GERMAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

DJ Brecht's play _Fear and MIsery of the Third Reich_.jpg

What happened to German literature during the second world war? John Williams reviews "Publishing in Exile: German-Language Literature in the U.S. in the 1940s" at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

It is common to consider human displacement during wartime. But what about art? Forced migration in the arts is much harder to dramatise, but it has deep consequences. The impact of the second world war on German literature, for example, is the subject of "Publishing in Exile: German-Language Literature in the U.S. in the 1940s" at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. On view is an unprecedented collection of letters, travel documents, manifestos and books that tell the story of prominent German publishers uprooted by the Third Reich. Conceived at the Goethe Institute and curated by Paul North, an assistant professor in the German department at New York University, the show is a deeply moving tribute to the tenacity of human creativity in the face of mortal challenges.

Entering this show, visitors are promptly met with a poster that was ubiquitous in Germany in April 1933. Designed by the National Socialist Student Association, it features 12 theses, including “The Jew can only think Jewish. If he writes in German, he lies”, and a demand “to maintain the purity of the German language.” Less than a month later, National Socialists staged public book burnings in Berlin and 21 other German cities. The threat of violence loomed.

Publishers duly moved to other parts of Europe, and a few then crossed the ocean to America, mindful of the spreading danger. Wieland Herzfelde (pictured right), for example, fled to Prague in 1933, then to London and finally New York, where he founded the Aurora Press, which he ran together with 11 authors.

The 1940s marked a dramatic time for German publishers, particularly from 1942 to 1947, when exiled houses issued more than 200 German-language books. These included new works by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig, and reissues of classics by writers including Goethe and Rilke.

Despite this lofty output, German readers in America were thin on the ground, ensuring slim profits. Yet these publishers had more complicated motivations. Especially during the war years, German editions were “much more a demonstration of cultural (and political) self-assertiveness than a business,” writes Wulf Koepke, a German literature professor, in an essay republished in the exhibition’s handsome, slim catalogue. Most writers had to decide whether to “renounce the present and write for a future German-speaking public” or to “try to write in English and become authentic immigrants.”

Quite a few writers chose the former, resulting in a unique cultural experiment: like a plant moved indoors during winter's chill, much of Germany’s intellectual life was transferred to a temporary haven, where it was nourished quietly in the hopes of one day being transplanted back home. At the time this seemed like a risk on a future that might never come.

The exhibition presents a full range of communication between publishers and authors--a reminder that quotidian concerns are present during even the most extraordinary times. In one letter from May 1947, Hermann Broch’s publisher broaches the subject of an open account standing at more than $550. Broch had been ordering copies of his own books, along with several by other writers, and he was asked to make good on a portion of their cost:

As this is an age of compromises I feel that you should at least pay us for the cash item and other Pantheon books purchased by you. . . . you undoubtedly must appreciate that if we pursued that policy [of free books] with our other friends and authors, our business practice could be only termed unsound.

But the bulk of correspondence exhibited here reflects the dramatic, urgent tone of a noble cause. Near a photo of Herzfelde arriving in New York with his family, there is a letter he wrote to Heinrich Mann in May 1943:

“And if today it is a matter of a beginning with weak means and powers, this founding can perhaps prove to be important preparation for a time in which the voices of German writers once again reach the hearing of the German people.”

Mann and others responded by buoying publishers with heartfelt support. “I meant every word about the fearsome seriousness of the situation and about the sentiments that your personal fortunes have infused in us,” wrote Thomas Mann (pictured right) to Gottfried Bermann Fischer, a publisher, in 1940. Mann had arrived at Princeton by that time, and was concerned about Fischer’s attempts to escape Europe for America. Anna Seghers, a German novelist who had fled to Mexico, wrote a letter to Herzfelde in which she described the strange sensation of crossing paths with fellow exiles there:

There is such excitement among the intellectuals here, and naturally also other feelings you can’t imagine. When you bump into a good familiar face in the dark streets you have to laugh, but otherwise there’s nothing to laugh about.

The exhibition concentrates on prominent publishers in New York, but a few geographical detours leave a lasting impression. One is devoted to the unlikely flourishing of European leftists such as Seghers in Mexico City. Lázaro Cárdenas, the country’s progressive president, welcomed embattled writers, and El Libro Libre (“The Free Book”) issued at least 20 books by them. Another glass case features one of the show’s most striking artefacts: the scripts for Thomas Mann’s anti-Nazi radio addresses to the German people. The BBC broadcast the speeches, but “It is likely that few listeners received them”, explains an exhibitor's note.

The show does occasionally suffer from the difficulties of dramatising a crisis in the arts. It would be nearly impossible to read all of the correpondence on display, some of which is pedestrian anyway. And the books themselves, no matter how remarkable, are still books in glass cases. All these papers sometimes feel so silent that the events they chronicle feel very far away. But it doesn’t take much imagination to feel the urgency of the historical backdrop, and to infuse the materials with the force of a rallying cry.

A fascinating section is dedicated to the Buecherreihe Neue Welt book series, founded to "aid in the reorientation of [the nearly 400,000] German Prisoners of War in the United States." Bermann Fischer was enlisted to produce inexpensive paperbacks of humanistic literature to issue to prisoners. Whether books can truly change hearts and minds is an open question. But an excerpt from a report on the programme's results is perhaps the most astonishing item in this show. It stirringly argues (as Hitler and others surely knew when they lit their matches) that these books would help to usher in a new future in Germany:

There is no absolute measure of the influence upon the minds of the Prisoners of War of the good books made available to them. But surely these books have exerted some influence, and perhaps a great one. It is expected that Prisoners of War will take many of these books back with them when they return to Germany. The Nazis knew the power of books and therefore burned them. But these same books are returning home to take up the battle again.

Picture credit: US copyright for Brecht's play, "Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches" ("Fear and Misery of the Third Reich"), published in 1946 by Aurora Press in New York. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (top); Photo of Wieland Herzfelde at his desk in Amsterdam, c.1939. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Photo of Thomas Mann in Princeton, c.1938. Courtesy of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

(John Williams is a freelance writer and the editor of the Second Pass, an
online book review. He lives in Brooklyn.)