"I have spent my whole life creating only one book – about a man placed between action and inaction, between power and knowledge."
"I am neither a fatalist nor a Marxist who believes that the world is ruled by economic and material laws alone. But neither am I an individualist, convinced that each person can be the master of his or her own future. However, these three theories objectively encompass what is called destiny."
Today, in the English-speaking world, the novelist Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) is known mostly to historians and connoisseurs of interwar European Jewish culture, but in his day he was a celebrated literary giant, and he's still well-known in Germany itself. As a NYT article notes, "One of a handful of German writers who enjoyed success outside of Germany, his works achieved an unprecedented critical and popular acclaim in both the U.S.S.R. and the democratic countries, especially the English-speaking nations."
His general demeanor was often described as contemplative, a word that fits all four introverted intuitive types. Wikipedia describes Martha, his wife of forty-six years as "irrepressible and somewhat eccentric", which fits some sort of extraverted ethical.
His novels pay a lot of attention to Fi personal subjectivity of the people he depicts. The Ugly Duchess, the people Joseph Flavius encounters in his life, even the pathetic (in both senses of the world) pretender Terentius — all are dealt with in detail, in the Ni-ish evolution of their life trajectory, and without much Fe-tinged pathos to the degree uncommon even for a "canonical" EII. What we get instead a patient, individuating attention to each one's inner workings — orientation to the inner side of people and phenomena rather than to their external conduct or social role, as Talanov's ILI trait list notes. Jud Süss, a novel to which the Nazis infamously made a counter-film, is specifically known for this — the title character is a manipulator who ruins people, and the novel is nonetheless remembered for its psychological depth and sympathy to a man who lost his daughter, eventually realizing that his revenge on her rapist will not bring her back ("a study of the tragedy caused by the human weaknesses of greed, pride, and ambition," as Wikipedia puts it) rather than for delivering a clean condemnation. His style is an unblinking attentiveness that doesn't need to raise its emotional volume to make you feel the weight of events.
The greatest political complication of his life, is, without a doubt, Moscow 1937. A cautious, research-driven intellectual sat in the courtroom, decided he was "forced to accept the evidence of my own senses," and built an elaborate logical structure to explain away the trial's obvious theatricality. Many biographers explain his conduct as self-censorship, suppressing his doubts for the sake of the cause, as Fi-driven protection of the needed hope in an anti-fascist ally. "Perhaps he envisioned that the USSR, in need of manpower for its construction, would take in Jews fleeing Nazism. In the face of the threat of Nazism, he was looking for a worthy opponent to Hitler. Feuchtwanger never forgot for a moment that he was not only a German writer but also a Jew. Feuchtwanger could not risk opening a second front against the Jews, a Soviet front in addition to the Nazi front," speculates Alex Gordon. At least, this fits the dutiful collectivist side of the EII type.
Even his ultimate refusal to support Marxism or individualism is the same as his refusal to fully condemn any one character: in both cases, he declines to let a general theory (of history, or of morality) do the work that close individual attention, so prominent in his literary approach, should be doing instead.
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