“How Dearly One Pays for Defending the Soviets”: Lion Feuchtwanger in the American Exile (Part III: 1945–1950)

The article examines the final period of Lion Feuchtwanger’s life during his American exile. The onset of the Cold War, which manifested itself in the United States as the era of McCarthyism, evoked for Feuchtwanger strong parallels with the early years of Nazism in Germany and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of France. Suspicions of “un-American activities” fell primarily upon émigrés who held communist sympathies or supported the Soviet Union’s anti-nuclear stance. Both Feuchtwanger himself and his close associates—including Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Mann—were suspected of communist affiliations and ties to the USSR. Eisler was deported from the United States; Brecht fled to Paris immediately after being summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); Chaplin’s re-entry visa was revoked while he was in London; and Thomas Mann, subjected to sustained vilification in the American press, chose to remain permanently in Switzerland. Feuchtwanger, who had been under FBI surveillance since his arrival in the United States, was denied American citizenship — a status that would have guaranteed his right to re-enter the country after traveling to Europe. A renewed wave of attacks in the American press followed his receipt in 1953 of the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). After hosting a delegation of Soviet journalists at his home in 1955, Feuchtwanger was definitively branded as a “friend of the Soviet Union.” Although his novels began to be published in Russian from this period onward — a development of profound personal significance to him — the final years of his life, according to the recollections of his widow, Marta Feuchtwanger, were marked by persistent fear of deportation. Despite his severe illness, HUAC and FBI agents conducted prolonged interrogations at his residence, Villa Aurora, which officials claimed were necessary prerequisites for his naturalization. Marta Feuchtwanger was granted American citizenship only after her husband’s death.