Reading Group Selection for May: The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger

The Book Beat reading group selection for May is The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger. Our discussion will be held Wednesday, May 31 at 7pm online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.

The Oppermanns is novel published in 1933. A revised translation with an introduction by Joshua Cohen appeared in 2022, bringing this important work back into the public eye. Completed while the author was in exile in France and banned from publishing in the newly established Third Reich, The Oppermanns tells the story of a bourgeois Jewish family whose life and business is overturned by the rise of Nazism. It anticipates the events of WWII and foreshadows much of the ideological turmoil of today. Unlike other historical novels concerning Nazi Germany, The Oppermanns provides a glimpse of the period in real-time from an early critic of the regime. According to Cohen, it remains “one of the last mas­ter­pieces of Ger­man Jew­ish culture.”

“The Oppermanns” immerses us in these oppositions, and in our own contradictions, and reminds us, every time we leave the page to check our phones, that just reading a novel about the German 1930s — about pervasive surveillance and militarized policing, about how the fake-news threats of “migrants” and “terrorism” can be manipulated to crush democratic norms — will never be enough to prevent any of that from ever happening again.” -Joshua Cohen, New York Times

“The novel is an emotional artifact, a remnant of a world sick with foreboding, incredulity, creeping fear, and—this may feel most familiar to us today—the impossibility of gauging whether a society is really at the breaking point.” —The Atlantic

“Readers will be struck by how little the language about white supremacy, antisemitism, the swapping of lies for facts, the discrediting of the press, and the embrace of violence over reason have changed. It’s hard to imagine a 90-year-old book being more timely.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Feuchtwanger’s dire vision of his home­land break­ing apart bears uncan­ny resem­blance to our cur­rent polit­i­cal malaise. As Cohen and oth­er lit­er­ary crit­ics have not­ed, The Opper­manns antic­i­pates many of the social and cul­tur­al (d)evolutions that haunt our own time.” —Jewish Book Council

Lion Feuchtwanger (b. 1884) was a German novelist, playwright, and key literary figure during the Weimar Republic. As a result of his criticism of the Nazi Party in Germany, he became a victim of government-sponsored persecution. In 1933, his name appeared on the first of Hitler’s Ausbürgerungsliste, documents that arbitrarily deprived certain Germans of their citizenship and rendered them stateless. He later found refuge in France and then the United States.