24 Facts About Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright.

Lion Feuchtwanger was born in 1884 to Orthodox Jewish margarine manufacturer Sigmund Feuchtwanger and his wife, Johanna nee Bodenheimer.

Lion Feuchtwanger was the oldest in a family of nine siblings of whom two, Martin and Ludwig Feuchtwanger, became authors; Ludwig's son is the London-based historian Edgar Feuchtwanger.

Lion Feuchtwanger studied literature and philosophy in the universities of Munich and Berlin.

Lion Feuchtwanger made his first attempt at writing while still a student and won an award.

Lion Feuchtwanger then studied history, philosophy and German philology in Munich and Berlin.

Lion Feuchtwanger received his PhD in 1907, under Francis Muncker, on Heinrich Heine's The Rabbi of Bacharach.

Lion Feuchtwanger was pregnant at the wedding, but the child died shortly after birth.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lion Feuchtwanger served in the German military service but was released early for health reasons.

Lion Feuchtwanger soon became a figure in the literary world, and he was sought out by the young Bertolt Brecht.

Lion Feuchtwanger published the first part of the trilogy Josephus The Jewish War in 1932.

Lion Feuchtwanger was one of the first to produce propaganda against Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The next day, Prittwitz resigned from the diplomatic corps and called Lion Feuchtwanger to recommend that he not return home.

In 1933, while Lion Feuchtwanger was on tour, his house was ransacked by government agents who stole or destroyed many items from his extensive library, including invaluable manuscripts of some of his projected works.

Lion Feuchtwanger's works were included among those burned in the 10 May 1933, Nazi book burnings held across Germany.

When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Lion Feuchtwanger was interned for a few weeks in Camp des Milles.

Lion Feuchtwanger escaped with the help of Marta; Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped refugees escape from occupied France; Hiram Bingham IV, US Vice Consul in Marseille; Myles Standish, US Vice Consul in Marseille; Waitstill Sharp and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister and his wife who were in Europe on a similar mission as Fry.

Lion Feuchtwanger was granted political asylum in the United States and settled in Los Angeles in 1941, when he published a memoir of his internment, The Devil in France.

In 1943, Lion Feuchtwanger bought Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, California, and he continued to write there until his death in 1958.

Lion Feuchtwanger defended the Great Purge and the show trials which were then taking place against both real and imagined 'Trotskyites' and 'enemies of the people'.

In 1953, Lion Feuchtwanger won the National Prize of East Germany first Class for art and literature.

Lion Feuchtwanger reacted to the regime change with the novel The Oppermanns.

At first, Lion Feuchtwanger was writing it as a screenplay proposed by the British Government it was never completed and instead was reworked into a novel, resulting in the book's style, which differs with quick-cuts and literary montage sequences.

Lion Feuchtwanger's novels go unread; his plays go unperformed; he's a first-class writer without a first-class berth; a classic firebrand without a canon.