Lion Feuchtwanger Research Articles

“The Past is a Foreign Country:” Constructions of History in Novels by Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Zweig

“The Past is a Foreign Country:” Constructions of History in Novels by Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Zweig

Смена парадигмы: оппозиция «внешняя» и «внутренняя» литература, или «дистанцированная» критика нацизма (на примере романа Лиона Фейхтвангера «Лже-Нерон»)

Смена парадигмы: оппозиция «внешняя» и «внутренняя» литература, или «дистанцированная» критика нацизма (на примере романа Лиона Фейхтвангера «Лже-Нерон»)

Nomadic cosmopolitanism: Jewish prototypes of the cosmopolitan in the writings of Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Lion Feuchtwanger, 1918–1933

Whereas Jews formed the paradigm of the modern cosmopolitan in the early twentieth century, they have largely vanished from today’s academic discourse of the cosmopolitan. But the story of cosmopolitanism, I contend, cannot be written without attention to the Jews. My article thus examines key writings by the German-speaking Jewish writers Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Lion Feuchtwanger, who postulated Jews and Jewish culture as the prototype of a deterritorialized cosmopolitan. In doing so, these writers departed from older notions of rooted cosmopolitanism, which they saw as unviable after the nationalistic excesses of First World War. This construct enabled them to both claim a secularized Jewish particularity and place the Jew at the core of the European idea.

Writing Coincidence: Brecht’s and Marlowe’s History Play

Abstract Although the importance of writing to Brecht’s dramaturgy and dramatic theory has been repeatedly suggested in recent Brecht scholarship, less attention has been devoted to the ways in which writing works in the poetic and dramatic texts that he wrote. Through a close analysis of his and Lion Feuchtwanger’s adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II—another drama in which writing plays a crucial role—I trace the implications of writing for the status of biography, history, and decision in the text. (KM)

Writing Coincidence: Brecht’s and Marlowe’s History Play

Although the importance of writing to Brecht’s dramaturgy and dramatic theory has been repeatedly suggested in recent Brecht scholarship, less attention has been devoted to the ways in which writing works in the poetic and dramatic texts that he wrote. Through a close analysis of his and Lion Feuchtwanger’s adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II —another drama in which writing plays a crucial role—I trace the implications of writing for the status of biography, history, and decision in the text.

“I am not a hero, I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood by Horst Weber (review)

am not a hero, I am a Hanns Eisler in Hollywood. By Horst Weber. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012. [536 p. ISBN 9783487147871. i48.] Music examples, illustrations, personalia, bibliog- raphy, filmography, index.Horst Weber's study of Hanns Eisler in Hollywood is without a doubt a big book. This biography of the Austrian composer focuses on a tumultuous period of his exile in the United States. Weber synthesizes wide-ranging detail-archival documents, close music analysis, psychoanalytical excur- sions, and reception history-to tell a story about earning money, writing music, nego- tiating shifting global politics, and living as a foreigner in California from 1942 to 1947. The German musicologist consis- tently taps into the debates that drive scholarship on the composer: How do we reconcile Eisler's politically-engaged com- positions with those for commercial film? How did the devoted Schoenberg student come to write almost entirely diatonic mu- sic in the German Democratic Republic? It is precisely the varied nature of Eisler's professional activities in Los Angeles that Weber isolates in order to stress continu- ities with the composer's life and musical language before and after. He thus coun- ters musicological narratives that under- stand exile as the cause of a decisive break in compositional style. Instead, in this sub- stantial scholarly study, the California exile comes to stand for the complex and often contradictory musical figure that Hanns Eisler was throughout his life.Weber's writing style sets the pace of the text, and his dedication to detail shapes the entire monograph. Most of the chapters re- produce substantial excerpts from primary documents, and Weber goes to consider- able efforts to set these off from his inter- pretation and synthesis, inviting other scholars to take advantage of the material's textual and musical richness. Of twin im- portance are Eisler's Hollywood composi- tions and the California papers of the com- poser and his wife, Louise Eisler-Fischer, which recently became available as a part of the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California. From film score to lied to piano sonata to incidental music for Bertolt Brecht's the- ater, the musical works span genres. Weber accords each measured analysis, drawing out gestures, tonal spaces, and formal ten- sions to paint a picture of the composer's musical value system. Fragments of scores- many of which are currently unpublished- enable the reader to follow the nuances of Weber's close readings. Sometimes his insights come across as meant for scholars familiar with the voluminous literature on the composer, much of which is in German. But the author also contributes by synthesizing existing knowledge, such as the publication history of Composing for the Films and the sources and composition history of the Hollywood Songbook, and the resulting charts are a clear and helpful resource for musicologists of any stripe.The book's scope is vast, but the thick de- scription that pervades it evokes Eisler inti- mately and humanly. Weber sustains his own scholarly and personal reflections on exile and other traumas of twentieth- century history throughout the book, giv- ing the five-hundred-page tome a unified voice. An opening sequence serves as the introduction to the five thematic sections that clearly structure the book. It sets the author's ambition to study Eisler as a com- poser hidden by his exile, and it advo- cates for his originality and significance. The first section is devoted to Eisler's tran- sition to living in Los Angeles. After an evocative retelling of the composer's depar- ture from New York City and cross-country road trip-the section's first chapter con- tains some of the most dynamic writing in the entire book-Weber discusses his final compositions on the East Coast. Piecing together letters, receipts, and newspaper clippings that reveal Eisler's negative im- pressions of Los Angeles and frustrated re- ception in New York, Weber establishes the fundamental personal unhappiness and professional outsider status that define, through this book, Eisler's exile on the West Coast. …

