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 Lion Feuchtwanger was born in 1884 to
Orthodox Jewish margarine manufacturer Sigmund Feuchtwanger and his wife, Johanna (née Bodenheimer). He was the oldest in a family of nine siblings of whom another two, Martin and
Ludwig Feuchtwanger, also became authors; Ludwig's son was the London-based historian
Edgar Feuchtwanger (1924–2025). 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 made his first attempt at writing while still a secondary-school student and won an award. In 1903, in Munich, he passed his
Abitur examinations at an elite school, the
Wilhelmsgymnasium. He then studied history, philosophy and German
philology in Munich and
Berlin. He received his
PhD in 1907, under
Franz Muncker, with a study of
Heinrich Heine's unfinished 1840 novel
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 (no connection to the post-WWII magazine
of the same name). 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. He was one of the contributors of the Swedish avant-garde magazine
Thalia between 1910 and 1913. In 1912, he married a Jewish merchant's daughter,
Marta Loeffler. She was pregnant at the wedding, but the child died shortly after birth. After the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914, Feuchtwanger served in the German military (November 1914), 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 of 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).
Shift from drama to novels After some success as a playwright, Feuchtwanger shifted his emphasis to writing historical novels. His most successful work in this genre was
Jud Süß (
Süss, the Jew), written 1921–1922, 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. He published the first part of his
Josephus trilogy,
The Jewish War, in 1932. In 1930, Feuchtwanger wrote his first socio-political novel , based on the events of
Beer Hall Putsch, as his reaction on the impending threat of Nazism; the novel would become the first entry in
Wartesaal trilogy about the rise of Nazism in Germany. He continued the trilogy with
The Oppermanns in 1933, which would become one of his best-known books.
Persecution by the Nazis Early opposition Feuchtwanger was one of the first to produce propaganda against Hitler and the Nazi Party. As early as 1920 he published in the satirical text
Conversations with the Wandering Jew: Towers of Hebrew books were burning, and bonfires were erected as high as the clouds, and people burnt to char, innumerable, and voices of priests sang in accompaniment:
Gloria in excelsis Deo. Traces of men, women, children dragged themselves across the square, from all sides, they were naked or in rags, and they had nothing with them but bodies and the tatters of book scrolls – of torn, disgraced book scrolls, soiled with feces. And there followed them men in kaftans and women and children in the clothes of our day, countlessly, endlessly.
Rise of Nazism and exile In 1930, Feuchtwanger published , 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 Nazis 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. 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 fled with his wife Marta to the United States via Spain and Portugal, staying briefly in
Estoril, with the help of several Americans involved in helping artists and writers in danger of persecution by Nazi Germany escape Nazi-controlled Europe. His rescuers included
Varian Fry (an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France);
Hiram Bingham IV (US Vice Consul in Marseille); Myles Standish (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 might 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. Feuchtwanger's arrival in New York in early October 1940 had adverse consequences on the escape organizations in France. The novelist "out of an unplumbable naivety or an unforgivable and opportunistic ego" described his escape in detail to
The New York Times. His rescuers in France were endangered by Feuchtwanger's indiscretions. The news story soon got to Europe with the consequence that Spain closed its borders, possibly under pressure from Nazi Germany. The closed border with Spain caused rescue operations to nearly cease for the remainder of the year.
Asylum in United States Granted
political asylum in the United States, Feuchtwanger 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; he continued to write there until his death in 1958. In 1944, he cofounded the publishing house Aurora-Verlag in
New York City.
Stalinism In response to the Western Powers pursuing a policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (the
Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935; allowing the
German reoccupation of the
Rhineland (1936); non-intervention against the 1936
Falangist Coup in Spain;
Italy's attack on
Abyssinia in 1935), Feuchtwanger flirted with
Soviet communism out of a longing to find the staunchest enemy of Germany's National Socialism. 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 people". Feuchtwanger's praise of Stalin triggered outrage from
Arnold Zweig and
Franz Werfel. The book has been criticized by Trotskyists as a work of naive
apologism. Feuchtwanger's friendly attitude toward Stalin later delayed his naturalization in the United States.
Postwar During the
McCarthy era, Feuchtwanger 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 (1953) 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, Feuchtwanger 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. == Major works ==