09/26/2022
Feuchtwanger (The Devil in France ) chronicles the tsunami of antisemitism that engulfed Germany and its people in the years leading up to WWII in this harrowing novel, originally published in Amsterdam and in Cleugh’s translation in 1933, and revised with an introduction by Pulitzer winner Joshua Coen. The Oppermanns are a bourgeois Jewish family who for generations have been fixtures in Berlin society. Gustav and Martin oversee the family’s furniture business. Edgar is a renowned surgeon. When the first rumblings of National Socialism come to their attention, they mock the crude propaganda of Hitler’s Mein Kampf , but the “authority of sober reason” to which they cling, as Feuchtwanger writes, is soon undermined by crass nationalism, and members of the family endure dramatic affronts to their reputations: Martin’s son is ostracized at school, Edgar is accused of killing patients, and the family furniture business is forced to merge with a gentile firm. As a Jewish artist in the Weimar era, Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) suffered similar humiliations, and here he unflinchingly shows the tide of Nazism and “the barbarism and criminality of the caveman” that enabled it to be as relentless as it is incomprehensible. For readers discovering this clear-eyed account now, it’s made all the more devastating by the vast scope of horrors it anticipated. (Nov.)
"As for Feuchtwanger, the same year that The Oppermanns was published, the German Jewish author was stripped of his citizenship and had his property in Berlin seized and his books burned . . . He ultimately escaped to the United States, where he lived for the last 17 years of his life. Is this still the same country where he’d find refuge?"
New York Times - Pamela Paul
Symphonic . . . Think Buddenbrooks with Nazis . . . The Oppermanns presents how extinction feels from the inside. The habits that once kept you alive, passed on from generation to generation, no longer work. Everything you thought would prepare you for future success instead narrows your chances of survival. The news from 1933 is still news, if we know how to listen to it.
[A] methodically harrowing novel . . . McNally Editions has happily brought him back into circulation . . . The question that haunts The Oppermanns is eternally relevant: what kind of resistance is possible against ruthless power? . . . Feuchtwanger is too strong a writer to give a blandly reassuring answer. But the implication of the final pages is clear: in the great theater of history, useless gestures count.
"A long-forgotten masterpiece published in 1933 and recently reissued with a revised translation by the novelist Joshua Cohen . . . The novel is an emotional artifact, a remnant of a world sick with foreboding, incredulity, creeping fear, and—this may feel most familiar to us today—the impossibility of gauging whether a society is really at the breaking point."
The Atlantic - Gal Beckerman
Feuchtwanger reveals the strength of his argument by understatement, for he is writing a narrative, not a tract . . . There are few novelists living today who can compete with Feuchtwanger’s rare gifts of historical observation and understanding of individual character.
New York Herald Tribune - Horace Gregory
Solid and exciting, conceived and realized by an artist, the best novel Feuchtwanger has written.
New Republic - Nathan Asch
Feuchtwanger delineates—with what was, at the time, agonizing prescience—the ever-darker unfolding of the Reich’s repressive mission, resulting in a novel at once unbearable and unputdownable. It is also an alarmingly timely reminder: the Nazis’ first steps—censorship, disinformation, and the sowing of fear and mistrust among citizens—in turn permit the unspeakable . . . [A] masterpiece . . . The exhortation that we read this book is as urgent as Feuchtwanger’s need to write it.
The Nazi cloud deepens on the horizon. But anyone who has read Mein Kampf in one of its early editions will appreciate the witticisms a reading aloud of some of its passages arouses in [the Oppermanns’] circle. When all else fails they can always fall back on ‘The Leader’s’ German prose for entertainment. They refuse to believe that such a fellow can ever come to power over the German folk . . . And so this novel is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!’
New York Times - Fred T. Marsh
★ 2022-07-27
Written in 1933, the year Hitler was appointed German chancellor, the Bavarian Jewish Feuchtwanger's five-alarm warning of a novel focuses on the well-off Oppermann family, of which three brothers run a family chain of furniture stores in Berlin. With their history of achievement and as proud Germans, the siblings think they're safe from the oppressive actions they're hearing about. The first inkling that they are at risk comes via the persecution of 17-year-old Berthold Oppermann, a good student and self-possessed soul, by a Nationalism-embracing teacher who loves hearing his students sing "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, / Then all goes well again." Soon enough, the weight of state-mandated hatred falls on the Oppermanns in spite of their painful decision to change the name of their business to a non-Jewish–sounding name, as other Jewish firms had done. But as the scourge of discrimination against Jewish businessmen, doctors, and others intensifies, leading to suicides and purges ("Who was shameless enough to allow himself to be operated on by a Jew today?" it is asked), the notion among self-deluding Jews that "the disease that ails this country, man, is acute, not chronic" dims. The novel never raises its voice. Its power builds from its methodical telling of day-to-day reality, how the characters respond to increasingly frightening events, and what their future, if there is one, holds. News of concentration camps—the horrors of which even Feuchtwanger, writing as a French exile, couldn't imagine—is heard from a distance. Readers will be struck by how little the language about White supremacy, antisemitism, the swapping of lies for facts, the discrediting of the press, and the embrace of violence over reason have changed. It's hard to imagine a 90-year-old book being more timely.
An unsettling but page-turning novel about 20th-century evil.
This competent collection of 18 horror stories by the standard-bearers of the genre spans 138 years and represents the results of a poll taken of horror fiction readers and writers at the World Fantasy Conventions in 1981 and 1982. Edgar Allan Poe's classic ``The Fall of the House of Usher'' is followed by ``Green Tea,'' authored by his contemporary, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who is credited with transforming the figure of the ghost from a moral avenger into a malevolent spirit. Stories by Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Fritz Lieber Jr., Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury examine social and individual concerns while tingling the spine. The last piece in the collection is ``The Reach,'' a tingling ghost story by Stephen King, written in 1981. (Aug.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Anthology of classic work, from Poe and LeFanu up to Stephen King. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
