Time & Perspective Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger’s line lands like a polite footnote with a blade inside it. A novelist - not a credentialed historian - “should add” a minor clarification, and then quietly detonates the era’s favorite alibi: that modern history-writing is “scientific.” The phrasing matters. “Open to debate” sounds modest, almost procedural, but it’s a rhetorical trapdoor; once you admit debate, you admit uncertainty, and once you admit uncertainty, the whole prestige of “science” starts to look like costume jewelry.

The subtext is less anti-history than anti-certainty. In the early 20th century, the social sciences were busy borrowing lab-coated authority, while governments and ideologues were busy manufacturing narratives with the same tools: statistics, archives, official reports, “objective” language. Feuchtwanger, writing in the shadow of propaganda and total war, knows how easily a record becomes a script. His skepticism isn’t about whether facts exist; it’s about how selection, emphasis, and framing turn facts into fate.

Calling history “truly scientific” also hints at a category error. Science is repeatable; history is irreducibly singular. You can verify sources, test claims against evidence, correct errors - but you can’t rerun the French Revolution with a control group. Feuchtwanger’s intent is to puncture the self-seriousness of institutional history and defend a more honest stance: histories are constructed arguments, not neutral mirrors, and their “objectivity” often hides the storyteller’s hand. In a century that proved how lethal narratives can be, that’s not pedantry; it’s self-defense.