"After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones"
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Feuchtwanger is quietly blowing up the museum rope around "historical fiction". The line reads like a modest confession, but its subtext is a provocation: if the past feels safely sealed off, that's because writers and readers collude to keep it that way. By invoking his conscience, he frames the choice as ethical, not merely aesthetic. History, in his view, isn’t a costume department; it’s a device for telling the truth about the present when the present is dangerous to name directly.
That intent lands with extra force in Feuchtwanger's context. A German-Jewish novelist who watched Weimar instability curdle into fascism and then lived in exile, he understood how quickly "current events" become censored, distorted, or normalized. Setting a story in ancient Rome or early modern Europe can look like escapism, but he’s insisting it’s the opposite: a way to smuggle urgency past the gatekeepers of ideology and the reader's own defensiveness. The historical novel becomes a Trojan horse for contemporary critique.
The phrase "modern and up-to-date" also exposes a bias in literary prestige. Contemporary novels get treated as the real arena of relevance, while historical ones are pegged as nostalgia or pageantry. Feuchtwanger rejects that hierarchy. His wager is that power, propaganda, opportunism, and moral compromise don’t retire; they change uniforms. He isn't trying to make history "relatable". He’s arguing that it's already speaking in today's accent, if you listen without the comforting distance.
That intent lands with extra force in Feuchtwanger's context. A German-Jewish novelist who watched Weimar instability curdle into fascism and then lived in exile, he understood how quickly "current events" become censored, distorted, or normalized. Setting a story in ancient Rome or early modern Europe can look like escapism, but he’s insisting it’s the opposite: a way to smuggle urgency past the gatekeepers of ideology and the reader's own defensiveness. The historical novel becomes a Trojan horse for contemporary critique.
The phrase "modern and up-to-date" also exposes a bias in literary prestige. Contemporary novels get treated as the real arena of relevance, while historical ones are pegged as nostalgia or pageantry. Feuchtwanger rejects that hierarchy. His wager is that power, propaganda, opportunism, and moral compromise don’t retire; they change uniforms. He isn't trying to make history "relatable". He’s arguing that it's already speaking in today's accent, if you listen without the comforting distance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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