The Oppermanns

The Oppermann brothers consider themselves exemplary German citizens: cultured, liberal, proud contributors to society. One runs the trusted Oppermann furniture chain. One is an eminent surgeon. One is a respected critic, book collector, and bon vivant. None can take Hitler or his supporters seriously. To them, anti-Semitism is a thing of the past. Only their sister and her husband grasp the true danger when the Oppermanns are pressured to bring an “Aryan” competitor into the family firm, or a new teacher changes the history lessons at their children’s school, or violence erupts in the streets.

Written in 1933—in real time, as the Nazis consolidated power—The Oppermanns captures the day-to-day vertigo of watching a liberal democracy fall apart. As Joshua Cohen writes in his introduction to this new edition, it is “one of the last masterpieces of German-Jewish culture.” Prescient and chilling, it has lost none of its power today.

“A long-forgotten masterpiece published in 1933 and recently reissued with a revised translation by the novelist Joshua Cohen. It is a book written in real time—written, that is, right on that threshold . . . 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 fact that Feuchtwanger could write with such clarity about history-altering events that had not yet been fully digested is astonishing.”

—Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

“Feuchtwanger delineates—with what was, at the time, agonizing prescience—the ever-darker unfolding of the Reich’s repressive mission, resulting in a novel at once unbearable and unputdownable. It is also an alarmingly timely reminder: the Nazis’ first steps—censorship, disinformation, and the sowing of fear and mistrust among citizens—in turn permit the unspeakable . . . [A] masterpiece . . . The exhortation that we read this book is as urgent as Feuchtwanger’s need to write it.”

—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“There are novels that are simultaneously very much of their time and yet almost clairvoyant about the future. Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns . . . is one of those books . . . 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 . . . It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow . . . But unlike much overtly political fiction, his book is imbued with all the humor, humanity and sweep of a 19th-century epic.”

—Pamela Paul, New York Times

“[A] methodically harrowing novel . . . McNally Editions has happily brought him back into circulation . . . The question that haunts The Oppermanns is eternally relevant: what kind of resistance is possible against ruthless power? . . . Feuchtwanger is too strong a writer to give a blandly reassuring answer. But the implication of the final pages is clear: in the great theater of history, useless gestures count.”

—Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“Symphonic . . . Think Buddenbrooks with Nazis . . . The Oppermanns presents how extinction feels from the inside. The habits that once kept you alive, passed on from generation to generation, no longer work. Everything you thought would prepare you for future success instead narrows your chances of survival. The news from 1933 is still news, if we know how to listen to it.”

—Marco Roth, Tablet Magazine

“Journalism is often called history’s first draft, but the rare novel manages to scoop even the zealous newspaper. The Oppermans, by Lion Feuchtwanger, is such a novel, written in the blur of real time as Germany molted into the Reich . . . The novel has been reissued by McNally Editions, which rescues worthy titles from obscurity. It is accompanied by an introduction from Joshua Cohen, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus . . . If there is justice in letters, if not in life, [the book’s] obscurity will now end. Reading The Oppermans is like riding a Ferrari into a slow motion car crash; the ride is a pleasure if you can ignore the wheels spinning out and look away from what’s coming around the bend.”

—A.R. Hoffman, The New York Sun

“Feuchtwanger achieved something remarkable: He wrote a powerful and literary book that managed to capture the truth of a harrowing moment—immediately before and after Hitler was named chancellor in January 1933. And he did it in almost real time . . . Feuchtwanger’s ability to render utterly real characters who labor with the very questions that were absorbing his contemporaries is illuminating. Reading him now—84 years after the book’s publication and 60 years after the author’s death—the quandaries feel very current.”

—Jens Kruse, Politico

“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 has changed. It's hard to imagine a 90-year-old book being more timely.”

—Kirkus, Starred Review

“Feuchtwanger 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 Cohen . . . For readers discovering this clear-eyed account now, it’s made all the more devastating by the vast scope of horrors it anticipated.”

—Publishers Weekly

“It’s impossible not to get a jolt of recognition when a character warns her husband, who ‘always believed everything was all right as long as one could prove one’s statements,’ that ‘nowadays accuracy meant nothing.’ . . . But Feuchtwanger tells the story of the Oppermanns and their friends and colleagues with such stunning immediacy that most of the time the reader’s attention is firmly on 1933, sharing their bafflement, anger and terror as a familiar, stable world collapses around them, to be replaced by barbarism . . . This gripping novel deserves to be widely read. It will stay with you for a very long time.”

—Anna Carey, The Irish Times

“Lion Feuchtwanger's lost classic The Oppermanns tracks the fate of a Jewish family in Berlin, who are alert to the early omens but don't believe the worst will happen . . . Few novels strike such a stark note of warning, or capture with such accuracy the perilous years of the rise of a dictatorship.”

—Nilanjana S Roy, Financial Times

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) was known in the 1920s as a bestselling historical novelist, a frequent collaborator with Bertolt Brecht, and an early, outspoken critic of the Nazi movement. Forced into exile in France, Feuchtwanger and his wife were interned by the Vichy government during World War II. They escaped to the United States and settled in Pacific Palisades, where they became central figures in the émigré community that included Brecht as well as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, among many others.

Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel, The Netanyahus, received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books include Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, and Witz. He is the editor of He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka and I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: The Elias Canetti Reader.

James Cleugh (1891–1969) was a poet, publisher, biographer, critic, and novelist, as well as a translator primarily from French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The Oppermanns • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022332

Oct 18, 2022 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 12

5" x 8.5" • 400 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022370