The World's Illusion by Jakob Wassermann

  • FIRST PUBLISHED: Christian Wahnschaffe, 1919 (English translation, 1920)
  • TYPE OF WORK: Novel
  • TYPE OF PLOT: Social criticism
  • TIME OF WORK: Prior to World War I
  • LOCALE: Europe

The Story

Christian Wahnschaffe was an unusual person, even as a child. In boyhood, he was without fear. He would harry an entire pack of mastiffs belonging to his father, ride the wildest horses, and take risks in huntings; but he always came away without harm, as if his life were charmed. As young Wahnschaffe grew older, he lost none of his daring. Because his father was a very rich man, Christian lived in the best European society. One of his close friends and traveling companions was Bernard Crammon, a member of the Austrian aristocracy.

During a stay in Paris, Crammon saw a young dancer, Eva Sorel, in an obscure theater. The dancer was so impressed by Crammon that he introduced her to his circle of leisure-class intellectuals, where she met Christian Wahnschaffe. Orphaned at an early age, the first things that Eva could remember were connected with her training as a tightrope walker with a troupe of traveling players. One day, a disabled Spaniard bought the little girl’s liberty from the gypsies to train her as a dancer, for he recognized the possibilities of her beauty and grace. When she was eighteen, the Spaniard sent her to Paris with his sister to make her debut. Shortly afterward, she met Bernard Crammon.

Christian Wahnschaffe fell desperately in love with Eva Sorel, but she refused him as a lover. Although she was charmed by his appearance and his personality, she remained aloof, for she saw in him a man who had not yet learned to appreciate the aesthetic and intellectual life of his time.

Christian had a rival for the love of Eva Sorel, a young English nobleman, Denis Lay. Lay was as handsome as Christian and more talented in the world of the intellect; he was also Christian’s equal in the world of physical accomplishments. Lay appealed far more to Eva than did the German. Nevertheless, there was something about Christian that mysteriously fascinated the girl.

Denis Lay’s rivalry lasted but a few months. One night, while he entertained Eva Sorel, Crammon, Christian, and a large company aboard his yacht in the Thames, the passengers saw a crowd of striking dockworkers on the river's banks. Lay dared Christian to compete with him in a swimming race to the shore to investigate the crowd. When the Englishman leaped overboard and started for the shore, strong undercurrents soon dragged him under despite Christian’s efforts to save him. The next morning, his body was recovered. The tragic incident had a profound effect on Christian.

Sometime later, in Paris, Christian met a refugee Russian revolutionary, Ivan Becker. Becker tried to make Christian understand something of the widespread misery in Europe and the exploitation of the poor by the classes above them. When Christian finally asked Becker what he should do, the Russian replied that everyone in the upper classes asked the same question when confronted by problems of inequality and poverty. Becker continued that it was really a question of what the poor man was to do.

One night, Becker took Christian to see the wife and four children of a man who had attempted to assassinate the elder Wahnschaffe. Disturbed by the degrading poverty of the household, Christian gave them a large sum of money. Later, he learned that this charitable act was the worst thing he could have done, for the woman wasted the gold in foolish purchases and loans to people who had no intentions of repaying her.

Christian began to be bored with the life of leisure and luxury he had led. It seemed to him that he should do something more useful with his life. He lost interest in his gem collection, and when he discovered that Eva Sorel desired his world-famous diamond, the Ignifer, he sent it to her.

Meanwhile, Eva had achieved great success. In St. Petersburg, the Grand Duke Cyril, a man of great political influence under the tsar, offered to lay everything he could command at her feet, but she refused him. Still fascinated by the memory of Christian, Eva returned to Western Europe. During a holiday, she sent for Christian and took him as her lover. The sweetness of the affair, however, was blunted by Christian’s new liberalism. He had become friendly with Amadeus Voss, a young man who once had studied for the priesthood and consequently had become more than ever convinced of the futility of his life. One day, Eva was injured when a large stone, thrown by a drunken man at a fair, struck her feet. At her home, while Christian was bathing and binding her swollen feet, he felt that he was kneeling to her spiritually as well as physically. His whole mind rebelled against this discovery, and he left the dancer precipitately.

A few weeks later, Christian and his friend Crammon went to Hamburg to see a friend off to America. After the ship had sailed, they wandered about the waterfront. Hearing screams in a tavern, they entered. There, they found a man mistreating a woman whom they rescued and took to an inn. The following morning, Christian returned and told her he would care for her. When she said that she was Karen Engelschall, a prostitute, Christian assured her that he only meant to take care of her as a human being. He had already decided to go to Berlin to study medicine, and she readily agreed to accompany him since her mother and brother were living in that city.

Christian’s father and brother had become much richer, and both held posts in the German diplomatic service. The elder Wahnschaffe wished Christian to take charge of his business, but Christian refused. Deciding to become a poor man and to help humanity, he also sold the land he had inherited from his mother’s family. That was the reason for his decision to study medicine. His friends and his family thought him mad, and his father threatened to have him placed in protective custody in a sanatorium. Even the people Christian had taken into his care, Amadeus Voss and Karen Engelschall, thought he was mad. They had previously had visions of great wealth to be gained through him.

