Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)
David Midgley on the life and legacy of the man who wrote Jüd Süss
Feuchtwanger was fond of recalling the words of a taxi driver who recognised him when he settled in America in the 1940s: "Sure, I've read all your novels. Power" - the American title of Jew Süss - "Buddenbrooks and The Song of Bernadette." The taxi driver who mistakenly attributed to Feuchtwanger works by Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel was obviously confused, but he was also conferring a kind of popular accolade. In the circumstances of the Second World War Feuchtwanger really did enjoy a peculiar status as the most widely read representative of that "other Germany", the fellowship of German-language authors who had fled from National Socialism.
As a prominent anti-fascist writer, Feuchtwanger was much published and honoured after 1945 in the GDR, and in the 1980s interest in him was also rekindled in the Federal Republic, as the reading public rediscovered the wealth of literary writing which the Nazis had suppressed. It was as an eye-witness to the dire circumstances and the ideological struggles of exile in France in the 1930s that Feuchtwanger was introduced to West German television viewers through the dramatisation of his novel Exile in 1981. On the 50th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in 1983, The Oppermanns was similarly televised in both Germany and Britain. This work -written in 1933 as an instant response to the political situation in Germany, and prompted, indeed, by interest in British government circles in making an anti-Nazi film - describes the progressive isolation and persecution of three Jewish brothers and their dependants, whose cultural roots are entirely German. Martin Oppermann is powerless to prevent the "aryanisation" of the family furniture firm; Edgar is forced out of his medical practice and emigrates to Palestine; Gustav, a writer, abandons his work on a book about Lessing in order to devote himself to intellectual resistance and the gathering of information about the Nazi regime, but is arrested, and dies of the consequences of his mistreatment in a concentration camp. In 1992 there followed a dramatisation of Success, the novel in which Feuchtwanger had ironised the attitudes of the Nazi movement, and of the petty-minded provincialism of his own Bavarian background, as early as 1930.
These three novels which had attracted the interest of the television companies constitute what Feuchtwanger called his "Waiting Room Trilogy". This slightly bizarre title contains a hint of the distinctive historical vision which characterises Feuchtwanger's narratives. His protagonists are typically characters with strong personal motivations and deep concerns, but they are shown to be powerless in the face of the forces which move history forward. This goes for the perpetrators of violence as much as for their victims. Feuchtwanger's outlook is fundamentally optimistic; he is deeply imbued with the Enlightenment belief that reason will ultimately prevail. But it will prevail in ways which transcend the efforts of individuals, whether for good or ill. This historical outlook led him to become a naive enthusiast for Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s.
The key to Feuchtwanger's literary success was his skill at constructing historical narratives which carried easily recognisable resonances for his own time. The novel which established his international reputation, Jew Süss (1925), grew out of an attempt to depict the situation of the Jewish industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau, who was assassinated by German nationalist fanatics in 1922; Feuchtwanger found that he was able to bring out his social and psychological themes more clearly by basing the action instead on the persecution of the 18th-century Jew Joseph Süß Oppenheimer who fell victim to envy and animosity as financial adviser to the Duke of Würrtemberg. (It was the plot of this novel that was turned into a notorious antisemitic film under Goebbels' patronage in 1940.) In exile, Feuchtwanger put his classical education to work in a satirical representation of the Nazi leadership in Roman guise under the title The False Nero. For the novels he wrote after 1945 he particularly favoured plots which showed the onward march of history in conjunction with individual human foibles and failings. He wrote of the political machinations of Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin at the time of the American Revolution (Proud Destiny), of the transformation of the artist Goya from a court painter to a political artist (This Is the Hour), and of the personal humiliations as well as the revolutionary legend that inescapably accompanied Jean-Jacques Rousseau on his decline into old age ('Tis Folly to be Wise).
Feuchtwanger's most estimable achievement is probably the trilogy of novels he wrote between 1932 and 1945 based on the life and times of the Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Josephus; The Jew of Rome; The Day Will Come). Here he works through the complex and intractable tensions which exist between Josephus' Jewish cultural identity and his intellectual aspiration to become a citizen of the world, vividly evoking the historical circumstances of the first century AD as well as catching the resonances of the theme for 20th-century readers. His last two novels, which date from 1955 and 1957, again extract contemporary resonances from traditional Jewish themes. In Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo he presents the title figure as a tragic victim of the clash between the feudal order of 12th-century Castile and the new money economy; and in Jephta and his Daughter he uses the biblical story as the basis for a plea for reason and tolerance aimed at the young state of Israel.
Feuchtwanger's appeal lies in his fluent and often colloquial narrative style, which reduces historical figures to a recognisable human stature. He was mostly well served by his English translators (although The Oppermanns was clearly produced with indecent haste), but the translations of the later novels especially display a studied conventionality which will strike present-day readers as rather staid and dated. Even Willa and Edwin Muir, whose translations contributed signally to the success of the earlier novels, lose something of the vigour of Feuchtwanger's style, particularly when they closely imitate the rhythm of his native Bavarian idiom ("The King of Prussia had been nagging, the dirty hound…"). Feuchtwanger's novels continue to sell well in Germany, and English readers would profit from up-dated versions approximating more to the idiom of our own times.
David Midgley is a University Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at St John's College, Cambridge.
Enquiries regarding copyright status in the works of Lion Feuchtwanger and further information on existing translations from:
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Translations of works by Lion Feuchtwanger mentioned in this article, most of which are out of print. (The date of original publication in English is given. There have been various publishers for each translation.)
Jew Süss, Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1926; Success. Three Years in the Life of a Province, Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1930; Josephus, Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1932; The Oppermanns, Tr. James Cleugh, 1933; The Jew of Rome, Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1935; The Day will Come, Tr. Caroline Oram, 1942; The False Nero, Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1937; Proud Destiny, Tr. Moray Firth, 1947; This is the Hour, Tr. H.T.Lowe-Porter and Frances Fawcett, 1951; Tis Folly to be Wise, Tr. Frances Fawcett, 1953; Raquel. The Jewess of Toledo, Tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, 1955; Jephta and his Daughter, Tr. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 1958.
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