short on time, short on paper and ink, short on everything but purpose. In the nine months between the spring and the fall of 1933, he conjured up an entire world and chronicled its destruction, which he set within another nine-month span, more-or-less simultaneous—specifically, between the last free elections of the Weimar Republic in winter 1932 and Hitler’s outlawing of non-Nazi parties and dissolution of the Reichstag in summer 1933. In other words, Feuchtwanger wrote The Oppermanns in real time, as the events he was writing about were still unfolding, and even while he was suffering the
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