The odds were against Edgar Feuchtwanger reaching the age of 100. He was born on 28 September 1924 into a time of poverty and political turmoil in post-first world war Germany. He was also born into a Jewish family in a society that was about to turn to National Socialism, an ideology that would ultimately be responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. In 1929, when Feuchtwanger was five, something happened that made his long life even more unlikely. He got a new neighbour: Adolf Hitler.

In October that year, Hitler moved into the grand second-floor flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 in Munich. His previous flat, on the other side of the Isar, the river that divides Munich, had become too small. Munich to him was the “Capital of the Movement”, a title he awarded the city officially in 1935. From 1929 on he lived in nine rooms in this corner building, with its long balconies and baroque facade. His staff moved in with him, and, soon, devotees and high-ranking SS officers were flocking to the flats nearby. Diagonally opposite, at Grillparzerstrasse 38, with a direct view of Hitler’s flat, lived the Feuchtwanger family.

Edgar Feuchtwanger, whom his parents called Bürschi, grew up in a respected and wealthy family that employed a chef and a nanny. His father, Ludwig, was a publisher and lawyer; his mother, Erna, a pianist. Intellectuals of the early 20th century were constantly in and out of the family home: the writer Thomas Mann; the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who later became a Nazi legal theorist and party member. And, of course, Ludwig’s brother, and Edgar’s uncle, Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of the novels Jew Süss and Success.

It's rather crazy to read about his story in an era where the U.S. is just disappearing anyone they don't much care for.