Lion Feuchtwanger

[Benny Profane]

I've discovered this very forgotten writer.

An important influence for Bert Brecht and other german languange's playwrights, he was a Jewish author who criticized a lot the Nazi Party's accendent in Germany.
He found asylum in United States and died in 1958.

According to his article on Wikipedia, here are his works:

• Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (The Ugly Duchess), 1923 —about Margarete Maultasch (14th century in Tyrol)
• Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (The Life of Edward II of England), 1924: written with Bertolt Brecht.[15]
• Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925.
• The Wartesaal Trilogy
  • Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province), 1930
  • Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns), Querido, 1933; published in an English translation by James Cleugh, by Secker, 1933[16]
  • Exil (Paris Gazette); German-language edition published by Querido, in Amsterdam, 1940; published in an English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, by Viking, 1940[17]
• The Josephus Trilogy—about Flavius Josephus beginning in the year 60 in Rome
  • Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
  • Die Söhne (The Jew of Rome), 1935
  • Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, The day will come, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
• Marianne in Indien und sieben andere Erzählungen (Marianne in Indien, Höhenflugrekord, Stierkampf, Polfahrt, Nachsaison, Herrn Hannsickes Wiedergeburt, Panzerkreuzer Orlow, Geschichte des Gehirnphysiologen Dr. Bl.), 1934—title translated into English as Little Tales and as Marianne in India and seven other tales (Marianne in India, Altitude Record, Bullfight, Polar Expedition, The Little Season, Herr Hannsicke's Second Birth, The Armored Cruiser "Orlov", History of the Brain Specialist Dr. Bl.)
• Der falsche Nero (The Pretender), 1936—about Terentius Maximus, the "False Nero"
• Moskau 1937 (Moscow 1937), 1937
• Unholdes Frankreich (Ungracious France; also Der Teufel in Frankreich, The Devil in France), 1941
• Die Brüder Lautensack (Die Zauberer, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, The Lautensack Brothers), 1943
• Simone, 1944
• Der treue Peter (Faithful Peter), 1946
• Die Füchse im Weinberg (Proud Destiny, Waffen für Amerika, Foxes in the Vineyard), 1947/48 - a novel mainly about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin beginning in 1776's Paris
• Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston. Ein Stück in drei Akten ("The Devil in Boston: A Play about the Salem Witchcraft Trials"), Los Angeles 1948.
• Odysseus and the Swine, and Other Stories, 1949; a collection of sixteen short stories, some published in book form for the first time (London: Hutchinson International Authors Ltd, 1949)
• Goya, 1951—a novel about the famous painter Francisco Goya in the 1790s in Spain ("This is the Hour" New York: Heritage Press, 1956)
• Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau ('Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau), 1952, a novel set before and during the Great French Revolution
• Die Jüdin von Toledo (Spanische Ballade, Raquel, The Jewess of Toledo), 1955
• Jefta und seine Tochter (Jephthah and his Daughter, Jephta and his daughter), 1957

He won the 1957: National Jewish Book Award for Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo. He was nomited for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Has anyone here read anything by him?

 

[Stevie B]

I recently discovered this very forgotten writer.

An important influencer for Bert Brecht and other german languange's playwrights, he was a jew author who criticized a lot the Nazi Party's accendent in Germany.
He found asylum in United States and died in 1958.

According to his article on Wikipedia, here are his works:

