Youth, education, and first job Jacob was raised alongside his older brother Robert (1883–1924) and younger half-sister Alice Lampl (1898–1938) in an intellectual German-Jewish household. Jacob attended
Gymnasium schools in Berlin and Vienna, obtaining his
Abitur (high school exam) from the
Ascanian high school in Berlin, under the tutelage of the noted philosopher
Otto Friedrich Gruppe. He enrolled at the Frederick William University (today the
Humboldt University of Berlin) to study literature, history, music, and
Germanistics. At college he became friends with the
Expressionist Georg Heym, and gained his first journalistic job – as a theatre critic for the
Deutschen Montagszeitung.
Weimar Republic For twenty years, Jacob worked as a journalist and feature writer, also publishing a number of novels, short story collections, and plays. In September and October 1926, he served as a delegate to the
International Film Congress in Paris, an event at which a number of
anti-Semitic propaganda films were promoted. Jacob reproduced the experience later in his novel
Blut und Zelluloid. During the period he earned a reputation as a talented and prolific author, publishing in fields as diverse as news journalism, biography (especially of German composers), dramatic works, fiction, and cultural history.
Third Reich, concentration camps, and emigration Following the
rise to power of the
Nazi Party and the promulgation of laws restricting the freedoms of Jews, Jacob lost his job as a journalist at the
Berliner Tageblatt in March 1933. He sought now to make a living as a freelance writer in Vienna, concentrating his efforts on biographies and non-fiction. At the 11th international congress of the literary organization
P.E.N., held in
Dubrovnik, Jacob joined fellow writers
Raoul Auernheimer and
Paul Frischaue in vocal opposition to Nazism, and contributed to the fracturing of the Austrian chapter of P.E.N. His books were banned under the Nazi regime, but remained in print via Swiss and Dutch exile publishers. Following the
annexation of Austria, Jacob was arrested on 22 March 1938. All of his belongings, including his library and private correspondence, were confiscated, and Jacob was included in the first so-called "celebrity transport" of prisoners to the concentration camp at
Dachau. He remained there until 23 September 1938, when he was transferred to
Buchenwald. Jacob's future wife, Dora Angel-Soyka, succeeded through the exercise of extraordinary effort in having Jacob released from Buchenwald. The sister of the Austrian poet Ernest Angel, and former wife of the writer
Otto Soyka, she enlisted the help of Jacob's American uncle Michael J. Barnes in securing his release on 10 January 1939. Jacob and Angel-Soyka were married on 18 February 1939 and immediately left Germany, via the United Kingdom, for New York.
US, return to Germany, and death In the United States, Jacob resumed his writing career, contributing both to German-language periodicals including the Jewish weekly
Aufbau and to the
New York Times. He wrote a book on the history of bread: Six Thousand Years of Bread in German. It was translated in English by
Richard and Clara Winston and published in 1944 by Doubleday. He published further works of non-fiction, now in English, and gained American citizenship on 28 February 1945. Following the end of the war, he returned to Europe in summer 1953, but did not settle permanently, moving frequently between hotels and boarding houses with his wife. His health, severely damaged by his internment, declined, and from 1959 he produced no further literary works. Jacob died in 1967 and is buried, with his wife, in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. ==Critical reception==