On Acevedo-Muñoz’s <em>West Side Story as Cinema</em>

On Acevedo-Munoz's West Side Story as Cinema West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece. By Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. x + 204 pp., 978-0-7006-1921-4 (hc). US $29.95.Which titles deserve to be designated in the category of film? Those that are done in languages like Yiddish or Hebrew would easily make the cut, perhaps even if done by Hebrew-speaking Israeli Arab directors and scenarists. Documentaries of Jewish life would normally be included, but not those the Nazis produced depicting the Warsaw Ghetto or the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. To list The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City as a Jewish film would be grotesque. That also goes for movies made in the Third Reich, like Jud Suss (Veit Harlan, Germany, 1940), a deliberate rebuttal of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The taxonomy should make room, however, for the works of all sorts of Gentile directors who portray Jewish characters, whether Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof; USA, 1971) or Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; Canada, 1974). Special consideration might be given to films that might have directly engaged the Jewish condition but didn't. In The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, USA, 1937), for example, the letter J on a dossier, next to the name of Alfred Dreyfus, is the only hint of the genesis of the frame-up that would rock France.Perhaps the most intellectually intriguing subset would embrace films bereft of any overt or explicit Jewish content. But if the major creative figures in such cinematic endeavors are Jews, a distinctive sensibility might nevertheless be detected; a singular ethnic stance might somehow be fathomed. Here the strongest instance is Casablanca (USA, 1942), directed by Michael Curtiz (ne Kertesz Kaminer Mano) and written by Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch. The filmmakers informed the audience of the high price imposed on the United States for its policy of isolation, as a world war raged on three continents; and Michael Walsh's crafty novel, As Time Goes By (1998), by imagining the backstory to the film, clinches the case by making saloon-keeper Richard (Rick) Blaine Jewish. Another opportunity for inclusion as a Jewish film is West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, USA, 1961), the subject of this informative and engaging book, West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece.When the musical West Side Story opened on stage in New York City in 1957, the generalization offered later in Spamalot was validated: You just won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews. Jerome Robbins (ne Rabinowitz) conceived, directed, and choreographed the show. Arthur Laurents, who first achieved success with a play exposing bigotry (Home of the Brave), wrote the book of West Side Story. Its lyrics are credited to Stephen Sondheim, but composer Leonard Bernstein was his collaborator. (In a striking but characteristic gesture, Bernstein gave the twenty-seven-year-old Sondheim sole credit so that he could advance his own remarkable career.) It was hardly unusual for Jews like Harold Prince to co-produce a Broadway show. But even the first actor to play Tony, Larry Kert, was Jewish. Perhaps their commitment to a musical that portrays the high cost of hatred was not coincidental. Perhaps such a message had special meaning for Jews who had managed to live through the most devastating demographic-and cultural and moral-loss in the modern history of their people.Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz, who teaches film studies at the University of Colorado, is not especially attentive to the changes recorded in translating the play to the film, which was released four years later. He focuses more on structural and technical features of the movie rather than the interpretive issues it raises. Robbins signed on as co-director with Robert Wise (who was not Jewish), and the challenge they met was formal. …

Weltanschauliche Orientierungsversuche im Exil / New Orientations of World View in Exile ed. by Reinhard Andress (review)

