By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Lion Feuchtwanger received an orthodox Jewish education and read the holy books in the original. He could have become a rabbi, but this field did not interest him. He received an excellent humanitarian education, knew philology, philosophy and a number of foreign languages – Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, English – and had a doctorate, but did not become a scientist.
He was born and lived in Munich and was well acquainted with the leaders of the Bavarian Socialist Republic, but did not become a statesman. He was a contemplative, giving free rein to the characters in his historical novels who demonstrated his views. In his autobiography he wrote: “I have spent my whole life creating only one book – about a man placed between action and inaction, between power and knowledge.” He had no ideology and was skeptical about the possibilities of people to prevail over historical processes: “I am neither a fatalist nor a Marxist who believes that the world is ruled by economic and material laws alone. But neither am I an individualist, convinced that each person can be the master of his or her own future. However, these three theories objectively encompass what is called destiny.”
Feuchtwanger was more familiar with the Jewish language, tradition and culture than any other secular writer of Jewish origin, but he did not become a national writer. He wrote more books on Jewish themes than any of his secular countrymen and colleagues, but the Jewish answer to the Jewish question was foreign to him.
Feuchtwanger’s two books, Success (1930), an anti-Nazi novel with a Communist protagonist visiting the USSR, and Moscow. 1937 made him one of the most popular foreign authors in the USSR, although Success was a literary failure and Moscow. 1937 was a false book. Feuchtwanger’s books were translated into Russian and published in large editions. Since the Jewish theme was close to the writer-favorite of the Soviet authorities, Feuchtwanger unwillingly became a teacher of Jewish life for the Jews of the USSR. Soviet Jews, cut off from tradition, learned from his books about their people’s past hidden from them, and read about their fellow tribesmen as positive characters who did not exist in Soviet literature.
The German writer aspired to the USSR, like the hero of the novel Success, the communist Kaspar Pröckl, whose prototype was Bertolt Brecht. And, like Pröckl, Feuchtwanger managed to realize his dream and visit the Soviet Union. In January 1937, Stalin more than three hours “processed” the German writer during their meeting in Moscow and convinced him of the rightness of the Soviet system: “When you get from this oppressive atmosphere of shabby democracy and hypocritical humanity in the clean air of the Soviet Union, it becomes easier to breathe. […] How pleasant it is after the imperfection of the West to see such a work to which one can say from the bottom of one’s heart: yes, yes, yes! And since I considered it dishonorable to hide this ‘yes’ in my chest, I wrote this book.”
Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger was born on July 7, 1884, in Munich to a wealthy Jewish family in which he was the eldest of nine children. His father was a wealthy factory worker who inherited the margarine business from his father. His mother took care of the house and raised the children. Lion’s parents were orthodox Jews, but he did not perform religious rituals. Upon leaving school, Lion became a student at the University of Munich, where he studied philosophy and literature. He subsequently studied German philology and Sanskrit in Berlin. Between 1905 and 1906 he wrote his first literary works, and in 1907 he defended his doctoral dissertation analyzing Heinrich Heine’s unfinished work The Rabbi of Barachah.
At the time of Hitler’s rise to power, the writer was abroad. Friends persuaded him not to return to Germany. Feuchtwanger’s books were burned by the Nazis, and on August 25, 1933 he was deprived of German citizenship. His property was confiscated and his doctoral degree from the University of Munich was revoked.
At the end of World War II, Feuchtwanger, then living in Los Angeles, was suspected of being a Communist sympathizer. He was denied American citizenship. After the war, the University of Munich returned the writer’s doctoral degree taken away by the Nazis. For his outstanding services as an artist and “defender of the ideas of peace and progress,” Lion Feuchtwanger was awarded the East German State Prize for Art and Literature (1953). He was a soldier, a prisoner, an exile, a doctor of literary studies and a celebrated writer. Lion Feuchtwanger died on December 21, 1958 in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades from stomach cancer.
Feuchtwanger wrote several novels with a Jewish theme – The Jewish War, Sons, The Day Will Come, Success, The Opperman Family, Exile, Jew Süss, The Jew of Toledo, or The Spanish Ballad, and Jeffai and His Daughter. The writer was a cosmopolitan. He died without having citizenship of any country. In connection with the publication of Jew Süss (1929), he notes his cosmopolitanism and ambivalent position: “I will say without saying: my brain is the brain of a cosmopolitan, but with my feelings, with my heart, I am a Jew.”
He can be characterized by the words he found for the protagonist of his The Jewish War, the Jewish writer and historian Josephus Flavius – “a cosmopolitan in mind and a nationalist in heart.” The duality that Feuchtwanger attributed to Joseph was characteristic of himself. “I am a German by language, an internationalist by conviction, a Jew by feeling,” the writer remarked. – “It is very difficult sometimes to bring beliefs and feelings in harmony with each other.”
