His works, both reportage and fiction, concentrate on the multi-ethnic corner of Galicia, Podolia and Bukovina, now largely in western Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met.

Karl Emil Franzos was born near the town of Czortków (Chortkiv) in the eastern, Podolian region of the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia.

In the 1770s his great-grandfather established a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia, part of the Habsburg monarchy since the First Partition of Poland in 1772.

When the Austrian administration required Jews to adopt surnames, "Franzos" became his grandfather's name, from his French background, even though he regarded himself as German.

Franzos had acclaimed the 1871 German unification under Prussian leadership and advocated a Greater Germany including the Austrian territories.

More and more under Jew-hatred attacks, Franzos suffering from heart trouble died at the age of 55 in Berlin, where he is buried in the Weißensee Cemetery.

His conviction that Germanisation was the way forward was based on the idealistic strain in German culture and will have looked very different in his day to a post-Holocaust perspective.

Galicia and Bukovina were the most backward, the poorest provinces of the Austrian Empire, so that Franzos saw his promotion of Germanisation as part of an attempt to improve conditions there politically and economically as well as culturally and socially.

The rigidity with which the eastern Jewish communities shut themselves off from outside influences is the theme of Franzos's most ambitious work, Der Pojaz, completed in 1893, but not published until after his death in 1905.

This problem forms the subject of a number of his works, including two of his best novels, Judith Trachtenberg (1890) and Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child (1896).