Lion Feuchtwanger
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Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884 - 21 December 1958) was a German-Jewish novelist who was imprisoned in a French internment camp in Les Milles and later escaped to Los Angeles with the help of his wife, Marta.
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Family background
Feuchtwanger was born in Munich in 1884, and raised in a household that was both observantly Jewish and patriotically German. This dichotomy would later appear in his written works, especially his novel Josephus.
Early career and persecution
Lion served in the Germany Army during World War I, an experience that led to a leftist tilt in his writings. He soon became a figure in the literary world and was already well-known in 1925 when his first popular novel, Jud Süss, appeared. He also published Erfolg (m. "Success"), which was a thinly veiled criticism at the Nazi Party and Hitler. 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, and the next day, Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Feuchtwanger and recommended not to return home. In 1933, while Feuchtwanger was on the tour, his house was ransacked by government agents who stole many items from his extensive library. 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, the official Nazi paper Reichsanzeiger included Feuchtwanger's name in the first list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people."
In his writings, Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi racist policies years before the official London and Paris 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 for the opposition to the Third Reich. Within a year, the novel was translated to 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 a Roman upstart claiming to be Nero and Hitler.
Imprisonment and escape
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and imprisoned in an internment camp. However, he later escaped with the help of his wife Marta and Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France. Feuchtwanger eventually received asylum in the United States, settled in Los Angeles, and continued to write there until his death in 1958.
Works
- Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (The Ugly Duchess), 1923
- Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925
- Der falsche Nero (The Pretender), 1936
- 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
- Goya, 1951
- Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1952
- 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
- Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
- Die Söhne (The Jews of Rome), 1935
- Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
External links
- Feuchtwanger Memorial Library (http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/libraries/feuchtwanger/aboutfeuchtwanger.html)de:Lion Feuchtwanger
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