In the article On Meaning and Meaninglessness Feuchtwanger wrote: “I have long been deeply concerned with one theme – the conflict between nationalism and internationalism in the human soul. If I try to embody this conflict in a novel on a contemporary theme, I am afraid that my personal experiences will obscure and cloud the picture. Therefore, I preferred to transfer this conflict into the soul of a man who, as it seems to me, experienced it in the same form in which many people experience it nowadays – although this man lived 1860 years ago – in the soul of the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius.” The theme of departure from Jewishness in the case of Josephus Flavius turns into a theme of struggle for cosmopolitanism, in which a harmonious combination of Greco-Roman and Jewish culture must be found.
Feuchtwanger was a “citizen of the world,” but his spiritual world was filled with biblical imagery and Jewish customs. Although he was an opponent of Zionism, his cosmopolitan stance weakened in the 1930s and began to be colored with national colors. These fluctuations are reflected in his articles The Historical Process of the Jews (1930) and Nationalism and Jewry (1933). Feuchtwanger early sensed the danger of antisemitism and showed it in the pamphlet Conversation with the Eternal Jew (1920).
Feuchtwanger studied with interest the life of Jews in the USSR in 1937. In his book Moscow. 1937 he repeated Soviet lies about the solution of the Jewish problem: “I was best convinced of the soundness and effectiveness of the Soviet Union’s national policy by the Union’s method of resolving the difficult, seemingly insoluble, Jewish question. […] The Soviet Union […] assimilated a large part of its five million Jewish population and, by giving another part a vast autonomous region and the means to settle it, created for itself millions of hard-working, capable citizens fanatically devoted to the regime. […] Thus, if the economic development of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, favored the assimilation of the Jews, on the other hand, the Soviet Union, finally eliminating the thesis of the “harmful illusion of Jewish nationality”, gave its Jews the opportunity to preserve their nationality.”
Feuchtwanger had several reasons for traveling to Moscow in 1937. The best known reason is his leftist, pro-socialist views. Another reason is his interest in the Jewish question and in the tactics of the Jewish leaders of the USSR. His books probe which type of Jew serves the nation more faithfully – the court Jew Joseph Süss Oppenheimer from Jew Süss; Yehuda ibn Ezra, the favorite of King Alfonso VIII from The Spanish Ballad; the assimilated and estranged historian and writer, the collaborationist Joseph Flavius in The Jewish War trilogy; Jephthah, the leader and fighter for the national interest in Jephthah and His Daughter; or the revolutionary leader Thomas Wendt (Ernst Toller) in The Year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighteen?
Feuchtwanger was interested in what a prominent Jew among non-Jews should be like – a noble champion of justice, like Toller, the leader of the Bavarian Revolution, who failed to keep people “from going mad” and gave up power, or Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, Jewish leaders who were deeply embedded in the life of the indigenous nation in Russia and in its revolution, and who walked with it to the end of their lives, which ended with their execution.
Feuchtwanger attended a trial in which the main defendant was the Jewish socialist Karl Radek. The persecution of Jews by the Nazis aroused Feuchtwanger’s suspicions that the contagion of German antisemitism was being transferred to the Soviet Union. During the eight days of Radek’s trial, Feuchtwanger sat silently in the hall and nervously moved his fingers. Perhaps the fate of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Radek reminded him of the tragic end of the Jew Süss.
Over the Moscow trials hovered the ghost of the main leader of socialism, the Jew Lev Trotsky. All those convicted recognized themselves as agents of the “traitor” Trotsky. Could Feuchtwanger believe in the truthfulness of Stalin’s remark, uttered in their conversation on January 8, 1937: “Some people do not believe that Trotsky and Zinoviev collaborated with agents of the Gestapo. And their supporters are arrested together with Gestapo agents. This is a fact. You will hear that Trotsky has made an alliance with Hess to blow up bridges and trains, etc., when Hitler goes to war on us. For Trotsky cannot return without the USSR being defeated in war?” Could the writer who wrote the novel The Opperman Family about the Nazi policy toward the Jews believe in the collaboration of the Gestapo with the famous Jewish communists Trotsky and Zinoviev?
In the 1937 book, Feuchtwanger describes the USSR as the Promised Land for the Jews. Reading the transcript of Stalin’s conversation with Feuchtwanger, it is hard to understand how a German writer could fail to see the dictator, demagogue and liar before him. Was Feuchtwanger’s book Moscow. 1937 a mistake and delusion of one of the most prescient writers of the first half of the twentieth century or a forgery imposed on him by the only force opposing Nazism? The above “Jewish” passage from Moscow. 1937 resembles dreaming more than reality. It was his fantasy on Jewish themes. The German writer described rather what the fate of Soviet Jews was to be than its realization. His description is more like a dream of normalizing the life of the German Jewish community than a solution to the problem of Soviet Jews. Having described the tragedy of German Jews in The Opperman Family, he understood in 1937 that the German Jewish community was agonizing.
Feuchtwanger, a political immigrant, an exile who had been stripped of his German citizenship, whose property had been confiscated, whose library had been burned, whose head had a bounty of ten thousand marks, feared for the fate of German Jews.
