Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger
East German stamp in memory of Lion Feuchtwanger
Born	(1884-07-07)7 July 1884 Munich
Died	21 December 1958(1958-12-21) (aged 74) Los Angeles
Occupation	Novelist, playwright
Nationality	German

Lion Feuchtwanger (German: [ˈfɔɪçtˌvaŋɐ]; 7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958) was a German-Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Feuchtwanger's Judaism and fierce criticism of the Nazi Party, years before it assumed power, ensured that he would be a target of government-sponsored persecution after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Following a brief period of internment in France and a harrowing escape from Continental Europe, he sought asylum in the United States, where he died in 1958.

Feuchtwanger is often praised for his efforts to expose the brutality of the Nazis but criticized for his failure to acknowledge the brutality of the rule of Joseph Stalin.

Feuchtwanger's ancestors originated from the Middle Franconian city of Feuchtwangen; following a pogrom in 1555, it had expelled all its resident Jews. Some of the expellees subsequently settled in Fürth, where they were called the Feuchtwangers, meaning those from Feuchtwangen. Feuchtwanger's grandfather Elkan moved to Munich in the middle of the 19th century.

He was born in 1884 to Orthodox Jewish margarine manufacturer Sigmund Feuchtwanger and his wife, Johanna née Bodenheim. He was the oldest in a family of nine siblings of which two, Martin and Ludwig, became authors; Ludwig's son is the London-based historian Edgar Feuchtwanger. Two of his sisters settled in Palestine following the rise of the Nazi Party. One was killed in a concentration camp, and another settled in New York.

Lion studied literature and philosophy in the universities of Munich and Berlin. He made his first attempt at writing while still a student and won an award. In 1903 in Munich, he passed his examinations at an elite school, Wilhelmsgymnasium. He then studied history, philosophy and German philology in Munich and Berlin. He received his PhD in 1907, under Francis Muncker, on Heinrich Heine's The Rabbi of Bacharach.