Lion Feuchtwanger (; 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 Judaism and 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 found asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.
Life and career Ancestry Feuchtwanger's Jewish ancestors originated from the Middle Franconian city of Feuchtwangen; following a pogrom in 1555, it had expelled all its resident Jews. Some of the expellees subsequently settled in Fürth, where they were called the "Feuchtwangers", meaning those from Feuchtwangen.W. von Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, p. 40f Feuchtwanger's grandfather Elkan moved to Munich in the middle of the 19th century.R. Jaretzky, Lion Feuchtwanger, p. 9
Early life Lion Feuchtwanger was born in 1884 to Orthodox Jewish margarine manufacturer Sigmund Feuchtwanger and his wife, Johanna (née Bodenheimer). He was the oldest in a family of nine siblings of whom another two, Martin and Ludwig Feuchtwanger, also became authors; Ludwig's son was the London-based historian Edgar Feuchtwanger (1924–2025). Two of his sisters settled in Palestine following the rise of the Nazi Party. One was killed in a concentration camp, and another settled in New York.
Feuchtwanger made his first attempt at writing while still a secondary-school student and won an award. In 1903, in Munich, he passed his Abitur examinations at an elite school, the Wilhelmsgymnasium. He then studied history, philosophy and German philology in Munich and Berlin. He received his PhD in 1907, under Franz Muncker, with a study of Heinrich Heine's unfinished 1840 novel The Rabbi of Bacharach.
Early career
After studying a variety of subjects, he became a theatre critic and founded the culture magazine Der Spiegel in 1908Marta Feuchtwanger: Nur eine Frau, Jahre Tage Stunden (Just a Woman, Years, Days, Hours), pub: Aufbau-Verlag Berlin Leipzig, 1984. p 143. (no connection to the post-WWII magazine of the same name). The first issue appeared on 30 April. After 15 issues and six months, Der Spiegel merged with Siegfried Jacobsohn's journal Die Schaubühne (renamed in 1918 to Die Weltbühne) for which Feuchtwanger continued to write. He was one of the contributors of the Swedish avant-garde magazine Thalia between 1910 and 1913. In 1912, he married a Jewish merchant's daughter, Marta Loeffler. She was pregnant at the wedding, but the child died shortly after birth.
After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Feuchtwanger served in the German military (November 1914), but was released early for health reasons. His experience as a soldier contributed to his leftist writings.
In 1916, he published a play based on the story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, which premiered in 1917, but Feuchtwanger withdrew it a couple of years later as he was dissatisfied with it.
During the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Feuchtwanger was ill and unable to participate.
Association with Brecht Feuchtwanger soon became a figure in the literary world, and he was sought out by the young Bertolt Brecht. Both collaborated on drafts of Brecht's early work, The Life of Edward II of England, in 1923–1924.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. 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)."Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," by W. Stuart McDowell, in The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin, Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000).
Shift from drama to novels After some success as a playwright, Feuchtwanger shifted his emphasis to writing historical novels. His most successful work in this genre was Jud Süß (Süss, the Jew), written 1921–1922, published 1925, which was well received internationally. His second great success was The Ugly Duchess Margarete Maultasch. For professional reasons, he moved to Berlin in 1925 and then to a large villa in Grunewald in 1932. He published the first part of his Josephus trilogy, The Jewish War, in 1932.
In 1930, Feuchtwanger wrote his first socio-political novel , based on the events of Beer Hall Putsch, as his reaction on the impending threat of Nazism; the novel would become the first entry in Wartesaal trilogy about the rise of Nazism in Germany. He continued the trilogy with The Oppermanns in 1933, which would become one of his best-known books.
Persecution by the Nazis Early opposition Feuchtwanger was one of the first to produce propaganda against Hitler and the Nazi Party. As early as 1920 he published in the satirical text Conversations with the Wandering Jew:
Towers of Hebrew books were burning, and bonfires were erected as high as the clouds, and people burnt to char, innumerable, and voices of priests sang in accompaniment: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Traces of men, women, children dragged themselves across the square, from all sides, they were naked or in rags, and they had nothing with them but bodies and the tatters of book scrolls – of torn, disgraced book scrolls, soiled with feces. And there followed them men in kaftans and women and children in the clothes of our day, countlessly, endlessly.
