In contrast to the sometimes overly generous treatment of German writers forced into exile by Hitler's fascist regime, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile applies the strict aesthetic and historical standards of literary criticism, putting aside any special pleading for their anti-Nazi political views. This critical approach leads to two important conclusions: that the emigrant writers' sacrifices and opposition to Hitler's Germany, however courageous, were ultimately futile and that the literature they produced was largely an aesthetic failure, due in part to the very nature of the exile experience. Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile includes a brief description of literary life in the Third Reich, but then concentrates on the United States as the scene of the exile's greatest activity after the outbreak of World War II. Krispyn concludes that the exiles' failure to achieve their political and artistic aims constitutes an important political case history within the larger history of Nazi Germany. Artistic and intellectual activities seem powerless to oppose terror, and the turn of the creative mind to political ends seemingly undermines the aesthetic force of creation.

In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann, "the best of Germany," refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality. Exiled across the world, they continued the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to their return to a ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories. The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Dblin, Hanns Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides a counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.

An innovative, critical, historically informed, yet accessible reassessment of writers who remained in Nazi Germany and Austria yet expressed nonconformity - even dissent - through their fiction.

This book is an account of what happened to some of the best German writers and journalists after they fled the Nazi terror to find shelter in France. It is a tragic intellectual drama that unfolds over seven years, and features writers such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth, as well as H. G. Wells, AndrÃ?Â?Ã?Â(c) Malraux, Aldous Huxley, and AndrÃ?Â?Ã?Â(c) Gide. It recounts how persecuted writers settled in a colony in the south of France; how they tried to counter-attack, aided by British and French writers; how they quarrelled among themselves; and how they sought to alert the West to Nazi plans for military conquest and warn the German people that Hitler was plunging the nation into ruin.

Bertolt Brecht in Context examines Brecht's significance and contributions as a writer and the most influential playwright of the twentieth century. It explores the specific context from which he emerged in imperial Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Brecht's response to the turbulent German history of the twentieth century: World Wars One and Two, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of exile, and ultimately the division of Germany into two competing political blocs divided by the postwar Iron Curtain. Throughout this turbulence, and in spite of it, Brecht managed to remain extraordinarily productive, revolutionizing the theater of the twentieth century and developing a new approach to language and performance. Because of his unparalleled radicalism and influence, Brecht remains controversial to this day. This book – with a Foreword by Mark Ravenhill – lays out in clear and accessible language the shape of Brecht's contribution and the reasons for his ongoing influence.

This work is a collection of twenty-four fundamental essays on the many-sided topic of German exile literature during and after Hitler's Third Reich. Exile literature, which emerged in the 1980s as a special field of critical investigation within German Studies, embraced the diverse works of writers who were scattered from Hollywood to Moscow but were related by the common bond of exile from Germany. Leading American and European specialists in the field are contributors to the volume, which discusses the work of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch and Karl Wolfskehl among others.

This is the first academic treatment of the life and work of the German-Jewish writer, Henry William Katz (1906-1992), who was exiled from Nazi Germany in 1933. From a combined literary, historical, biographical and sociological perspective, Ena Pedersen analyses Katz's depiction of the Eastern European Jews in Galicia, Weimar Germany and in exile, focusing on the problems of anti-Semitism, assimilation, German-Jewish symbiosis, and Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Narratorial technique and structuring principles of his works are examined carefully as is the development of themes and characters from his early journalism through to his later fiction. The book further contains the first biography of Katz's life, based on interviews with friends and relatives of Katz in Germany, France and the USA, as well as an analysis of his journalistic articles and political engagement with the SPD in the context of the crisis of left-wing journalism towards the end of the Weimar Republic. Through comparisons with contemporary Weimar journalists such as Alfred Polgar and Kurt Tucholsky, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish writers in exile such as Joseph Roth, Martin Beradt, Lion Feuchtwanger and Ernst Glaeser, Katz is placed within the body of Weimar journalism, German exile literature, and Jewish ghetto literature. Through her analysis of his works, Ena Pedersen shows how Katz conforms to the patterns of German-Jewish exile literature yet stands out from his contemporaries through his focus on the Eastern European Jews, describing in a uniquely personal and yet often sarcastic and critical way the particular concerns and dilemmas of this minority within the German-Jewish community at the time.

Exile is as old as humanity itself but a radically new fate for the "novice" exile, who falls into a world about which personal experience can tell him nothing. He does, however, know a great number of stories -- myths, legends, allegories, biblical or historical accounts -- about exile. The novice's search for a foothold initiates a learning process in which the exilic tradition assumes a major role. The present book captures this learning process: it is a cultural history of exile as it was experienced by thousands of German and Austrian writers and intellectuals who opposed National Socialism: among them Brecht, Canetti, Seghers, Remarque, the Manns, and Ludwig Marcuse. It shows how, slowly, exile becomes a reality through the growing awareness of -- and reference to -- the exemplary figures of a shared fate. Scores of fellow travelers, from the mythic figures Odysseus and Ahasverus ("The Eternal Jew") to writers such as Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo, frame the experience of exile, imbuing it with meaning, giving it depth, and even elevating it to a "High Moral Office." They frequently make appearances in the narratives of the Nazi-era exiles. The Russian-American exile poet Joseph Brodsky called writers in exile "retrospective and retroactive beings." What their retrospective gazes yield as they search for meaning in banishment is at the heart of this book.. Johannes F. Evelein is Professor of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

In the 1930s and '40s, LA became a cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals - including Thomas Mann, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg - who were fleeing Nazi Germany. This book is the first to examine their work and lives.

The antifascist exile beginning in 1933 led to a cooling among the émigrés of the artistic and literary modernist experiments of the Weimar Republic and to a return to realism and the traditional novel form. Epic and Exile examines the Popular Front– oriented cultural initiatives of the 1930s less in terms of their political strategy than in their function as a cultural and literary program for the exiles, implying a specific relationship to questions of artistic form, historical conceptions, and indeed the political as such. A popular front aesthetics is, Bivens argues, realist and modernist at once, and, in its focus on the opacities and contradictions of everyday life as a historical formation, it is particularly concerned with problems of the epic form.