Daniel Nothafft, a musician of genius in Nuremberg, marries one sister and loves the other, and his refusal to bend to the town, his family or anyone's comfort ruins nearly everyone around him, himself included. Jakob Wassermann published "The Goose Man" in 1915, and it became one of the most widely read German novels of its generation. The title comes from the Goose Man fountain in Nuremberg, and the city itself — its burghers, its gossip, its narrow houses — is drawn with a satirist's precision. Fifty-nine plates of German painting from 1833 to 1914, among them Adolph von Menzel and Max Liebermann, carry the plain weight of work and daily life that Nuremberg's burghers would have recognized at once.
