Lion Feuchtwanger - Persecution By The Nazis

Persecution By The Nazis

He also published Erfolg (Success), a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Nazi Party (which he considered, in 1930, a thing of the past) during the inflation era. The new fascist regime soon began persecuting him, and while he was on a speaking tour of America, in Washington, D.C., he was a guest of honor at a dinner hosted by then German ambassador Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron on same day (January 30, 1933) Hitler was appointed Chancellor. The next day, Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Feuchtwanger, recommending that he not 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 Oppermanns undergoes an identical experience). In the summer of 1933, his name appeared on the first of Hitler's Germany Ausbürgerungsliste. During this time, he published the novel The Oppermann brothers.

Feuchtwanger and his wife did not return to Germany, moving instead to Southern France, settling in Sanary-sur-Mer. His works were included among those burned in the May 10, 1933 Nazi 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official government gazette, Reichsanzeiger, included Feuchtwanger's name on the list of those whose German citizenship was revoked because of "disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people."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 had addressed and predicted many of their 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 (Der Teufel in Frankreich).

In his writings, Feuchtwanger exposed Nazi racist policies years before the official London and Paris governments abandoned their policy of appeasement towards Hitler. He remembered that American politicians also had suggested that "Hitler 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, Polish 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.

The following year he traveled to the Soviet Union. His Moskau 1937, show him praising life under Joseph Stalin and approving of the Moscow Trials. The book has been criticized as a work of naive apologism.