Lion Feuchtwanger

This essay foregrounds music, radio, and sound in the novels of the German exile author Lion Feuchtwanger. Specifically, it analyzes the narrative techniques in Feuchtwanger’s "Waiting Room Trilogy," a collection of novels written from 1927 to 1939 that chronicled the rise of Nazism. Along with the trilogy’s aim “to document for posterity,” the essay argues that we can see the emergence of an acoustics of exile, primarily though the lead protagonist of the final novel, Sepp Trautwein: an exiled composer living in Paris in 1935. Trautwein composes a symphony called "The Waiting Room," and I engage Feuchtwanger’s symphonic image of “The Waiting Room” as a way of addressing music’s link to the experience of exile and the interwar period. In this reading of the trilogy, the “Waiting Room" symphony sheds light on the role music plays in all three novels, as related especially to Feuchtwanger’s treatment of religion, politics, and modern media.
https://www.peterlang.com/abstract/title/68691?rskey=0ZZsfr&result=1

This essay begins with a critique of several arguments against the possibility of cosmopolitan thought and practice, and therefore, of a “cosmopolitan identity”.
In the first part, it takes as a historical example various aspects of the cosmopolitanism of European Jews: was it real or imagined by antisemitic, xenophobic and nationalist citizens of Europe to justify exclusion and persecution? Was it forced upon these people by the oppression they suffered in the diaspora, or was it deliberate (and idealistic/utopian)?
The second and third parts study several manners of constructing cosmopolitan characters and collective cosmopolitan identities in literary fiction, first with the figure of Casanova, then through a detailed analysis of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence.
Some close readings lead us back to European Jews from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, with the legend of the Jewess of Toledo and its many rewritings.
Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre and particularly his Ibis Trilogy introduce us to the represented fullness of a cosmopolitan world in the guise of a historical fiction situated grossly in the mid-19th century. But can this elaborate geographical, linguistic and symbolic construction, full of extraordinary personalities and unusual encounters, constitute a paradigm for a viable cosmopolitanism today?
The answer partly depends on what we mean by “narrative identity,” self-othering and the relational nature of selves in formation. But, in any case, literature and art can help because of their anaphoric character and the open-endedness of time in the aesthetic experience.
KEYWORDS
Cosmopolitanism - Diaspora - Jews - Multilingualism - Narrative Identity - Nomadism - Casanova - Salman Rushdie - Amitav Ghosh

The commonsense opposition between the country of origin and the country of reception has become increasingly problematic in recent exile studies. Many critics have fastened upon ideas of displacement or deterritorialization to abandon modernist tropes of exile and modern practices of exile central to Western culture's narratives of political formation and cultural identity (Caren Kaplan). What is at stake is a nuanced interpretation of exile as a symbolic formation, moving beyond current mystifications of the lived experience, expatriation and irreparable loss. Exile can also be represented in a historically and culturally analyses of the social and literary practices produced in a situation of temporary mobility. To question exile, then, is to inquire into the ideological function of exile being one of the most important ‚places' of cultural production since the beginning of the 19th century. Associated with sea side tourism, the small village of Sanary-sur-Mer in Southern France has been one of the most popular places for German artists fleeing from the Hitler Regime in 1933 and later (Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht and many others have been and have lived in Sanary-sur-Mer). Its history in the 1930's offers a unique reference for mapping exile communities, it helps us to track more specifically the production of modernism in literary articulations of exile, and it proposes historical paths of enquiry into emigration comparing it to other, similar and overlapping forms of mobility.

A closer look at the literary works, essays, letters and diaries of important German
exile writers and anti-Nazi dissidents during National Socialism leads to an important
observation: that is the increase of references to classical topoi of the Barbarian. Since
at least 1933 and the traumatic Nazi book burnings, in German (exile) literature does
not only occur a political actualization but also an emphatical radicalization of the
reactivated dichotomies of ‚civilization/culture‘ vs. ‚the Barbarian‘ and sometimes
more specific of ‚the Hellenes‘ vs. ‚the Persians‘. Even though numerous literary texts
display these dichotomies, in literary criticism a systematic analysis of their semantic
implications and their function is still lacking. This study thus aims to present a first
overview and interpretation of this noticeable actualization of the above mentioned
topoi in German exile literature, particularly in the works of Klaus Mann.

SOMMARIO: La storia degli amori tra Alfonso VIII di Castiglia, detto il nobile, e una giovane ebrea di Toledo, originata da una minuta notazione storica, ha dato luogo a una fioritura di testi di vario genere e qualità, in cui la trama della vicenda amorosa si intreccia alla storia degli ebrei e dell'antisemitismo e alle idee politiche e letterarie, nella cornice di cinque secoli di storia d'Europa. Tra tutti spiccano le opere drammatiche di Lope de Vega e di Franz Gril-lparzer. Il più recente frutto di questa tradizione è il romanzo Ballata spagnola, dell'ebreo tedesco Lion Feuchtwanger, scritto dopo l'Olocausto, che si conclude con il brutale assassinio della bella ebrea.
ABSTRACT: The story of the love affair between King Alphonse VIII of Castille, called the Noble, and a young jewish woman from Toledo, born from a small historical notation, give birth to a flowering of text, of diverse genre and quality, where the plot of the love affair is interwoven with jewish history, antisemitsm, political and literary ideas, framed by five centuries of Euro-pean history. The dramas by Lope de Vega and Franz Grillparzer stand out among the others. The most recent fruit of this tradition is the novel Spanish Ballad, written by the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger after the Holocaust, that ends with the brutal murder of the beautiful jewess.

