In 1925 Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger moved to Berlin which at this time was the vibrant cultural centre of the country. Life in Munich was becoming more threatening with the rise of the populist National Socialist movement. In 1922 there were reports of antisemitic graffiti being scrawled on the walls of the homes of Jewish writers. There were reports that if the 1923 Hitler Putsch in Munich had not been a fiasco, it would have been followed by arrest for Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht (who up to this point was also based in Munich). Nevertheless, it would probably be overstating the case to assert that the Fewuchtwanger's move to Berlin was a political decision driven primarily by antisemitism in Munich. The lure of Berlin as a cultural metropolis, which by 1925 had already drawn in Brecht and the writer Arnold Zweig, was powerful. Leon was by now enjoying significant commercial success with his books and in 1931 the couple had a house of their own built in the fashionable district of Berlin-Grunewald. In Autumn 1932, with the political situation in Germany ever more polarised and deadlocked, Marta Feuchtwanger accompanied her husband on a "reading trip" to London where an English-language translation of the first volume of Feuchtwanger's Josephus trilogy was being issued. It appears that Lion continued on to North America for an extended lecture tour while Marta returned to Berlin. At the end of the year she departed for her annual skiing holiday in St Anton. While she was away, on 30 January 1933, the Hitler government took power. The situation for Jews with a high public profile deteriorated very rapidly, and the Feuchtwangers were known to be fiercely critical of the National Socialists. Marta and Lion Feuchtwanger now stayed out of Germany. Their empty new home in Berlin-Grunewald was soon ransacked by Nazi paramilitaries.