Paul Kornfeld (1889–1942)

Paul Kornfeld was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Emilie and Moritz Kornfeld. He studied at the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität, the German section of Charles University. As a young man, he was a member of the so-called Prague Circle that included renowned literary figures such as Franz Kafka and Max Brod, as well as his classmates Willy Haas and Franz Werfel. After the death of his older brother in 1905, his family expected that Paul would succeed him in his father's business. To further his literary ambitions, in 1914 he moved to Frankfurt am Main, where his first play Die Verführung (The Seduction) was produced at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus. It won him recognition as an important new writer. That same year, he married actress Friederike "Fritta" Brod. He published his thesis Der beseelte und der psychologische Mensch (The Spiritual and the Psychological Person, also translated as The Inspired and the Psychological Being), in the Expresssionist journal Das junge Deutschland (Young Germany). He published the collections of short stories Legende (1917) and Die Begegnung (1917). Kornfeld turned towards satirical comedy in the 1920s, such as Kilian oder Die gelbe Rose (Killan, or The Yellow Rose, 1926). He also wrote a modern mystery play, Himmel und Hölle (Heaven and Hell, 1918). In 1925, Max Reinhardt brought Kornfeld to Berlin, where his play Jud Suss (Jew Suss) was his greatest stage success. It was a highly nuanced portrayal of the controversial 18th century Jewish financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, whose story had already been depicted in Wilhelm Hauff's 1827 novella and in Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 historical novel. Within a decade, it also became the subject of a 1934 British film and then a notorious 1940 Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film. The rise of the Nazi regime to power in Germany in 1933 put an end to Kornfeld's career there and he returned to Prague. There he began work on what turned out to be his only novel, Blanche oder Das Atelier im Garten (Blanche or The Studio in the Garden). Shortly after he completed it in 1941, Kornfeld was deported by the Nazis to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland (called in German, Ghetto Litzmannstadt), where died in 1942. Blanche oder Das Atelier im Garten was finally published in 1957, 15 years after his death, and is today his best-known work.