The Oppermanns

[he [] PPER MAN NS LION FEUCHTWANGER Translated Irnrn the German by JAMES CLEUGH With an introduction by RUTH GRUBER CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS, INC. NEWYORK

Copyright © 1934 by The Viking Press, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1962 by The Viking Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, Inc. Translated from the German by James Cleugh First Carroll & Graf edition 1983 Second Carroll & Graf edition 2001 Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. A Division of Avalon Publishing Group 19 West 21 st Street New York, r~y 10010-6805 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 0-7867-0880 -8 Manufactured in the United States of America

Critical Praise for Lion Feuchtwanger's The Oppermanns "The story of the Oppermanns appeals to our reason, our sense of justice, our indignation. But [the novel] appeals to our emotions as well; those emotions, detached but pro- found, which it is the problem of pure artistic creation to arouse .... Feuchtwanger, no more than Voltaire or Zola (in the Dreyfuss case), is concerning hirnself with the literary val- ues of his material. ... 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 out- side bearing the message, "Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!" -New York Times Book Review, 1934 "The book is a loosely imaginative commentary on the course of events in Germany from the period of General von Schleicher's brief Chancellorship to a few months after the appointment of Herr Hitler as Chancellor. Inevitably the result is something both less and more than a novel. ... " - Tim es Literary Supplement (London) "There are few novelists living today who can compete with Feuchtwanger's rare gifts of historical observation and understanding of individual character." - Booklist "A powerful, gripping appeal to the world on behalf of a declassed minority which has lost its right to the quiet enjoy- ment of life and liberty." - Boston Transcript "Solid and exciting, conceived and realized by an artist, the best novel Feuchtwanger has written." - The New Republic "Feuchtwanger is a brilliant enough writer to know how to plead his cause popularly and incomparably." - Chicago Tribune

INTRODUCTION H e sits on the sofa in his hotel suite, his head hunched forward as if he is reading a book. He is a small man with agentIe voice, a giant among the German [ew- ish novelists rescued from Nazi terror. He is Lion (pro- nounced Leon) Feuchtwanger. It is 1947, and I meet hirn while he is in New York on a lecture tour. He speaks to me the way he writes; with cool logic and a carefully controlled passion. He teils me that he writes to shake the world, as he did with his novel The Oppermanns, as timely and riveting in 2001 as when he published it in 1933, the very year Hitler rose to power. I had come to interview hirn, but almost at once he was in- terviewing me. "What do you do," he smiled, "when you're not cross-exam- ining your willing victims?" I hesitated, and said, "I'rn writing a novel." He waited for me to go on. "It's about a young couple who meet in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons Camp." "And what's the problern?" he asked. "Mrs. Ogden Reid, the owner of the Neu/ York Herald Tri- bune, has asked me to cover the voyage of UNSCOP-the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. It means giv- ing up the novel and traveling some four months through Germany, Austria, Palestine, and the Arab world. I'rn in full v

VI 'I N T RODUCTION swing with the novel and 1 don't know whether 1 should con- tinue or take on this new assignrnent." His blue eyes behind huge glasses seemed to ignite. "Of course you must go. The novel can wait. You can always go back to the novel. This is a chance of a lifetime. How many young women--even men-are given such an assignment?" I never regretted taking his advice. Soon, our conversation returned to the subjeet of his own life and work. He told me he was fortunate to be living in Sanary, near Marseilles, Franee, in 1933, when he was asked by the British to write a play about life in Germany under Hitler's emerging shadow. Had he then been in Germany denouneing Hitler, he would probably have been arrested, tortured, even murdered, for what already was a substantial outpouring of his anti-Nazi articles and speeches. He aecepted the commission and wrote the play entitled Die Geschwister Oppenheim (The Family Oppenheim), However, as soon as the British gave diplomatie reeognition to Hitler's new regirne, they cancelled any plans to perform it, In six months, from April to Oetober 1933, Feuehtwanger turned it into the historical novel called The Oppermanns. In the epilogue to the German edition ofExit, a later histor- ical novel by Feuchtwanger, he explained that he had written The Oppermanns in white heat: "I wanted to enlighten the readers of the world as soon as possible about the true face of the Nazi regime and its dangers." Ir was an early wake-up call. Too rnany people were apathetic about Hitler and the evil that was National Socialism.. Tao many looked upon Hitler as a clown with 3 Charlie Chaplin mous- tache. In essays and plays, and in The Oppermanns, Feueht- wanger tore open the curtain of anti-Semitism in Germany. "How did you escape frorn the Nazis?" I asked hirn.

