Lion Feuchtwanger: Dictating, film (1956)
Lion Feuchtwanger: Dictating, film (1956)
Er diktierte grundsätzlich seiner Sekretärin, und zwar stundenlang alles, was ihm durch den Kopf ging, die Pläne zu einem neuen Roman, die verschiedenen Möglichkeiten, Teile eines Kapitels, Bruchstücke, Sätze, Erinnerungen an seine Zeitungslektüre oder an gestrige Gespräche, Klatsch, [...] Charakterskizzen der Romanfiguren oder der deutschen Dichter in Sanary, was Feuchtwanger gerne zum Abendessen bekäme und seine Meinung übers Wetter [...].
[He basically dictated everything that went through his head to his secretary – for hours at a time: the plans for a new novel, the various options, parts of a chapter, fragments, sentences, musings on what he had read in the newspapers or conversations he had had the day before, gossip, [...] character sketches of novel figures or German poets in Sanary-sur-Mer, what he would like to eat for dinner and his thoughts on the weather [...]. (ed. trans.)]
Hermann Kesten: Meine Freunde, die Poeten, 2006
The film records how the writer Lion Feuchtwanger dictated his last novel Jefta und seine Tochter [Jephta and his Daughter], which was published in 1957, to his secretary Hilde Waldo. All of the novels that Feuchtwanger authored from 1941 until his death in 1958 in Pacific Palisades came about in this manner. After his morning exercises, Feuchtwanger went to work in the study of his spacious villa where he dictated various versions of the chapters of his novel, which would keep his secretary typing long into the evening.
This method of working was beyond the financial means of many exiled authors. However, Feuchtwanger's novels were successful in America. His books were distributed by large book societies such as the “Book-of-the-Month-Club”.
Hilde Waldo was also an exiled German who initially hailed from Berlin. Immediately after Feuchtwanger hired her as his secretary in 1942, the FBI began to take an interest in her. The records document numerous contacts between Waldo and the FBI. As a left-wing intellectual who had travelled to the Stalinist Soviet Union between 1936 and 1937, Feuchtwanger was treated with suspicion by the US authorities and was subject to observation by the FBI in a similar way as his colleague Bertolt Brecht.
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