Berthold Auerbach

Berthold Auerbach was born Moses Baruch Auerbacher on 28 February 1812 in Nordstetten, a village of the Black Forest, into a poor Jewish family, and was sent to the Talmud school and the rabbinical seminary before the universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg drew him toward philosophy — he never converted, and remained all his life an avowed Jew and a fighter for emancipation. His first works were Jewish: a novel on Spinoza (1837), whose complete works he translated into German, and a defense of Judaism against its detractors.

Then he found his true subject in the villages of his childhood: the Black Forest Village Stories of 1843, tales of peasants told with warmth, exactness and moral seriousness, were one of the great bestsellers of nineteenth-century German literature, created the genre of the village tale, the Dorfgeschichte, and were read across Europe and America — a Jew from the ghetto of a small town had become the voice of the German countryside.

The last years darkened it: the antisemitic agitation of 1880 in the Berlin he loved wrung from him the cry that he had 'lived and worked in vain'. He died in Cannes on 8 February 1882.