Time & Perspective Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger is calling out a lazy suspicion that still haunts historical fiction: if you write about the past, you must be trying to hide from the present. The line has the clipped, prosecutorial feel of an indictment, and that’s the point. He’s not confessing to escapism; he’s describing the accusation lodged against writers who refuse the newsroom’s deadlines. “Suspected” matters as much as “reactionary” - it frames the charge as reflexive, socially produced, less a fair reading than a cultural tell.

The subtext is about who gets to claim relevance. In moments of political heat, art is pressured to prove its usefulness, preferably by speaking in contemporary slogans. Feuchtwanger, a German-Jewish novelist who watched Europe slide into fascism and ended up in exile, knew how quickly “engaged” can become a demand for alignment. If the present is owned by the loudest ideologies, the past can look like either refuge or resistance. His irony is that historical narration is never neutral: choosing which “events…have run their course” is a way of measuring what hasn’t.

Context sharpens the sting. Feuchtwanger’s own bestselling historical novels (from Jewish antiquity to early modern Europe) weren’t antiques; they were disguised diagnostics of authoritarianism, scapegoating, and mass psychology. The sentence exposes a paradox: the past is treated as politically safe until a writer uses it to make the present unmistakable. Then the charge flips - not escapist, but dangerous.