A portrait of 1933

The Oppermanns is a novel torn from history, but with lessons for today

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

On the recommendation of a former professor-adviser of my undergraduate studies in political economy, I purchased a copy of The Oppermanns, a novel written by Lion Feuchtwanger in the incandescent heat of the year 1933 in Berlin, Germany.

Feuchtwanger was born in 1884 — five years older than Adolf Hitler — but was an actual German, unlike the “Bohemian corporal,” as Weimar President and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg referred to him, owing to der Führer’s provenance in Austria. 

Born in Munich to an Orthodox Jewish family that had weathered pogroms in the 16th century and, by the 19th century, had flourished in the foodstuffs industry, Feuchtwanger went on to found the publication Der Spiegel (which exists today as a powerful media property) and developed into a playwright, who influenced the likes of Bertolt Brecht.

Unlike Brecht, Feuchtwanger’s plays were not performed in their day, including Jud Süß, written in 1916 for stage but novelized in 1925, then appropriated and doggerelized in 1940 by the Nazis into a notorious piece of antisemitic propaganda

The other play Feuchtwanger wrote and that morphed into a novel was The Oppermanns, which portrays how the members of a large Jewish-Christian family navigated the swiftly evolving (or devolving) conditions in their multi-generational homeland.

Divided into three sections titled “Yesterday,” “Today” and “Tomorrow,” the book covers a deceptively short amount of time — only a year or so, with certain days, weeks and months freighted with more uncertainty and terror than others. But the structure lends itself to the stepwise progression of dictatorship as it creeps up on people who are too often over-confident in the stability of their lives and the institutions that underpin them.

While being populated by composite characters, The Oppermanns is a gripping portrait that feels absolutely true, considering that it was written amid the real-time, real-life advance of National Socialism in crumbling Weimar Germany. The book’s horror flows not only from the everyday travails experienced by its personalities — nor what the reader knows occurred in the Holocaust, which was looming on the horizon, and which Feuchtwanger foresaw even in those “early days” of the Nazi regime — but how relatable it feels to current conditions in the United States.

For instance, the passage below occurs on Page 225 and is (in part) a monologue by the family attorney Mühlheim in reference to the fire that gutted Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, which had just occurred and an event that various Oppermann family members are either denying the Nazis perpetrated, claiming it wasn’t that big of a deal or getting ready to quit Germany for Palestine because of.

“They [the Nazis] have gambled on the stupidity of the masses with alarming accuracy,” Mühlheim warns Gustav Oppermann in a predawn visitation during which he encourages his friend and client to get out while the getting is good. 

“The Leader [Hitler] himself frankly stated that such gambles were the fundamental principle of his political actions: why shouldn’t they continue along those lines? …,” he says, adding: 

“They don’t bother about unnecessary niceties. They are gigantic, shockingly coarsened, provincial Machiavellis. Their success is chiefly due to this primitive peasant craftiness. The fact is, the others inevitably persist in believing that no one could be taken in by such crudeness. And then, equally inevitably, everybody is taken in.”

As more and more of the Oppermanns’ neighbors, colleagues and erstwhile friends are “taken in,” they find their status slipping away, their jobs imperiled and their reputations destroyed by the opportunism that the Nazi terror offers to those who stand to benefit from it. Their reactions are varied: shock, denial, flight and the torturous act of coming to grips with what’s really happening around them. They suddenly can’t say certain things, do certain things, go certain places — not because of some high-handed edict (that would come later), but because of fear. With all other political parties outlawed and mobs marching in the streets to the tune of the Horst-Wessel-Lied (named for an assassinated brownshirt whom the Nazis turned into a national martyr), they simply don’t feel safe in the place their family has called home for centuries.

There is one character in The Oppermanns who confronts this “crudeness” with the most heartbreaking directness and courage, and that is Berthold Oppermann, Gustav’s nephew. 

Berthold is 17 years old and the best student at his school, which prides itself on its liberal arts approach to education. Berthold’s earnestness and integrity are challenged when a new headmaster arrives with a Hitlerian agenda, full of pseudo-history, pseudo-science and pseudo-morality, and he fills the class’ curriculum with his claptrap. 

Meanwhile, Berthold has been preparing a lecture to be presented to his classmates on humanism, but is forced to scrap that in favor of an exploration of “Arminius, the German” — an obviously propagandistic fantasy rooted in German exceptionalism. 

Berthold is no dummy, though. He immediately picks up on the intellectual dishonesty of the assignment, yet works through the nights to write a nuanced, critical and analytical argument that deflates the myth of Arminius while also extolling supposed “German values.” 

(Arminius was the Roman-era Cheruscan tribal chieftain who destroyed three legions in the Teutoburg Forest and — at least according to the Nazis’ retelling — founded the Germanic cultural tradition, which was untrue, as Berthold knows.)

With his thesis completed and mid-delivery, Berthold suggests Arminius wasn’t the grand founder of Germanism, and the headmaster interrupts and denounces him before the class — the former’s attempt at “restoring truth and sanity” to German history, to borrow a contemporary phrase.

The headmaster demands Berthold apologize and recant — despite the fact that he wasn’t allowed to finish — though the boy sticks to his guns, despite the dire ramifications to his own academic life and the lives of his family. He’s a patriotic German with a true and powerful sense of the country’s intellectual, moral and philosophical heritage, of which he feels a part. He can’t imagine why another German would be so dense. It doesn’t matter: The headmaster is in charge and Berthold isn’t.

A lot of us feel like Berthold right now. We’re being told by the “headmaster” or “the Leader” a pack of nonsense that is simply not true, and if we say the obvious thing — that it’s not true — then we’re told that we’re the ones who are crazy or unpatriotic, ahistorical, un-American.

We are not.

And if there’s one truth in Feuchtwanger’s wrenching portrait of the deeply human Oppermanns, it’s how terrifying it is to live in a country you love as it gives in to its basest instincts — against reason, against community, against humanity — along with the immense sadness that brings and the courage necessary to meet it.