Sigmund Aharon Feuchtwanger

Alexander Duparc Collection

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Sigmund Aharon Feuchtwanger, son of Elkan Feuchtwanger and Sarah Fuerther to:
Johanna Bodenheimer

1) Lion Jacob Arie Feuchtwanger, birth 7 Jul 1884, died 21 Dec 1958
a German-Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Feuchtwanger's Judaism and fierce criticism of the Nazi Party, years before it assumed power, ensured that he would be a target of government-sponsored persecution after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Followin g a brief period of internment in France and a harrowing escape from Continental Europe, he sought asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.

Feuchtwanger is often praised for his efforts to expose the brutality of the Nazis but criticized for his failure to acknowledge the brutality of the rule of Joseph Stalin.

Early opposition to Nazis[edit]

Feuchtwanger was one of the very first to recognize and warn against the dangers of Hitler and the Nazi Party. As early as 1920 he published in the satirical text Conversations with the Wandering Jew, a vision of what would later become the realit y of anti-Semitic racist mania:

Towers of Hebrew books were burned, and bonfires were erected high up in the clouds, and people burnt, innumerable priests and voices sang: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Traits of men, women, children dragged themselves across the square from all sides , they were naked or in rags, and they had nothing with them as corpses and the tatters of book rolls of torn, disgraced, soiled with feces Books roles. And they followed men and women in kaftans and dresses the children in our day, countless, end less.

Persecution by the Nazis

Feuchtwanger also published Erfolg (Success), a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Nazi Party (in 1930, he considered it a thing of the past) during the inflation era. The new regime soon began persecuting him, and while he wa s on a speaking tour of America, in Washington, D.C., he was guest of honor at a dinner hosted by the then ambassador Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron on the same day (January 30, 1933) that Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The next day , Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Feuchtwanger to recommend him not to return home.

In 1933, while Feuchtwanger was on tour, his house was ransacked by government agents who stole or destroyed many items from his extensive library, including invaluable manuscripts of some of his projected works (one of the characters in The Opper manns undergoes an identical experience). In the summer of 1933, his name appeared on the first of Hitler's Germany Ausb?rgerungsliste, which were documents by which the Nazis arbitrarily deprived Germans of their citizenship and so rendered the m stateless. During that time, he published the novel The Oppermanns. Feuchtwanger and his wife did not return to Germany but moved to Southern France, settling in Sanary-sur-Mer. His works were included among those burned in the May 10, 1933, Naz i book burning held across Germany.

On August 25, 1933, the official government gazette, Reichsanzeiger, included Feuchtwanger's name on the list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people." Because Feuchtwanger ha d addressed and predicted many of the Nazis' crimes even before they came to power, Hitler considered him a personal enemy and the Nazis designated Feuchtwanger as the "Enemy of the state number one," as mentioned in The Devil in France.

In his writings, Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi racist policies years before the British and French governments abandoned their policy of appeasement towards Hitler. He remembered that American politicians were also among those who suggested that "Hitl er be given a chance." With the publication of The Oppermanns in 1933, he became a prominent spokesman in opposition to the Third Reich. Within a year, the novel was translated into Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Po lish and Swedish languages. In 1936, still in Sanary, he wrote The Pretender (Der falsche Nero), in which he compared the Roman upstart Terentius Maximus, who had claimed to be Nero, with Hitler.

After leaving Germany in 1933, Feuchtwanger lived in Sanary-sur-Mer. The high sales of his books, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, allowed him a relatively comfortable life in exile. In response to the lack of any forthright anti-Nazi attitud e among the Western powers, he approached Soviet communism. From November 1936 to February 1937 he travelled the Stalinist Soviet Union. In his travel impressions of Moscow in 1937, in Moskau 1937, he praised life under Stalin and justified the sh ow trials against alleged Trotskyites, attracting outrage from Arnold Zweig and Franz Werfel. The book has been criticized as a work of naive apologism.[11] His friendly attitude toward Stalin later delayed his naturalization in the United States.

Imprisonment and escape

When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Feuchtwanger was interned for a few weeks at Les Milles (Camp des Milles). When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was captured and again imprisoned at Les Milles.[12] Later, the prisoner s of Les Milles were moved to a makeshift tent camp near N?mes because of the advance of German troops. From there, he was smuggled to Marseille disguised as a woman. After months of waiting in Marseille, he was able to flee with his wife Mart a to the United States via Spain and Portugal. He escaped with the help of Marta; Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France; Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in Marseille; Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp , a Unitarian minister and his wife who were in Europe on a similar mission as Fry. Wauratall Sharp volunteered to accompany Feuchtwanger by rail from Marshall, across Spain, to Lisbon. If Feuchtwanger had been recognized at border crossings in Fr ance or Spain, he would have been detained and turned over to the Gestapo.

Realizing that Feuchtwanger was still not out of reach of the Nazis even in Portugal, Martha Sharp gave up her own berth on the Excalibur so Feuchtwanger could sail immediately for New York City with her husband. to:
Martha Loeffler, died 1987

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