos died in 1904.

His earliest collections of stories and sketches, "Aus Halb-Asien", "Land and Leute des ostlichen Europas" (1876) and "Die Juden von Barnow" (1877) depict graphically the life and manners of the races of south-eastern Europe.

His other works include:

*"Junge Liebe "(1878)
*" Stille Geschichten" (1880)
*" Moschko von Parma" (1880)
*"Ein Kampf und Recht" (1882)
*" Der President" (1884)
*" Judith Trachtenberg "(1890)
*" Der Wahrheitsucher" (1904)
*" Der Pojaz" (1904)

Woyzeck

Franzos is also well-known for being the first to publish an edition of the Georg Büchner play Woyzeck. Franzos completed his edition in 1879. The manuscript of Woyzeck was difficult to decipher, and had to be treated with chemicals in order to bring the ink up to the surface of the paper, and many of the pages were kept and later destroyed by Büchner's widow, who survived him by four decades. But Franzos's edition was for many years the authoritative version, until the late 1910s when a revival of Büchner's works began in Europe and the many errors in Franzos' edition came to light. These errors include the misspelling of the title, as "Wozzeck" instead of "Woyzeck", an alternate ending that involves Wozzeck drowning in lieu of Büchner's incomplete manuscript, and a fragmented plot without connections between the scenes. Although the play is often performed in newer versions, Franzos' edition has been immortalized in the form of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, which uses the Franzos edition as its base.

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