Sad news–Peter Feuchtwanger the pianist has died. His obituary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes him fondly and rather well, and also sketches in some background about Bavaria and the Feuchtwanger family, including Lion.
There will be a screening of Herb Krill’s 2008 film Feuchtwanger lebt! at Lichtspiel in Bern, Switzerland tomorrow night, accompanied by a live introduction by Herb. Konrad Wolf’s 1971 film version of Goya will be screened at Lichtspiel two weeks from now.
Filmmaker Herbert Krill
Art historian Dr. Roland Jaeger’s article on Lion Feuchtwanger’s brother Martin in Aus dem Antiquariat 2/2016. A further version with additional research will appear in due course, writes Roland.
The New York Times has run a Books Section article (‘Edgar Feuchtwanger Bore Witness, Horribly Close to Hitler,’ June 2nd 2016) coinciding with Edgar’s talk at the 92nd Street Y cultural center.
Edgar has also appeared on CNN with Christiane Amanpour, June 23rd 2016. Minute 0.57: “If Hitler had known who I was, I wouldn’t be here to talk to you. My uncle Lion Feuchtwanger–who was very much a personal enemy of Hitler’s–had satirized him as Rupert Kutzner [in Erfolg], and if they had ever found out that we were the closest relations to Lion, we would’t be here for sure.”
And also on the world’s most visited English-language newspaper website Daily Mail Online on June 23rd: “A Jewish man and one-time neighbor of Hitler has revealed what it was like to live next door to the German dictator for nine years during his rise to power. Edgar Feuchtwanger’s incredible story is made the more improbable by the fact that his uncle, Lion Feuchtwanger, was a prominent novelist and ‘personal enemy’ of Hitler at the time.”
Edgar’s memoir Hitler, My Neighbour (Bretwalda, London), written from his own contemporary viewpoint as professional historian, was published in the United Kingdom in 2015 (see 1st October 2015 post).
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The new commemorative plaque on the front of Regerstrasse 8. The plaque on the pavement is still in place, writes Manfred Flügge (biographer of Marta Feuchtwanger and Eva Herrmann).
Photo credits: Manfred Flügge
Ken Burns and Artemis Joukowsky’s film Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War (with Tom Hanks as the voice of Waitstill Sharp) was previewed at the White House as part of the ongoing refugee debate and at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in early September, and broadcast on PBS on September 20th 2016. 7 minutes of the film are devoted to the rescue of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger in 1940.
Further reading:
- full account of the role played by the Sharps, and the their status as Righteous among the Nations, at the Yad Vashem website
- Marta Feuchtwanger’s own account of how she and Lion made their escape from Vichy France with the help of the Sharps and the Emergency Rescue Committee
Interesting insights into why Lion Feuchtwanger was nominated for, but did not win, the Nobel Prize for Literature after the publication of Erfolg, in this Spiegel article from 2009.
The jacket of the 2014 edition (reissued, with new material) of Wilhelm von Sternburg’s biography. The photo by E.O. Hoppé was taken at Lion Feuchtwanger’s rented apartment at Hohenzollerndamm 34 in Wilmersdorf (Berlin), writes art historian Dr. Roland Jaeger in the latest International Feuchtwanger Society newsletter (19/2016).
“In von Sternburgs Biografie ist sehr schön nachzulesen, wie Feuchtwanger zu seiner Stadt steht und die Stadt zu ihm.” Münchner Merkur
![maierhofer1_0[1]](http://lionfeuchtwanger.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/maierhofer1_01.jpg)
Professor Waltraud Maierhofer has edited and written an introduction to the J. Barrows Mussey English translation of Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston, which has just been published as a Kindle e-book. Waltraud and colleagues Mary Bryant and Regina Range tell the full story behind the Mussey translation in Feuchtwanger and Remigration (proceedings of the International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2011).
Feuchtwanger Re-Freshed, a University of Southern California student production which was performed for the first time at the International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2015, will be performed again at Villa Aurora on December 4th 2015:
“What happens to great ideas that never get the chance to grow into stories? Feuchtwanger collected long lists of ideas for novels and plays that he intended to write, but was unable to get to in his busy lifetime. The USC MFA Dramatic Writing playwrights have taken five of these ideas and turned them into short plays, bringing Feuchtwanger back to life in our own complex time.” Andrew Robinson, Former Head of MFA Acting Program, USC