Mapping the Other: Lion Feuchtwanger's Topographies of the Orient

Abstract

Christo, to name two peinliche Assoziationen Feuchtwanger himself stated would inevitably come to mind at the mention of the historical novel (Sinn 508). As such, it paved the way for Heinrich Mann's Henri IV novels, for Thomas Mann's JosephTetralogy, and for Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, to name just three of the more established examples of the genre. And yet, Jud Siip is basically unread today, for reasons my own reading of the text will work to spell out. There is something startlingly eccentric to Paul Gerhard Klussmann's claim that Jud Sip is one of the great novels of the Weimar Period, in all respects equal to Mann's Der Zauberberg or D6blin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (Klussman 92), and yet this eccentricity might do Feuchtwanger more justice than the more conventional argument that Feuchtwanger will be remembered for his 1930 political roman 'a clef Erfolg: Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Province (Modick). My reading of Jud Siip will try to take Klussmann seriously by positing the explosive power of Jud Sil3, a deeply conflicted power fed by Feuchtwanger's own extravagant hopes for an expanded role for German-Jewish intellectuals in the political and cultural spheres of the Weimar Republic. Taking a look at the actual history contained in Feuchtwanger's historical novel, we find ourselves confronted with what