Lion Feuchtwanger: Exil, typescript (1939)
Lion Feuchtwanger: Exil, typescript (1939)
Viele engte das Exil ein, aber den Besseren gab es mehr Weite, Elastizität, es gab ihnen Blick für das Große, Wesentliche und lehrte sie, nicht am Unwesentlichen zu haften. Menschen, von New York nach Moskau geworfen und von Stockholm nach Kapstadt, mußten, wenn sie nicht umkommen wollten, über mehr Dinge nachdenken und tiefer in die Dinge hineinschauen als solche, die ihr Leben lang in ihrem Berliner Büro festhockten.
[Many felt restricted by exile, but the better ones gained more breadth from it, elasticity, it gave them an eye for the bigger picture, for the essential, and taught them not to get bogged down in the irrelevant. If they did not want to die, people who were thrown from New York to Moscow and from Stockholm to Cape Town had to think about more things and look at them in more depth than those who spent their lives stuck in an office in Berlin. (ed. trans.)]
Lion Feuchtwanger, Exil, 1940
The author Lion Feuchtwanger began working on this typescript for his novel Exil in May 1935 and completed the novel in August 1939. He dedicated this third and last part of his Wartesaal [Waiting Room] trilogy to the living and working conditions of Germans living in exile in Paris of the 1930s. Feuchtwanger knew the circle of émigrés and their turbulent lifestyle in Paris, as he often went to the city from the tranquil fishing village, Sanary-sur-Mer, where he chose to live during his exile in France. He also travelled to Paris to work together with Heinrich Mann on setting up the German Freedom Library.
Feuchtwanger’s figures struggle to achieve a balance between adapting to the hard requirements of life in exile and holding on to their ideals. The composer Sepp Trautwein almost loses sight completely of his musical work because of his job as an editor at Pariser Nachrichten. Out of fear for his daughter, who is still in Germany, the owner of Pariser Nachrichten collaborates with the Nazis.
While Feuchtwanger drew on real historical occurrences as individual motifs in his novel, he nevertheless attempted to present his figures as paradigmatic, that is, he did not aim to portray “real” people, but rather “historical” characters. For example, one storyline is based on the kidnapping of a journalist. Various narrative strands in Exil take place around the exile newspaper Pariser Nachrichten. According to Feuchtwanger, this newspaper was based on the Saarland exile magazine Westland.
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