Lion Fojhtvanger was born on July 7, 1884. This means that we are now celebrating his 140th birthday. This writer of German language and Jewish origin grew up as the ninth child in the family of a wealthy owner of margarine production facilities in Munich. He studied Greek and Latin at the gymnasium, biblical Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic at a private school - the language that, according to tradition, was spoken by the first man Adam as well as Jesus of Nazareth.
He studied history, philosophy and German philology in Munich and Berlin. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1907 on Heinrich Heine's unfinished prose "The Rabbi of Baharah". First, he works as a journalist, founds his own magazine, gets married. Wife Marta gives birth to a daughter who soon dies of typhus. He was a substitute reservist in the First World War, but was not drafted due to his poor health. He writes prose all the time, but does not find a publisher. He achieved his first success with dramatic texts. Already in 1918, he pointed to the talent of the young Bertolt Brecht. His friendship will connect him with him for the rest of his life.
Jew Zis
After the First World War, Feuchtwanger finishes the novel "Jewrejin Zis". He has been waiting four years for its publication. When the novel was finally published in 1925, Fojhtvanger became famous overnight. The English translation of the novel also contributed to this. Already in the first year, the novel had 23 editions in Great Britain. A pocket edition followed. Success abroad spilled over back to Germany. The original German publisher sold 100 copies, and in 000 the new publisher Knaur printed another 1933 copies. Criticism was not favorable to the author of the bestseller. She observed this novel schematically – as a philo-Semitic and even as an anti-Semitic novel, ignoring its artistic complexity.
(Audio book "Jews Zis" by Leon Feuchtwanger in German)
Feuchtwanger was inspired by the historical figure of a flesh and blood Jew. His name was Joseph Ben Issachar Ziskind Oppenheimer. Later, he was derogatorily and colloquially called Jud Zis. He was born in Heidelberg. It should be remembered that Jews were then only allowed to live in the ghetto, that they were forbidden to own land or be members of one of the craft guilds. They were left with trade and the financial sector. Oppenheimer was skilled in both areas. So skilled that he was asked for advice at the wasteful princely court. He became a "court factor", actually the financier and treasurer of Karl Alexander, Duke of Wirtenberg. The duke was Catholic, his treasurer Jewish, and the population predominantly Protestant. The duke had absolutist ambitions, his powerful subjects wanted them to wonder too. When the duke died, the anger of courtiers and subjects was directed at the Jew Zis. The court proceedings to which he was exposed went down in history as a classic example of a rigged trial. Zis was sentenced to death in advance. The invented accusations were mixed with the facts - Zis was a womanizer and had sexual relations with Christian women - who apparently had nothing against it. But none of the serious charges – high treason, corruption, evasion – could be proven. In January 1738, Duke Karl Rudolph, signing the death sentence, allegedly said that it was "a strange event, that a Jew should pay a guild for Christian hangmen." They painted the cage red and placed it in the main square in Stuttgart. They offered to spare him if he converted to Christianity. He refused. He did not even take food, because it was not prepared according to Jewish regulations. He is said to have prayed, "Hear, O Israel..." Shema, Israel. He was hanged in front of a crowd of 20 people. His body decomposed in a cage that had been on public display for six years.
After death, he was not forgotten. It became the focal point of increasingly present anti-Semitism. Almost a century later, the German writer Wilhelm Hauf published the novella "Jud Zis" in 1827. It was best described by our contemporary, writer and journalist Kurt Esterle, calling it "the stepping stone of anti-Semitism".
Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Ziss, published a century after Hauf's novella, tried to tell the story from the perspective of a good connoisseur of both worlds – Jewish and German. At the same time, Feujthwanger was a humanistic cosmopolitan by conviction. He did not advocate Zionist nationalism. His protagonist is torn between the ghetto and the court, between tradition and luxury, between the religious and the secular. All these contradictions will come to his head in a time that is always looking for scapegoats among members of minorities.
