Just as history does not repeat itself, but does “rhyme,” so are a few other elements of life in this world; for instance, literature.
This morning I had the strange experience of historical deja vu, the literary version.
I write novels; I have published four of them since 2009.
How I got into this activity can be simply stated: it was something meaningful to do in response to my own, personal mid-life crisis.
I was reflecting on these events after encountering a book review in the New York Times this morning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/lion-feuchtwanger-oppermanns.html?
As I was reading there about a 1930’s German author, Lion Feuchtwanger, I had a feeling of deja vu.
If you don’t know what deja vu is, you can get a notion of it by viewing the cover of the vinyl LP record album, Deja Vu, recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, in 1972. That album jacket features a photo of the quartet as they had re-imagined their group would have existed in the American West, a century earlier.
But I digress. I was about to tell you about the German writer, Lion Feuchtwanger, whose historical fiction work preceded, by 73 years, my own novel, Smoke. Both books tell a story about events in Nazi Germany, 1930’s.
Lion wrote his novel, in “real time”, which is to say, his story was built arounds events that were actually happening in real time, while he was living, where he was living, in Germany, in the early 1930’s.
In contrast, I wrote my novel, Smoke, as part of a wider European odyssey set in 1937, based on historical research.
Admittedly, Lion was far more qualified to write about Nazi Germany than I am. He was living there, and saw first-hand, the terrible events that were being inflicted on Germans—especially Jews—at that time.
In my case, however, because I had discovered some terrible truth about Europe, specifically Germany, by research, I decided that there was an historical fiction tale that needed to be told. . . hence, Smoke, which I published in 2011.
In Joshua Cohen’s NYTimes review yesterday, Oct 3, he writes this basic description of Lion’s novel about a persecuted family in 1933:
“The Oppermanns” is a novel about the decline and fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture dynasty whose members are unable to countenance the rising threat of National Socialism.”
This brief description got my attention, because the historical fiction story that I composed in Smoke includes events in which a Jewish family, the Eschens (altough they are not the main characters) make the very difficult, but necessary, decision to leave their native Munich home. The Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1934 were making life so difficult and dangerous for them. These people had a thriving cattle/meat/deli business that the third reich basically stole from them. This persecution was happening all over Germany during the third reich, 1930's.
That theft also included the Nazis' imprisonment of the Eschens' son, Heinrich, in a prison called Dachau in 1937. I chose their fictional family name to be “Eschen” because my research revealed that the first prisoner who was killed at Dachau had that name. In my story, however, Heinrich manages to get out of that first concentration camp.
So this morning while reading Joshua Cohen’s review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns” I had the deja vumoment.
These two fictionalized families had similar backgrounds. One had a furniture dynasty; the a other a prosperous deli. But both families suffered the oppression of anti-semitic Third Reich Nazi persecution, and ultimately. . . Holocaust.
All that to say: May it never happen again! Let history be a lesson, a warning, for us here and now.
I was not able to comment in the NYT on Joshua Cohen’s review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.” So I wrote this blog instead. I had to do something to get the deja vu out of my system!
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