‘The Oppermans,’ by Lion Feucthwanger
Translated by James Cleugh, Introduction by Joshua Cohen
McNally Editions, 400 pages

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. It is a dispatch from the tipping point and sheds light on what it felt like to live under the gathering shadows of looming catastrophe. 

The book is a family biography gone haywire. It centers on a prosperous German-Jewish family shredded by the Nazi buzzsaw. Feuchtwanger wrote it in the second half of 1933, and its action transpires between the winter of 1932, during the Weimar Republic’s death rattles, and the summer of 1933, when the Nazis consolidated power. 

“The Oppermans” is a novel that doubles as a seismograph.

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.” Mr. Cohen lauds Feuchtwanger as a “writer as curious and prolific as an entire cohort of his peers,” but laments that “his novels go unread; his plays go unperformed; he is a first class writer without a first class berth.” 

If there is justice in letters, if not in life, that 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. It is a biography of the eponymous family, and their experiences as the Nazis came to power. The horrors it limns are all the more chilling for being incipient. 

Even readers familiar with the destruction of European Jewry could find themselves thrown off-kilter by this account of the Holocaust in utero. The Final Solution is years away, and the Nazis are brutes but not yet the genocidaires of Belzec, Auschwitz, and Babi Yar. This is the moment when things could have been otherwise, when what “The Oppermans” calls the “Nationalist” party was a joke, until is wasn’t. 

There are three Opperman brothers, and they all come undone. Martin carries on the family business under the watchful portrait of his grandfather Immanuel, who amassed the family fortune. His grandson will preside over its liquidation. Gustav is an intellectual who awakens late to what is happening outside the walls of his book-lined study. Edgar is a pioneering physician who thinks of himself as a man of science, not a Jew. 

“The Oppermanns” shines when it aims a spotlight on the small-scale gains that made Hitler possible. A Nazi schoolteacher bullies Martin’s son and changes the curriculum, and both students and staff are too morally supine to stop it. “The boys,” we are told, “quickly come to terms with their first Nationalist teacher.” The Oppermans believe that “they had won a place for themselves in this country.” They hardly stood a chance. 

The signs are everywhere, but so are the misreadings. A salesman notices that a gang tries to push a Jew in front of a train, but reassures himself that they were stopped in time. The butler at a private club turns up for work one day wearing a swastika. One of Martin’s gentile business partners turns prophetic and mutters, “those gentlemen are going to burn their fingers someday.” Hitler, “the Leader,” is dismissed because his prose is turgid.

It is easy to look back at the haute bourgeoisie Oppermans and fault them for their complacency. A farsighted niece moves to Palestine, and a savvy brother-in-law makes arrangements to move his assets, and then his family, abroad. Virtuous non-Jews sense the wind’s direction and do what they can, while they still can. By and large, however, the Oppermans are slow to see and sluggish to act. They fail to perceive the “fathomless, worldwide stupidity.”

It is to Feuchtwanger’s credit that we like and respect his characters enough to resist blaming the Oppermans for their own misfortune. The novel is populated with major and minor characters who are allowed petty anxieties and grandiose dreams. They yearn for more marks, or a plate of piping hot schnitzel, or a joyride through Berlin. They try to keep the Nazis in the background because their foreground is full of life.  

Once the die has already been cast, the characters can reflect on how the Nazis “gambled on the stupidity of the masses with alarming accuracy” and attribute their success to “primitive peasant craftiness.” By then, many who once laughed at what the book terms the “barbarians” have joined them. The family business has been Aryanized, and the first concentration camps are up and running. The book ends when the real horror begins.