Reviewed by: Weltanschauliche Orientierungsversuche im Exil / New Orientations of World View in Exile ed. by Reinhard Andress Carol Anne Costabile-Heming Weltanschauliche Orientierungsversuche im Exil / New Orientations of World View in Exile. Edited by Reinhard Andress. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 371. Cloth $100.00. ISBN 978-9042031685. This volume presents the revised and expanded papers from the North American Society for Exile Studies conference held at Saint Louis University in October 2008, and is dedicated to the late Wulf Koepke. Focused on “new orientations” of exile studies, the volume takes a broad view of exile that ranges from exile concepts in the Middle Ages to the very specific relationship of St. Louis to German exiles. The book is organized thematically and covers the topics: exile in the Middle Ages; new orientations in philosophy and religion; new orientations in writing; new political and cultural orientations in South America, France, the USA, Germany and China, and exile in St. Louis. It concludes with a personal reflection from Guy Stern, who spent two years at Saint Louis University some 65 years prior. Otto Eberhardt’s excursus on exile in the Middle Ages outlines ways in which medieval heroes experienced involuntary exile (in the form of banishment) as well as voluntary exile (practiced by monks and students). Evelyn Meyer focuses specifically on Parzival’s grail quest as an example of exile in the Middle Ages. The section on philosophy and religion contains four essays. Wulf Koepke analyzes Ludwig Marcuse’s Ignatius von Loyola. Ein Soldat der Kirche. Regina Weber focuses on Raymond Klibansky’s reorientation in exile and his promotion of international understanding through tolerance. Whereas it is widely accepted that philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich’s work was not motivated by exile experiences, Johannes F. Evelein presents evidence from Tillich’s letters, diaries, speeches and travel reports that demonstrate that exile did have a strong influence on him. Jörg Thunecke examines Karl Jakob Hirsch’s Heimkehr zu Gott, a semifictitious novel of Hirsch’s conversion to Christianity. The section on reorientation through writing presents essays on Lion Feuchtwanger, Felix Pollak, and Nelly Sachs. South America served as a safe haven for many exiles from Nazism. Helga Schreckenberger examines the formative influence that his adolescent exile to Bolivia had on the distinguished scholar Egon Schwarz. Marlen Eckl examines the ways in which Otto Maria Carpeaux’s exile experiences transformed him from a devoted Austrian to a convinced Brazilian. Benjamin Weiser Varon’s transformation to an advocate of Zionism as a result of his exile is the topic of Reinhard Andress’s chapter. The section on France, the USA, Germany, and China is the least cohesive of the volume, a problem that one frequently encounters in conference proceedings. It presents an eclectic array of essays on Walter Hasenclever and Thomas Mann, as well as chapters on US policy following World War II and the Shanghai exile community. One of the most interesting essays in the volume is that by Sydney Norton and Lynette Roth on the “Manifestations of Exile in the Work of Max Beckmann,” [End Page 466] which focuses on the collection of Beckmann’s paintings and prints held at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Overall, the volume presents interesting new insights into selected areas of exile studies. Scholars and students working on the individuals discussed in the chapters will find a wealth of information that contributes to the continuing scholarly engagement with exile studies. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming University of North Texas Copyright © 2013 The German Studies Association

Traduire l’exil: Das Exil Übersetzen by Michaela Enderle-Ristori

what point in their training? The goals of programs and the needs of students should be paramount in making these decisions, but it is also important for teachers themselves to be aware of linguistic variation and to know where to find innovative pedagogical materials. This volume serves as a useful resource for considering these issues and serves its intended readership well. Harvard University (MA) Stacey Katz Bourns Enderle-Ristori, Michaela. Traduire l’exil: Das Exil Übersetzen. Tours: PU François-Rabelais, 2011. ISBN 978-2-87706-642-6. Pp. 227. 18 a. Bringing together historians and literary critics, this volume addresses the political relationship between exile and translation in a specific geographical space—the cultural transfer from Germany to France—and at a particular historical moment, the years 1933 to 1945. Four essays look at the challenges Jewish German-language writers experienced in French exile and in French translation. Deborah Viëtor-Engländer focuses on Alfred Kerr, who at 65 was forced to flee with his young family to France. Once in exile, the German theater critic was not only cut off from his audiences but also from the language in which he wrote. Thus, Viëtor-Engländer argues, Kerr not only lost his characteristic style but also his social critique. Carl Einstein, as Marianne Kröger explains, had valuable French connections to the art scene—Picasso, Braque, and the Cubist art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were his personal friends—as well as to the publishing world long before he took up residence in Paris in 1928. Well respected, Einstein, who was fluent in French, found work as an art critique and translator until 1933, after which he economically struggled in what he called an “artless” time. While Kerr survived the war in England, the Leftist Einstein, who in 1936 left Paris to fight in the Spanish Civil War, committed suicide upon returning to now German-occupied France, where his life was once again in danger. Unlike Kerr and Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger was no Francophile. Frédéric Teinturier maintains that Feuchtwanger’s ambivalent attitude towards France,a country that he critically portrays in The Devil in France should be read as the“aesthetic critic”rather than as a straightforward portrayal of France. Deliberating why the mediocre memoirs of Viennese journalist and salon hostess Bertha Zuckerkandl were instantly translated into French and English when she went into French exile in 1938, Sigurd Scheichl suggests that they had, from the beginning, been written with a Francophone audience in mind, an audience that she believed would share her opposition to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria while wishing for an ongoing Austrian-French cultural exchange. The remaining essays analyze the politics of translation. Looking at which French translators were still translating German exile texts after 1933 (Sylvie Aprile), or how French writers in the resistance viewed Germany’s literary and cultural heritage from before 1933 198 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 199 (Isabella Kalinowski on René Char), or, for example, how German exile texts are being translated today (Roussel and Schulte on Anna Seghers), these articles emphasize the social role of literature and language during times of national crisis. Equally of interest is Patrice Arnaud’s essay in which he provides a linguistic portrait of the 600,000 Frenchmen who were sent to Nazi Germany as forced laborers between 1942 and 1945. Concluding that the majority of these Frenchmen did not know German beforehand,he describes the strategies that helped them cope in the foreign language and the rational and political success behind each choice. Pennsylvania State University Bettina Brandt Schneider-Mizony, Odile, et Maurice Sachot, éd. Normes et normativité en éducation: entre tradition et rupture. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. ISBN 978-2-29656856 -3. Pp. 188. 19 a. The eleven contributors to this volume seek to interrogate the epistemological construct of the “norm,” with the goal of destabilizing its signification. Such a move is critical: rather than belonging to the domain of uncontested sacral dogma, norms serve to mediate between subject and object. Moreover, they are socially constructed, or more precisely, politically motivated instruments of control and authority, whose articulation and adoration generate considerable academic capital. This admixture of...

