Lion Feuchtwanger: “I am German and my heart beats Jewish”

by time news

2023-05-21 17:04:42

SEver since his great novel “Erfolg”, which was published in 1930 and which he also called his “Hitler novel”, Lion Feuchtwanger was hated by the Nazis. His books were burned on May 10, 1933 to roaring applause, he was one of the first Germans to have their citizenship revoked by the Nazis – from then on he lived – at the time of the “seizure of power” in the USA to give lectures – as a stateless person without a passport.

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The writer, who was born in Munich in 1884, was never to return to Germany. From his exile he commented on German conditions in clear words, as documented in a volume of speeches and essays that is now being published. The question in the title – “Am I a German or a Jewish writer?” – had to be asked by Feuchtwanger in the 1920s, when the number of voices that considered “both” to be categorically impossible as an answer increased. For Feuchtwanger, the connection between the German and Jewish spirit had been a happy one up until then; he referred to Heine and Marx, Freud and Einstein and many other examples. He sees that this connection is in danger of being severed. “The year 1933 is the darkest in the history of German culture and in the history of German Jews for five hundred years,” writes Feuchtwanger.

struggle with words

The speeches, articles and essays from the years 1931 to 1949 show the writer as a precise observer and determined combatant. Though he struggles with words, he knows it won’t be enough. “Any attempt at understanding these people is just a sign of weakness: the only language they understand is that of violence.” With mind and language alone one remains powerless, for writers like Feuchtwanger this is an existential experience, that of the filmmaker Woody Allen once poured into a bitter gag in “Manhattan”: “I recently wrote an essay against anti-Semitism.” – “How nice! I prefer baseball bats.”

Feuchtwanger describes Nazi Germany sharply and scathingly: Hitler (“a middle-class actor”), Göring (“the pure, clumsy, bullish expression of naked violence”) and Goebbels (“the short, ugly, misshapen Goebbels”) embody for him the system of lies and violence that made “a doctrine of human inequality, a senseless mixture of pseudo-zoology and bureaucracy, the basis of its laws, of its existence”. “All the juice of Germany today serves to prepare for war, all other life withers.”

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Before the establishment of the Third Reich, “books by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Remarque, Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Zweig had circulations that were many times higher than those of ‘Mein Kampf’,” writes Feuchtwanger. “As long as the German people could still choose freely, they decided in favor of civilization and the German language, against barbarism and stammering.” German culture was greatest where it aimed at world participation, not at tribal arrogance. “Those who wrote best in German, Lessing, Goethe, Nietzsche, definitely felt like cosmopolitans.”

Among the most impressive documents in the volume are two open letters. The first addresses “the residents of my house at Mahlerstrasse 8 in Berlin”. A profiteer of “Aryanization” now lives at the former address in Feuchtwanger. Feuchtwanger inquires whether, as he has heard, the Nazis actually killed his turtles.

“We’ll meet again”

In the second letter he addressed “seven Berlin actors” who took part in the film “Jud Suess”, including Veit Harlan. The propaganda film distorted Feuchtwanger’s novel beyond recognition. “Doesn’t it make you a bit uncomfortable with the idea that the others will watch your film when the thousand-year Reich has evaporated?” Feuchtwanger asks the actors. And prophesies: “We will meet again, gentlemen, in Berlin, in a time that may not be so far away.” Feuchtwanger’s firm belief that the Nazi rule will soon come to an end runs through all the texts. However, in view of the death camps and mass shootings, his hope that one would be able to laugh about this episode in the style of an Aristophanes proved to be false or downright naive.

From 1933 onward, Feuchtwanger had little doubt as to the cultural and civilizing breach that the Nazis would cause. “The highest authority before which this state crawls on its stomach is the unleashed petty bourgeois,” stated Feuchtwanger. “This also explains why today’s rulers do not pursue opponents with more savage hatred than the spirit, than the free word. The destruction of literature in the true sense of the word, the burning of books, is perhaps the most important symbol of their reign.” Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles in 1958, and the Villa Aurora in the hills of Pacific Palisades became a meeting place for the exiles; others – such as Walter Benjamin or Stefan Zweig – were driven to suicide by the exile situation.

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The poet’s ingenuity

In the end, is he a Jew, a German or a citizen of the world? Feuchtwanger gave a short, valid answer: “I am a German writer, my heart beats Jewish, my thinking belongs to the world.”

Lion Feuchtwanger: Am I a German or a Jewish writer?? Considerations of a cosmopolitan. Structure, 232 pages, 26 euros

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