Rise of Nazism and exile In 1930, Feuchtwanger published , a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Nazi Party (in 1930, he considered it a thing of the past) during the inflation era. The Nazis soon began persecuting him, and while he was on a speaking tour of America, in Washington, D.C., he was guest of honor at a dinner hosted by the then ambassador Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron on the same day (30 January 1933) that Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The next day, Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Feuchtwanger to recommend that he not return home. Feuchtwanger, however, did not heed his advice and returned to Germany.
In 1933, while Feuchtwanger was on 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). In the summer of 1933, his name appeared on the first of Hitler's Ausbürgerungsliste, which were documents by which the Nazis arbitrarily deprived Germans of their citizenship and so rendered them stateless. During that time, he published the novel The Oppermanns. Feuchtwanger and his wife did not return to Germany but moved to Southern France, settling in Sanary-sur-Mer. His works were included among those burned in the 10 May 1933 Nazi book burnings held across Germany. Later Success and The Oppermanns would become the first two parts of the Wartesaal ("The Waiting Room") trilogy.
On 25 August 1933, the official German government gazette, Reichsanzeiger, included Feuchtwanger's name on the 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 the Nazis' 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.
In his writings, Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi racist policies years before the British and French governments abandoned their policy of appeasement towards Hitler. He remembered that American politicians were also among those who suggested that "Hitler be given a chance". With the publication of Success in 1930 and The Oppermanns in 1933, he became a prominent spokesman in opposition to the Third Reich. Within a year, the novel was translated into the 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.
After leaving Germany in 1933, Feuchtwanger lived in Sanary-sur-Mer. The high sales of his books, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, allowed him a relatively comfortable life in exile. In 1940, he finished Wartesaal with the third novel, Exil (translated into English as Paris Gazette).
Imprisonment and escape When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Feuchtwanger was interned for a few weeks in Camp des Milles. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and again imprisoned at Les Milles.Jean-Marc Chouraqui, Gilles Dorival, Colette Zytnicki, Enjeux d'Histoire, Jeux de Mémoire: les Usages du Passé Juif, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006, p. 548 Later, the prisoners of Les Milles were moved to a makeshift tent-camp near Nîmes because of the advance of German troops. From there, he was smuggled to Marseille disguised as a woman. After months of waiting in Marseille, he fled with his wife Marta to the United States via Spain and Portugal, staying briefly in Estoril, with the help of several Americans involved in helping artists and writers in danger of persecution by Nazi Germany escape Nazi-controlled Europe.Exiles Memorial Center. His rescuers included Varian Fry (an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France); Hiram Bingham IV (US Vice Consul in Marseille); Myles Standish (US Vice Consul in Marseille); Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp (a Unitarian minister and his wife who were in Europe on a similar mission as Fry).
Waitstill Sharp volunteered to accompany Feuchtwanger by rail from Marseille, across Spain, to Lisbon. Had Feuchtwanger been recognized at border crossings in France or Spain, he might have been detained and turned over to the Gestapo. Realizing that Feuchtwanger might be abducted by Nazi agents even in Portugal, Martha Sharp gave up her own berth on the Excalibur so Feuchtwanger could sail immediately for New York City with her husband.
Feuchtwanger's arrival in New York in early October 1940 had adverse consequences on the escape organizations in France. The novelist "out of an unplumbable naivety or an unforgivable and opportunistic ego" described his escape in detail to The New York Times. His rescuers in France were endangered by Feuchtwanger's indiscretions. The news story soon got to Europe with the consequence that Spain closed its borders, possibly under pressure from Nazi Germany. The closed border with Spain caused rescue operations to nearly cease for the remainder of the year.
Asylum in United States Granted political asylum in the United States, Feuchtwanger settled in Los Angeles in 1941, when he published a memoir of his internment, The Devil in France (Der Teufel in Frankreich).
In 1943, Feuchtwanger bought Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, California; he continued to write there until his death in 1958. In 1944, he cofounded the publishing house Aurora-Verlag in New York City.
Stalinism In response to the Western Powers pursuing a policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935; allowing the German reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936); non-intervention against the 1936 Falangist Coup in Spain; Italy's attack on Abyssinia in 1935), Feuchtwanger flirted with Soviet communism out of a longing to find the staunchest enemy of Germany's National Socialism.