"Jakob Wassermann was one of the most widely read and well-known writers of the first half of the twentieth century. But his literary weight has been increasing even more in recent years." Marcel Reich-Renicki Jakob Wassermann gave masterpieces of literary enlightenment." Sigmund Freud "Wassermann is the world star of the novella genre. He felt the world deeply, full of thoughts and his own poetics." Thomas Mann "His contemporaries, Rilke, Mann and Hesse used to compare him to Fyodor Dostoevsky. And rightly so." "Frankfurter Zeitung" "Mourning is often only a very refined form of hypocrisy." Jakob Wassermann