Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Heinrich Mann and the Struggle for Democracy
- 2 Hermann Hesse and the Weimar Republic
- 3 In Defense of Reason and Justice: Lion Feuchtwanger's Historical Novels of the Weimar Republic
- 4 The Case of Jakob Wassermann: Social, Legal, and Personal Crises in the Weimar Republic
- 5 Signs of the Times: Joseph Roth's Weimar Journalism
- 6 Ernst Jünger, the New Nationalists, and the Memory of the First World War
- 7 Innocent Killing: Erich Maria Remarque and the Weimar Anti-War Novels
- 8 In “A Far-Off Land”: B. Traven
- 9 Weimar's Forgotten Cassandra: The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in the Weimar Republic
- 10 Radical Realism and Historical Fantasy: Alfred Döblin
- 11 Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate Second-Rate Writer”?
- 12 Hans Fallada's Literary Breakthrough: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Kleiner Mann — was nun?
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
3 - In Defense of Reason and Justice: Lion Feuchtwanger's Historical Novels of the Weimar Republic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Heinrich Mann and the Struggle for Democracy
- 2 Hermann Hesse and the Weimar Republic
- 3 In Defense of Reason and Justice: Lion Feuchtwanger's Historical Novels of the Weimar Republic
- 4 The Case of Jakob Wassermann: Social, Legal, and Personal Crises in the Weimar Republic
- 5 Signs of the Times: Joseph Roth's Weimar Journalism
- 6 Ernst Jünger, the New Nationalists, and the Memory of the First World War
- 7 Innocent Killing: Erich Maria Remarque and the Weimar Anti-War Novels
- 8 In “A Far-Off Land”: B. Traven
- 9 Weimar's Forgotten Cassandra: The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in the Weimar Republic
- 10 Radical Realism and Historical Fantasy: Alfred Döblin
- 11 Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate Second-Rate Writer”?
- 12 Hans Fallada's Literary Breakthrough: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Kleiner Mann — was nun?
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) belongs to a generation of German writers who spent their formative years in the Wilhelmine Empire. These writers began their literary careers shortly before or after the turn of the century, were politicized during or at the end of the First World War, established their reputation as representatives of literary modernism or the avant-garde during the Weimar Republic, and often shared the common experience of exile after the collapse of the first German democracy. Many of Feuchtwanger's artistic friends and acquaintances belonged to this Frontgeneration, as the historian Detlev Peukert has called this generation of intellectuals born in the late 1870s and 1880s. What Feuchtwanger shared with them — despite many cultural and political differences — was his generation's disdain for the bourgeois value system of their parents, the flight into the practice of aestheticism before the First World War, and the rejection of this often immoral and apolitical stance in favor of artistic endeavors that could no longer afford the aestheticist denial of the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.
Feuchtwanger rebelled against the Jewish and bourgeois world of his parents — the Feuchtwangers were owners of a margarine factory — by first turning away from the orthodox rituals of his religious parents, and then, after the completion of his dissertation, “Heinrich Heines Fragment: Der Rabbi von Bacherach” (1907), preferring a financially insecure career as literary critic and author over a respectable life as an academic.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- German Novelists of the Weimar RepublicIntersections of Literature and Politics, pp. 61 - 84Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006