The Oppermanns

''The Oppermanns'' (german: Die Geschwister Oppermann) is a 1933 novel by Lion Feuchtwanger. It is the second novel in his ''Wartesaal'' ("The Waiting Room") trilogy, which tells about the rise of Nazism in Germany; the first part of the trilogy is ''Success'' (1930) and the last is ''Exil'' (1940). In the same year when the novel was written, in 1933, the Nazis fully came into power, and the author published the novel already in exile.

Background

The novel was written while the Nazis were coming into power in the Weimar Republic; it was completed in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Feuchtwanger, a German Jew who was already well known for his criticism of NSDAP, that year was stripped of his citizenship, his property in Berlin was seized, his works were included in the lists of "Un-German" literature that was burned in May, and he was forever banned from publishing in the newly established Third Reich. ''The Oppermanns'' was first printed by the Dutch ''Querido Verlag'', when the author was already in exile in France. Feuchtwanger was writing about the events he was experiencing and only lightly fictionalizing them. In the first edition, the surname was changed from ''Oppermann'' to ''Oppenheim'', and the title was changed to ''Die Geschwister Oppenheim''; the surname was corrected in later editions and translations. According to Maik Grote, this happened because when the novel was about to be printed, Feuchtwanger's brother received a threatening letter, in which a professor whose name was also Oppermann, also an SA leader, wrote that there had never been a Jewish family with that surname, and that he could prove that by his genealogy which goes back to the 13th century. Feuchtwanger informed Querido about the letter and asked to change the surname.

The book was based on research that Feuchtwanger wrote for a screenplay, on which he was working with the British screenwriter Sidney Gilliat. Although the project was commissioned by the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, it was never completed as MacDonald and his government decided upon a course of appeasement of Nazism and Fascism after Hitler's seizure of power. Feuchtwanger began reworking the screenplay in April 1933 and had the novel finished by October.

Plot

''The Oppermanns'' is a family saga that chronicles the fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture company under the rise of Nazism.

In "time immemorial", Emmanuel Oppermann, a merchant who moves to Berlin, supplies the Prussian Army and starts the Oppermann furniture company. The main characters are his grandson Gustav Oppermann, a writer who is working on a biography of Gotthold Lessing, and his brothers Martin and Edgar. The story takes place between November 1932, when Gustav turns 50 years old, and the late summer of 1933. While the Nazis are quickly establishing their dictatorship, many Germans that do not share their views, as well as some Jews, insist that things will eventually turn around and thus prefer to wait passively or ignore what is happening around them. Edgar, a successful doctor at a Berlin hospital, faces an antisemitic public smear-campaign and is later removed from the hospital by the ''Sturmabteilung''. Martin, the head of the Oppermann family business, is forced to merge it with an "Aryan" German partner. Meanwhile, Martin's 17-year-old son Berthold is expelled from his soccer club despite his talent for the sport, and in class, he is abused by a Nazi teacher for refusing to express his loyalty to the new regime. Gustav decides to leave Germany and move to Switzerland, but later comes back under a false passport to become an anti-Nazi political activist and to document Nazi crimes. He is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, although he is eventually released.

Reception

The first German-language publication of ''The Oppermanns'' sold approximately 20,000 copies. Overall, the book sold approximately 250,000 copies worldwide, and was translated into over 10 languages. A few months after the first publication, the novel was translated into English and released in the United States. Fred T. March wrote in 1934 in ''The Times'', that the novel "is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, 'Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.'"

Klaus Mann later praised the novel as the "most striking, most widely read narrative description of the calamity that descended over Germany." In 1983, Frederick S. Roffman said of the novel in ''The New York Times'' that since Hitler's rise to power, no other "historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted the relentless disintegration of German humanism."

In 2018, ''Deutsche Welle'' placed the book in their "100 German Must-Reads" list and wrote that today it is "considered one of the most important literary works documenting the downfall of a democracy" and became "Feutchwanger's most recognized novel".

Roffman noted that Feuchtwanger's novels remained popular in German-speaking countries after the 1950s, but not in English-speaking ones. In October 2022, the novel was rediscovered, and Joshua Cohen revised the 1933 translation and published an introduction to it, adapted version of which was published as an essay in ''The New York Times''. While Pamela Paul

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