University of Southern California, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library

The Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and Archive was donated to the University of Southern California by Marta Feuchtwanger, the widow of the German Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958). Lion Feuchtwanger fled Europe during World War II and lived in Los Angeles from 1941 until his death. He began his literary career as a theater critic and a playwright but is best known as the author of Jud Süss (1925) and other historical novels. The voluminous archival material collected by Feuchtwanger includes his personal and business correspondence, multiple versions of his writings, reviews of his work, photographs, and other personal artifacts. The Feuchtwanger Archive also contains the correspondence of Marta Feuchtwanger, who survived her husband by almost thirty years and remained an important figure in the exile community, and correspondence and manuscript material from composer Hanns Eisler, writer Heinrich Mann, and literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse. Among the nearly thirty thousand books in the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library are noteworthy collections of Greek and Latin classics, German literature, and German exile literature, as well as many primary and secondary sources on subjects such as the historian Flavius Josephus, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. About eight thousand of the rarest volumes are housed on the university’s campus, while the rest remain on long-term loan at the Feuchtwanger’s former residence, Villa Aurora, in Pacific Palisades.