Fritz Mauthner

Fritz Mauthner (22 November 1849 – 29 June 1923) was an Austro-Hungarian novelist, theatre critic, satirist, and exponent of philosophical skepticism derived from a critique of human knowledge.

Life

Mauthner was born on 22 November 1849 into an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family from Horschitz (Hořice; also Horschitz) in Bohemia. His father owned a small weaving factory in Horschitz and at the age of six the family moved to Prague to provide a better education for the children. Mauthner's (1918) Erinnerungen provides a fascinating account of his early upbringing in Prague, portraying the situation of the family as Jews in relation to German and Czech cultures and languages and within the national conflict in Bohemia. As Gershon Weiler (1970) observes in Mauthner's Critique of Language, it is not by chance that Mauthner's early attention was directed to the problems of language as he found himself growing up in a linguistic crossfield where German, Czech and Hebrew were all part of the cultural mix and deeply intertwined with questions of identity and belonging - "I cannot understand how a Jew born in a Slavonic land of the Austrian empire could not be drawn to the study of language." Mauthner's agnosticism was also influenced by his early experiences. His parents were assimilated Jews but he did receive some religious grounding while at school. This smattering of knowledge eventually led him to develop a strong antipathy to religion which he came to associate with the empty rituals he had been forced to undertake as a youth in Bohemia.