My First Wife by Jakob Wassermann
Jakob Wassermann’s gripping, dramatic portrayal of a marriage—and its disastrous breakdown—is titled My First Wife. It tells the tale of young author Alexander Herzog, who flees to Vienna in order to pay off his debts and end a broken romance. Ganna, a book-lover who is exuberant, girlish, awkward, weird, and wild, is after him there. He believes he can shape Ganna into what he wants after becoming dazzled and scared by her devotion to him and drawn to the big dowry her affluent father is offering. But no one is able to restrain her troublesome impulses. Herzog will learn that Ganna has resources and tenacity he didn’t know she had and that he can never escape her when their marriage begins to self-destruct.
My First Wife by Jakob Wassermann
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My First Wife, which was posthumously released in 1934 and was based on the author Jakob Wassermann’s own disastrous marriage, exudes an undeniable atmosphere of reality and sad experience. It is a heartbreaking work of art that unfolds in startling detail. While the names and the number of children his fictional self and wife had together have been changed from the actual four, the vast majority of other details have been accurately captured.
Alexander Herzog is the moniker given to Wassermann’s persona. He is a young writer from Germany who settles in Vienna soon before the 20th century begins. Ganna, the younger daughter of a law professor who is scholarly yet exuberant and highly strung, decides she will wed him. She threatens to leap 20 feet off a balcony that hangs over a lake to get his consent. Herzog says, “She was definitely capable of it.” The 44-year-old neuropathology instructor Sigmund Freud, a university colleague of her father’s, maybe a good choice. He should have looked for an alternative at that moment rather than committing himself to marriage.
He was aware of the challenges Ganna had to face while growing up, as well as the “twice-weekly prophylactic beatings” she endured at the hands of her father. However, Herzog was not a post-Freudian; like many young men before and since Herzog believed he could shape Ganna into the wife he wished for.
According to Herzog, he was unfaithful in his marriage, regularly lacked resolution, frequently spent a lot of time away from home working or living, and was, in his own way, just as unrealistic about maintaining the home as Ganna was.
She possessed a variety of skills, consistently expressed her genuine admiration for his writing, was supportive of him personally, was willing to put up with his lifestyle and extramarital affairs, and was able to support the couple’s home with the interest from her dowry and, eventually, with capital as well. However, even after the divorce, perhaps even more so, she was maniacally fixated on what she saw to be her rights over Herzog and everything that belonged to him.
The Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy suffers from the First World War’s own loss of lives, livelihoods, property, and both. We would respect Wassermann for using the historical struggle as a setting for his story about the catastrophic breakdown of a marriage if it weren’t fiction.
