author
Jakob Schaffner
1875–1944
A Swiss novelist whose hard childhood fed directly into his fiction, he wrote intense, searching books that won wide attention in the German-speaking world. His career later became deeply controversial because of his support for Nazism.
1 Audiobook
Der Dechant von Gottesbüren : Roman
by Jakob Schaffner
About the author
Born in Basel in 1875, Jakob Schaffner grew up in difficult circumstances and spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. He trained as a shoemaker, lived a restless life in his younger years, and eventually became a writer whose work stood out for its emotional intensity and sharp break from comfortable middle-class conventions.
Schaffner moved to Germany in the years before World War I and became known as part of a newer generation of Swiss writers. His best-known novel, Johannes (1922), drew on his early life and helped secure his literary reputation.
That reputation is inseparable from the politics of his later years. Schaffner became a supporter of Nazism, and this has left his legacy heavily disputed: he is remembered both as a significant Swiss novelist and as a writer whose political commitments deeply damaged how his work is read today.