Heinrich Eduard Jacob (GER)

Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

Jacob, originally named Henry Edward Jacob, was born in Friedrichstadt, a district of Berlin, the son of bank director and newspaper publisher Richard Jacob (1847 - 1899) and his wife Martha (née Behrendt), the daughter of a landed family. The couple divorced in 1895 and Martha was remarried, to the Viennese banker Edmund Lampl, in the same year.

Jacob's work is the subject of analyses and criticism by a number of scholars of literary history. Writing in 2005, Isolde Mozer identified a mystical thread in his work despite its modernity. He characterized Jacob's thematic use of Kabbalist elements as an effort to find a solution to the crisis of modernity.

Jens-Erik Hohmann argued in a 2006 monograph on Jacob that the author's career represents a component of the history of Germany as a whole - as an account of a human and an artist attempting both to survive and remain part of the thread of history in a turbulent time.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Eduard_Jacob