Edward II (review)

Reviewed by: Edward II Johan Callens Edward II. By Christopher Marlowe. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin. 20–21 January 2012. When assuming the artistic directorship of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2000–2001, Ivo van Hove took a gamble by mounting Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, a propagandistic piece that has survived in a corrupt memorial reconstruction and that has been underrepresented in the repertoire. That production featured a daring set by Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner and collaborator since their early days on the margins of 1980s Flemish theatre, and costumes by gay fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck. In this respect, it was as radical an artistic statement as the “filmic” production of Edward II (1924) with which the young and aspiring Brecht claimed his place on Berlin’s stage. As Martin Esslin and Jan Knopf have argued, Brecht’s Marlowe adaptation broached not only the subject of homosexuality but revived the question of history’s theatrical representation, which was either silenced in the wake of World War I disillusionment or spectacularized in epic UFA pictures like Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920). Almost a century later, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz—the same company that revived van Hove’s acclaimed production of The Misanthrope for the New York Theatre Workshop (2007)—invited him to stage Marlowe’s Edward II. Outdoing Brecht yet using Marlowe’s original like both Claus Peymann (1998) and Frank Castorf (1999) before him, van Hove enhanced the homosexual theme and recontextualized the play within the problematic German heritage of World War II. Telescoping events that took place years apart, Marlowe’s history play personalizes the early fourteenth-century struggle between the English Crown and the nobility through Edward’s love for the low-born Gaveston. In Germany, Edward II reentered the repertoire with Brecht’s adaptation, which was dependent on Lion Feuchtwanger’s help and Walter von Heymel’s 1912 translation, which van Hove also used. If Brecht was attracted to the play’s critique of abusive authorities, Derek Jarman, in the AIDS-dominated climate of the 1990s, took an interest in the play’s gay theme and its usefulness for his activist agenda. Van Hove also foregrounded these political issues, shifting the setting to the interior of a contemporary prison, replete with camera surveillance, factionalism, and sexual violence, and using a self-conscious, intermedial mise en scène to invoke the fraught memory of Germany’s military past—still repressed by the elder generation, already forgotten by the younger. The result was a heavily edited text, structured and framed by fifteen intertitles that invoked Brecht’s epic theatre and Piscator’s agit-prop, even if the ideological side of van Hove’s earlier Marlowe production as a piece of religious propaganda may have proven a liability. For van Hove, Gaveston’s early intention of pleasing the art-loving king with boys reenacting Actaeon as he spies on a naked Diana—a speech delivered without visual support to give the language its full due—turned the entire deposition drama into an inset of sorts, “The Dream of Edward II,” as announced in the first program-matic intertitle. The brevity of the first few scenes, marked by the titles’ brusque and noisy intrusion, imposed a dynamic that instantly drew the viewers into the drama. Subsequently, the pace varied, following the demands of the action, ever summarized in single catchwords (Politik [politics], Liebe [love], Widerstand [resistance], Komplott [conspiracy], Kalkül [calculation], Homosexualität [homosexuality], and [End Page 601] so on). All intertitles were briefly projected onto a screen straddling two rows of four cells separated by an elevated security desk, a panoptic watchtower against a back wall of galvanized metal plates. Click for larger view View full resolution Urs Jucker (Leicester) in Edward II. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.) This omnipresent camera surveillance, deployed in screen montages (by Tal Yarden), linked inmates separated by the wide stage but also exposed their intrigues, secret thoughts, and yearnings. Occasionally, the perspective of the prison interiors was distorted or the otherwise black-and-white images morphed into colors, thereby measuring the subjectivity of certain speeches and the drama’s emotional intensity. Van...

‘And Israel watcheth over each’: The Jewish reception of Jew Suss (1934) in Inter-war Britain

Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in early 1933 the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced a film version of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel Jew Suss. Whilst British censors would not allow any film to openly criticize the Nazi policy of persecution of Jews, it was clear to both the British Jewish and mainstream British press that the historic events depicted in the narrative had a wholly modern resonance. The task of this article is to trace this press discourse in order to understand the contours of the Jewish reception of Jew Suss’ British release. With particular attention devoted to commentary supplied by the Jewish press, the article examines a distinctly Jewish concern with the film as an article of propaganda. Not only was alarm expressed that the film might disseminate anti-Semitic prejudice, its potential to be read as a tendentious promotion of particularist interests was also a catalyst for anxiety. The unease associated with this latter factor should, it is argued, be understood in the context of the widely articulated contemporary trope of the cinema as a Jewish monopoly.

