Barbara Drosihn

With «Success», we journey into the inner workings of a society in which everything is measured in terms of personal career advantage, the demands of embittered contemporaries, hatred of one’s neighbours, anger at those with a different political opinion and one’s own lack of any sense of direction.

»The Oppermanns« was the first German novel to present an almost photographically accurate description of the radical changes in everyday life in Germany between November 1932 and the summer of 1933: based on newspaper and eyewitness accounts, Lion Feuchtwanger uses an analytical eye and literary skills to relate how the Nazi regime goes about systematically reorganising society and step by step undermines everything that one dynasty of an assimilated Jewish family have built their lives on.