Against Forgetting: Feuchtwanger Online

Against Forgetting: Feuchtwanger Online

By (Berlin)

I have visited Villa Aurora several times in connection with my teaching and research on Jud Süss and the media. The first time was during the early seventies before German reunification. This was around the time of a large demonstration in Santa Monica calling for the United States government to reopen the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Jewish couple executed in 1953 after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.

What I encountered in the hills of the Pacific Palisades was a quiet retreat for writers and scholars. On the walls were baroque folios reminiscent of a monastic library. I immediately thought of the Benedictine library at Admont Abbey and the library of Vorau Abbey, which are both in the Austrian state of Styria. Feuchtwanger's library was a place of reflection, meditation, and reverence for language. Alongside works in Latin, French, and Spanish were German authors, his sole interlocutors during much of the last twenty-five years of his life. In the presence of these departed authors, he penned the lines describing how authors’ works are dependent on the locations where they are written. In “The Writer in Exile,” he explains how he cannot believe

…that it was only in terms of subject matter that exile influenced the work of Ovid, Li Bai, Dante, Heinrich Heine, and Victor Hugo. It seems to me the inner being of these works, written during a period of banishment, was determined by the external circumstances, by exile. […] Exile was not a minor circumstance influencing these works, but rather their very source. It was not the content that was changed by banishment, it was the essence.

My most recent visit to Villa Aurora was in 2007. It now looks completely different: The cloistered atmosphere. After its renovations were complete, it became an artists' residence for the young intellectuals and artists who receive grants to stay there.

As part of my teaching and research on Jud Süss and the media, I have hosted and participated in numerous Feuchtwanger colloquia. The most important of these was held in West Berlin in 1984 to commemorate Feuchtwanger's 100^th birthday. It was organized by the Academy of Arts and TU Berlin and co-hosted by Walter Huder and myself. It successfully brought together literary historians from numerous countries with leading players in the German film industry. The overarching theme—Jud Süss and the media—made it possible for the filmmakers and historians to exchange ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

The colloquium opened with a paper on the intellectual background to Feuchtwanger's work entitled “Feuchtwanger and the Third Enlightenment,” by Harold von Hofe from the United States. This was followed by two additional papers by US researchers, Otmar Drekonja’s “Feuchtwanger and Socialism” and H.-B. Moeller’s essay about  Feuchtwanger’s relationship with Brecht. Then came the Jud Süss specialists: Barbara von der Lühe from West Germany presented “Lion Feuchtwanger's Novel Jud Süss and the Development of Jewish Self-Awareness in Germany;” Margarita Pazi from Israel analyzed “The Jud Süss Dramas of Paul Kornfeld and Avi Shául,” James Richie from Great Britain shared his work on the Jud Süss dramatization by Ashley Dukes; and Siegfried Zielinski of West Germany compared Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Süss with the Lothar Mendes and Veit Harlan film versions of it.

The colloquium ended with a discussion titled “Jews in Film and TV after Auschwitz,” which focused on the film industry's use of the Holocaust in commercial films. Jewish studies expert and historian Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich of Basel and film journalist Erwin Leiser from Stockholm discussed the issue with several filmmakers who had used Feuchtwanger's work for commercial projects. The filmmakers included Egon Monk from Hamburg, who had filmed a 1983 ZDF production of Die Geschwister Oppermann, and Gerd Angermann from Stuttgart, who had written a screenplay for Jud Süss that was in production at ZDF. In addition, the producer Artur Brauner from Berlin-Spandau and the Baden-Baden-based television executive Peter Schulze-Rohr from Südwestfunk participated in the discussion. They held the film rights for a screenplay of Jud Süss written by Egon Eis. In addition, Schulze-Rohr had commissioned Leo Lehmann in London to write a screenplay based on Feuchtwanger’s novel. The audience was shocked by the filmmakers' frank statements, and many journalists were drawn into the debate, even though they were covering the event.

QU: Were the journalists part of a panel discussion, or were they covering the event? Covering

The colloquium was accompanied by a film retrospective and exhibition. The papers were collected in a published volume of the conference proceedings edited by Walter Huder and myself, titled Lion Feuchtwanger "…für die Vernunft, gegen Dummheit und Gewalt,” Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar assisted with the editing, and the volume was published in Berlin by Publica in 1985.

After reunification, I continued working closely with the subject of Jud Süss and the media for my teaching and research, presenting my research and organizing various conferences and cultural events. Certain perceptions about Feuchtwanger changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. To former West Germans, Feuchtwanger was no longer the worthy Jew and émigré, but rather the East German author and writer of slightly kitschy historical novels. However, a recent development works is helping to counteract this view of Feuchtwanger. TU Berlin has published course modules for a master’s degree in communications based on Lion Feuchtwanger and the Web site

Dr. Peter-Paul Schneider of the German Radio Archive in Babelsberg (DRA) and I designed the first module, which was offered during the winter semester of 2006 and 2007 and continued the following summer. This was unique, since it attracted German and foreign students who had not read a word of Feuchtwanger. Most of them probably wrote his name for the first time in their lives during the course. We only accepted students who were willing to devote significant amounts of time to researching in the Feuchtwanger archives. The research was done using print and audiovisual materials at the DRA in southwest Berlin, which is home to the radio and television archives from the former East Germany. The DRA offers various finding aids to perform searches within radio and television programs and the accompanying written material. The DRA also houses a library focusing on East German and media history with an extensive photo and press archive.

