Marta Feuchtwanger (née Löffler; 21 January 1891 – 25 October 1987) was the irrepressible and somewhat eccentric third child of a prosperous Munich businessman who in 1912 married the author Lion Feuchtwanger. Although they married only after Marta became pregnant with Feuchtwanger's child, the marriage lasted forty-six years and she became both a devoted wife and a huge influence on his work. The Jewish couple were forced to emigrate during the Hitler period. After her husband died in 1958 Marta Feuchtwanger spent nearly three decades as a high-profile widow in Los Angeles.
Biography Early years Marta Löffler was born and grew up in Munich. Her parents were Leopold Löffler, a successful textiles merchant, and his wife, born Johanna Reitlinger. The family adhered to Liberal Judaism: they did not flaunt their Jewish faith or insist on rigid adherence to Jewish dietary rules. Her upbringing was comfortable and the ambiance was culturally rich. She came into contact with the works of Ibsen and Nietzsche at an early age. A keen gymnast, by the time she was fourteen Marta was the leader of a gymnastics group. She met Lion Feuchtwanger through his sister Franziska Feuchtwanger in 1909. When they discovered Marta was pregnant Lion Feuchtwanger proposed marriage. Although they both rejected marriage as a "bourgeois convention", they traveled to Überlingen on the north shore of Lake Constance and went through a quiet marriage ceremony on 10 May 1912. One source describes their decision to marry as "spontaneous". Lion Feuchtwanger's family opposed the marriage. Once married, the Feuchtwangers undertook a two-year tour together that included Switzerland, southern France, Italy and Tunisia.
Extended honeymoon While still in Switzerland the couple undertook a strenuous hike which nearly ended in a miscarriage for Marta. Instead Elisabeth Marianne, their daughter, was born in Lausanne on 11 September 1912. The child was weak and the mother was diagnosed with childbed fever. The doctor recommended a warmer climate and the young family moved on to Pietra Ligure, along the coast from Genoa. It was here that the Feuchtwangers' only child died of Typhus, aged approximately ten weeks. The baby was buried in the local cemetery while her parents stayed on in the resort for another five months to grieve and to recover. Aspects of the experience would later find their way into several of Lion Feuchtwanger's novels. During the first part of 1913 they moved on to Monte Carlo and exhausted their savings in the casinos. They therefore hastened back to Italy and Lion Feuchtwanger started sending pieces of written work for publication to the Frankfurter Zeitung. That funded a trip that included Florence, Rome, Ischia, Capri, Naples and Syracuse. As they traveled they lived a hand to mouth existence, interacting with the poor. They contracted Typhus but survived. In July 1914 they took a boat to Tunisia, where they visited Arab bazaars and ancient Jewish streets in Tunis, before moving on to Carthage and Hammamet, where they were able to lodge with the French consul. They were not following the news from Europe, so were taken by surprise when their host announced that war had broken out between France and Germany: he would need to arrest them.
War years In the event they were able to board a train back to nearby Tunis, where Lion Feuchtwanger was placed in prison. By the time he was released twelve hours later Marta Feuchtwanger had managed to book them space on a steamer back to Palermo. Lion Feuchtwanger made the voyage hidden under a lot of coal sacks because, as a German military reservist, he was obliged to travel with a German military identity document. Two other Germans on the crossing with military obligations to the German army were indeed tracked down by a French patrol and taken away, but the Feuchtwangers successfully landed on Italian soil and, penniless, sought out the German consul who was able to provide the train tickets and stamps in their identity documents that were necessary to enable them to return to Germany. They reached Munich in the middle of September 1914. Three of Lion Feuchtwanger's brothers were already fighting on the frontline. Lion launched his career as an author by presenting a translation into German of The Persians by Aeschylus. Widely seen in the context of those times as a statement of opposition to war, the play was staged in Munich and ran for three months between October and December 1914. Feuchtwanger was conscripted into the army in October 1914. Five months later he suddenly started coughing up blood and was rushed to hospital. He was therefore not with his regiment on the train journey to the frontline which set off the next morning and which ended unexpectedly when the train was blown up and his fellow conscripts were killed. Shortly after this a military doctor declared him physically unfit to serve in the army, but he nevertheless spent the rest of the war in a fluctuating state of poor health, depression and anxiety, concerned that he could at any moment be reconscripted. Meanwhile, he tried to pursue his literary career while Marta concentrated on the organising the necessities of their life together. She would always be the practical partner in a spectacularly unequal marriage: Lion Feuchtwanger was becoming a world-renowned novelist but he would never become a practical man. After the war, if they were out in a car together and experienced a puncture, it would be the fitness fanatic Marta who would change the wheel while Lion held the torch. Throughout their life together she would see herself as her husband's devoted servant. In Munich there was also scope for networking. During this time the still little known Bertolt Brecht approached Lion Feuchtwanger for help in establishing himself in the world of theatre: lifelong friendship ensued. It was Marta Feuchtwanger who recommended Brecht to change the name of the subsequently successful play on which he was working from "Spartakus" to the more politically innocuous "Trommeln in der Nacht" ("Drums in the Night").