Lion Feuchtwanger, a German opponent to Gide

ResumeQuand, fin novembre 1936, l’ecrivain juif-allemand Lion Feuchtwanger quitta son exil en France pour gagner Moscou, son voyage se deroula des le debut dans l’ombre d’Andre Gide. Pour les responsables sovietiques, le recit de voyage de Gide Retour de l’U.R.S.S. constituait une debâcle qui ne devait en aucun cas se reproduire. Et Feuchtwanger se resolut a assumer le role qu’on lui avait attribue. Alors qu‘il se trouvait encore a Moscou, il lanca une polemique contre Gide. De plus, il attaqua l‘ecrivain francais a plusieurs reprises dans son livre Moskau 1937, paru par la suite. Cependant, il suffit d‘y regarder de plus pres pour s’apercevoir que, dans le fond, les visions de Gide et de Feuchtwanger concernant la vie sovietique varient tres peu l’une de l’autre. Il semble donc d’autant plus surprenant que les deux ecrivains aboutissent a des conclusions quasiment contraires dans leurs textes.Le present article examine les recits de ces deux voyages ainsi que leurs liens internes, et analyse les differentes manieres dont les deux auteurs se percoivent en tant qu’ecrivains et acteurs politiques de leur temps.

Outpost: Villa Aurora | Pacific Palisades

vO LD X z 'LLJ a. O LU CL ' s 0 u ee x. u 3: $ $ 1 X a. RmyiOSe Villa Aurora I Pacific Palisades '« Nestled mountains Palisades high overlooking of in Pacific the mountains of Pacific Palisades overlooking the ocean, Villa Aurora is the former homeof exiledGermanJewish writer lion Feuchtwanger and his wife,Marta,who were forced tofleetheNazi regime and foundrefugein Los Angelesin 1943.Soontheir residence became a magnet, attracting thecr&me de la crfeme of European 6migr6s, artists, and intellectuals. Regular guestsincludedThomas Mann, BertoltBrecht,Arnold Schoenberg ,TheodorAdorno,Ludwig Marcuse,Aldous Huxley,Alma Mahler-Werfel, CharlieChaplin, Charles Laughton,Billy Wilder , and, morerecently, Edward Said, WimWenders, and Volker Schlondorff. Today, Villa Aurora is an international meetingplace and artists' residency. Its purposeas a European-American Foundation is to foster mutualexchangein thefields ofliterature, music, art, andfilm as wellas inpolitical and social thought, each yearbringingup tosixteen artists forthreemonthstaysto theVilla.Recent fellows include Oscar-winner Jochen Freydank aswellaswriters Susanne Kippenberger andHelene Hegemann. Moreover, every year theVilla offers the Feuchtwanger Fellowship ,whichprovides residency to a writer who is beingpersecuted or forcedto live in exile. This program wascreated incollaborationwithHuman RightsWatch, inmemory oftheEuropean exiles whofoundsanctuary intheUnited States, and to remind us that theexpulsionof culturalfigures and intellectual repression is still occurring intheworldtoday. As an institution devotedto transatlantic relations, the Villa offers a wide rangeofprograms onAmerican andEuropean issues in collaboration withartists, academic institutions, and partner organizations inLos Angelesand beyond. - Imogen vonTannenberg lmog«nvonTinn«iibcrg isthe director of Villa Aurora. 80 1 World Literature Today ...

Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures (review)

Reviewed by: Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures Andrea Pető Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures, by Andrei Oisteanu. Studies in Antisemitism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009. 468 pp. $60.00. Moshe Idel, the most prominent kabala scholar of our time, sets the tone of this volume, as the first sentence of his introduction labels Oisteanu as "an expert in Romanian folklore and an active Jewish intellectual in Romania." The lengthy book is a summary of "ethnic imagology" of Jews in Romania and a long overdue historical milestone in Romanian research on stereotyping. The book comes out of a very controversial national legacy. In 1940 the second largest European Jewish community, with 800,000 members, lived in Romania, labeled by Hannah Arendt as "the most anti-Semitic country." However the, "Olympics of antisemitism"—examining who is the most antisemitic of all—does not lead anywhere, as Oisteanu himself also pointed out, especially not after 1945, when the antisemitic climate reflected in the sheer denial of the existence of any other nationalities than Romanian living in Romania caused the book by Lion Feuchtwanger, The Jewess of Toledo, to be published in Romanian with a neutral title, The Spaniard Ballad. The book summarizes Oisteanu's research, executed at an often daunting level of detail, in the best tradition of Romanian intellectual life: it is rich in content and flamboyant in style and in its empirical basis. The book's divisions show the physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magical, and religious portrait of the Jews. It resembles an encyclopedia which aims to include all possible details and information about the "image of the other," and its stringent demands on the reader's concentration makes it difficult reading. It is very useful for those who want to experience the richness of this very complex matrix of stereotyping based on all possible written sources about Romanian culture. The empirical base of the book is very wide and heterogeneous: from jokes to newspapers and literary works. The author has examined every possible corner of Romanian culture to find out what people have thought about the Jews—every corner except visual sources such as artwork and cartoons. [End Page 183] My critical comments are related to how the book handles temporality. Stereotypes are presented as timeless, and regardless of the fact that the chapters present the material more or less chronologically, the reader is left in the dark as to why certain types of stereotypes surface at a certain historical period, while others do not. This timelessness, on the other hand, has an advantage because it shows how invisible the line is between marking a group of people according to certain characteristics and denying their existence along the very same lines. In the book "Jew" stands as a "category," understood by Rogers Brubaker in disaggregated, dynamic, and relational terms (Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe [Cambridge, 1996, p. 16]). This understanding could have been more fruitfully explored in some cases, such as that of the stereotypical "Jewess." This issue is discussed in a rather old fashioned way in the section of the book on the physical appearance of the Jew, where the author describes the female Jew as beautiful, tempting but inaccessible, wearing silk and sophisticated jewelry, but does not examine how gender stereotypes are constitutive parts of constructing the image of the other and how these stereotypes change over time in different contexts. In the introduction of the book the author describes the methodology as comparative in time and in space, in cultures and in ethnicity. This is a very ambitious aim. We cannot blame the book for failing to meet this broad goal, or for the number of rich but heterogeneous details that often make the argument difficult to follow. We should rather celebrate the book as a closing cornerstone which is a historical snapshot of difficult centuries of the co-habitation of Jews and Romanians in Central Europe. Andrea Pető Central European University Budapest Copyright © 2010 Purdue University...

