Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958), a distinguished member of the post-World War I German literary scene, lived and wrote in political exile for the last quarter-century of his life. His masterwork, Success, is one of the great novels of the 20th century.

Lion Feuchtwanger was born on July 7, 1884, in Munich, Germany, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. At Berlin and Munich universities he studied philosophy, literature, and ancient and modern languages and also developed a working interest in theater; in fact, while still a student he composed three short Old Testament plays - Joel, King Saul, and Uriah's Wife (1905-1906). After graduation he became a drama critic for Die Schaubühne (The Stage) from 1908 to 1911. In 1912 he married Martha Loffler.

Feuchtwanger was an inveterate traveller, and in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, he was in Tunisia (which was then French) and was arrested as an enemy alien and imprisoned. He escaped after a short internment, returned to Germany, and served in the army. After his discharge he wrote several anti-war plays (one, entitled Peace, was modeled on an Aristophanes anti-war play), but wartime patriotic fervor led to their suppression. Back in Berlin he began graduate work in literature and received a Ph.D. in 1918; his thesis subject was the great 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.

Feuchtwanger's own early poetry reflected his socialist and pacifist views, and in 1918 he founded a literary newspaper, Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to promote "revolutionary artistic tendencies." His editorship led to the discovery of the experimental radical playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose work Feuchtwanger enthusiastically promoted; they later collaborated on several plays, including Das Leben Eduard des zweiten von England (1928), an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II.

Feuchtwanger was an energetic man and a prolific writer: he translated literary classics from the Spanish, the English, and the ancient Greek and worked as an editor and a reviewer, yet still found time for his own plays, novels, and poems. He finished his first novel, Jew Süss (Power), in 1921 but was unable to find a publisher for it until 1925, when it became an international best-seller. Set in the 18th century, it deals with an identity crisis: in order to gain social power, the novel's protagonist renounces his Jewish heritage and becomes assimilated into the mainstream of German culture. In 1928, although he had not yet visited the United States, Feuchtwanger, under the pseudonym J. L. Wetcheek (a literal translation of "Feuchtwanger"), wrote Pep, a book of satirical poems about America.

The Novel Success

Feuchtwanger's reputation was initially as a playwright and later as a historical novelist, but his masterpiece, Erfolg (1930; Success), was a contemporary roman à clef, a novel of a gloriously liberal but doomed Weimar Republic moving inexorably toward fascism. Published just three years before Hitler's rise to power, the novel is not only prophetic of Germany's totalitarianism, but uncanny in its multi-level depiction of the corruptive process.

The narrative scheme of Success was almost certainly influenced by movie techniques. As in John Dos Passos' USA trilogy and Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, the main plot line, where it exists at all, is subordinated to multiple parallel sub-plots, so that there is, as in film, frequent "cross-cutting." Dozens of characters are successfully manipulated, and so skillfully that when a character reappears after an absence of 40 or 50 pages he is almost immediately recalled by the reader.

The widely diffuse central story line concerns the futile efforts of a young woman, Johanna Krain, to free her lover, Krüger, from prison. As an art museum curator he has grievously offended the conservative Bavarian folk by exhibiting two unconventional paintings: one is an unusual treatment of "Joseph and His Brothers," and the other is a female nude. With the first painting Feuchtwanger hit upon a sly symbol; the Munich populace is too unimaginative to see the connection between themselves and Joseph's businesslike, short-memoried brothers, but they are nevertheless troubled by the painting. Much less subtle is the second painting, which leads to Krüger's trial for adultery with the painting's nude subject (of which he is actually innocent) and breach of public morality; unfortunately for Krüger, too many marginal matters obtrude, and he is found guilty and languishes in prison for several dispiriting years before dying there. Krüger is, even before Hitler's advent, a victim of Hitlerism, of provincial mentality and rigged justice.

