September 2025

I already said just a bit about this book, comparing my experience reading it with my experience of reading Prophet Song last year. While reading each of these books, I found it difficult sometimes to remember whether I read something in the book — i.e., a fictional account — or something in the day’s newspaper. This brings to mind a snippet from Catherine Lacey’s novel The Möbius Book:

My friend Heidi’s son once told her he wasn’t going to finish reading a book he’d begun. What’s wrong with the book? she asked. Too fictiony, he said. What do you mean, too fictiony? she asked. Too realistic, he said.

There were moments while reading this book alongside U.S. news that fiction became too realistic. And other moments when the news became seemingly fictiony. At times I found myself struggling to remember whether I’d read about a particular event in the novel or in the newspaper.

Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of The Oppermanns, was a German Jew who moved from Germany to France in 1933. As Joshua Cohen says in his introduction, Feuchtwanger wrote the book in real time, with the timeline of the novel running less than a year before the time when he was writing. Feuchtwanger had good reason to leave Germany. He was already an acclaimed playwright and novelist, and he had been harshly critical of the Nazi party in some of those writings. Wikipedia reports that after Hitler came to power, Feuchtwanger was identified in government documents as “Enemy of the state number one.” He was still in France when Germany occupied the country in 1938. After a brief imprisonment, he managed to escape to the United States.

The novel is an extended account of the Oppermann family, focusing on three brothers who had built on their grandfather’s success as a German business man. One of the brothers directs the furniture store established by their grandfather. A second is a successful surgeon. A third is a literary scholar. There are two other siblings in the family: a sister who married a Jewish man from Eastern Europe (but who has somehow attained American citizenship) and a brother who died in World War I, having earned an Iron Cross for his service.

The books opens in November 1932, only months before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Despite the more and more explicit and concrete expressions of anti-Semitism, each of the Oppermann brothers feel secure in their social and financial standing and therefore confident that they are in control of their lives. They see Hitler’s rise to the Chancellorship as a blip and are confident that the German people will soon come to their senses. (It’s worth noting here that Feuchtwanger himself said in a December 1932 interview that Hitler was finished.)

I won’t chronicle the details of the next nine months. The cultural and economic status of the Oppermann family deteriorates rapidly. They struggle to respond to the threats to their lives and livelihood, in large part because for months they simply cannot accept the fact that these are real threats. “It seemed ridiculous to imagine that the tame, domesticated beast — the common man — threatened to revert to his wolfish nature.” There’s an allusion to Plato here: Plato characterized the tyrannical individual as a wolf.

As the book nears its end, the Oppermann family gathers one last time, knowing that they’re unlikely to be together ever again:

Their homeland has slipped away from them. … they had lost the business in Gertraudtenstrasse and everything connected with it, they had lost Edgar’s laboratory and the house in Max Reger Strasse. That which three generations in Berlin and three times seven generations of them in Germany had built up, was gone. Martin was going to London, Edgar to Paris. Ruth was in Tel Aviv; Gustav, Jacques, and Heinrich were going no one knew where. They would be scattered over the four seas of the world; they would be scattered to all the eight winds.

What do words like happiness and freedom mean in a world dominated by consumerism? I discovered this book in the afterword to Perfection, which I read in July. Latronico, the author of Perfection, says in that afterword that he’s indebted to Perec, and I can definitely see the influence. Both books explore a life shaped by advertising and the desires that advertising attempts to instill in us. It’s fascinating to me not only how Latronica brought in the power of social media but also how Perec managed to capture some of the uneasiness of our more recent times, even without social media. Both books are narrated in a rather droll tone — or, as I said in my notes about Perfection, a voice that somehow reminds me of Detective Friday from the old Dragnet series.

Perec’s characters are a young couple who with their friends seek to live a life unattached to things, even as they spend more than a little energy lusting after those things. “They cast their eyes enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and perfection of the upper middle classes” (p. 50). They see those things as coming with too high a cost — the cost of giving up spontaneity and freedom. “For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life’s enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership” (p. 65).

While reading the book I was haunted by my memory of a commitment I made while I was in college: I was determined never to own more things than I could fit into my Volkswagen Beetle. Needless to say, that didn’t last long. My first component stereo system pushed me over the edge. But at least I enjoyed listening to the music.