INTRODUCTION vii "I owe it to my wife, Marta." Marta Loeffler Feuchtwanger, famous in Munich for her beauty, twice saved his life. In 1914 they were living in Hamamet, a small place south of Tunis, when the first Great War of the twentieth century broke out, and they were caught by surprise. They became "enerny aliens" and were imprisoned in primitive conditions. Marta managed to escape, smuggled hirn out, and hurried thern aboard an Italian ship. They landed in Palermo, Italy, and then went horne to Germany, where he enlisted in the German military and fought for a few months in the war. The second escape occurred while they were living in Sa- nary, in southern France. In May 1940, France fell to the Nazis. Captured by the Vichy French, Lion and Marta were again arrested as "enerny aliens" and thrown into separate prlson camps. 1 sat mesmerized as he told me how he was forced to carry bricks up a hill, then carry them down again, and repeat the process until he was exhausted. "It was one of the Nazi tricks to dehumanize us with useless labor." "Did 1 think I was going to die?" He repeated my question. He shook his head. "No man believes in his own death. That's what kept me alive." Marta again escaped from her camp. She learned that Lion was ill and so mistreated that he was close to death. Desperate, she forced her way into the office of the American Consul, Hiram Bingham, Jr., who then hid her in his own horne. A co- terie of Arnericans-among thern Varian Fry, the diplomat the world now knows was rescuing hundreds of [ewish writ- ers and artists-worked to save him. Feuchtwauger and Marta crossed the Pyrenees on foot to safety.

VIII INTRODUCTION The Oppermanns, though he had written it seven years earlier, captured the trauma and emotions of their hazardous escapes. It was an instance of art imitating life and life, in turn, imitating art, ••• In the novel, the Oppermann family, successful middle- elass German [ews who own a ehain of furniture stores, are robbed of their business, their hornes, and their money, as the Nazi laws take hold. Some escape to Switzerland, among them Lion's autobiographical literary hero, Gustav Opper- mann, who finds temporary haven in Lake Lugano. Back in Germany, some commit suicide, others are trapped. "Their homeland, their Gerrnany," Feuehtwanger writes, "had proved false to thern. For centuries they had feit seeure in that homeland and now everything was suddenly crurn- bling to bits ... neighbor spied on neighbor, son on father, friend on friend." Like: many German [ews, several of the characters in the book live in denial, refusing to see the danger that is soon to engulf them; others see the violence, the lies of the Nazis, and the misery of the [ews as they are tortured in concen- tration carnps-their faces and skulls battered, their limbs broken, their bodies starved, their lips thirsting for a drop of water. He did not eonsider The Opperrnanns his best work, though the historical novel won rave reviews when it was published around the world in 1933 and 1934, and again, rnany years later when it appeared in America as a feature film on public television. "It is his most prophetie book," Herman Graf, who first republished it in English in 1983, told me. "He wrote it in 1933 with Hitler just in power, yet it reads as if he had written

INTRODUCTION IX it in 1938, with all the details ofthe Nazi's later and most hor- rendous atrocities." Every book one writes carries within it a fragment of auto- biography. The Oppermanns mirrors a piece of Feuchtwanger's life in Germany. Born in Munich in 1884 to an Orthodox [ew- ish family, he rebelled against the orthodoxy of his handsome but cold and distant father and morose mother who rarely smiled. Timid, mocked by eight siblings for his diminutive stature, he soon surpassed thern a11 by his writing. Still in his teens, he began publishing plays and critical essays and at twenty-four, received a Ph.D . from the Univer- sity of Munich. He married Marta in 1912 and moved to the Riviera to write novels. Marta gave birth to a fragile little girl who died before she was one. Feuchtwanger was so depressed that he vowed they would never have another child. In 1925 he wrote [ea: Süss (retitled Power when it was pub- lished in the United Stares a year later) which made hirn an instant success in Europe and America. It was produced in England as a motion picture, and in 1939 was distorted by the Nazis into a violently anti-Semitic movie. Words, books, history-they were his life. Wherever he set- tled, he created a library, though he twice lost connection with his precious volumes. His Berlin library was destroyed when Nazi thugs broke into his apartment, stole his unfinished manuscript about the Roman historian, [osephus, and burned his books in a funereal pyre. He was forced to abandon his second library in Vichy France when he escaped with only the clothes on his back. In America, he created a third library with over 30,000 volumes in various languages. They are now at the University of Southern California and supported by the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Fund.