Within a few months, Karen died of bone tuberculosis. By that time, Christian had returned all of his fortune to his family and was almost penniless. Then Karen’s brother committed a murder and tried to implicate Christian. With patience Christian played upon the nerves of the brother until he admitted having committed the crime and then exonerated Christian. Shortly afterward, the elder Wahnschaffe appeared at the Berlin tenement where his son was living and attempted to persuade him to return to his rightful place in society before the reputation of the entire Wahnschaffe family was utterly ruined. Christian refused, but he agreed to disappear entirely. Nothing more was heard of him. Sometimes, rumors sifted back to his former friends and his family that he had been seen among the poorest people in London, New York, or some continental city and that he was doing his best to make life easier for the unfortunates of this world.

Critical Evaluation

The World’s Illusion (published in two volumes in the original) is a powerful philosophical novel exploring the decadence of upper-middle-class European society before World War I. Completed in the last year of the war, the novel is a declaration of the author’s faith that humankind, through suffering and the atonement of guilt, may be redeemed from its wickedness. At the same time, the book is a jeremiad on the old order of the privileged classes, exhausting themselves through frivolous pleasures, greed, and stupidity. Indeed, like an Old Testament prophet, Jakob Wassermann excoriates the evils of a corrupt society, even as he laments its waste; from this perspective of social criticism, his novel can be appreciated in the light of the German postwar Expressionist movement in art. From a literary perspective, however, the book follows the moral tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy. Sustained, eloquent, and at times hortatory, The World’s Illusion attempts, on a grand scale, to summarize the passions, ideas, and ethics of an effete civilization.

Wassermann’s hero is Christian Wahnschaffe—a wealthy, intelligent, but spiritually restless searcher after self-knowledge. His search for perfect love is frustrated. Eva Sorel, who inspires in him the deepest passion, ultimately proves to be—in her own words—a sorceress who would enslave him. Nevertheless, Christian frees himself from the sorcery of submissive love; he will not serve any soul weaker than his own. Similarly, his search for perfect friendship, even with the “stainless knight” Bernard Crammon, is unfulfilling. He is bored with luxury, wearies of senseless pleasure, and rejects the feverish activities of political idealism. By the end of the novel, he has divested himself of wealth and station; through service on behalf of miserable, suffering humanity, he has attempted to live purely and simply; through abnegation of his own selfish desires, he has attempted to follow the paths of righteousness.

From Christian’s moral pilgrimage, Wassermann (as a twentieth-century John Bunyan) points to a clear message: that by following the evil gods of Baal, the children of light have fallen into the darkness of “the world’s illusion.” This illusion is the worship of false gods—hedonistic delights, sterile vanity, sensuality—that conceals the real purpose of existence. In two important scenes of the novel, Amadeus Voss alerts his friend Christian to this purpose. In the final chapter of “The Silver Cord,” he reads to Christian two passages from Ecclesiastes, 11:9 and 12:1, to remind him that God’s judgment will follow after those who pride themselves on their youthful vigor. At an even more significant turning point in the novel, the section titled “Karen Engelschall,” Amadeus reads to Christian from Isaiah 3:15. The passage beginning “What mean ye that ye crush my people” concludes with a terrible threat of doom to the “daughters of Zion” for their vanity. At once, Christian understands that his life has been one of fatuity, and he leaves Berlin. Thus, like a Tolstoyan hero, he learns that social glory is a mere bauble. In the second volume of the book, he learns—like a Dostoevskian hero—that he must undergo suffering and renunciation to purge himself of guilt.

Yet as a novel of ideas, The World’s Illusion perhaps resembles the fiction of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, Wassermann’s contemporaries, more closely than that of the Russians. Like Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), The World’s Illusion analyzes the decadence of a social class committed to vulgar materialism; and like Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) or Steppenwolf (1927), the book concerns the discovery of self through the visionary or intuitive stages of an interior journey. To make these stages clear to the reader, Wassermann’s method is one of sharp contrasts: the ideal with the real; the life of power with the life of service; sincere affection (Letitia) with egoistic passion (Eva); the luxury of German aristocrats with the poverty of Polish peasants and Russian Jews; morality with sensuality; man’s judgments with those of God. At times, Wassermann’s dialectic method lacks subtlety, but at his best, he writes with intensity, lyric beauty, and fervent moral conviction.

Principal Characters:

  • Christian Wahnschaffethe son of a wealthy German capitalist
  • Bernard CrammonWahnschaffe’s aristocratic friend
  • Eva Sorela dancer
  • Ivan Beckera Russian revolutionist
  • Amadeus VossWahnschaffe’s boyhood friend
  • Karen Engelschalla prostitute befriended by Wahnschaffe

Bibliography

"Jakob Wassermann: About Success and the Illusion of Belonging." Leo Baeck Institute London, www.leobaeck.co.uk/snapshots/jakob-wassermann-about-success-and-illusion-belonging. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

"Jakob Wassermann." Holocaust Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jakob-wassermann. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Volckmer, Katharina, and Katharina Barbara Emmy Volckmer. Society and Its Outsiders in the Novels of Jakob Wassermann. 2014. Oxford University, UK, dissertation.

Wassermann, Jakob. The World's Illusion. Vol. 2, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920.