Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger wrote historical novels as political warnings, was stripped of his citizenship by the Nazis, and escaped from a French internment camp disguised as a woman. He was born in Munich into an orthodox Jewish family and took a doctorate in philosophy. Jud Suss, published in 1925, is about an eighteenth-century court Jew destroyed by the antisemitism of the state he served; the Nazis later filmed a version that inverted it into propaganda, which is among the more complete perversions of a book in history. Erfolg, in 1930, is a novel about Bavaria in the 1920s containing a transparent portrait of Hitler as a small-time demagogue, published while its subject was still available to read it. He was in America lecturing when the Reichstag burned in 1933; his house was ransacked, his library destroyed, his books were among the first burned publicly, and his citizenship was revoked. He went to southern France, was interned by the French government in 1940 as an enemy alien despite being a refugee from the same enemy, and was got out by an American operation involving Varian Fry, crossing the Pyrenees on foot. He settled in Los Angeles among the emigre community around Brecht and Mann, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was never granted American citizenship. He died stateless in 1958. Brecht was a close collaborator and the two wrote plays together. His Los Angeles house, the Villa Aurora, is now a residency for artists and writers. He kept rebuilding his library after each confiscation, and the second one, assembled in exile, survives.

• Lived: 1884 CE – 1958 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: writer