An enthralling roman à clé depicting the rise of Nazi-ideology in Germany. Martin Krueger, a museum director in Munich, has become quite unpopular and some people would like to be rid of him. Consequently, the lawsuit against him does not turn out to his favor. However, his friends keep fighting to prove his innocence. “The novel ‘Success’ is more than a ‘documentation of Bavaria’. It turns out to be the story about the overall state of affairs in the epoch of incipient Nazism in Germany.” Victor Klemperer

First published in 1934 but fully imagining the future of Germany over the ensuing years, The Oppermanns tells the compelling story of a remarkable German Jewish family confronted by Hitler's rise to power. Compared to works by Voltaire and Zola on its original publication, this prescient novel strives to awaken an often unsuspecting, sometimes politically naive, or else willfully blind world to the consequences of its stance in the face of national events—in this case, the rising tide of Nazism in 1930s Germany. The past and future meet in the saga of the Oppermanns, for three generations a family commercially well established in Berlin. In assimilated citizens like them, the emancipated Jew in Germany has become a fact. In a Berlin inhabited by troops in brown shirts, however, the Oppermanns have more to fear than an alien discomfort. For along with the swastikas and fascist salutes come discrimination, deceit, betrayal, and a tragedy that history has proved to be as true as this novel's astonishing, profoundly moving tale.

Not since The Oppermans has Feuchtwanger so successfully tapped the rich vein of current social problems as he does in this realistic picture of the German exiles in their new setting (in this case, Paris). ""Paris Gazette"" is the name of the journal run by the exiles, but controlled by a man who fears the repercussions of vitriolic pronouncements against the Nazis. Through the interlinking of the lives of men and women concerned, one gets highlights and shadows of an unreal new world, honeycombed with Nazi propagandists. The fight for principle, infinitely more important than the individual concerned, wrecks lives—and they all face another period of rebuilding. A powerful and challenging book-not for hammock reading. \[Kirkus Reviews\]