Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America - Softcover

Palmier, Jean-Michel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784786446 ISBN 13: 9781784786441

Publisher: Verso, 2017

Synopsis

A magisterial history of the artists and writers who left Weimar when the Nazis came to power

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 Döblin, 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean-Michel Palmier, the author of numerous works, was Professor of Aesthetics at Université Paris I specializing in German artistic movements of the 1920s and ’30s. The Académie Française awarded Weimar in Exile the Prix Eugène Piccard for a work of modern history.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. One of the many sobering lessons of the Third Reich was the failure of Germany's intellectual elite to stop the rise of Hitler. Starting in 1933, with Hitler's assumption of power, German poets, philosophers, playwrights, artists and scientists—including Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and thousands of others—seeing the writing on the wall, packed up and found new homes. French scholar Palmier has written a well-nigh exhaustive work on this cultural diaspora. His staggering achievement is to portray the exquisite poignancy of these exiles' situation: powerless Germans forced to watch their country implode from abroad. Palmier's deceptively straightforward structure cloaks a far more cunning and generous approach. "Europe" ends in Barcelona, while the American phase ends with McCarthy; thus, he shows, these cultural stalwarts were learning new forms of political disappointment with each passing day. Palmier's command of this vast subject is truly breathtaking; he finds space to address exiles in Turkey, China and Latin America; exiles in American academia; and the legal problems they faced. And all the while, the story of these exiles is really, by indirection, the story of the Third Reich itself constantly agitating against them. (July)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1784786446
• ISBN 13: 9781784786441
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 864