Lion Feuchtwanger (pseudonym: J.L. Wetcheek) (7 July 1884 - 21 December 1958) was a German-Jewish novelist and playwright who was imprisoned in a French internment camp in Les Milles and later escaped to Los Angeles with the help of his wife, Marta.
Contents |
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
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 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official Nazi paper, Reichsanzeiger, included Feuchtwanger's name in the first list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people."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" (this is mentioned in The Devil in France (Der Teufel in Frankreich)). Still, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels paid Feuchtwanger the dubious compliment of having his book Jud Süß made into a film in 1940 - of course, with an outright antisemitic slant added, which did not appear in the original. 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 "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 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 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 oblivious to the Great Terror; he speaks approvingly of its show trials. The book has been criticized as a work of naive apologism. [1]
Imprisonment and escape
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, and Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in Marseilles. Feuchtwanger eventually received asylum in the United States, settled in Pacific Palisades, California in 1941, and continued to write there until his death in 1958.
Works
- Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (The Ugly Duchess), 1923 -- about Margarete Maultasch (14th century in Tyrol)
- Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925
- Die Geschwister Oppermann, (The Oppermanns), 1933.
- 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, 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
- Der Teufel in Frankreich (The Devil in France), 1941
- 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
