A Writer and His Times
HANSER, RICHARD
A Writer and His Times Insight and Action: The Life and Work of Lion Feuchtwanger By Lothar Kahn Fairleigh Dickinson. 392 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "Putsch! How Hitler Made...
...All this seems to have been a kind of compartmentalized posturing, a reaction to the disarray in the West that made the Soviet Union appear to promise a more orderly and purposeful social system for the future...
...Take, for instance, the words of a White Army officer after the bloody sup-Dression of the Raterepublik in Munich in 1919, an event Feuchtwanger witnessed...
...But if his books are no longer read or regarded as they once were, his story is still well worth telling...
...or, more accurately, the whole gantlet...
...In the classic McCarthy vein, the immigration people queried him about an allegedly revolutionary play, totally forgotten by everybody else, that he had written 40 years before...
...Its depiction of the intrigues of an 18th-century court Jew, however, invited accusations of anti-Semitism and caused a stir that went beyond its literary merits...
...Feuchtwanger's muddled radicalism, in fact, was always at violent odds with his strong appetite for the privileges and appurtenances capitalism lavishes on achievers...
...It causes too much trouble in the newspapers...
...Yet for all its photographic realism and guidebook detail, it does not really reflect what was then brewing along the banks of the Isar...
...Today the pyramids of Egypt tower as high as ever, while the stature of Lion Feuchtwanger has shrunk...
...he was one of the most widely read of contemporary writers (on occasion mounted police had to protect him from swarms of admirers on the street...
...In Action and Insight Lothar Kahn tells it definitively and with insights of his own...
...The timid and unathletic author made a madly adventurous escape by night over an unmarked mountain trail...
...he used a bent for books and a knack for language to show his overbearing parents and more favored siblings which of the Feuchtwangers would amount to most in the world...
...The Jewess of Toledo, the third volume of a Josephus trilogy, and many others...
...But the physical safety and renewed success were deceptive...
...I specifically told my men not to shoot any literary people,' he said...
...He resumed his output of historical fiction...
...But that was only one of Feuchtwanger's experiences of the baleful entanglement of literature and politics in uneasy times...
...The shy, homely, undersized sprout of a solidly philistine Jewish clan in Munioh (his father was a margarine tycoon...
...To come to America and not see Lion Feuchtwanger would be like going to Egypt and not seeing the pyramids.' The remark was not so extravagant and unlikely then as it seems now...
...With the aid of American rescue officials, the author-on-the-run was brought at considerable hazard to the United States...
...he had been hailed as the greatest historical novelist of modern times...
...Short of the premature extinction that overtook many of his colleagues, Lion Feuchtwanger ran the whole gamut...
...Once he was asked why he didn't go and live in Moscow, and his answer was: "Do you think I'm crazy...
...The success of The Ugly Duchess and Jew Suss, two early works, made him a factor in the cultural tumult of Weimar and a peer of Brecht, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Werfel, the two Manns, and the rest...
...If there are more lapses in the editing of Insight and Action than one likes to see in a book from a university press, these are offset by its general solidity and by a happy sprinkling of apt anecdote...
...Although his books had been burned in Germany and his name was on the Nazi extermination lists, the French put him behind barbed wire as an enemy alien anyway...
...It is unlikely that anyone would consider his literary reputation to be of sightseeing proportions...
...How Hitler Made Revolution" When a group of Russian writers came to the United States on a cultural exchange in the late '50s, they were asked to name the author then living in America they would most like to meet...
...The book stands high in the Feuchtwanger canon and is often admired as an early warning of the Nazi menace...
...to fledgling playwright and novelist...
...he saw the story as an allegory of the futility and emptiness of action as opposed to the rewards of philosophical detachment and spiritual serenity, a recurring theme of his...
...As a result he died in 1958 without having been granted the American citizenship he had sought for years...
...A decade later, though, the Nazi propaganda apparatus was able, by cunning alterations and distortions, to make its most vicious and effective film out of the material he had unintentionally and ironically provided...
...Its Hitler character, Rupert Kutzner, is hardly more than a cartoon, and the significance of the putsch is lost in a rather tediously prolonged plot about civic corruption and miscarried justice...
...Although Feuchtwanger clearly was not much of a threat to the security of the United States, the ideological gumshoes of the time regarded him with a nagging distrust and suspicion that clouded his last years...
...He went from drama critic in Munich ???a needlessly sarcastic and even ruthless one...
...In addition, he published a favorable interview with Stalin and supported the Stalin-Hitler pact...
...Feuchtwanger attended the Moscow show trials and his apologetic comments were, according to Walter Laqueur, "among the worst written on the subject...
...He lived to be 75, was active to the end and what happened to him personally, professionally and politically is an anthology, a catalogue, of what an author can be subjected to in our irrational and spooky era...
...The ironies multiplied...
...A fellow refugee, the poet Walter Hasenclever, had committed suicide in the internment barracks the night before...
...He found haven in the land that had often been the target of his satire...
...critics reviewed him with respect in half a dozen languages...
...He also felt official animosity with his novel Success, a treatment of the social and political situation in his native Bavaria at the time of the Hitler putsoh of 1923...
...Despite the inescapable barriers and pitfalls of the author-in-exile, Feuchtwanger prospered...
...Feuohtwanger, in many ways, can be taken as an exemplar of the genus writer in the 20th century...
...Suss, a runaway best seller, established the young author's reputation in the United States, where it was called Power...
...Feuchtwanger's intent was neither anti- nor philo-Semitic...
...A number of writers had been killed, and the White officer regretted this, for his own reasons...
...The answer was: "Feuchtwanger...
...Feuchtwanger, after all, had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize...
...While he languished in a concentration camp, RAF pilots were bombarding Germany with leaflets containing quotations from his works...
...Meanwhile, we have Lothar Kahn's exhaustively researched and intelligently written factual treatment of the subject...
...Curiously, the most vivid portrait in the novel is that of the great Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin, thinly veiled as Balthasar Hierl...
...The historical novel is not held in much esteem any more, and it would be a final irony if some future fictioneer took Feuchtwanger's story as the basis for a work about a writer's sojourn through our times...
...his run through the trials of the 20th-century writer was not yet over...
...Nevertheless, Success was a success, too, and Feuchtwanger was comfortably ensconced in a Mediterranean villa when war came...
...This Is The Hour: A Goya Novel, Raquel...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 10