Hitler is represented in the novel as a character named Rupert Kutzner, leader of a lunatic-fringe right-wing group whose power grows and moves centerward as ministers and industrialists find the group useful. Other important replications are Kaspar Pröckl (Bertolt Brecht), Jacques Tüverlin (Feuchtwanger himself), and Hessreiter (either Krupp or I. G. Farben). Quite probably all of the characters have real-life models, just as the depicted events mirror actual developments in the decline of German democracy. But it's not the historical literalness that accounts for the novel's greatness; rather, it's the wealth and depth of Feuchtwanger's moral imagination. Dotting the book's landscapes are startling ironies and haunting tableaux: the testimony that sinks the decent, civilized Krüger comes from an arrant perjurer, the hooligan chauffeur Ratzenberger, who is not so incidentally a member of Kutzner's party; the liberal defense attorney, Geyer, is mugged by his own cadging, nihilistic son, Erich; the folksy Chaplinesque comic, Balthasar Hierl, secretly fears and detests his adoring public; the once-liberal minister Klenk, swept to the right by the political winds, finds himself strangely and deeply moved by the left-revolutionary film "Orlov" (actually Eisenstein's masterpiece, "Potemkin"); the great painter Landholzer has slyly found "asylum" in a mental institution, which he finds more congenial than the outside world.

Success's approximately 800 pages constitute a conspectus of Germany in the 1920s, brilliantly dissecting the private and public tensions that were building to a national crisis and, ultimately, to a European calamity. Few novels have been as ambitious and fewer still as fulfilling. English language readers are the beneficiaries of an exemplary translation by Willa and Edwin Muir (1930).

Exile in the United States

In 1932 and 1933 Feuchtwanger travelled in America and began writing a trilogy that reached back into Roman antiquity, focusing on the complex figure of Josephus, the Roman-Jewish soldier-historian. Upon his return to Germany Feuchtwanger's Berlin house and his fortune were confiscated by the Nazi government. He fled to France, where he lived and wrote until French capitulation in 1940 led to his confinement in a concentration camp; that incarceration and his escape in female disguise are described in Der Teufel in Frankreich (1941; The Devil in France). Still under a German death sentence for his writings and his avowed politics, Feuchtwanger fled with his wife to Spain, then to Portugal, and in late 1940 reached the United States, which became his permanent home.

Feuchtwanger's political militancy and creative powers were not at all blunted by exile. In addition to his Josephus trilogy, he wrote Die Geschwister Oppenheim (1933; The Oppermanns, 1934), a powerful novel of a wealthy Jewish family cheated of their department store through the connivance of a competitor and the government; an allegorical novel followed, Der Falsche Nero (1936; The Pretender), in which a lowly potter (read "Hitler") is elevated by a capitalist to a position of pseudo emperor, but is finally overthrown and crucified along with his supporters.

After World War II's end, Feuchtwanger reverted to his first fictional love, the historical novel: Die Füchse Im Weinberg (1947; Proud Destiny) documents Benjamin Franklin's role in forging an alliance between France and the American insurrectionists during the revolutionary struggle against England. Goya (1951; This Is the Hour) portrays the tempestuous personality of the great Spanish painter against the background of his times. Spanische Ballade (1955; Raquel) is an intriguing romance of medieval Spain, exploring the interactions of its three central types - the businessman, the adventurer, and the historian.

Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles, California, on December 21, 1958.

Further Reading

Two English-language studies of Feuchtwanger are Lothar Kahn's Insight and Action (1975) and John M. Spalek's Lion Feuchtwanger: the man, his ideas, his work (1972). Two important works in German are Günther Horst Gottschalk's Die "Verkleidungstrachnik" Lion Feuchtwanger in Waffen für Amerika (1965) and a full-length critical study of Success Egon Bruckener's Lion Feuchtwanger's Roman "Erfolg" (1978).