QU: Are these facts correct?

To encourage personal initiative, the communications students were allowed to pursue their own research objectives within the Feuchtwanger collection. For example, those from Berlin and northern Germany focused on Feuchtwanger’s Bavarian-tinged German. Those interested in contemporary German cinema and television gravitated towards East German classics they had never seen or television moments such as live appearances by Lion or the sporty Marta. One student from Shanghai discovered an interest in Marta and Martin Feuchtwanger, while a student from Vietnam studied the winners of the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize, and a student from Hangzhou was impressed by Feuchtwanger’s aphorisms. A student from Mongolia was particularly struck by the words of German studies specialist and Stasi employee Anneliese Löffler, written on what would have been Feuchtwanger’s 95^th birthday:

It is worth refreshing the memory of his works, as they are much-loved and admired companions—and will remain so—for a great many people." (Anneliese Löffler, "A Passion for Reason: On Lion Feuchtwanger's 95^th Birthday,” Berliner Zeitung, East Berlin, July 8, 1979)

By contrast, South Korean student found a particularly vivid, damning review of Feuchtwanger, a 1980 article by Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Referring to the historical novels, Reich-Ranicki writes:

[…] But whatever one feels compelled to say about or against Feuchtwanger's widescreen novels, one should remember that he also wrote a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the Weimar Republic, Erfolg (1930). Here he attempted what he also endeavored to do later: to breathe new life into the outmoded form of the novel. The book presents a new way to deliberately and palpably convey the rhythms and atmosphere of everyday life in a modern metropolis, using the techniques of the epic. Only in the case of Erfolg, and nowhere else, was Feuchtwanger influential from a stylistic standpoint.

(Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Was she really 'Just a Woman'? From the memoirs of Marta Feuchtwanger. ZDF's fascinating program on Feuchtwanger," in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 22, 1980).

Students returned to the TU Berlin campus with their research findings and discussed them in groups and individual sessions with instructors. The principal question we asked was how to slow the process by which Feuchtwanger was becoming a forgotten author—and how to engage a new generation of readers. We discussed various market strategies, including a radical switch from print to audiobook formats. Students pointed out that strong sales of Jud Süss and Erfolg audiobooks supported this strategy. Further, Audio Verlag GmbH in Berlin is producing a second, 356-minute audio version of the satirical novel about Bavarian life, read by two well-known German voices, Axel Corti and Hannelore Elsner. The students also noted that Erfolg was the novel Reich-Ranicki praised 27 years earlier. Considering Feuchtwanger’s significance as a writer in exile, the students also suggested launching two global competitions for translations of his work and journalists’ coverage of the 50^th anniversary of his death.

QU1: I paraphrased this—is it still accurate?

QU2: Are these German actors?

In addition, we discussed several methods for renewing Feuchtwanger’s cultural significance using the Internet. At the end of the 2007 summer semester, Maak Fischer developed a plan for a Web site that would offer a guide to Feuchtwanger-related resources at archives in Germany and abroad. Our goal was to update the Web site each month during the year leading up to the 50^th anniversary of Feuchtwanger's death on December 21, 2008. The online presence is of particular interest to journalists, and it exposes Feuchtwanger aficionados and newbies alike—including our students—to new resources for research and further exploration.

We launched the Web site in the first half of the 2007 and 2008 winter semester. By the end of 2007, the site included links to a selection of archival print, radio, and television resources from the DRA, resources from USC’s Feuchtwanger Memorial, and materials from the September 2007 International Feuchtwanger Society conference, Feuchtwanger and Film. We also featured work by the latest Villa Aurora grant recipients. Afterwards, we evaluated the Web site to improve its navigation and editorial content. Our students interviewed several experts who emphasized the importance of making information about Feuchtwanger readily available to journalists, since they must often work under severe time constraints while completing short articles. We investigated the possibility of offering an archive press service to do preliminary research for journalists.

QU: I rephrased—is this accurate?  Was a press service ever set up?

Baden-Baden entrepreneur and media consultant Marduk Buscher helped us improve the usability of the Web site near the end of the 2007 and 2008 winter semester. His IT company IT + Media Group GmbH set up a new site at It now includes a content management system that simplifies Web site administration, and Buscher and his team are helping TU students add new content, graphic elements, and features.

QU: Correct?

TU Berlin will offer additional Feuchtwanger-based, master’s-level communications course modules this year related to online journalism. These include "Online Journalism and Lion Feuchtwanger's 124^th Birthday on July 7, 2008" and a module geared towards news agencies based on the 50^th anniversary of Feuchtwanger's death on December 21, 2008. Media experts and representatives from several media companies will give practical demonstrations of Web publishing via the platform.