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials": Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials":Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis Waltraud Maierhofer (bio) The Crucible (1953), by pre-eminent American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), has become widely acknowledged as a timeless play about the hunt for "witches" and other supposed evildoers, and about mass hysteria. According to a popular introduction to this work, the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play was The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), a historical study, albeit not without fictional elements, about the Salem witch trials by Marion Starkey.1 It is a little-known fact that the German-Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884, Munich–21 December 1958, Los Angeles) published a play about the Salem trials before Arthur Miller did. It was published in German under the title Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Mania or The Devil in Boston) in 1948 in Los Angeles.2 A first sketch is dated 22 October 1945.3 Feuchtwanger began writing the play in the final months of 1946 and finished it in late 1947. I. The Devil in Boston The play premiered in Germany in March 1949, in the "Kleines Theater im Zoo" in Frankfurt am Main, directed by Fred Schroer. Feuchtwanger wrote a short statement about his play for the program, "Zu meinem Stück" (About My Play).4 The premiered version was slightly revised from the first American edition in German, and subsequent performances (Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1949; Nürnberg, 1949) and book editions followed.5 Several stages of typescript translations in English are extant in the Feuchtwanger Archive at the University of Southern California, the first [End Page 355] dated August 1947. The titles vary slightly from Delusion to Boston to Devil in Boston, which appears to have met Feuchtwanger's final approval, and a corrected copy is marked "Copyright 1948").6 Feuchtwanger wanted to have the play performed in the United States in English, but was not immediately successful.7 The American-language premiere did not take place until February 1952 at the Circle Theatre in Hollywood (directed by Benjamin Zemach), where it remained in the repertoire for only half a year.8 Another staging, of a Yiddish translation by N[athaniel] Buchwald, took place the next year in New York by the Yiddish Theater Ensemble, in Barbiyon Plaza. Morris Carnovsky directed and performed in this production.9 Arthur Miller's Crucible (1953) premiered on Broadway on 22 January 1953 and was published that same year. Initially, it was not as sweepingly successful as it later became. Feuchtwanger's drama had its New York premiere in February 1953. The audience, including the critics, did not know of its earlier publication in German and its staging on the West Coast, leading one critic to label it as "Another Play On Salem Witches."10 Reviews of the New York performance immediately compared the two: Vernon Rice pointed out that Feuchtwanger's play had fewer dramatic high points, while his simpler plot and setting fared favorably with John Chapman. It is not important for the following argument whether the two writers knew about each other's plays and whether one might have influenced the other,11 although it remains a valid question. Both draw attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of suspicion, denunciation, persecution, and extermination. Their approaches are very different in that Miller shows trial scenes onstage, while Feuchtwanger has them reported. Both fictionalize one of the "bewitched" girls and main plaintiffs, and incorporate love interests in her characterization, but these choices result in decisive plot differences. However, my goal is not to compare the two plays, but rather to examine the specific perspective of a stateless immigrant on this "American" topic, which the German-Jewish writer here applies to postwar, post-Nazi Germany. Even Feuchtwanger scholarship tends to bypass this play. For example, a recent study on the reception of Feuchtwanger's works in Germany since 1945 only briefly touches on the play, stating as evident that it represented the author's reaction to the beginning of the McCarthy era and intended to draw parallels between persecutions of "witches" and leftists.12 Only [End Page 356] one short comparison with Miller's Crucible has been undertaken, in which Robert...

No place for Peace-Mongers: Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Czechoslovak Communist Propaganda

During the escalation of the Cold War, Hollywood stars were framed in Czechoslovak Communist propaganda as possessing two qualities. Firstly, they were perceived in this most Western Soviet satelli...

