Time & Perspective Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger lands the point with a clean bit of engineering shade: confusing an artifact with the infrastructure that carries it is a category error. A historical novel, like a melody, is designed to move through you, not to diagram the machinery behind it. By yoking literature to radio transmission, he picks a deliberately technical, modern metaphor that flatters the reader’s common sense. Of course you wouldn’t demand that a composer explain electromagnetic propagation; why demand archival precision from a novelist whose job is selection, distortion, and emphasis?

The subtext is defensive but not evasive. Feuchtwanger isn’t saying history doesn’t matter; he’s warning against treating narrative charisma as credential. Historical fiction thrives on plausibility, not proof. It raids the past for character, motive, atmosphere, and moral pressure, then arranges them into a story that feels inevitable. That inevitability is the trap: readers often confuse “it makes sense” with “it happened.” His analogy quietly accuses the audience of outsourcing their historical literacy to entertainment, then blaming the entertainer for not being a textbook.

Context sharpens the barb. Feuchtwanger wrote in a Europe where propaganda and mythmaking were not parlor games but political weapons, and he watched how seductive stories could harden into “history” in the public mind. The line is a plea for epistemic boundaries: admire the craft, interrogate the source, and don’t mistake emotional truth for factual authority.