Berlin In 1925 Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger moved to Berlin which at this time was the vibrant cultural centre of the country. Life in Munich was becoming more threatening with the rise of the populist National Socialist movement. In 1922 there were reports of antisemitic graffiti being scrawled on the walls of the homes of Jewish writers.Pischel, Joseph: Lion Feuchtwanger, Versuch über Leben und Werk, Frankfurt/Main 1984. pp.60, 80 There were reports that if the 1923 Hitler Putsch in Munich had not been a fiasco, it would have been followed by arrest for Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht (who up to this point was also based in Munich). Nevertheless, it would probably be overstating the case to assert that the Fewuchtwanger's move to Berlin was a political decision driven primarily by antisemitism in Munich. The lure of Berlin as a cultural metropolis, which by 1925 had already drawn in Brecht and the writer Arnold Zweig, was powerful. Leon was by now enjoying significant commercial success with his books and in 1931 the couple had a house of their own built in the fashionable district of Berlin-Grunewald. In Autumn 1932, with the political situation in Germany ever more polarised and deadlocked, Marta Feuchtwanger accompanied her husband on a "reading trip" to London where an English-language translation of the first volume of Feuchtwanger's Josephus trilogy was being issued. It appears that Lion continued on to North America for an extended lecture tour while Marta returned to Berlin. At the end of the year she departed for her annual skiing holiday in St Anton. While she was away, on 30 January 1933, the Hitler government took power. The situation for Jews with a high public profile deteriorated very rapidly, and the Feuchtwangers were known to be fiercely critical of the National Socialists. Marta and Lion Feuchtwanger now stayed out of Germany. Their empty new home in Berlin-Grunewald was soon ransacked by Nazi paramilitaries.
Marseille When he returned from North America in March 1933 Lion Feuchtwanger rejoined his wife who was still in St Anton. From here they now travelled together directly to Marseille and took a taxi towards he coast in order to find somewhere to live. On 21 April 1933 they set up a base in the Réserve Palace Hotel on the corniche along the coast at Bandol. They confided to their friend Arnold Zweig that what they missed more than the money they had been forced to leave behind (and forfeit) in Germany was, for Lion, their lost house and his books, while Marta missed most intensely the garden. They had difficulty finding a more permanent home and remained in the hotel, living out of suitcases, for some months, but Marseille was by now home to a growing colony of German exiled intellectuals and they were at this stage determined not to move away from the city. Feuchtwanger's Berlin publisher sold on literary rights to a publisher in Basel, so he was still able to publish his novels. His work was also accepted for publication in the United States and in England, but Marta nevertheless noticed that funds were running low. The need to move on from their hotel based existence became financially pressing, especially after they were joined in the hotel by , Lion Feuchtwanger's longstanding secretary.
Fellow exiles included Thomas Mann who rented a villa in nearby Sanary-sur-Mer for the summer, and later recalled in his diary having met Marta at the Réserve Palace Hotel, describing her as an "Egyptian-like woman" (als eine "ägyptisch aussehende Frau"). His older brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann, also spoke of Marta's endlessly elegant and stylish deportment. During the summer of 1933, and then for the rest of the decade, the Feuchtwangers found themselves at the heart of a group of literary celebrities. In Sanary they came into contact with René Schickele and Aldous Huxley. After a time Marta found the Villa Lazare along the coast between Bandol and Sanary, which was available for rent. It had its own little private beach and a view across the bay from the Gorguette peninsular. In June 1933, after overcoming various bureaucratic challenges, the Feutchtwangers moved in. The house was not fully furnished and initially they slept on mattresses on the floor. There was no telephone. There was no separate kitchen, but at one end of the large main room was a fireplace that incorporated a cooking-grill. The Villa Lazare became a social centre for the German emigrant-writers' colony. Marta organised reading groups and extended tea parties that often included more than sixty guests. Lion Feuchtwanger was working night and day on the second novel in his ; he is rarely mentioned in connection with his wife's heroic socialising during this period. One of the first people Marta invited to stay after they moved into the Villa Lazare was their friend Bertolt Brecht. She sometimes teamed up with Brecht, Heinrich Mann and / or others to undertake exploratory excursions in the area. In addition to the many visitors, there was by now a permanent third resident at the Villa Lazarre. Lola Sernau had worked as Lion Feuchtwanger's secretary since 1925, and during the first part of 1933 she had managed to rescue several manuscripts from their former home in Berlin-Grunewald, before the Nazis ransacked the place. Because of the nature of the relationship between Lion and Lola, there were frequent tensions between the wife and the secretary.