• Die häßliche Herzogin Margarete Maultasch (The Ugly Duchess), 1923 —about Margarete Maultasch (14th century in Tyrol)
• Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (The Life of Edward II of England), 1924: written with Bertolt Brecht.[15]
• Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925.
• The Wartesaal Trilogy
  • Erfolg. Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz (Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province), 1930
  • Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns), Querido, 1933; published in an English translation by James Cleugh, by Secker, 1933[16]
  • Exil (Paris Gazette); German-language edition published by Querido, in Amsterdam, 1940; published in an English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, by Viking, 1940[17]
• The Josephus Trilogy—about Flavius Josephus beginning in the year 60 in Rome
  • Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
  • Die Söhne (The Jew of Rome), 1935
  • Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, The day will come, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942
• Marianne in Indien und sieben andere Erzählungen (Marianne in Indien, Höhenflugrekord, Stierkampf, Polfahrt, Nachsaison, Herrn Hannsickes Wiedergeburt, Panzerkreuzer Orlow, Geschichte des Gehirnphysiologen Dr. Bl.), 1934—title translated into English as Little Tales and as Marianne in India and seven other tales (Marianne in India, Altitude Record, Bullfight, Polar Expedition, The Little Season, Herr Hannsicke's Second Birth, The Armored Cruiser "Orlov", History of the Brain Specialist Dr. Bl.)
• Der falsche Nero (The Pretender), 1936—about Terentius Maximus, the "False Nero"
• Moskau 1937 (Moscow 1937), 1937
• Unholdes Frankreich (Ungracious France; also Der Teufel in Frankreich, The Devil in France), 1941
• Die Brüder Lautensack (Die Zauberer, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, The Lautensack Brothers), 1943
• Simone, 1944
• Der treue Peter (Faithful Peter), 1946
• Die Füchse im Weinberg (Proud Destiny, Waffen für Amerika, Foxes in the Vineyard), 1947/48 - a novel mainly about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin beginning in 1776's Paris
• Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston. Ein Stück in drei Akten ("The Devil in Boston: A Play about the Salem Witchcraft Trials"), Los Angeles 1948.
• Odysseus and the Swine, and Other Stories, 1949; a collection of sixteen short stories, some published in book form for the first time (London: Hutchinson International Authors Ltd, 1949)
• Goya, 1951—a novel about the famous painter Francisco Goya in the 1790s in Spain ("This is the Hour" New York: Heritage Press, 1956)
• Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau ('Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau), 1952, a novel set before and during the Great French Revolution
• Die Jüdin von Toledo (Spanische Ballade, Raquel, The Jewess of Toledo), 1955
• Jefta und seine Tochter (Jephthah and his Daughter, Jephta and his daughter), 1957

He won the 1957: National Jewish Book Award for Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo. He was nomited for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Has anyone here read anything by him?

I haven't, as of yet, but a friend once strongly recommended The Oppermanns as being an outstanding book that focused, in real time, on Hitler's early rise to power and the impact it had on Jewish families in Germany. I found this undated New York Times quote about the book that is another vote of confidence: "Extraordinary . . . No single historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted . . . the insidious manner in which Nazism began to permeate the fabric of German society than Lion Feuchtwanger's great novel."

 

[Benny Profane]

I found this undated quote New York Times quote about the book that is another vote of confidence: "Extraordinary . . . No single historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted . . . the insidious manner in which Nazism began to permeate the fabric of German society than Lion Feuchtwanger's great novel."

Thanks a million, Stevie!

There are 7 books by him translated into Portuguese:

• Jud Süß (Jew Suess, Power), 1925;
• The Josephus Trilogy—about Flavius Josephus beginning in the year 60 in Rome
  • Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), 1932
  • Die Söhne (The Jew of Rome), 1935
  • Der Tag wird kommen (Das gelobte Land, The day will come, Josephus and the Emperor), 1942;
• Simone, 1944;
• Die Füchse im Weinberg (Proud Destiny, Waffen für Amerika, Foxes in the Vineyard), 1947/48 - a novel mainly about Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin beginning in 1776's Paris
• Goya, 1951—a novel about the famous painter Francisco Goya in the 1790s in Spain ("This is the Hour" New York: Heritage Press, 1956)
• Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau ('Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau), 1952, a novel set before and during the Great French Revolution;

And two novels I couldn't identify.

By the description of New York Times, I've noticed that his style is very close to Fallada's. I could notice that he wrote about historical icons with Jewish heritage! I was very curious about his works.

 

[Leseratte]

Thanks for opening this thread, Benny. I didn´t read anything by him but I read about Jud Süss in the German literature forum. It is probably his best known book.
Wikipedia is not the same anymore. Feuchtwanger has a Wikipedia page in Portuguese, but it doesn´t list his books.

