Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Lion Feuchtwanger, the Jewish writer who reached a global readership in the three decades between the publication of his first bestselling novels in the 1920s and his death in exile, was deeply affected by his experience of revolution in his native Germany. Unlike writers such as Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam, he did not take a leading role in the revolution in Bavaria following World War I, but as a citizen of Munich he observed it first hand and supported its main aims: free elections, a free press, and the removal of censorship. However, his “dramatic novel” Thomas Wendt (1919) reflects his anguish over the conflict he saw between revolutionary ideals and the seemingly inevitable use of brutal force. Herein are the seeds of that constant preoccupation with the tension between contemplation and action which characterize the intellectuals and writers who inhabit his subsequent literary work. As a man of liberal persuasion, Feuchtwanger favored the American and French over the Bolshevik revolutionary model. He deviated from this position only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet Union seemed to represent the best hope of defeating the Fascist forces which had forced him into exile – first in France in 1933 and then, after the fall of France in 1940, in the US. His short book Moscow 1937 (1937) is remarkable for its fulsome praise of Stalin and its disparaging asides against ... log in or subscribe to read full text