Time & Perspective Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Depicting history is never just a neutral act of description; it’s a choice about what to light up and what to leave in shadow. Feuchtwanger’s line catches the paranoia that clings to historical storytelling, especially in societies flirting with reaction: once you start reconstructing the past with texture and empathy, you risk giving it an aura. The “short step” is doing a lot of work here. It suggests a slippery, almost inevitable drift from representation to reverence, as if narrative itself is a kind of propaganda solvent that dissolves critical distance.

As a novelist, Feuchtwanger isn’t attacking history so much as exposing the moral hazard of craft. Fiction makes the past legible by giving it drama, motive, and atmosphere - the very ingredients that can turn brutality into “grandeur” and inequality into “order.” The suspicion he names isn’t merely about bad-faith nostalgists; it’s also about audiences. Readers crave coherence and heroes. They prefer a past that feels meaningful over one that feels contingent, ugly, and random. That appetite pressures storytellers to smooth edges, to translate complexity into page-turning myth.

Context matters: Feuchtwanger, a Jewish German writer pushed into exile by Nazism, watched a modern state weaponize romanticized history into mass politics. In that world, “glorifying the past” isn’t an aesthetic mistake; it’s a pipeline to authoritarian longing. The quote functions as a warning label on historical art: the more vividly you resurrect an era, the more carefully you must guard against making it attractive.