Sex, lies and the Third Reich – inside the debauched chaos of the 1930s

• Who was the worst German writer to be married to in the 1930s? Could it be Brecht, who gaslit his wife Helene Weigel while stringing together a daisy chain of girlfriends? Or Hermann Hesse, who went to the registry office “to have a ring put in my nose”, then vanished to a spa while his bride honeymooned alone? No, the worst was surely the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who in 1933 joined other exiles in the south of France. “F---ed Marta. Lola in a permanent bad mood,” he wrote on July 30. Lola wa