Writer’s work continues to inspire protest against censorship
In accordance with Banned Books Week, which ends Saturday, USC held several different events that celebrate intellectual freedom by calling attention to censorship and repression.
On Tuesday, USC screened Howl — the story of Allen Ginsberg and the landmark 1957 obscenity case that sought to ban Howl and Other Poems on the basis that it contained no literary merit. It is no coincidence then that at Wednesday’s Visions and Voices event, USC Libraries hosted a panel to discuss Lion Feuchtwanger’s works in the context of media and government censorship.
Feuchtwanger was a German-Jewish writer of historical novels and plays. After realizing the extent of Hitler’s evil, he also published articles condemning the regime — the New York Herald Tribune published Feuchtwanger’s essay “Hitler’s War on Culture” in 1933. That same year, after learning that his citizenship and all his possessions had been taken away by the Nazis, Feuchtwanger decided to seek refuge in Southern France.
Feuchtwanger, however, was not safe from Hitler’s ever-increasing power. He was No. 1 on the Nazi regime’s list of the most dangerous authors, hence the title of the event — “Enemy Number One.”
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was imprisoned and placed in an internment camp in France along with Nazi enemies and spies. After escaping the clutches of the Nazis, Feuchtwanger and his wife took their final refuge in Los Angeles, in a Spanish Colonial Revival house, which they called Villa Aurora.
“Enemy Number One,” featured a panel comprised of Zimbabwean writer Christopher Mlalaz and USC English professor Michelle Gordon and Wolf Gruner, a USC professor of history who holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies. Speaking of his experiences with media censorship under the government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Mlalazi’s experience was skillfully included within the context of Feuchtwanger’s 1940 internment and escape from Nazi-occupied France.
Mlalazi, the recipient of the 2010 Villa Aurora Feuchtwanger Fellowship, gave the audience frightening accounts of Mugabe’s censorship tactics — including a description of the torture that the production manager of his satirical play, The Crocodile of Zambezi, endured after the show’s second night.
Mlalazi himself has received ominous phone calls since announcing his excitement for winning the Feuchtwanger Fellowship on Facebook. Just like Feuchwanger, Mlalazi lives in a constant state of fear.
Fear, however, is a double-edged sword: Although it paralyzes, it also motivates. Despite some apprehension, Mlalazi will return to Zimbabwe in December so that he can be with his friends and family — and to continue helping his people answer questions about themselves and their country.
Mlalazi is careful, however, to mask his social and political critique behind a veil of abstraction and metaphor.
“We will never be silenced,” he said.
Feuchtwanger had this same mentality in the face of the enemy. He was not afraid to write an angry letter to the Nazis who took his house and burned his library. Feuchtwanger, like so many other writers, was impelled to open the eyes of the world and let them see the horrors that were occurring.
It is no wonder that Mlalazi saw a lot of himself when reading the gripping story of Feuchtwanger’s internment and subsequent escape to the United States. It is his courageous way of coping with evil that unites Mlalazi with Feuchtwanger, and a host of others. Feuchtwanger’s novels remain influential and relevant today in many ways.
At the end of the event, attendees was invited to visit USC’s Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, located on the second floor of Doheny Library. Doheny houses all of Feuchtwanger’s most valuable possessions. The Feuchtwangers’ longtime relationship with USC professor Harold von Hofe gave Marta Feuchtwanger (Lion’s wife) the reason she needed to enable USC to establish the Feuchtwanger Institute for the Study of Exile Literature.
After Marta’s death in 1987, USC retained the rights of the Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and sold it to The Berlin Lottery Foundation for $1.9 million. USC also gave them a permanent loan of 20,000 books under the condition that the Villa remain as it was during Feuchtwanger’s time.
The money gained as a result, along with the royalties USC receives for Feuchtwanger’s works, helps to maintain and uphold the pristine status of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. In conjunction with the Visions and Voices event, USC Libraries used its rights to the author’s works to proudly showcase its recently published edition of Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Devil in France.
Considering Feuchtwanger’s passion for education and understanding and interpreting history, it would have made him proud to see such a well-attended event held in his honor. It was Marta Feuchtwanger’s dream to memorialize her husband’s life and to ensure that their book collection — which is continually being expanded — would be taken advantage of.
The Feuchtwanger’s lost all of their possessions twice to the Nazis, and they were not about to see their last collection lost in a similar way. They could not have imagined a better future for their third personal library.
I saw Crystal City’s comment. I felt a little elaboration on what he said was in order. It is well known that 110,000 Japanese Americans were locked in various internment camps around the country during WW2. It is not as well known that 11,000 German Americans and 3,000 Italian Americans shared their fate. Some Jewish refugees also found themselves interned because they wer from Germany! When I have spoken of this to people, the question is usually asked about Nazi membership. With a handful of exceptions, the answer was, by and large, no, the people interned had little to do with the Nazi Party. These 14,000 people were immigrants and their American born children who were caught in the type of vise that America would see in the McCarthy era with the Communist Witch Hunts. For example, a business rival would call the FBI and falsely report that a family had a picture of Hitler over their mantle, when the family had no mantle at all. That family was locked up, True story. Large numbers of Italian emigres and Italian Americans were ENCOURAGED to move off the West Coast with veiled hints that what happend to the Japanese could happen to them. Fort Missoula was a biracial internment camp (Japanese/Italian). There was a family camp in Crystal City Texas that was very multiethnic and multinational. The point that I think needs to be made is that, for whatever reason or reasons, the the depth of the story of the Enemy Alien Internment Program is far deeper than just anti-Japanese sentiment.
The point that ties this response to the above article is that there is a small number of dedicated historians, survivors and political activist who are trying to bring the depths of the full scope of the internment to light in an era of apparent apathy.
And we, German Americans will also not be silenced. We too were interned right here in the United States. The media, Congress, and the Courts ignore our plea to put daylight on the events that affected the German American victims. Nevertheless, we too will prevail!