Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us
By Pamela Paul
Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” which is being rereleased this month with a revised translation of James Cleugh’s original by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, is one of those books. It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.
The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/opinion/the-oppermanns-feuchtwanger.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/10/10/pamela-paul-ninety-years-ago/
https://multiculturalmeanderings.com/2022/10/08/paul-ninety-years-ago-this-book-tried-to-warn-us/