Feuchtwanger, Lion (Munich, 1884-1958, Los Angeles), completed his study of Germanistik, philosophy, and anthropology at Munich and Berlin universities in 1907 with a doctoral thesis on Heine (Heinrich Heine's Fragment ‘Der Rabbi von Bacherach’). He then worked as editor, founding a periodical (Der Spiegel. Blätter für Literatur, Musik und Bühne), and as dramatic critic. In 1910 he published his novel Der tönerne Gott, and two years later set out on prolonged travels. At the beginning of the 1914-18 War he was in Tunisia (then French), where he was interned but escaped and returned to Munich. Having been called up but discharged again on health grounds, he resumed his work for the theatre. Through this he met Brecht and Marieluise Fleißer. In 1925 he moved to Berlin, but in 1933 after a lecture tour to the USA emigrated to southern France. In the same year he was deprived of his German citizenship. He recorded a visit to Russia, which included a meeting with Stalin, in Moskau 1937. Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde (1937, reissued with postscript by J. Pischel, 1993)—a rejoinder to André Gide's Retour de l'URSS (1937). From 1936 to 1939 he was co-editor of Das Wort. In 1940 the authorities in Vichy France interned him, but he escaped to the USA, living first in Los Angeles and from 1943 in Pacific Palisades. He wrote on the plight of the internees in France in Unholdes Frankreich. Meine Erlebnisse unter der Regierung Pétain (1942, as The Devil in France, 1941, as Der Teufel in Frankreich, 1954).

Feuchtwanger came to be best known for his historical novels, for which he chose periods of unrest and transition that reflected his own experience, convictions, and Jewish heritage. He wrote with little regard for historical accuracy. H. Mann was an admired friend, but his move towards a dialectical approach to history owed much to his contact with Brecht. After Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (1923), Jud Süß (1925), originally a play (1918), enjoyed international success. An epic trilogy on Flavius Josephus, entitled Josephus-Trilogie, began with Der jüdische Krieg (1932) and was completed under the impact of Hitler's regime with Die Söhne (1935) and with the two parts (‘Domitian’ and ‘Josef’) of Der Tag wird kommen (1945, as Josephus and the Emperor, 1942); the trilogy appeared in 1952, the third part as Das gelobte Land. The novel Der falsche Nero (1936) presents a caricature of Hitler, and Simone (1944) was written while Feuchtwanger was collaborating with Brecht on Die Gesichte der Simone Machard. Goya oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1951) focuses on the political function of art, exemplified by Goya's commitment to the contemporary Spanish scene, and Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1952) on the idea of revolution, as represented by the people. The central themes of his last novel, Jefta und seine Tochter (1957), which treats Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter (from the Book of Judges), are peace and freedom, the ideals that characterize Feuchtwanger's vision of a world order based on reason and an enlightened approach to social and political problems. An intellectual of the Left, whose approbation of the Soviet Union was followed by disillusionment, he became a committed anti-Fascist after witnessing the terror created by Hitler in Munich. In his second trilogy, Der Wartesaal. Zyklus aus dem Zeitgeschehen, he depicts crucial phases of this period up to the 1939-45 War, working from personal experience, authentic sources, and documented material. It consists of Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (2 vols., 1930), Die Geschwister Oppenheim (1933, as Die Geschwister Oppermann, 1948), and Exil (1940, film version 1981). The title of Erfolg is satirical; the novel, which was begun in 1927, is an analysis of the rise of National Socialism and contains many portraits of well-known figures, including Brecht as ‘Kaspar Bröckl’ and the author himself as the writer ‘Tüverlin’. A multilayered experimental novel, it is remarkable for its use of cinematic technique as well as montage. Exil reflects Feuchtwanger's concern that authors writing in exile should point beyond their own traumatic experience to constructive ideas benefiting the community of nations.

