DOUBLE DOUBLE Toil and Trouble

Feuchtwanger is an enigma when it comes to prophesying sales. This, I think, has definitely the best chance for a popular reception of anything he has done since The Oppermanns. The story itself is built around the figure of a clairvoyant (presumably modelled on Hanussen, who disappeared at a point convenient to the Nasis). Other characters suggest Nazi figures, -- Goering, Roshm, Goebbels. But the story itself is so interwoven with the whole panorama of Germany, gradually succumbing to the mesh of Nazi intrigue, that in the final analysis, it is that aspect that stands out. You feel as if you were seeing behind the machinery, through the Reichstag fire; industry and monied interests are caught in the net; women play a dynamic though insidious part. And through the story goes the figure of Oscar Lautensack, clairvoyant, torn between a faith in his own powers and the ever-recurrent temptation to use those powers, and manipulate them to his own ends. Not easy reading but worthwhile.