"History requires a skilled creative writer to bring it vividly to life." Lion Feuchtwanger, Das Haus der Desdemona

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

Bestselling novelist and International Feuchtwanger Society member Tanja Kinkel’s article ‘Villa Aurora’ is currently available from the Literatur in Bayern website.

“[…] Ich zog in Marta Feuchtwangers früheres Zimmer ein und hatte drei Monate lang das Glück, in dem Paradies zu leben, das sich Lion und Marta, zwei Münchner im Exil, am Pazifik geschaffen hatten.”

Lion Feuchtwanger at the 2015 Hay-on-Wye (UK) literary festival: for Letters Live, an event celebrating the art of letter-writing, actor Jude Law read Lion’s public letter to the occupants of his house Mahlerstrasse 8.

Letters Live was also performed by Jude Law at a refugee camp in Calais on February 21st 2016.

Edgar Feuchtwanger’s memoirs, written from his own contemporary viewpoint as a professional historian, have been published by Bretwalda (London).

“Nine-year-old Edgar was strolling down the street in  pre-war Munich when he glanced into a nearby garden. There, relaxing in a deckchair and dozing in the sun, he saw a neighbour who lived directly opposite him. Edgar, who was Jewish, felt no cause for alarm. Yet this fellow city dweller was none other than Adolf Hitler, then resident in Munich and on his way to becoming the most dangerous and fearsome tyrant of the 20th century.

And as such Edgar, now the 91-year-old distinguished historian Edgar Feuchtwanger, witnessed some of the most dangerous and notorious events in the run-up to war. Edgar’s family was well-known in pre-war Germany. His uncle was Lion Feuchtwanger, a successful author in the Weimar Republic who incurred the wrath of the authorities when in 1930 – the year of Hitler’s electoral breakthrough – he published a novel called Success, which lampooned the German leader as Rupert Kutzner, a garage mechanic with a populist touch, who founds a party called the Truly Germans.”  Daily Express

Following his fascinating talk at the International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2015 (see Lion Feuchtwanger Facebook page for full report), Professor Ian Wallace will return to the subject of Lion Feuchtwanger’s British dimension next week at the Institute of Modern Languages Research School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Upcoming conference in Munich in July 2015, masterminded by City of Munich archivist and Lion Feuchtwanger biographer Andreas Heusler: Zwischen ‘Erfolg’ und ‘Exil’. Lion Feuchtwanger und München. Full image set at the Feuchtwanger Facebook page.

Forthcoming proceedings of International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2013 (Berlin).  Kudos to Professor Geoffrey Davis for putting it all together!

Professor Reinhard Wittmann,  joint curator (with Dr. Vera Bachmann) of the upcoming  Erfolg exhibition at the Literaturhaus Munich, has given an interview on Deutschlandfunk radio to coincide with the opening of the exhibition, which will run until February 2015.

• Unterrichtsmaterialien zu Erfolg

Professor Anne Hartmann will return to the subject of Lion Feuchtwanger and Stalin this week at the Literaturhaus Berlin:

A co-operation of Villa Aurora and Literaturhaus Berlin
in celebration of Feuchtwanger’s 130th birthday
Thursday, July 10, 2014, 8 pm

Lion Feuchtwanger in Moscow in 1937

“To understand Stalin – was that at all possible for a western intellectual, who paid him a visit in the Soviet Union in the 1930s? What was it that Feuchtwanger grasped, when he sat face to face with the dictator on January 8th, 1937? How far reaching was his insight and knowledge about that radically foreign society?

In his travel log of 1937, Feuchtwanger shows considerable appreciation for Stalin and his policies. He ends his book with a triple, enthusiastic YES for the USSR praising its social order and even justifying its show trials. The political reasons are obvious. Forced into exile, by the Hitler regime, the German-Jewish author hoped, the Soviet Union would offer the fierce resistance to the National Socialists, which was sadly missing among the western democracies.

But other motives may be worth mentioning. There are irritations, contradictions and cracks detectable under the smooth surface of his travel log. Those will be the focus of the lecture which will also discuss the limits of understanding and sympathy. It includes the question as to why Feuchtwanger stuck staunchly to his vision of the Soviet realities until his death in 1958.”  Anne Hartmann

Further reading:

• 12 October 2012 post
• article by Anne Hartmann in the journal Osteuropa

Happy Birthday, Fritz!

This Festschrift for Professor Friedrich Knilli contains, among other articles, ‘Two Films about Jud Süss‘ (Edgar’s International Feuchtwanger Society Conference 2005 paper); a tribute from Marje Schuetze-Coburn and Michaela Ullmann (Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, USC); and the following poem by renowned Polish-German theatre critic and academic Professor Andrzej Wirth:

Mein lieber Fritz

If you don’t mind

Der forscher ist grösser

Als sein gegenstand

Ohne dein witz

Ohne dein elan

Wer wüsste noch

Wer war veit harlan