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400:, and his brothers Martin - owner of the family furniture business - and Edgar - a well-known doctor. The story takes place between November 1932, when Gustav turns 50 years old, and the late summer of 1933. While the Nazis are quickly establishing their dictatorship, many Germans that do not share their views, as well as some Jews, insist that things will eventually turn around and thus prefer to wait passively or ignore what is happening around them.
506:
540:, Cohen notes that the style of the novel differs with "quick-cuts and montage sequences". He also writes that one of the central themes of the novel is built around the phrase "It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it", derived by Feuchtwanger from "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it", a phrase, attributed to
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in
December 2022: "Feuchtwanger himself doesn't seem to be offering a template for how democracy dies. If anything, in his novel, templates shatter easily and quickly. For all the lessons he is trying to impart in 1933, there is no clearer answer about when exactly it’s time to go, when holding on to
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appreciated the novel for its description of the mass psychology and 'the misbegotten assumptions' that helped the Nazis to establish their dictatorship, Cohen praises the novel as "one of the last masterpieces of German Jewish culture" and also notes the lack of its popularity in the
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sold approximately 20,000 copies. Overall, the book sold approximately 250,000 copies worldwide, and was translated into over 10 languages. A few months after the first publication, the novel was translated into
English and released in the United States. Fred T. March wrote in 1934 in
481:
Given that
Feuchtwanger's books were so explicitly and accessibly addressed to a general audience, it's poignant that he has none now. His novels go unread; his plays go unperformed; he's a first-class writer without a first-class berth; a classic firebrand without a
357:; the surname was corrected in later editions and translations. According to Maik Grote, this happened because when the novel was about to be printed, Feuchtwanger's brother received a threatening letter, in which a professor whose name was also Oppermann, also an
416:
Gustav decides to leave
Germany and move to Switzerland, but later comes back under a false passport to become an anti-Nazi political activist and to document Nazi crimes. He is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, although he is eventually released.
412:
Meanwhile, Martin's 17-year-old son
Berthold is expelled from his soccer club despite his talent for the sport, and in class, he is abused by a Nazi teacher for refusing to express his loyalty to the new regime - eventually leading to his suicide.
395:
In "time immemorial", Emmanuel
Oppermann, a merchant who moves to Berlin, supplies the Prussian Army and starts the Oppermann furniture company. The main characters are his grandson Gustav Oppermann, a writer who is working on a biography of
361:
leader, wrote that there had never been a Jewish family with that surname, and that he could prove that by his genealogy which goes back to the 13th century. Feuchtwanger informed
Querido about the letter and asked to change the surname.
64:, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Knowledge (XXG).
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placed the book in their "100 German Must-Reads" list and wrote that today it is "considered one of the most important literary works documenting the downfall of a democracy" and became "Feutchwanger's most recognized novel".
559:
Beckerman in his essay defines the central conflict of the novel as the conflict of dignity of an individual and the external "common sense". In his opinion, this conflict is represented in the fates of Martin and
Berthold.
436:
that the novel "is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, 'Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.'"
493:
dignity becomes self-indulgent and dangerous. What remains instead is a deep sense of that rumbling "elemental force," and the impossible choices should you find yourself stuck in its path."
460:
Roffman noted that
Feuchtwanger's novels remained popular in German-speaking countries after the 1950s, but not in English-speaking ones. In 2020 the novel was re-discovered by publisher
464:
and re-printed in
English, with a revised translation, for the first time since the 1930s. Two years later, publisher McNally Editions issued an American edition with an introduction by
443:
later praised the novel as the "most striking, most widely read narrative description of the calamity that descended over Germany." In 1983, Frederick S. Roffman said of the novel in
50:
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that since Hitler's rise to power, no other "historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted the relentless disintegration of German humanism."
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principle", according to which art can "have a message" and participate in political life, and that Feuchtwanger "expected his work not just to be something, but to
324:
Feuchtwanger, a German Jew who was already well known for his criticism of the NSDAP, that year was stripped of his citizenship, his property in Berlin was seized,
548:. He also thinks that the novel "raises salient questions about the relationship between art and politics", as Feuchtwanger while writing the novel followed "the
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of Nazism and Fascism after Hitler's seizure of power. Feuchtwanger began reworking the screenplay in April 1933 and had the novel finished by October.
342:, when the author was already in exile in France. Feuchtwanger was writing about the events he was experiencing and only lightly fictionalizing them.
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309:(1940). In the same year when the novel was written, in 1933, the Nazis fully came into power, and the author published the novel already in exile.
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Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
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Edgar, a successful doctor at a Berlin hospital, faces an antisemitic public smear-campaign and is later removed from the hospital by the
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The book was based on research that Feuchtwanger wrote for a screenplay, on which he was working with the British screenwriter
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something", unlike many other German-language writers and writers of the United States, where this principle was dismissed.
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Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Knowledge (XXG) article at ]; see its history for attribution.
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a machine-translated version of the Italian article.
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The Oppermanns. A novel. Translated by James Cleugh
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Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature
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293:. It is the second novel in his
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355:Die Geschwister Oppenheim
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591:The Oppenheim Family
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971:Anti-fascist books
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822:The New York Times
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708:(3 October 2022).
653:The New York Times
647:(6 October 2022).
538:The New York Times
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584:Adaptations
572:in 1933 as
474:Pamela Paul
390:family saga
375:appeasement
330:Third Reich
235:Netherlands
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925:Categories
889:19 October
788:080788099X
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441:Klaus Mann
313:Background
159:Translator
40:in Italian
618:Egon Monk
603:a TV film
450:In 2018,
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351:Oppenheim
347:Oppermann
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249:774592110
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132:Oppenheim
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910:IMDb
891:2022
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