Entre tradition et acculturation Le témoignage de Lion Feuchtwanger, écrivain en exil

One of the most renowned German-Jewish emigrants, Lion Feuchtwanger (born in 1884), fled into exile in 1933, first to the south of France then to America, and remained till his death in December 1958 in Californian, an exile. His literary and journalistic work reflects the difficult situation of the exiled writer – in his essay Grose und Erbarmlichkeit des Exils published in Paris in 1939 and his novel Exil (1940), but also in the strongly autobiographical work Der Teufel in Frankreich (1940). He dwells in these works on the problematical status of “exterritoriality”. With time the idea of a return to Europe became more unreal. Even as he got older he didn’t manage to put down roots either in Sanary-sur-Mer or in Los-Angeles. He remained in the German and Jewish culture of his origins. He tried to stay a German writer all his life and didn’t receive American citizenship. This doesn’t mean he wanted to live as a “remigrant”, but he wanted to live as a “world citizen, whose homeland shouldn’t be a country, a state, a people, but the whole world.” (J. Pischel)

Heinrich Mann et Lion Feuchtwanger en France (1933-1940) Deux attitudes contraires ?

Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger embody and illustrate two apparently contrary attitudes to the host country France : Mann’s years in France, which he felt very close to, did not seem like an exile, while Feuchtwanger was, as is well known, not a fan of the French culture and customs. Nevertheless, these facts must not mislead our interpretation : H. Mann and Feuchtwanger do not differ as much as we may think ; they both react as men of letters and they both perceive France as an aesthetical, philological object. H. Mann’s letters in exile show this very clearly.

Was wird mit uns geschehen? Tagebücher der Internierung 1939 und 1940 by Kurt Stern, Christian Löser

292 Reviews action of theplay is in a small hostelry bringing together a cross-section of citizenry. AsWerner notes, echoes ofHorvath and Fleisser abound with much sexual innuendo, twonear suicides, and characters called Adam and Eva. Following awareness of these threeplays, Welt iiberfuillt has recently come to light inNew York Public Library. By 1933Anna Gmeyner was not inNazi Germany but inFrance with G. W. Pabst. Recent research has demonstrated the extent of her input into the famous mining disaster filmKameradschaft. Werner's treatment ofGmeyner's filmwork with Pabst leads on smoothly into the next phase of her exile life. In Paris Gmeyner, long since divorced from Wiesner, met aRussian philosopher of religion called JaschaMorduch. They married and in 1935moved toEngland. Here Gmeyner worked on filmswith Berthold Viertel, especially The Passing of theThird Floor Back with Conrad Veidt, by then also an exile inEngland, and onViertel's filmversion ofToller's Pastor Hall. Significant toowas herwork with theBoulting brothers. Important though this film work was, itwas as nothing compared to theworldwide success of the Pabst film Kameradschaft, on which she had worked with Karl Otten, Peter Martin Lampel, and Herbert Rappaport. By 1934 the exilejournal Pariser Tageblatthad brought out not aGmeyner play but a narrative work calledMary Anna wartet, in fifteeninstalments. Then inLondon at theFree German League ofCulture Gmeyner read from a novel she had been writing. Manja, einRoman umfuinf Kinder appeared inAmsterdam in 1938.This German ver sionwas immediately followed byAmerican and English editions. Gmeyner's second novel, Cafe du Dome, suffered an unfortunate fate. Itwas published only inEnglish and theGerman original was lost. It is this English version which has now been republished. Where Manja was a so-called 'Deutschlandroman', showing the rise of National Socialism through theperspective of a Jewish girl and her four friends,Cafe duDome isamulti-perspective novel showing the febrile lifeof exiles inParis.Werner sees Cafe du Dome as pointing to something beyond political party concerns to faith, hope, and love. By the end Nadia is 'guterHoffnung': she ispregnant. After thedeath of her husband, Gmeyner continued towrite inEnglish, now mov ing into the literature of comparative religion.Werner lists,but does not discuss in detail, these lateworks, and has an even longer listof novels and plays byAnna Mor duch ofwhich there isno trace.Perhaps there are still Morduch/Gmeyner discoveries tobe made? Altogether Birte Werner is to be congratulated on her immaculate research into thisworthy author. INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC AND ROMANCE STUDIES, LONDON J.M. RITCHIE Was wird mit uns geschehen? Tagebuicher der Internierung 1939 und 1940. By KURT STERN. Ed. by CHRISTIAN L6SER. Berlin: Aufbau. 2006. 231 PP. ?I8.90. ISBN 978-3-351-02624-0. Although the diaries which Kurt Stern kept during his two periods of internment in France (September-December 1939 and May-July 1940) may lack the powerful impact of others from the same period (Christa Wolf rightly speaks inher foreword of 'dieses wenig spektakulare Buch'), they do afford a fascinating insight into the mental landscape of a principled but undogmatic Communist struggling to come to termswith his unjust internment as an enemy alien, with themonotonous realities of camp life,and with alarming political events in theoutside world. Discovered in2000 after thedeath of his wife and now published in theirdaughter's translation from the French original, Stern's diaries reveal that,unlike, forexample, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frei, and Arthur Koestler, he has surprisingly little to say about living condi tions and the treatment of internees in the camps, in large part no doubt because life MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 293 inBlois, Villerbon, and Albi was far less harsh than inLe Vernet and Les Milles. He is much more preoccupied by the relativelymundane problem of living inuncomfort able proximity to individuals with whom he has little in common and forwhom he often feels unspoken contempt. Keeping a diary provides an outlet for such feelings as well as an opportunity to impose a structure on the otherwise shapeless lifeof an internee by recording and reflectingon his daily thoughts and experiences. The search for intellectual stimulation through intensive reading, piano lessons, chess, the learning of English, and endless discussions is punctuated by a number ofmoral issueswhich focus on lifeoutside the camp and present a...

