On the remainders – Alex Ross earlier this year in the New Yorker:

‘The villa fell vacant in 1939. Four years later, it attracted the attention of Marta Feuchtwanger, the wife of the German émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. The price was absurdly low: nine thousand dollars, or about a hundred and sixty-four thousand today. Many windows were broken, and dirt had accumulated on the floor. Marta cleaned the place out and furnished it with items from junk stores. When the leftist composer Hanns Eisler was forced to leave the United States, in 1948, he left behind a massive mahogany couch. Lion, meanwhile, set about reconstituting his library. A manic bibliophile, he had lost his book collection twice: first when he left Berlin, in 1933; then when he fled France, in 1940. By the time of his death, in 1958, he had acquired some thirty thousand volumes. Hounded by the F.B.I. for his leftist views, he thought of returning to Europe, but he would have had to leave his library behind once again.’

(…)

‘Much the same thing happened on January 7th and 8th of this year, except that it was an even closer call. Houses on either side had been completely obliterated. Fire had marched up the hillside to the edge of the small back lawn. But the villa suffered no obvious harm. More than twenty thousand of Lion’s books remain on the shelves. He had not lost his library a third time.’

Read the article here.

I visisted the Feuchtwanger villa in 1998 on 1999, I was invited by Peter Lilienthal, who wanted to write a screenplay for him. (It never happened.)

I was thinking of the villa because I’m reading Jud Süß in a new Dutch translation.

It’s good to read the novel first, before seeing the nazi-propaganda movie with the same name.

The Feuchtwanger novel is a bit long-winded, but still very much worth reading, captivating. Jud Süß as Scarface.