The Working Problems of the Writer in Exile

The German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger was widely read, but his literary reputation plummeted after the middle of the twentieth century. Feuchtwanger came from a prosperous Orthodox family in Munich and considered an academic career but, knowing he would have to convert to succeed, abandoned the idea. Before World War I, he worked as a theater critic and wrote a number of one-act plays on Jewish themes. His novel Jud Süss (1925), about the eighteenth-century southern German court Jew Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, brought him international recognition. His historical novels, many of which were on Jewish themes, were his most successful works. He also wrote essays on contemporary Jewish topics. He took refuge in southern France in 1933 and, after the German invasion, escaped to the United States, where he lived in Los Angeles and was a central figure in the German exile community there.