Title:: [[The Oppermanns]] Authors:: [[Lion Feuchtwanger]] Tags:: #fiction #historicalfiction Read:: [[2026-02-12]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/p/DUt4zoeDhLl/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[McNally Editions]], 2022 - Original Copyright:: 1933 - Pages:: 380 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9781946022332 ## Annotations Reading The Oppermanns in 2026 feels less like revisiting history than like watching a familiar pattern unfold. In his introduction to the 2022 edition (I recommend reading after finishing novel), Joshua Cohen refers to the Trump presidency in the past tense, describing warnings of a “Weimar sequel” as Cassandra cries. But reading this now, during a second Trump presidency, from Minneapolis–St. Paul, where masked federal agents have been detaining and disappearing people in broad daylight for how they look or speak, well, forgive me if that sense of a dodged bullet feels premature. Astonishingly published in 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, Feuchtwanger’s novel follows a prominent Jewish family as German civil society corrodes around them. What’s eye-opening isn’t hindsight, it’s proximity. Feuchtwanger was writing as events unfolded, and the novel’s own history (banned and burned by the regime it depicts) mirrors its warning. The book and its creation tell the same story: witness under threat. What unsettled me most is the familiarity of the types. The opportunists. The careerists. The true believers. The liberals convinced institutions will self-correct. The respectable figures who adapt, rationalize, accommodate. Your family and friends who pretend not to notice. In that way, it feels uncannily aligned with Dorothy Thompson’s “Who Goes Nazi?” The Oppermanns shows how a modern, educated society slides into open authoritarianism. No single moment feels decisive, but danger accumulates in concessions. As close to required reading as a novel can get. Translated by James Cleugh (also in 1933!)