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.