Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America

by Jean-Michel Palmier

The artists and writers who left when the Nazis came to power were “the best of Germany.” Palmier weaves their diverse stories into a history of magisterial scope.

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.

They emigrated to Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Oslo, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mexico, Jerusalem, Moscow. Throughout their exile they strove to give expression to the fight against Nazism through their work, in prose, poetry and painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to the return to their ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories.

This absorbing history covers the lives of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Doblin, Hans Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others, whose dignity in exile is a moving counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

852 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2006

Reviews

[Anne Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is described as "magisterial," which is appropriate -- very long, very authoritative, and sometimes lacking shape and narrative. But its research is compelling for anyone with a serious interest in 20th century German history. This tells the story of the anti-Nazi Germans (leftists, Jews, artists and intellectuals, and every possible intersection of those categories). The author, the late Jean-Michel Palmier, was a professor in France and a friend of Piscator's widow, so his grasp of the cultural history is extraordinary. Some of the chapters are dominated by lists of which Germans emigrated where, and when. Not thrilling prose, but extremely useful for students of the period. I wish his publisher had taken greater pains in the copy-editing, but I'm very grateful that the books exists in English. Palmier offers some of the most detailed history of the German Socialist and Communist parties in exile that I've seen.

[John Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a book to just pick up and read from start to finish. I mean, you can do that, I did, because I was tuck in a house with just this book and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, but for most readers, going at it like that will drive you to madness or to just fling it out the window into the snow eventually. Not because it's a bad book, far from it, it has an addictive quality and a narrative that, if a bit jumbled (and it might be better in...French?), makes you want to read it into the night...it's also not a happy subject, which, you knew that, I knew that, but there's knowing that and then being submerged in that, breathing that because of the rigorously researched nature of the text. If you want to start with Exilliteratur, start with the texts themselves (again, not a picnic, but not meant to be), and then go back and read this chronicle of literary resistance to evil.
Very French in terms of unshakeable authority and also general dodgy nature.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough analysis of German intellectuals, political activists, artists and musicians who left Germany in 1933. This book is very valuable for a number of reasons - it has an excellent history of policies towards refugees in multiple countries - this provides the context of the exiles' lives wherever they went. It does not hide the extent to which both Stalinism and anti-Communist politics further victimized these anti-fascist emigres. It contains vivid stories of the lives of individual writers and artists and their fates. The epilogue is very powerfully written. It's very, very long, and sometimes repetitive, but worth the effort. I can't think of any other book like it.