"An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary." -- Lion Feuchtwanger
Lion Feuchtwanger (pseudonym: J.L. Wetcheek) (7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958) was a German-Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Feuchtwanger's fierce criticism of the Nazi Party—years before it assumed power—ensured that he would be a target of government-sponsored persecution after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Following a brief period of internment in France, and a harrowing escape from Continental Europe, he sought asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.
Although Feuchtwanger is praised for his often courageous efforts to expose the brutality of the Nazis, he is occasionally criticized for his failure to acknowledge persecutions in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
"After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.""An action doesn't have to be wrong just because it is not logical. It doesn't have to be right just because it has its logic.""Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.""Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.""Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.""From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.""I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one.""I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.""Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.""There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime.""What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity."
Feuchtwanger was born in Munich in 1884, and raised in a Jewish household. He studied literature and philosophy in the universities in Munich and Berlin.
Feuchtwanger served in the German Army during World War I, an experience that contributed to a leftist tilt in his writings. After studying a variety of subjects, he became a theater critic and founded the culture magazine, "Der Spiegel", in 1908. He soon became a figure in the literary world, and was sought out by the young Bertolt Brecht, with whom he collaborated on drafts of Brecht's early work, The Life of Edward II of England, in 1923-24. According to Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta, Feuchtwanger was a possible source for the titles of two other Brecht works, including Drums in the Night (first called Spartakus by Brecht).
Feuchtwanger was already well-known throughout Germany in 1925, when his first popular novel, Jud Süß (translated as Power), appeared. He also published Erfolg (English: Success), a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Nazi Party (which he considered, in 1930, a thing of the past) during the inflation era. The new fascist regime soon began persecuting him, and while he was on a speaking tour of America, in Washington, D.C., he was a guest of honor at a dinner hosted by then German ambassador Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron. That same day (January 30, 1933) Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The next day, Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Feuchtwanger, recommending that he not return home.
In 1933, while Feuchtwanger was on the tour, his house was ransacked by government agents who stole or destroyed many items from his extensive library, including invaluable manuscripts of some of his projected works (one of the characters in The Oppermanns undergoes an identical experience).
Feuchtwanger and his wife did not return to Germany, moving instead to Southern France, settling in Sanary-sur-Mer. His works were included among those burned during the May 10, 1933 book burnings held across Germany. On August 25, 1933, an official Nazi paper, Reichsanzeiger, included Feuchtwanger's name on the first list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people." Because Feuchtwanger had addressed and predicted many of their crimes even before they came to power, Hitler considered him a personal enemy and the Nazis designated Feuchtwanger as the "Enemy of the state number one", as mentioned in The Devil in France (Der Teufel in Frankreich).
Still, Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels paid Feuchtwanger the dubious compliment of having his book Jud Süß made into a film in 1940—albeit, with the introduction of an anti-Semitic slant that did not appear in the original.
In his writings, Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi racist policies years before the official London and Paris governments abandoned their policy of appeasement towards Hitler. He remembered that American politicians also had suggested that "Hitler be given a chance." With the publication of The Oppermanns in 1933, he became a prominent spokesman in opposition to the Third Reich. Within a year, the novel was translated into Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish languages.
In 1936, still in Sanary, he wrote The Pretender (Der falsche Nero), in which he compared the Roman upstart Terentius Maximus, who had claimed to be Nero, with Hitler.
The following year he traveled to the Soviet Union. His notes about life in Moscow, Moskau 1937, show him praising life under Stalin and evidently against the international image of the Great Terror; he speaks approvingly of the Moscow Trials. The book has been criticized as a work of naive apologism.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and imprisoned in an internment camp, Les Milles (Camp des Milles). In 1941, he published a memoir of his internment, The Devil in France (Der Teufel in Frankreich). He escaped Les Milles with the help of his wife Marta; Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France; Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in Marseilles; and the Rev. Waitstill and Mrs. Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife who were in Europe on a similar mission as Fry. The Rev. Sharp volunteered to accompany Feuchtwanger by rail from Marseilles across Spain to Lisbon. If Feuchtwanger had been recognized at border crossings in France or Spain, he would have been detained and turned over to the Gestapo. Realizing that even in Portugal, Feuchtwanger was still not out of reach of the Nazis, Martha Sharp gave up her own berth on the Excalibur, so Feuchtwanger could sail immediately for New York City with her husband.
Feuchtwanger eventually received asylum in the United States, settled in Los Angeles in 1941. He bought Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, California in 1943, and continued to write there until his death in 1958. His wife, Marta, continued to live in their house on the coast, and remained an important figure in the exile community, devoting the remainder of her life to promoting the work of her husband. Before her death in 1987, Marta Feuchtwanger donated her husband's papers, photos and personal library to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, housed within Special Collections in the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California.
Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (The Ugly Duchess), 1923...about Margarete Maultasch (14th century in Tyrol)
Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (The Life of Edward II of England), 1924: written with Bertolt Brecht.
Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925.
Die Geschwister Oppermann, (The Oppermanns), 1933.
Marianne in Indien und sieben andere Erzählungen (Marianne in Indien, Höhenflugrekord, Stierkampf, Polfahrt, Nachsaison, Herrn Hannsickes Wiedergeburt, Panzerkreuzer Orlow, Geschichte des Gehirnphysiologen Dr. Bl.), 1934...title translated into English as Little Tales and as Marianne in India and seven other tales (Marianne in India, Altitude Record, Bullfight, Polar Expedition, The Little Season, Herr Hannsicke's Second Birth, The Armored Cruiser "Orlov", History of the Brain Specialist Dr. Bl.)
Der falsche Nero (The Pretender), 1936...about Terentius Maximus, the "False Nero"
Moskau 1937 (Moscow 1937), 1937
Unholdes Frankreich (Ungracious France, Der Teufel in Frankreich, The Devil in France), 1941
Die Brüder Lautensack (Die Zauberer, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, The Lautensack Brothers), 1943
Simone, 1944
Die Füchse im Weinberg (Proud Destiny, Waffen für Amerika, Foxes in the Vineyard), 1947/48 - a novel mainly about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin beginning in 1776's Paris
Goya, 1951...a novel about the famous painter Francisco Goya in the 1790s in Spain
Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau), 1952, a novel set before and during the Great French Revolution
Die Jüdin von Toledo (Spanische Ballade, Raquel, The Jewess of Toledo), 1955
Jefta und seine Tochter (Jephthah and his Daughter, Jephta and his daughter), 1957
The Wartesaal Trilogy
Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success), 1930
Die Geschwister Oppenheim (Die Geschwister Oppermann, The Oppermanns), 1933
Exil, 1940
The Josephus Trilogy...about Flavius Josephus beginning in the year 60 in Rome
Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
Die Söhne (The Jews of Rome), 1935
Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, The day will come, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
