Lion Feuchtwanger ( 7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958) was a Bavarian 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 National Socialist German Workers 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.

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. Feuchtwanger's grandfather Elkan moved to Munich in the middle of the 19th century.

Early life

He was born in 1884 to Orthodox Jewish margarine manufacturer Sigmund Feuchtwanger and his wife, Johanna née Bodenheim. He was the oldest in a family of nine siblings of whom two, Martin and Ludwig Feuchtwanger, became authors; Ludwig's son is the London-based historian Edgar Feuchtwanger. 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 studied literature and philosophy in the universities of Munich and Berlin. He made his first attempt at writing while still a student and won an award. In 1903 in Munich, he passed his Abitur examinations at an elite school, Wilhelmsgymnasium. He then studied history, philosophy and German philology in Munich and Berlin. He received his PhD in 1907, under Francis Muncker, on Heinrich Heine's 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 1908. 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. In 1912, he married a Jewish merchant's daughter, Marta Loeffler. She was pregnant at the wedding, but the child died shortly after birth.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Feuchtwanger served in the German military service 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 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. 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).

Persecution by the Nazis

Feuchtwanger also published Erfolg (Success), 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 new regime 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.

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 Germany 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.

On 25 August 1933, the official 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 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.

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.

Stalinism

In response to the Western Powers pursuing a policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (the Anglo-German Naval Treaty; allowing the reoccupation of the Rhineland; non-intervention against the Falangist Coup in Spain; Italy's attack on Abyssinia), he flirted with Soviet communism out of a longing to find the staunchest enemy of Germany's National Socialism. [cite: Karl Schlogel, Moscow 1937, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017, chapter 5]

From November 1936 to February 1937 he travelled to the Soviet Union. In his book Moskau 1937, he praised life under Joseph Stalin. Feuchtwanger also defended the Great Purge and the show trials which were then taking place against both real and imagined Trotskyites and enemies of the state. Feuchtwanger's praise of Stalin triggered outrage from Arnold Zweig and Franz Werfel. The book has been criticized by Trotskyites as a work of naive apologism. Feuchtwanger's friendly attitude toward Stalin later delayed his naturalization in the United States.

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. 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 was able to flee with his wife Marta to the United States via Spain and Portugal, staying briefly in Estoril. 

He escaped with the help of Marta; Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France; Hiram Bingham IV, 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 would 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.

Asylum in United States

Feuchtwanger was granted political asylum in the United States and 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, and he continued to write there until his death in 1958.

In 1944, he cofounded the publishing house Aurora-Verlag in New York City.

Postwar

During the McCarthy era, he became the target of suspicion as a Pro-Soviet intellectual. In 1947 he wrote a play about the Salem Witch Trials, Wahn oder der Teufel in Boston (Delusion, or The Devil in Boston), thus anticipating the theme of The Crucible by Arthur Miller; Wahn premiered in Germany in 1949. It was translated by June Barrows Mussey and performed in Los Angeles in 1953 under the title "The Devil in Boston." In New York a Yiddish translation was shown. At the end of life, he dealt with Jewish themes again (The Jewess of Toledo) and advocated for the State of Israel as a Jewish refuge.

In 1953, Feuchtwanger won the National Prize of East Germany first Class for art and literature.

Illness and death

Lion Feuchtwanger became ill with stomach cancer in 1957. After several operations he died from internal bleeding in late 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 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 the Special Collections of the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California.

Works

• 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.
• Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925.
• The Wartesaal Trilogy
  • Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province), 1930
  • Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns), Querido, 1933; published in an English translation by James Cleugh, by Secker, 1933
  • Exil (Paris Gazette); German-language edition published by Querido, in Amsterdam, 1940; published in an English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, by Viking, 1940
• The Josephus Trilogy—about Flavius Josephus beginning in the year 60 in Rome
  • Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
  • Die Söhne (The Jew of Rome), 1935
  • Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, The day will come, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
• 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; also 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
• Der treue Peter (Faithful Peter), 1946
• 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
• Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston. Ein Stück in drei Akten ("The Devil in Boston: A Play about the Salem Witchcraft Trials"), Los Angeles 1948.
• Odysseus and the Swine, and Other Stories, 1949; a collection of sixteen short stories, some published in book form for the first time (London: Hutchinson International Authors Ltd, 1949)
• Goya, 1951—a novel about the famous painter Francisco Goya in the 1790s in Spain ("This is the Hour" New York: Heritage Press, 1956)
• 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

Awards

• 1957: National Jewish Book Award for Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo