Feuchtwanger and Judaism

This collection of essays is devoted to the Jewish themes that ran through Lion Feuchtwanger’s life, works and worlds. Beginning with a selection of Feuchtwanger’s unpublished writings, speeches, and interviews, the volume examines the author’s approaches to Jewish history, Zionism, Judaism’s relationship to early Christianity and to eastern religions, and Jewish identity through his works, above all his historical fiction. Essays also trace translations of his works into English and Russian, and the meaning of his writing for various communities of Jewish and non-Jewish readers in Britain, North America, and the Soviet Union. A final section frames the issues around Feuchtwanger and Jewishness more broadly by considering the condition of exile and expanding the focus to communities of émigré writers and political figures in North America and beyond.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California specializing in German-Jewish cultural history. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 and Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 and the editor of works on Jewish consumer culture, Los Angeles as a site of German-American crossings, and German Jews and gender history. Frank Stern is Professor for Visual and Contemporary Culture at the University of Vienna specializing in German-Jewish, Austrian- Jewish and Israeli cultural history with a focus an cinema. He is the author of The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany and Franz Rosenzweig. Denker der Jüdischen Moderne and the editor of Feuchtwanger und Exil and numerous other publications on film and cultural history.