 

[Benny Profane]

Thanks for opening this thread, Benny. I didn´t read anything by him but I read about Jud Süss in the German literature forum. It is probably his best known book.
Wikipedia is not the same anymore. Feuchtwanger has a Wikipedia page in Portuguese, but it doesn´t list his books.

I found the list of his works on Estante Virtual.

Here are the titles of his books (in Portuguese):

1) Flavius Josephus (I don't know whether it is the complete trilogy);
2) Simone;
3) Raquel, a Judia (I coudn't identify the original title);
4) Uma Luz nos Abismos (I coudn't identify the original title);
5) Sublime Destino;
6) O Judeu Suss;
7) Goya

 

[Leseratte]

The original names in German of the novels 3 and 4 are
3-Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo)
4-Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau(('Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau). Somewhat different this last one.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Haven't read this author, but I read he was shortlisted for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1930s and read, in his biography, that The Oppermans is his strongest work.

 

[Benny Profane]

The original names in German of the novels 3 and 4 are
3-Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo)
4-Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau(('Tis folly to be wise, or, Death and transfiguration of Jean-Jaques Rousseau). Somewhat different this last one.

Well, I posted that "he won the 1957: National Jewish Book Award for Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo" and I couldn't notice the nuances of what I wrote. ?‍

Thank you, Lesaratte, for these notes about the original titles.

 

[Leseratte]

Well, I posted that "he won the 1957: National Jewish Book Award for Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo" and I couldn't notice the nuances of what I wrote. ?‍

Thank you, Lesaratte, for these notes about the original titles.

I didn't notice it likewise. I accessed the German Wikipedia page!

 

[bacon]

I have his This is the Hour, the novel about Goya. Guess I'll move it up in the to-read pile.

 

[tiganeasca]

I've actually got a copy of both The Oppermans and Jew Süss but there's just too much in the to-read pile to make it any bigger. But one of them will go into the to-be-read-after-the-to-read-pile is gone.

 

[bacon]

I just finished Feuchtwanger's This is the Hour. It is also sometimes titled Goya. Francisco Goya, court painter, is the main character of this historical novel that roughly spans the early 1790s to the early 1820s. The author uses Goya’s paintings to depict a chronological view of his life, focusing on the background of his best paintings, the stories behind them, and the reaction of the Spanish court and his loved ones to them.

I learned a lot about Goya: he married a woman who’s brother was the most famous painter in Spain (that must have been annoying); he painted many of the Spanish nobility of the time, and may have helped influence political decisions. (Having royalty and nobility sitting before you in a pose for hours on a daily basis means you can introduce ideas that may have an effect on politics, and many politicians were in Goya’s ear to chat up the nobility so as to influence policies.) Before reading this book, I was only familiar with Goya’s later, darker works, but this book gives you insight as to Goya’s role in the court of Charles IV, when he created his earlier works. This novel is entertaining and engrossing. I wouldn’t put it at or above Wolf Hall, but I recommended it if you were ever fascinated by a Goya painting.

The title “This is the Hour” seems a very generic title when you first pick up the book, but by the end, when the author references Goya’s “Ya es hora!” you get a chill down your spine, as he references that the church and Inquisition are basically done having a stranglehold on society, that corrupt politicians will get their just desserts, etc. The late etchings are why I read the book in the first place, and the last 150 pages deal with these etchings, “the vengeance of all the oppressed”, and showing “The whole of Spanish greatness, the whole of Spanish misery!” Will Goya be destroyed by the Inquisition if he publishes them?

Some quotes from the book:

• Good luck has long legs, bad luck has wings.
• Oir, ver y callar: hear, see, and keep your mouth shut.
• A man takes two years to learn to talk and sixty to learn to hold his tongue.
• As long as reason sleeps imagination will produce dreams of monsters. But allied to reason, imagination becomes the mother of art and all its miracles.

