Judaism in the Works of Beer-Hofmann and Feuchtwanger (review)

Sarah Fraiman's study juxtaposes two prominent German Jewish writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866-1942) and Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958), whose careers differed in many respects. Beer-Hofmann was a Viennese dramatist and poet with strong ties to Austrian culture, best known for his early aestheticist novella Der Tod Georgs and for his biblical dramatic trilogy, Die Historie von König David. His limited but highly regarded corpus is marked by neoromantic and religious themes and motifs. [Feuchtwanger] was a prolific prose fiction writer with strong enlightenment inclinations. He not only broke new ground in the genre of the historical novel -- his subjects range from Josephus to Benjamin Franklin to Goya -- he wrote a number of works about German Jewry (Jud Süß: Die Geschwister Opperman; Exil) and bore witness to the crisis years of the 1930s. Unlike the much older Beer-Hofmann, Feuchtwanger flourished even after emigrating to the United States in 1940, as his novels were readily translated into English. Upon emigration, Beer-Hofmann retreated further into nostalgia, writing only a memoir of his beloved wife Paula, leaving his trilogy unfinished. Though Beer-Hofmann referred to his biblical trilogy as a "history," he kept lifelong distance from the political and social concerns of his day.