x INTRODUCTION Though he had rebelIed against religious orthodoxy, he never denied his Jewishness. He once said that even though his mind was intellectual, his heart was Jewish. In fact, his or- thodox [ewish training was the core of many of his novels. His book Raquel: The [etoess ofToledo, the thirteenth-century story of the beautiful daughter of King Alphonso the Eighth's [ew- ish Finance Minister, is one of his masterpieces. He based it on the Biblical story of Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus, and dedicated it to two wornen: Marta, the wife he loved, and his loyal secretary, Hilde Waldo. Some thirty years later, by coin- cidence, I wrote a ·book about another Raquel called Raquela: A Woman ofIsrael. Each time he came to New York on a lecture tour or to dis- cuss a new book with his publisher, Ben Huebsch of Viking Press, I interviewed hirn; and when he moved to Southern California, I visited hirn at his horne overlooking the hills of Pacific Palisades. Often, as we talked, I feIt his blue eyes studying me-warm, penetrating, filled at times with sadness, and other times squinting with mischief and fun. When Herman Graf visited Marta, still erect and elegant in her nineties, he drove round and round the house unable to find the hidden entrance, until at last he found the Spanish stairs leading downward to the mansion. Marta Feucht- wanger was amused by his dilemma. "You couldn't find the stairs," she laughed, and then more seriously said, "That's why nobody can murder me." Lion's secretary, Hilde, helped me understand how he wrote his historical novels. Early rnornings, he'd swim in the Pacific Ocean, take walks with Marta, then eat breakfast and begin working. He'd spend the morning dictating to Hilde, who typed as fast as he spoke. Often in the afternoon he'd read

THE OPPERMANNS XI and research voraciously, studying original documents, letters, and speeches to find all the material to make his historical novels authentie. Frequently, he'd work until seven or eight at night. Later, he and Marta would relax, dining and socializing with Thomas Mann and others in the colony of German exiles and ernigres who found not only success in America but also that for which they yearned most-freedom. Lion had long been an admirer of American writers and artists, especially Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and con- tinually sought to link Europe and Ameriea. His admiration for America had intensified knowing that Amerieans had helped save his life and President Roosevelt had arranged the visas that brought hirn and Marta to safe haven. He died in 1958 at the age of seventy-four, having survived wars, revolutions, imprisonments, and through it all he had remained eheerful, eourageous, and life-Ioving, a novelist whose hauntingly prophetie work , The Oppermanns, stands as a moving testament to rnan's innate eapaeity to transform the stuff of our lives into redemptive art, Ruth Gruber February 2001 New York City

AUTHOR'S NOTE Not one of the characters in this book existed as an actual in- dividual within the boundaries of the German Reich during the period of 1932-1933; however, they did exist collectively. In order to attain an accurate picture of the type, the author had to forgo any photographic representation of the individual. The novel T he Oppermanns does not describe actual but his- toric people. The material for the descriptions of the views, customs, and methods of the Nationalists in Germany can be found in Adolf Hitler's book My Battle, in the reports of those who es- caped from Concentration Camps, and, particularly, in the of- ficial notices appearing in the 1933 series of the German Reichsan zeiger. The author chose the name "Opperrnann" because it brings to mind similar, generally Jewish, names such as Wassermann, Friedmann, Goldmann, Silbermann, etc.•• . and at the same time has a German sound. A parallel instance occurs in the name Hitler, which is borne by a Jewish family in Moravia as weIl as by the Chancellor of the Reich. After the type of this volume had already been set, a family by the name of Oppermann advised the publisher that Opper- mann is a strictly Christian name and that they would, there- fore, like to have it avoided that bearers of the name Opper- mann be branded before the general public as belonging to a Jewish family. In view of the existing circumstances, the pub- lisher readily understands this attitude on the part of the Op- permann family and herewith advises the readers of this novel of the facts which the Oppermann family wishes to have defi- nitely understood. L.F. November 1933.

CONTENTS BOOK I: YESTERDAY I B00KII:TODAY127 B00KIII:TOM0RR0W245

[he DPPER MAN NS

1300k One: )Jesterday "Tkere is nothing tlte Ta"f,le /eilT more titan /lttell/gellce. /1 tltey u11JerstooJ what is truly terrifying, tltey woulJ /ea, I, ~~ glloTa1tCe. - GOETHE.

YESTERDAY W H EN Dr. Gustav Oppermann awoke on the sixteenth of November, which marked his fiftieth birthday, it was lang before sunrise. That was annoying. The day would be a strenuous one and he had intended to sleep late. From his bed he could distinguish a few bare tree tops and a bit of sky. The sky looked distant and clear, there was no sign of the fog that is so common in November. He stretched and yawned. Then, resolutely, now that he was weIl awake, he threw back the clothes from the broad, low bed, swung both his feet lightly to the floor, emerging from the warmth of the sheets and blankets into the cold morning, and went out on the balcony. Below, his little garden sloped, in three terraces, down to the woods; to right and left wooded knolls rose, and beyond the more distant tree-covered area further hills and woodlands ap- peared. A pleasantly cool breeze ascended from the little lake, which layout of sight to the left, and fro m the pines of Grune- wald. In the profound silence that precedes daybreak, he breathed the forest air deeply and with enjoyment. The strokes of an axe carne faintly frorn the distance; he liked the sound; the rhythmic blows emphasized the stillness. Gustav Oppermann, as he did every rnorning, rejoiced in his house. No one, if he were suddenly transported here without warning, could suspect that he was less than three miles fram the Memorial Church, the centre of the West End of Berlin. Really, he had chosen the prettiest spot in Berlin for his house. 3