Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884 - 21 December 1958) was a German-Jewish novelist who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and later escaped to Los Angeles with the help of his wife.
Family background
Feuchtwanger was born in Munich in 1884, and raised in a household that was both observantly Jewish and patriotically German. This dichotomy would later appear in his written works, especially his novel Josephus.
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 1927 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 not to return home.
In 1932, while Feuchtwanger was on the tour, his house was ransacked by government agents who stole many items from his extensive library. On August 25, 1933, the official Nazi paper Reichsanzeiger included Feuchtwanger's name in the first list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people." Soon all his works were ordered burned, and he fled to Sanary , in the south of France.
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 that "Hitler be given a chance." With the publication of The Oppermanns in 1933 he became a prominent spokesman for the 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 a Roman upstart claiming to be Nero and Hitler.
Imprisonment and escape
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and imprisoned in an internment camp. However, he later escaped with the help of his wife Marta and Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France. Feuchtwanger eventually received asylum in the United States, settled in Los Angeles, and continued to write there until his death in 1958.
Works
- Die häßliche Herzogin (The Ugly Duchess) 1923
- Jew Suess (Jud Süß, Power), 1925
- Erfolg (Success), 1930
- The Oppermanns, 1933
- The Pretender (Der falsche Nero), 1936
- Moscow, 1937
- Unholdes Frankreich (Ungracious France, Der Teufel in Frankreich,The Devil in France), 1941
- Die Zauberer (Die Brüder Lautensack, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, The Lautensack Brothers), 1943
- Simone, 1944
- Proud Destiny (Waffen für Amerika, Füchse im Weinberg, Foxes in the Vineyard), 1947
- Raquel, The Jewess of Toledo, 1955
- Jefta und seine Tochter, Jephthah and his Daughter, Jephta and his daughter, 1960
- The Josephus Trilogy
- Der jüdischer Krieg (Josephus), 1932
- Die Söhne (The Jews of Rome), 1935
- Der Tag wird kommen (Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
- The Waeresaal Trilogy
- Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success), 1930
- Die Geschwister Oppenheim (The Oppermanns), 1933
- Exil, 1940
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