The Oppermanns

September 26, 2022
Feuchtwanger (The Devil in France) chronicles the tsunami of antisemitism that engulfed Germany and its people in the years leading up to WWII in this harrowing novel, originally published in Amsterdam and in Cleugh’s translation in 1933, and revised with an introduction by Pulitzer winner Joshua Coen. The Oppermanns are a bourgeois Jewish family who for generations have been fixtures in Berlin society. Gustav and Martin oversee the family’s furniture business. Edgar is a renowned surgeon. When the first rumblings of National Socialism come to their attention, they mock the crude propaganda of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but the “authority of sober reason” to which they cling, as Feuchtwanger writes, is soon undermined by crass nationalism, and members of the family endure dramatic affronts to their reputations: Martin’s son is ostracized at school, Edgar is accused of killing patients, and the family furniture business is forced to merge with a gentile firm. As a Jewish artist in the Weimar era, Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) suffered similar humiliations, and here he unflinchingly shows the tide of Nazism and “the barbarism and criminality of the caveman” that enabled it to be as relentless as it is incomprehensible. For readers discovering this clear-eyed account now, it’s made all the more devastating by the vast scope of horrors it anticipated.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
A German classic about the Nazis' escalating campaign against the Jewish people, in a translation newly revised by Joshua Cohen. Written in 1933, the year Hitler was appointed German chancellor, the Bavarian Jewish Feuchtwanger's five-alarm warning of a novel focuses on the well-off Oppermann family, of which three brothers run a family chain of furniture stores in Berlin. With their history of achievement and as proud Germans, the siblings think they're safe from the oppressive actions they're hearing about. The first inkling that they are at risk comes via the persecution of 17-year-old Berthold Oppermann, a good student and self-possessed soul, by a Nationalism-embracing teacher who loves hearing his students sing "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, / Then all goes well again." Soon enough, the weight of state-mandated hatred falls on the Oppermanns in spite of their painful decision to change the name of their business to a non-Jewish-sounding name, as other Jewish firms had done. But as the scourge of discrimination against Jewish businessmen, doctors, and others intensifies, leading to suicides and purges ("Who was shameless enough to allow himself to be operated on by a Jew today?" it is asked), the notion among self-deluding Jews that "the disease that ails this country, man, is acute, not chronic" dims. The novel never raises its voice. Its power builds from its methodical telling of day-to-day reality, how the characters respond to increasingly frightening events, and what their future, if there is one, holds. News of concentration camps--the horrors of which even Feuchtwanger, writing as a French exile, couldn't imagine--is heard from a distance. Readers will be struck by how little the language about White supremacy, antisemitism, the swapping of lies for facts, the discrediting of the press, and the embrace of violence over reason have changed. It's hard to imagine a 90-year-old book being more timely. An unsettling but page-turning novel about 20th-century evil.

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