The first movie
After the Nazis came to power, all of Leon Feuchtwanger's books were banned. The author went into exile, first to France, and then in 1940 via Spain and Portugal to the United States of America.
The anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany after the First World War was recognized by Feujthwanger as a serious problem earlier than other contemporaries. Already in 1920, the writer wrote the satirical story "Conversations with the Eternal Jew" in which he perhaps most clearly in his generation perceives the danger brought by the then small Nazi movement and the man who spreads hatred in the Munich beer halls - Adolf Hitler: "The towers of Hebrew books have burned, they made pyres, high up to the sky, and people were charred, countless, while priestly voices sang: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Columns of men, women, children were drawn to the square from all sides; they were naked or in sackcloth, and they had nothing with them but corpses, and pieces of book scrolls, torn, desecrated, feces-smeared scrolls. Behind them came men in kaftans and women and children in clothes from our era, countless, without end".
Literature that recognizes the dire possibility that comes from the future in this way is very close to prophetic speech.
In 1934, a film of the same name was made in Great Britain based on the novel "Jew Zis". The direction was taken by Lotar Mendes, a director of Jewish-German origin.
The film was well received by critics. Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin were at the premiere in New York. The film was not a great success with the audience. It was banned in Nazi Germany, and was shown in Austria before its annexation to the Third Reich.
The Jewish War
It was at the time of the rise of the Nazis that Feujhtwanger wrote the first novel of the trilogy "The Waiting Room" and published it under the title "Success" in 1930. In it, he satirically describes Bavarian society in a time of turmoil. Rupert Kutzner from that novel is the literary counterpart of Adolf Hitler. After "Success", two novels of the same trilogy followed - "The Oppermans" in 1933 and "Exile" in 1939. It is interesting that a high-ranking Nazi whose name was Operman forced the author with threats not to call the first two editions from 1933 and 1935 "The Opermans". so those two editions had the title Oppenheimi. After leaving Germany, Feuchtwanger gave all subsequent editions the original title - Opermanovi.
It is also fascinating that in almost the same period, from 1932 to 1940, Fojhtvanger published the novels of the historical trilogy "Joseph Flavius". The titles of the parts of the trilogy are: The Jewish War, The Sons, The Promised Land. Feujtvanger becomes one of the most significant literary voices of the first half of the last century.
Joseph Flavius was a Jewish priest and military commander. In a message sent to Jerusalem that was intercepted by Roman soldiers, he announced that he would defend the city of Jotapat against the Roman legions for 50 days. The message was laughable to the overpowered invaders until they encountered stubborn resistance. When the city fell on the fiftieth day after the siege began, it turned out that Joseph was a prophet. They brought him before Vespasian, the commander of the Roman legions. Joseph addresses him as the messiah. Vespasian soon becomes emperor, and Joseph, instead of being on the cross, ends up as his biographer and chronicler. That journey from the leader of the Jewish resistance to one of the most famous ancient chroniclers of his time and the emperor's confidante inspired the writer Feuchtwanger.
At the end of his Jewish War, Feuchtwanger puts the following words into the main character's mouth: "In all probability," he dictated, "several of them will try to describe the war of the Jews against the Romans." They will be authors who were not witnesses to the event, and therefore are directed to empty, contradictory speculation. I, Joseph, son of Matthias, a priest of the First Order from Jerusalem, an eyewitness from the very beginning, decided to write the true history of this war".
And this trilogy confirmed the literary fame of Lion Feuchtwanger - which will not last long.
The Nazi response
It could be said that the Nazis followed with malice the great success of Feuchtwanger's novel "The Jewish Zis" in the Anglo-Saxon speaking area, as well as the making of a film based on that material. They considered that the message of the novel and film was philo-Semitic and that it harmed their anti-Semitic ideology.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, recognized the opportunity to cunningly Nazify the historical story of the Jewish treasurer of a German duke and turn it into a powerful anti-Semitic cinematic weapon of the regime.
