Feuchtwanger, Lion, (Jew Süss [hc, Viking Press, 1926, transl. by Willa and Edwin Muir under the title, “Power”, hc, Tradd Street Press, 2026] 978-1025919225 [pb, Tradd Street Press, 2026] 978-1025921167 [Set in 18th-century Württemberg, it follows Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a Jewish financial advisor who rises to power at the court of Duke Karl Alexander. Süss becomes the Duke’s indispensable court financier and, in effect, chief tax-farmer — a role that draws the resentment of the Christian nobility and populace. After the Duke’s sudden death, Süss is arrested and tried, with the charges against him (financial malfeasance, illicit relations with a Christian woman, etc.) functioning in the novel as a pretext for what is really a purge driven by antisemitic scapegoating. So the “crime” plot is really about the manufacture of Jewish criminality by a threatened establishment — this is the book’s real subject, and it’s why the Nazis (grotesquely) later adapted the same historical material into the 1940 propaganda film Jud Süß, inverting Feuchtwanger’s sympathetic treatment into an antisemitic caricature. - Project Gutenberg]
International · Fiction author
Lion Feuchtwanger
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) [a Bavarian-Jewish novelist and playwright, one of the best-selling German authors of the Weimar era. Born and raised in an observant Jewish and patriotic German household in Munich, he studied German history, and began writing plays and stories at age 19. He trained as a theatre critic before turning to historical fiction. His outspoken anti-Nazi views and Jewish background made him an early target of the regime — his works were burned in the May 1933 book burnings and the Nazis declared him “enemy of the state.” He fled to southern France in 1933, was interned by Vichy France in 1940, escaped disguised as a woman, and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he remained part of the émigré circle that included Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann until his death in 1958. His works included Jewish historical novels about Josephus Flavius and Jews in medieval Spain, but the two most relevant to this survey were:
Feuchtwanger, Lion, (The Oppermanns - Die Geschwister Oppermann) [English translation: by James Cleugh, published in 1933 – pb, McNally Editions, 2022] 978-1946022332 [This is the second novel in Feuchtwanger’s Wartesaal (“The Waiting Room”) trilogy about the rise of Nazism, following Success (1930) and preceding Exil (1940). It follows a Jewish family in Berlin who own a furniture business, and traces their dispossession as the Nazis come to power in 1932–33 — the family patriarch Martin is forced to merge the business with an “Aryan” partner under escalating pressure. This is less “crime/espionage” in plot terms and more a study of legalized dispossession and the criminalization of Jewish economic life by the state — relevant as a companion piece to Jud Süß’s theme (false or coerced “criminality” imposed on Jews), rather than as a crime or spy novel proper. -Wikipedia]