The Oppermanns

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. (Nov.)