Lion Feuchtwanger

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Lion Feuchtwanger bigraphy, stories - Writer

Lion Feuchtwanger : biography

7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958

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 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 sought asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.

Feuchtwanger is often praised for his efforts to expose the brutality of the Nazis and occasionally criticized for his failure to acknowledge the brutality of the rule of Joseph Stalin.W. von Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, p. 412ff

Notes

Association with Bertolt Brecht

Feuchtwanger soon became a figure in the literary world, and was sought out by the young Bertolt Brecht, with whom he collaborated on drafts of Brecht’s early work, The Life of Edward II of England, in 1923-24.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).

Jud Süß

Feuchtwanger was already well known throughout Germany in 1925, when his first popular novel, Jud Süß (Jew Suss), appeared. The story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer had been the subject of a number of literary and dramatic treatments over the course of the past century; the earliest of these having been Wilhelm Hauff’s 1827 novella. The most successful literary adaptation was Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel titled Jud Süß based on a play that he had written in 1916 but subsequently withdrew. Feuchtwanger did not intend his portrayal of Süß as an antisemitic slur but as a study of the tragedy caused by the human weaknesses of greed, pride and ambition.

The novel was rejected by the major publishing houses and was only reluctantly taken on by a small publishing house. However, the novel was so well-received that it went through five printings of 39,000 copies within a year as well as being translated into 17 languages by 1931. The novel’s success established Feuchtwanger as a major German author as well as giving him a royalty stream that afforded him a measure of financial independence for the rest of his life. Feuchtwanger’s drama and his hugely successful novel Jud Süß were adapted for the cinema screen by the Nazi film industry under the direction of Veit Harlan: "Jud Süß" (1940). The anti-Semitic propaganda piece uses Feuchtwanger’s novel’s success, while twisting and reversing the core of Feuchtwanger’s novel and play.

Shift from drama to novels

After some success as a playwright, Feuchtwanger shifted his emphasis to the historical novel. His most successful work in this genre was Jud Süß (written 1921-22, 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. In that same year, he published the first part of the trilogy Josephus The Jewish War .

Opposition to the Nazis

Feuchtwanger was one of the very first to recognize and warn against the dangers of Hitler and the Nazi Party. As early as 1920 published in the satirical text Conversations with the Wandering Jew, a vision of what would later become the reality of anti-Semitic racist mania:

Towers of Hebrew books were burned, and bonfires were erected high up in the clouds, and people burnt, innumerable priests and voices sang: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Traits of men, women, children dragged themselves across the square from all sides, they were naked or in rags, and they had nothing with them as corpses and the tatters of book rolls of torn, disgraced, soiled with feces Books roles. And they followed men and women in kaftans and dresses the children in our day, countless, endless.