Lion Feuchtwanger's Bavaria: Provincial Identity in Success

Lion Feuchtwanger worked on his Success from 1927 till 1930 on having left Munich, the capital of Bavaria, for Berlin. There were a lot of problems in the writer's relationships with Bavaria where he had lived for 41 years and it was necessary to express them in the literary form. Success is a traumatic narrative in which Bavaria trauma is worked trough. The novel's various conflicts are generally based, firstly, on the opposition of Bavarians and non-Bavarians and, secondly, on the opposition of “Wahrhaft Deutschen” (these are Nazi) and the world of reason. In this article the author considers these conflicts in their connection with the Bavarian's identity. She analyzes the Bavarian identity in Success not as the national but as the provincial one because the Bavarians do not stand against other nations, they stand against the central government. Provincial identity includes four components, namely, the cognitive, the axiological, the emotional and the regulative ones. The cognitive component of the Bavarian identity is made of geographical conceptualization and of the idea about Bavaria as an agricultural region. The axiological aspect includes some peculiarities of the novel's Bavarian characters. They all have such characteristics as conservatism and hostility towards progress, dislike of real art, aggressiveness towards “interlopers”, value of a surplus body. Unified emotional standards govern the Bavarians' behavior, and the intensity of their emotional reactions is much higher than the non-Bavarians' one. While making decisions the Bavarians mostly rely on their emotions and not on their reason. The regulative component of the Bavarian identity includes many behavior practices. These are: the habit not to use reason regularly and actively, various physiological activities, eating a lot of food, propensity to violence. Almost all the aspects of the Bavarian identity exemplified in the novel's Bavarian characters are also important for the “Wahrhaft Deutschen” leaders and followers; this political movement is definitely related to the Bavarian identity, for it was Bavaria where it appeared and got grassroots support. The conflict of the Bavarian and the non-Bavarian worlds is surely related to the specific Bavarian identity, namely, to the differences in the axiological and regulative fields and aggressiveness towards “interlopers”. Moreover, the conflict of “Wahrhaft Deutschen” and the other world is also caused by particularities of the Bavarian identity because their ideas and practices make up its grotesque version.

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