Brief biography of Lion Feuchtwanger
Writer Lion Feuchtwanger was born July 7, 1884 in Munich. After studying a variety of subjects, he became a theater critic and founded the culture magazing "Der Spiegel" in 1908. During World War I, he narrowly escaped being interned in Tunisia, but managed to flee. He was released from active military duty in order to mount plays for the soldiers.
He moved from Munich to Berlin in 1925. The Nazis staged their election coup in Germany while Feuchtwanger was on a lecture tour in the United States and he did not return to the country. From 1933 to 1940, he lived in Sanary-sur-mer in southern France and visited the Soviet Union in 1937. He was interned in a French camp in 1940. He fled and managed to make it to Portugal and from there to the U.S. He lived in Pacific Palisades until his death on December 21, 1958.
Lion Feuchtwanger was one of the few German writers who managed to find a readership even while in exile. His novels "The Lautensack Brothers" (1944) "Raquel" (1955) and especially "This is the Hour, a Novel About Goya" (1951) achieved great success in the U.S.
The woman beside Lion Feuchtwanger
"So, in my fiftieth year, I immigrated to America, virtually on foot. Did I thereby become an American? Could a piece of paper change half a century of my life? I don't think so. Now, with just over ten years to go before the completing the second half of a century, I feel it's a good thing to hold the citizenship of a country that unites the legacy of my German heritage with the descendants of many other nations. As an American, one is very close to being a citizen of the world."
Shortly before her nineteenth birthday, Marta Löffler met the young Munich theater critic and Ph.D. Lion Feuchtwanger. She later said that her life had not really begun until then. In the early years of their marriage, they roamed southern Europe, with little money, intoxicated by their experiences with foreign cultures and landscapes. When financial independence arrived on the back of literary success, they bought a house in Berlin's Grunewald suburb. But it was to remain their home for a mere two years. To avoid the almost certainly fatal persecution of the Nazis, they fled to southern France, where they enjoyed seven good years. In 1940, German troops invaded their Western neighbor and the immigrants were interned. Marta Feuchtwanger, interned in the Hyère camp, displayed amazing energy and resolve in achieving somewhat better conditions for her fellow prisoners. She managed to get out of the camp and get her husband freed. She then organized their flight across the Pyrenees to the United States. She lived in California until her death in 1987, in the house that was first the Feuchtwangers' refuge and then their home.
From: Marta Feuchtwanger: Nur eine Frau, Jahre Tage Stunden (Just a Woman, Years, Days, Hours), pub: Aufbau Verlag Berlin Leipzig, 1984
