Feuchtwanger and Judaism

Paul Lerner and Frank Stern (eds)

Feuchtwanger and Judaism

History, Imagination, Exile

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Feuchtwanger, Lion, 1884-1958, writer of added text. | Lerner, Paul

Frederick, editor. | Stern, Frank, 1944- editor.

Title: Feuchtwanger and Judaism : history, imagination, exile / Paul Lerner and Frank Stern.

Description: 1st edition | Oxford ; Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; New York ; Wien : Peter Lang, [2019] | Series: Feuchtwanger Studies ; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016708 | ISBN 9781788745567 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Feuchtwanger, Lion, 1884-1958. | Judaism. | Authors, German--Biography. | Germany--Biography.

Classification: LCC PT2611.E85 Z6345 2019 | DDC 833/.912--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016708

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 1422-9005

ISBN 978-1-78874-556-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-557-4 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78874-558-1 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-559-8 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Paul Lerner and Frank Stern have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editors

PAUL LERNER is Professor of History at the University of Southern California specializing in German-Jewish cultural history. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 and Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 and the editor of works on Jewish consumer culture, Los Angeles as a site of German-American crossings, and German Jews and gender history.

FRANK STERN is Professor for Visual and Contemporary Culture at the University of Vienna specializing in German-Jewish, Austrian-Jewish and Israeli cultural history with a focus an cinema. He is the author of The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany and Franz Rosenzweig. Denker der Jüdischen Moderne and the editor of Feuchtwanger und Exil and numerous other publications on film and cultural history.

About the book

This collection of essays is devoted to the Jewish themes that ran through Lion Feuchtwanger’s life, works and worlds. Beginning with a selection of Feuchtwanger’s unpublished writings, speeches, and interviews, the volume examines the author’s approaches to Jewish history, Zionism, Judaism’s relationship to early Christianity and to eastern religions, and Jewish identity through his works, above all his historical fiction. Essays also trace translations of his works into English and Russian, and the meaning of his writing for various communities of Jewish and non-Jewish readers in Britain, North America, and the Soviet Union. A final section frames the issues around Feuchtwanger and Jewishness more broadly by considering the condition of exile and expanding the focus to communities of émigré writers and political figures in North America and beyond.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

List of Figures

Paul Lerner and Frank Stern

Introduction

Part I Documents: Feuchtwanger on Judaism, Jewish History, and Jewish Identity

Part II Jewish Pasts, Jewish Futures

Margrit Frölich

1 Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jewish Historical Consciousness in America

Paul Lerner

2 Rethinking Jewishness in Dark Times: Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig on Judaism, Zionism, and History

Detlef Blasche

3 Frühes Christentum in Lion Feuchtwangers Josephus-Trilogie

Sebastian Musch

4 Historical, Political, and Metaphysical Aspects of the East in Feuchtwanger’s Der falsche Nero←vii | viii→

Adrian Feuchtwanger

5 Caught between Cultures: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Flavius Josephus

Part III Feuchtwanger in Translation: The Literary Imagination Abroad

Ian Wallace

6 Jud Süß in English Translation

Marat Grinberg

7 The Soviet Jewish Scripture: Lion Feuchtwanger and the Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

Anne Hartmann

8 Lion Feuchtwanger and the Question of Jewish Identity in Stalinist Russia

Part IVFeuchtwanger and Friends: Exile, Identity, and Religion

Michaela Enderle-Ristori

9 „Umwerthung aller Werthe“? Heinrich Mann, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert und das Judentum

Sean Nye

10 Listening in the Waiting Room: Feuchtwanger on the Acoustics of Exile

Marje Schuetze-Coburn

11 Aufbau: The Bridge between America and Europe during Lion Feuchtwanger’s Years in Exile←viii | ix→

Birgit Maier-Katkin

12 Anna Seghers and Judaism

Index←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

Figures

Figure 1. Lion Feuchtwanger, “Stellung zum Judentum. Rede vor Rabbis,” Folder D8a-40 (1940).

Figure 2. S. Sagall, “Feuchtwanger. Jewish Past and Future” (1936 or 1937).

Figure 3. Lion Feuchtwanger, “Are the Jews a Nation? The Marvel of a Vitalising Race that Has Defied History” (1927?).

Figure 4. Lion Feuchtwanger, “Einleitungsvortrag für die OSE” (date unknown).

Figure 5. Lion Feuchtwanger, “German Jews 1933 – Rede London Dez 1933,” LF D8a-33.

Figure 6. Lion Feuchtwanger, “Speech at the Occasion of the World’s Fair in the Palestine Pavilion 1940,” LF D8a-39.

Figure 7. Marta Feuchtwanger, “Why I am a Jew?” April 15, 1971, MF Collection, Box 117.

Figure 8. Volumes from Feuchtwanger’s and Sholem Aleichem’s collected works in Russian on display in the Moscow Jewish Museum. Photograph courtesy of Timmy Straw.

Figure 9. Boris Suchkov’s letter to Feuchtwanger, October 30, 1943. Courtesy of Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. Photograph by Marat Grinberg.

Figure 10. Solomon Iudovin’s illustration for The Jew Suess (1938–1939). Courtesy of “Internet-musei graviury.” ←xi | xii→

Figure 11. Title page of the Russian translation of Feuchtwanger’s The Day Will Come, last volume in the Josephus trilogy, from Feuchtwanger’s collected writings. Photograph by Marat Grinberg. ←xii | 1→

Paul Lerner and Frank Stern

Introduction