Was Feuchtwanger’s “yes” to the “clean air” of 1937 in the USSR naivety or encouragement of the only force opposing Nazism? Antonina Pirozhkova, the second wife of writer Isaac Babel, cites the following episode in her memoirs The Years that Passed by, 1932-1939: “Lion Feuchtwanger came to Moscow and came to visit Babel. He was a light red-haired man, small in stature, very neat, in a suit that seemed a little too small for him. The conversation was in German, which Babel knew fluently. […] After Feuchtwanger left, I asked Babel what particularly interesting things our guest had said? ̶ He spoke of his impressions of the Soviet Union and of Stalin. Told me a lot of bitter truth – noted Babel.” In Pirozhkova’s retelling, Babel heard from Feuchtwanger not sweet lies about the Soviet Union and Stalin, but “bitter truth.”
Feuchtwanger did not foresee the total annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis. However, he was well aware of what was happening to the Jews in Germany. Perhaps he envisioned that the USSR, in need of manpower for its construction, would take in Jews fleeing Nazism. In the face of the threat of Nazism, he was looking for a worthy opponent to Hitler. Feuchtwanger never forgot for a moment that he was not only a German writer but also a Jew. Feuchtwanger could not risk opening a second front against the Jews, a Soviet front in addition to the Nazi front.
One can come to the conclusion that Feuchtwanger correctly understood what was happening at the 2nd Moscow trial by reading his notes taken there: “The most terrible and difficult to explain was the gesture with which Radek left the courtroom after the end of the last session. It was near morning, at four o’clock, and everyone – judges, accused, listeners – was very tired. Of the seventeen accused, thirteen – among them Radek’s intimate friends – were sentenced to death; Radek and three others were sentenced only to imprisonment. The judge read the sentence; we all – the accused and those present – listened to it standing without moving, in profound silence. After the verdict had been read, the judge immediately withdrew. The soldiers appeared; they first approached the four men who had not been sentenced to death. One of the soldiers put his hand on Radek’s shoulder, apparently asking him to follow him. And Radek went. He turned around, raised his hand in greeting, shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly, nodded to the other death row inmates, his friends, and smiled. Yes, he smiled.”
Radek smiled guiltily. He asked his comrades, whom he had condemned, to forgive him for having, unlike them, preserved his life by cunning. Could Feuchtwanger not realize the falsity of the accusations at the 2nd Moscow trial after listening to the last word of one of the main defendants, Karl Radek? In front of an educated man, a famous writer, sat a classic buffoon, throwing the truth in the face of the king and his accusers, whom he despised: “Hearing that the people sitting here in the dock are simply bandits and spies, I protested against it! There are the testimonies of two persons – my own confession that I received instructions and letters from Trotsky (which, unfortunately, I burned), and the confession of Pyatakov, who spoke to Trotsky. All the confessions of the other defendants are based on our confession. If you are dealing with ordinary bandits and spies, what is the basis of your conviction that we are telling the pure truth?” This phrase was meant to show Feuchtwanger that the main accused, Karl Radek, was engaged in self-incrimination and had incriminated his comrades, and that his final word as a royal jester contained the truth disgraceful to the accusers.
Lion Feuchtwanger learned the true cost of Stalin’s policy toward the Jews and toward him personally. During the campaign against the “cosmopolitans” of 1949, he was relegated from the rank of “progressive writer and friend of the USSR” to the category of “rancid nationalists and cosmopolitans” and “literary peddlers.” Feuchtwanger learned that his cosmopolitan ideal had become a stigma placed on his Soviet countrymen by his Moscow interlocutor, whose genius he had exaggeratedly praised in 1937. Cosmopolitanism, borrowed by Feuchtwanger as a worldview, was recognized as a shameful phenomenon in a country the writer had unrestrainedly praised.
The accusations of cosmopolitanism leveled against Feuchtwanger by Stalin’s propaganda machine after the end of World War II were directed against Soviet Jews inspired by the Jewish themes of the German writer’s books, which could lead them down the dangerous road of freedom and longing for Israel. The Jews paid with a temporary hiatus in the publication of Feuchtwanger’s works, the withdrawal of his books from libraries, and his boycott by the Soviets for glimpses of their national consciousness.
The idea of persecuting “rootless cosmopolitans” in the USSR expressed an attack on the conjunction of “wrong” thinking and “wrong” blood. The connection between the circulation of ideas and the circulation of blood was simple and immediately reached the long-established antisemitic consciousness in the USSR. The same idea was freely converted in Nazi Germany, but it was persistently unrecognized as racist by its Soviet initiators and consumers. Its misanthropic content was clothed in the garb of formulas of socialism and internationalism.
After the forced “opening of borders” during the war, the USSR locked itself in isolationism with an ideology of exaltation over the West, whose “agents” were declared to be Jews. Feuchtwanger felt that a return to socialist Germany was impossible for him, for he was not German, not a socialist, not a communist. He did not resettle in the German “democratic” republic, where he was one of the most published and revered writers. Despite the praise for socialist “democracy” in his book Moscow. 1937, he lived in the United States from 1940 until his death, that is, he preferred “the imperfections of the West,” “the oppressive atmosphere of shabby democracy and hypocritical humanity” to the “pure air of the Soviet Union” and socialist East Germany.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.