Feuchtwanger wrote over twenty plays, including adaptations. An early play, Warren Hastings. Gouverneur von Indien (1916) was later turned into Kalkutta 4. Mai to form with Die Petroleum-Inseln and Wird Hill amnestiert? (a comedy) the Angelsächsische Trilogie (1927), conceived in collaboration with Brecht. Brecht also influenced his experimental novel in dialogue form (dramatischer Roman) Thomas Wendt (1920, as Neunzehnhundertachtzehn, 1936), and collaborated with him in his Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (1924), an adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II. Feuchtwanger also dramatized his novel Waffen für Amerika (2 vols.), entitling the play Füchse im Weinberg (both 1947-8). Throughout his work he aimed at psychologically convincing figures whose political commitment forms an integral part of their individuality. He died before finishing a planned work on the theory of the historical novel; the fragment he had completed appeared as Das Haus der Desdemona oder Größe und Grenzen historischer Dichtung (ed. F. Zschech, 1961). Collections include Kleine Dramen (2 vols., 1905-6), Stücke in Versen (1954), Stücke in Prosa (1959), a volume of poetry, PEP, J. L. Wetcheeks amerikanisches Liederbuch (1928), and two collections of stories, Odysseus und die Schweine (1950, Engl. as Odysseus and the Swine, 1949) and Panzerkreuzer Potemkin (1954); the title-story of the latter volume, also contained in Erfolg, is based on a mutiny involving a battleship of the Black Sea fleet, made famous by S. M. Eisenstein's film of 1925. Centum opuscula (1956, ed. W. Berndt) is a selection of essays and reviews. In 1933 Feuchtwanger collaborated with Arnold Zweig in Die Aufgabe des Judentums; their correspondence, Briefwechsel 1933-1958 (2 vols.), ed. H. von Hofe, appeared in 1984; Briefwechsel mit Freunden (2 vols.) in 1991; Gesammelte Werke (11 vols. of the Amsterdam edition) in 1933-48; and Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben 1959 ff.

Stamp in memory of 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 atrocities and mass murder on an unimaginable grand scale that were carried out in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

Contents 1 Background 2 Early career and persecution 3 Imprisonment and escape 4 Exile and residence in America 5 Works 6 See also 7 Notes 8 Further reading 9 External links

Background

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.

Early career and persecution

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.^[1] 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.^[2] 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).^[3]

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.^{[4][citation needed]}

Imprisonment and escape

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and imprisoned in an internment camp, Les Milles (Camp des Milles).^[5] 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.

Exile and residence in America

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.

Works

Dan Johnson (left), Larry Attille (centre), and Will Lampe (right) in the Riverside Shakespeare Company's 1982 production of Bertolt Brecht's and Lion Feuchtwanger's Edward II (1924).

• 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.^[6]
• 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

See also

• Walter Duranty

Notes

1. ^ Marta Feuchtwanger: Nur eine Frau, Jahre Tage Stunden (Just a Woman, Years, Days, Hours), pub: Aufbau Verlag Berlin Leipzig, 1984. p 143.
2. ^ In the dedication of The Life of Edward II of England, Brecht wrote "I wrote this play with Lion Feuchtwanger"; Dedication page from Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England, 1924.
3. ^ "Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," by W. Stuart McDowell, in The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin, Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000).
4. ^ H. Wagner, Lion Feuchtwanger, p.58
5. ^ Jean-Marc Chouraqui, Gilles Dorival, Colette Zytnicki, Enjeux d'Histoire, Jeux de Mémoire: les Usages du Passé Juif, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006, p. 548 [1]
6. ^ Dedication page from Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England, 1924.

Further reading

• Jaretzky, Reinhold (1998), Lion Feuchtwanger: mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (5th ed.), Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, ISBN 3-4995-0334-4 
• von Sternburg, Wilhelm (19999), Lion Feuchtwanger. Ein deutsches Schriftstellerleben, Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, ISBN 3-7466-1416-3 
• Wagner, Hans (1996), Lion Feuchtwanger, Berlin: Morgenbuch, ISBN 3-3710-0406-6 

External links

• Feuchtwanger Memorial Library
• Villa Aurora

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