Several filmmakers turned down Goebbels' offer, but director Faith Harlan agreed. The screenplay was based on Wilhelm Hauff's novella from 1827. After the war, the director, in court proceedings in which he was accused of falsifying and distorting Feuchtwanger's novel, said that he had not even read that novel and that, in addition to Hauff's novella, the spiritual food of the film, on Goebbels' recommendation, was Martin Luther's anti-Semitic writing "On the Jews and Their Lies" from 1543.
These details show that the Nazis found a foothold for their dehumanizing propaganda that was preparing the "Final Solution" in an anti-Jewish piece of German tradition.
(Advertisement for the 2010 film Jud Süß – Film ohne Gewissen)
Goebbels was pleased with the film, which was shown at the Mussolini Film Festival in Venice, and then throughout the Third Reich. Unlike other propaganda films to which the Nazis and their sympathizers were brought as a matter of duty, this film, with its technical and artistic ambition, packed messages of hatred in such a way that they looked attractive to the audience of the time. People paid at the cinema box office to be led to "righteous" anger against the Jews by the film's catharsis. Because the historical "Jud Zis", who was sentenced to death by the state apparatus of an innocent man, was transformed in the film into a greedy, unscrupulous and lustful freak. That is why, after the war, Barbara Gerber labeled the film as "the work of regime falsifiers of history", and the prominent film critic Michael Teteberg called it "political pornography". In 2010, the film "Jud Suß - Film ohne Gewissen" (Jew Suß - film without conscience) was shot in Germany. It was a film about the creation of a Nazi propaganda film. It shows the depth of the toxic trail he left behind.
The customer Joseph Goebbels himself wrote long before that: "Harlan's film‚ the Jew Zis." A very large, ingenious work. An anti-Semitic film, as we can only wish for. I look forward to that".
The film was banned for public screening in post-war Germany and could only be seen under special conditions – for example, for research projects.
The post-war life of Jud Zis
Lion Fojhtwanger did not return to the divided Germany. With his novelized biography of the famous Spanish painter "Goya or the difficult path of knowledge", he managed to once again become a well-read and sought-after writer in the German-speaking world. But he constantly wrote to his publishers in both East and West Germany from America that he wanted his most successful novel "Jew Zis" to be reprinted along with his other works. What a fatal effect the Nazi era had on the consciousness of Germans is shown by the response of its Frankfurt publisher Erich Vent. He said that the Nazi era "created such devastation in the minds, that even novels like 'The Jewish Zis', to which no one can really attribute anti-Semitic tendencies, and to which even today no serious person can sew such tendencies, it has an anti-Semitic effect on the poisoned brains of the backward classes".
From the 1958s, however, the first revised editions of this novel appeared in both Germanys, and in the decades after the author's death (in XNUMX in Los Angeles), a series of editions were published in the German-speaking world. Critics recognized in Feuchtwanger's Zis Oppenheimer a metaphor of modern man on the border between East and West.
In the novel "Sons", the second book of the historical trilogy "Joseph Flavius", the relationship between the West and the East - then Rome and Jerusalem - is described as follows: "The emperor treated Joseph in the same way that haughty Rome always treated the East. The East was older, more civilized, had deeper connections with God. They were afraid of that East, it attracted and scared people at the same time. They needed him, they used him, and they showed him sometimes favor and sometimes contempt".
One cannot escape the impression that Feuchtwanger's lucid insight - one of many - was actually given only to such people who nurtured both their East and their West in themselves in order to deeply understand and suffer their ambivalent relationship.
Gustav, a character from the novel The Opermans who experienced a concentration camp, wrote a thought from the Talmud on the back of a postcard. It could also be the motto that describes the life of Lion Feuchtwanger, and perhaps the life of every human being: "We are given to work on a work, but we are not given to finish it."
Bonus video:
