Eighty years after Lion Feuchtwanger traveled from his exile in south France to the capital of the Soviet Union, Anne Hartmann, expert for Russian language and literature at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, published her research results on this event. Her work is a comprehensive literary historical commentary on the small but explosive travel book “Moskau 1937. Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde,” (1937). Feuchtwanger wrote the report straight after his return. The book was published months later, and the same year translated into Russian, Italian, Spanish, and also English: “Moscow–1937–My Visit Described for My Friends,” translated by Irene Josephy (1937).

Hartmann documented her research from Russian, American, German, and Swiss archives in three steps, focusing on Feuchtwanger's visit to Moscow from different perspectives. In her introduction she informs us about the political and personal background and environment of the trip. She discusses the writer's motives and perceptions as well as international reactions to the visit and its report, bringing her interpretation in line with the voluminous research on Feuchtwanger and his work. For the second part, she arranged chronologically organized testimonies—letters and the diary of Feuchtwanger, responses of friends and colleagues, reports and letters of his Russian escort and translator, and the comments of other writers. In the last part, she presents documents: Soviet secret service reports, speeches and articles written by Feuchtwanger in Moscow, as well as interviews with him there, and articles on his travel to the USSR published in the Soviet-Russian and German exile press. The assembly of testimonies reads like a novel. The whole arrangement enables the reader to review the diverse material. The division into three different parts—introduction, testimonies, and documents—is an unusual but convincing composition of the material.

Feuchtwanger was a successful and a sensitive author, and a well-off man. After his mansion and his library in Berlin and Grunewald were taken over by the Nazis, he managed to entertain in style and to reorganize his library in Sanary-sur-mer, the exile for many famous German and Jewish intellectuals at that time. It was a risk for Feuchtwanger to visit Moscow in winter 1936–37. The exiled Jewish author had never been to Russia, did not know the language, but already since 1934 was courted, even persuaded to come. He was very popular also in Soviet Union, and he expected to and indeed did earn a lot of money there. Furthermore, he was the co-editor of the German exile magazine Das Wort in Moscow. Finally, he was provoked by his French colleague André Gide, who shortly before had criticized the Soviet experiment under Stalin after visiting Russia.

Traveling to Soviet Russia in 1937, expressing himself there, and describing this visit afterwards publicly, Feuchtwanger exposed himself as a political harbinger in times of terror both in Nazi Germany and in Stalin's Soviet Union, although he defined himself as a keen observer and not as a political agent. Persecuted in his former homeland, he set his hope on the unique experiment of building a state on reason. He admired the Soviet experiment before he traveled. He did not change his mind during his stay, although he was an eyewitness of dictatorship, experiencing the second show trial against Karl Radek and other so-called Trotskyists at first hand and taking an interview with Stalin exclusively. He never changed his mind and never gave up hope after his return from Russia, although he had a lot of opportunities to doubt, especially since his nearest colleagues and collaborators in Moscow, like Sergei Tret΄iakov, Mikhail Kol΄tsov, Isaak Babel΄ and others were arrested and killed shortly after his visit. The circumstances did not allow him to withdraw from politics, and his belief in humanism filtered his perception. That was his dilemma.

“Moscow 1937” evoked heavy protest, but also sympathy. The editor of the German exile magazine Neues Tage-Buch, Leopold Schwarzschild, qualified it as an “Anti-Gide” (346). Klaus Mann noted in his diary: “Not pleasant. Annoying with his “Yes, yes, yes. More shallow than Gide for sure” (211). The philosopher Ernst Bloch praised: “Feuchtwanger set a lighthouse for the errants with his book” (341–42). Finally, the former Soviet spy and dissident, Ignati Reiss, called the author “Homer Stalins,” singing about the lost hopes of millions of people.

“Moscow 1937” was not at all a report, but a statement, for Hartmann comparable with Feuchtwanger's historical novels, composed in generous lines, based on a subjective truth, and with statist utopias (98–99). Her conclusion was the result of a big error.