The Faces of Janus: English-Language Fiction by German-Speaking Exiles in Great Britain, 1933-1945 by Nicole Brunnhuber

MLR, 102.1, 2007 283 is more concerned with thepossibilities of a socialist theatre in theUK at thedawn of Thatcherism, while theanalysis ofHare's approach charts amove from thepolitical to themoral against the backdrop of a post-1 989 Britain without an ostensible socialist alternative. The study is fundamentally concerned with the translations themselves, as opposed to theproductions which theyhave generated. Consequently, elements ofBrechtian stagecraft figureonly in passing. Instead, McNeill focuses on the treatment of the atrical devices in the texts, such as the historicization of character, the deployment of epic theatre, and thepersistence or neglect of dialectics. The relationship between formal strategies and their subsequent transformation yields many interesting views on political theatre in threedistinct historical periods of the twentieth century. I cer tainly hope thatMcNeill will complete his study by publishing an article on David Edgar's Galileo, which premiered inBirmingham in 2005; such an essaywould surely provide an insightful epilogue to a study that comes to the role of political texts in the contemporary theatrewith a freshand critical eye. Both Kruger's andMcNeill's books areworthy additions toBrecht scholarship for twomain reasons. First, theydemonstrate the continued productivity of amaterial istassessment of Brecht that emphasizes the historical, the political, and the social. Second, the books seek to interrogate theways inwhich Brecht's theories of theatre can be gauged away fromhis own practice. IfBrecht is to retain currency and to be liberated from a reverential and restrictingmemorialization, then these two books help us toconsider Brecht in a new set of contexts and reveal his continued presence on theworld stage. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN DAVID BARNETT The Faces of Janus: English-Language Fiction byGerman-Speaking Exiles inGreat Britain, 1933-I945. By NICOLE BRUNNHUBER. (Exile Studies, 8) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2005. 240 pp. ?3'; SwF 69; ?47.40. ISBN 978-3-039Io i 8o-i. In exile Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger were able to establish themselves in theUnited States thanks to translators. The present author draws attention to the essay 'Das Sprach-Problem' byKlaus Mann, who notes that more exiles adopted the host language inEngland than anywhere else. As thepresent volume demonstrates, an astonishing number ofGerman-speaking exiles inGreat Britain not only made the language switch but were also remarkably successful. Out of themany to choose from,Nicole Brunnhuber decides in favour ofErnst Bornemann, Robert Neumann, Georg Tabori, Ruth Feiner, and Lilo Linke. By the timehe died Bornemann was famous as a sex guru and lexicographer-Sex imVolksmund (I97I); book collector-Unsere Kinder imSpiegel ihrerLieder, Reime, Verse undRdtsel (I973); and proto-feminist-Das Patriarchat (I975). Even more re markable than these laterworks was the success of his detective story from the film world, The Face on theCutting-Room Floor, which he published inLondon in 1937 only a few years after arriving there as a schoolboy escaping fromNazi Germany. Other English-language novels followed, notably Love Story (I 94 ).Because he had adopted the nom de plume of Cameron McCabe forhis detective story,his identity as the real author remained amystery formany years. Robert Neumann was an es tablishedwriter when he arrived inLondon in 1933, yet he too successfully switched language and produced successful 'English' novels such as The Scene inPassing (i 942) and The Inquest (1944). Ruth Feiner abandoned her native language as soon as she was capable of producing English-language fiction, and especially after Three Cups 284 Reviews ofCoffee (I941), though now almost forgotten, she enjoyed a very successful writing career. Lilo Linke also had a successful professional career, though her best-seller Restless Flags: A German Girl's Story (1935) iSnow also virtually forgotten.To a certain extent Georg Tabori's firstEnglish-language novel, the thrillerBeneath the Stone theScorpion (I945), has also faded from literary memory and it ishis contro versial plays, such as The Cannibals (i 968), which are remembered. Brunnhuber rounds offher studywith thoughts on the adoption by thesewriters in exile of theEnglish language and popular literaryforms such as thedetective storyand the romance. Clearly language-switching occurred not simply because publication in German was virtually impossible or because thewriters wished to demonstrate a pro-British and anti-Fascist stance. German-language writers found theycould com municate their positive and negative feelings about exile and...