 

[tiganeasca]

I re-post here my short review of Feuchtwanger's Jew Suss:

"A remarkable achievement that left me wondering how Feuchtwanger can have essentially dropped out of sight of modern readers. I have several other books of his and now they need to move up the list. I cannot help but wonder how he would fare in a modern translation (mine, and I think the only one in English, is old; it was done by the indefatigable translators from the 1930s, Willa and Edwin Muir. There were some oddities but overall I thought it a very fluid job); the writing is strong and wonderfully evocative. Feuchtwanger has chosen a true story to retell and, of course, embellish. It’s one of those stories that is so unbelievable that it cannot be anything except true (and my quick researches suggest that it is largely based on history, though deviating significantly in the end. Even so, Feuchtwanger’s ending struck me as just about perfect.) It is the story of a court Jew, Joseph Süss (or Süß) Oppenheimer (1698-1738), whose extraordinary gift for finance and feel for politics leads to his position as the top financial advisor—and then, the top advisor in all ways—for the Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. It is the story of his rise and fall and is crammed full of politics, religion, psychology, and even sex, all in a cauldron of inconceivable wealth and power. It evokes the time and the place so brilliantly you can smell the decay. Hubris? To excess. Wisdom? Remarkably enough, more than plenty. By turns hilarious and immensely sad, it is an extraordinary book."

 

[tiganeasca]

My timing in reading the book was better than I imagined! Exactly ten days after I posted that review: here is a link to a very interesting essay in the October 3, 2022, New York Times entitled, "A Classic Novel of the Nazis’ Rise That Holds Lessons for Today." The subtitle reads "Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns, newly reissued, raises salient questions about the relationship between art and politics."

What is also of interest is that the essay is by Joshua Cohen, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel “The Netanyahus.” The essay is adapted from his introduction to the new edition of The Oppermanns being published this month.

I have linked to the article but here are two telling paragraphs--one from the middle of the piece and the last paragraph:

"Given that Feuchtwanger’s books were so explicitly and accessibly addressed to a general audience, it’s poignant that he has none now. His novels go unread; his plays go unperformed; he’s a first-class writer without a first-class berth; a classic firebrand without a canon. Most of his work was clearly meant as a commentary on the Weimar Republic, yet America — where he eventually settled and became an eminence of the émigré circuit — proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that art can have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched power.
* * *
Feuchtwanger’s life, and his afterlife, provide cautionary lessons for these writers of the left. His example shows that art can challenge power, as it were, 'powerfully,' and yet have no political effect. Still, The Oppermanns also shows that a work intended to sound an alarm can echo beyond its emergency, if written with honest detail, great dramatic skill and a deep feeling for the individual human, whose experience of the news is called 'life.'”

 

[Ben Jackson]

As The Oppermans is getting reissued, I think I'm finally going to read this as I've not read any of his books.

 

[tiganeasca]

What is most disappointing is that even the publisher's website says virtually nothing about this "reissue." By that I mean, it is unclear whether this represents a new translation or not. However, it seems most likely that this is not a new translation but literally just a republication. No one mentions that it's a new translation and the publisher's website offers minimal information (to put it mildly). I'd like to think that if they had in fact commissioned a new translation, they would be trumpeting that fact.

For what it's worth, I took a look at my edition, published by Carroll & Graf in 1983 and again in 2001. It's not 100% clear but it seems to use the original (and likely only) English translation made by James Cleugh. That translation is undated but seems to be from the 1930s since the original English version copyright was held by The Viking Press in 1934 (and renewed in 1962). (Interestingly, my edition reprints the review of the book appearing in the New York Times in 1934--which says nothing about the quality of the translator or even bothers to identify the person.)

I haven't read this (yet) so can't comment on the quality of the translation; I don't recall running across his name elsewhere, though for some indefinable reason it rings a very vague bell in my head. The always-infallible Wikipedia gives Cleugh three sentences: "James Cleugh (1891-1969) was an English author and translator. He established the Aquila Press in the 1930s to publish obscure but literary works. He personally wrote or translated over 50 books." (On the other hand, I guess that's three more sentences than I'll get. ?)

 

[Stevie B]

The McNalley Editions release (see pic below) goes on sale on Amazon in ten days, but is already being sold on ebay. The translator's name isn't listed. When I click the "look inside" link, I'm brought to the 2001 edition.