Im Rahmen der interdisziplinären Erforschung des Antisemitismus sind in den letzten Jahrzehnten immer stärker auch dessen literarische Ausdrucksformen untersucht worden. Dabei haben die Diskussionen um Rainer Werner Fassbinders Stück „Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod“ in den 1980er Jahren, um Martin Walsers „Tod eines Kritikers“ in den 2000er Jahren oder um Martin Mosebachs „Das Bett“ im Rahmen der aktuellen Ausstellung „Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung“ im Jüdischen Museum Frankfurt zum einen gezeigt, dass Fragen nach Literarischem Antisemitismus auch in der Literatur nach 1945 einen Nährboden finden; zum anderen sind Forschungsarbeiten erschienen, die Klassiker der romantischen Literatur oder kanonische Autoren wie Gustav Freytag und Thomas Mann einer diesbezüglichen kritischen Relektüre unterzogen haben.

Für Deutschlehrerinnen und Deutschlehrer bietet der Themenbereich zudem dadurch zahlreiche Anknüpfungspunkte, da anhand des Literarischen Antisemitismus vielfach grundsätzliche literaturwissenschaftliche Fragen und Problemen diskutiert werden, die im Unterricht an diesem Beispiel paradigmatisch aufgezeigt und erörtert werden können: Anhand der Untersuchung antisemitischer Stereotype – beispielsweise in Texten, die rund um die „Hep-Hep-Krawalle“ entstanden sind oder aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus stammen –, kann Schülerinnen und Schülern einerseits die Wirkungsmacht von Sprache und Literatur vor Augen geführt werden; zugleich kann ihnen hierüber andererseits jedoch vermittelt werden, dass der Nachweis von antisemitischen Stereotypen in einem Text noch nichts darüber aussagt, ob es sich hierbei um einen antisemitischen Text handelt: Texte, die einen unzuverlässigen Erzähler einsetzen, dem auch die Schülerinnen und Schüler womöglich zunächst „auf den Leim“ gehen, und die mehrere Lesarten ermöglichen, je nachdem, wem Glauben geschenkt wird,  ermöglichen es, das kritische Hinterfragen von Erzählinstanzen einzuüben und die mögliche Multiperspektivität eines Textes erkennen zu lernen. Ausgehend von der für jede literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung zentrale Frage des „Wer spricht?“ kann älteren Schülerinnen und Schülern der Unterschied zwischen dem Aufweisen und dem Aufzeigen von Antisemitismus deutlich gemacht und so die Rolle der Autorin und der Autors diskutiert werden: trägt er oder sie Verantwortung auch für ein mögliches Missverstehen des Textes?

Die Studie unternimmt am Beispiel des deutschsprachigen Exilromans zur Zeit des ‚Dritten Reichs‘ den Versuch, die Ästhetik des Komischen als Teil einer modernen Exilpoetik zu etablieren. Sie berücksichtigt dabei das gesamte Spektrum komischer Schreibformen von der Satire über den Humor bis hin zum Grotesken, zum Pikaresken und zum Witz. In drei historisch-systematischen Grundlagenkapiteln und drei Fallstudien zu Alfred Döblin, Veza Canetti und Albert Vigoleis Thelen erfolgt die Analyse der Funktionen, Potentiale und Grenzen dieser komisierenden Erzählverfahren. Der Band versteht sich als Beitrag zur Rehabilitierung der komischen Dimension der Exilliteratur bzw. überhaupt erst zur Kenntlichmachung des Komischen als ernstzunehmender Schreibstrategie im Exil.

In the late 1930s, two prominent European writers, the French André Gide and the German Lion Feuchtwanger published books about their recent trips to the Soviet Union. Both writers belonged to minorities – Gide as a homosexual, Feuchtwanger as a Jew – and in the Soviet Union they were seeking solutions to the problems of their own countries: growing inequality, culture and intellectual freedom suffering under capitalism and emerging Nazism, private ownership as a barrier to rational organization of cities, discrimination against minorities. Both were pro-Soviet prior to the trips; Gide changed his mind, Feuchtwanger remained a sympathizer afterwards.

Práca má za cieľ charakterizovať postavu Josepha Flavia v diele Liona Feuchtwangera a v iných historických prameňoch, predovšetkým v jeho vlastnom diele Židovská vojna. Praktickou úlohou bolo nájsť miesta konkrétne opisujúce konanie Josepha Flavia v dielach oboch autorov a na základe toho charakterizovať jeho vlastnosti a pohľad na neho v danom diele, následne tieto diela porovnať. Teoretická časť práce zahŕňala vypísanie pasáží z diel, ktoré konkrétne opisujú Josepha Flavia. Josephus Flavius je veľkou súčasťou dejín židovstva, preto má práca význam v oblasti histórie, ale aj v oblasti klasickej filológie, keďže pracuje aj s pôvodným gréckym textom.

In Germany at the turn of the century, Buddhism transformed from an obscure topic, of interest to only a few misfit scholars, into a cultural phenomenon. Many of the foremost authors of the period were profoundly influenced by this rapid rise of Buddhism—among them, some of the best-known names in the German-Jewish canon. Sebastian Musch excavates this neglected dimension of German-Jewish identity, drawing on philosophical treatises, novels, essays, diaries, and letters to trace the history of Jewish-Buddhist encounters up to the start of the Second World War. Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, Theodor Lessing, Jakob Wassermann, Walter Hasenclever, and Lion Feuchtwanger are featured alongside other, lesser known figures like Paul Cohen-Portheim and Walter Tausk. As Musch shows, when these thinkers wrote about Buddhism, they were also negotiating their own Jewishness.