A theatrical production of Exil, directed by Stefan Pucher, has opened at the Munich Kammerspiele, with an accompanying reading of correspondence between Lion Feuchtwanger and fellow exiled Jewish author (and Nobel Prize for Literature nominee) Arnold Zweig.
Theatrical director Stefan Pucher
“Lion Feuchtwangers Roman Exil im nostalgischen Dreissigerjahre-Look”. Süddeutsche Zeitung
Hitler, My Neigbor (Other Press, New York), written from the viewpoint of Edgar as a child/teenager and covering the period 1929-1939, has just been published in the US. An excerpt has been published in Time magazine (online) and People magazine (online).
“Edgar plays with toys, listens to his mother playing piano, and eavesdrops on adult conversations between his father (the director of an academic publishing house) and his famous uncle, author Lion Feuchtwanger. […] An exceptionally powerful and emotionally charged story.” New York Journal of Books
“The title of this memoir says it all. A young Jewish boy growing up in Munich in the 1930s, Feuchtwanger writes about living across the street from Hitler, the future mass murderer he could see through his window.” New York Times Book Reviews, New and Noteworthy
See also:
Hitler My Neighbour (1-hour documentary film (2012), broadcast in English on PBS)
7th June 2016 post
1st October 2015 post
On the 80th anniversary of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1937 visit to Moscow, and to accompany publication of a new book on the subject by Professor Anne Hartmann, a conference entitled ‘Die revolutionäre Versuchung. Reiseberichte aus dem Exil: Auf nach Moskau! Der Fall Lion Feuchtwanger‘ will be held at Literaturhaus Berlin on 8-9th December 2017. For additional discussion of the Moskau 1937 affair, see also earlier posts:
7 July 2014
12 October 2012
The International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2017, with the title ‘France as Host Country to German-speaking (in particular German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish) Émigrés between 1933 and 1940: Forms and Media of Public Memory Culture,’ will be held in Paris from October 12th -14th 2017. A copy of my paper for this conference, entitled ‘Die Geschwister Oppermann: A German Jewish Family in Extremis,’ is available here (with accompanying image set).
Some recent discussions of the quality of Lion Feuchtwanger’s work, immortality and “the canon” in mainstream media:
Literaturpapst Marcel Reich-Ranicki rightly includes Höhenflugrekord, a classic of the Neue Sachlichkeit, in his influential Der Kanon–Erzählungen . In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2010, however, he argued that Feuchtwanger’s writing was sometimes “gaudy”.
Micha Brumlik, professor of education at the University of Frankfurt, writing in the Jüdische Allgemeine in 2013, values in particular the contemporary relevance of Der jüdische Krieg (see also my paper delivered at the International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2015, entitled ‘Caught Between Cultures: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Flavius Josephus’).
Bayerischer Rundfunk, on the occasion of its 2014 rerun of Dietrich Leube’s TV documentary Lion Feuchtwanger: Geachtet & geächtet, argued that it was with Erfolg that Lion Feuchtwanger staked his claim to immortality.
And Ian Wallace, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Bath and President of the International Feuchtwanger Society, writing for the Forgotten Gems section of the website New Books in German, admires Die Jüdin von Toledo for its portrayal of the mindset behind holy war (a matter of great concern today).
With Edgar at the Bibliothek der verbrannten und verbannten Bücher at Munich’s new NS-Dokumentationszentrum. Oskar Maria Graf famously commented that he wished the Nazis had burned his books in 1933; a year later they were in fact banned. The yellow edition of Jud Süss is the Drei Masken Verlag first edition (1925). The total print run in German up until 1933 was 200,000; in other European languages (English, French and a dozen others), Yiddish and Hebrew it was 638,000.
Erlebte Geschichten, Edgar Feuchtwanger, hosted by Ingo Zander. Minute 6.40: Edgar recalls day-to-day life living opposite Hitler, who was–fortunately, needless to say–unaware that Edgar and his family were the closest relatives of one of the Nazis’ most vocal public enemies (Lion Feuchtwanger).
A couple of re-runs of note:
Michael Verhoeven’s film Menschliches Versagen tomorrow night on ARD:
The photo is of the passport held by Edgar at age 14.
And the re-run of Barbara Schepanek’s 2015 TV documentary Schatten über München, which uses Erfolg as a basis for its account of Munich as the “Hauptstadt der Bewegung”:
Image set from filmmaker Herbert Krill‘s talk ‘Much More than a Secretary: Hilde Waldo and the Legacy of Lion Feuchtwanger’, given at Villa Aurora on October 29th 2016:
Manfred Flügge’s Fry, Bingham, Sharp: The Americans Who Saved Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, published by Villa Aurora, has been reviewed in the International Feuchtwanger Society Newsletter (Volume 21/2016).
