Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger was internationally the most widely read German author in inter-war years, and stood up publicly against nazism. He mentored Brecht, the start of a lifelong friendship. Many of his friends in the literary and cultural world remained (or became) neighbours in exile, first in the south of France (Werfel, Piscator, Koestler, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Kisch, Roth, Zweig), later in Los Angeles (Heinrich Mann, a lifelong friend, Döblin, Herzfelde, Schoenberg, Lang, Remarque, Huxley, Wilder.) Feuchtwanger pulled off the prodigious feat of counting both Brecht, and the notoriously awkward Thomas Mann, among his best friends.