Mixed Media

Between The Pages

For all exiles, always, tare's
before and after and why: the life
interrupted and the attempts to
re-create it, and the reason an old
country had to be fled for a new one.
Amidst whatever belongings the exiles
manage to transport are remarkable
stories, only some of which get told.
Between 1933 and 1945, about
132,000 people fled Nazi Germany and
settled in America. Among them were
many intellectuals and writers whose
experiences have been well documented.
The stories of others who were part of
that wave of immigration are less
known, but no less compelling.
Hitler's Exiles: Personal Stories of
the Flight from Nazi Germany to
America (New Press; $30), edited by
Mark M. Anderson, includes 50
diary excerpts, essays, letters and
articles. Much of it is material
appearing in print for the first time.

ews & Reviews

part a result of the dramatic, unexpect-
ed course of their lives.
In addition, many emigres spent a
lot of time waiting — for visas, for
jobs, for information — and "writing
served as a vital outlet for people with
oppressive time on their hands." In
New York and other cities, "a paper
trail remains to tell their stories."
For many of the people included in
this collection, leaving Germany was not
something they anticipated or desired;
coming to America was something they
were more than ambivalent about.
Ludwig Marcuse, an essayist and
philosospher, describes the "indescrib-
able twitch in my soul" that he felt
upon leaving and continued to experi-
ence. In America, they lost their social
position, their mastery of the language,
their professions, their confidence; they
were "nobodies in a foreign land," as
Marta Appel in 1937 quotes her hus-
band, a German-born rabbi who later
served a congregation in Jackson, Tenn.
Hertha Nathorff, a physician and rel-
ative of Albert Einstein, recounts in her
diary her impressions of working as a
housekeeper, just days after she arrived
in New York, to support her family.
"The other emigrant women and I agree
on one thing: If we had ever treated our
servants in this way, they never would
have been so faithful to us for years and
even decades. I sometimes smile at the
thought of what my dear servant Minna
would say if she could see me now
In a powerful account written in
1941 in New York, Ellen
Schoenheimer recounts the struggle of
her family in France after leaving
Germany. While part of a refugee con-
voy south of Paris in 1940 under
German fire, her 7-year old son told
her, "I have a bomb in my neck." She
describes how she helped save the boy,
whom most thought wouldn't survive,
at one point volunteering in a hospital
where he was treated. Since the book
was published, the editor has heard
from a man who identified himself as
the son, now living in New York City.
Also included is an account of the
voyage of the St. Louis, the ship of
refugees forced to return to Europe in
1939; a letter recounting a seder on a
refugee ship; a letter informing one
friend of another's suicide in an Upper
West Side hotel room; and articles
about life for the emigres in California.
Along with the unknown emigres,
Anderson also features little-known

1)

The stories — expressing courage,
loss, torment, yearning, pride, dignity,
bewilderment and the building of new
lives — inspire awe among readers
and the inevitable questions of what
we would have done.
Among the distinguishing factors
about this wave of immigrants is that
they were middle and upper class and
highly educated, that they "arrived in
America looking backwards, lamenting
what they had lost" and "also, that
they wrote down their impressions,"
Anderson explains in his introduction.
A professor of German and com-
parative literature at Columbia
University, he points out that this was
true of housewives and businessmen as
well as professional writers.
Many chronicled their life stories
for their families if not for publication,
and this was in part an outgrowth of
their literary German education which
encouraged documentation, and in

4/9
1999

72 Detroit Jewish News

For the 43-year old professor,
working on this book was
something of a departure in that
his own interest is generally lit-
erary. "History is also a story.
What we're left with in the end
is images and stories."

selections by intellectuals like Hannah
Arendt, Thomas Mann and Bertolt
Brecht.
The material is divided into three
sections, providing reflections on
Kristallnacht and leaving Germany; the
difficult passage through Europe and
across the ocean; and adjustment to the
altogether different world of America.
"I'm not interpreting the material.
I'm selecting it," says Anderson,
explaining how this book is different
from the many works that analyze and
theorize about the period.
In making his selections, Anderson
looked for material written as close to
the moment described as possible.
Most of the selections are written by
German Jews.
Anderson, who has long been
interested in German-Jewish culture
and has written books about Kafka,
felt a strong personal connection to
the people whose words he excerpts
here. "They were the generation right
after Kafka, who carried his books in
their suitcases when they left
Germany." Working on this book, he
explains, brought together his person-
al and professional lives.
His own background is a combina-
tion of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Alsatian-
French and German, although many
of his friends are from families who
fled Germany as refugees during this
period. "This was a way for me to give
back something to a culture I've
learned a lot from, and grown through
having studied it," he says.
The idea for the book was suggest-
ed to Anderson by his editor at the
New Press, Andre Schiffrin, whose
father arrived in America as a German
refugee in the 1930s and co-founded a
publishing company. For many years,
Schiffrin has published Studs Terkel,
the master of the oral history, getting
ordinary people to talk about their
lives with great candor.
Although the testimony collected in
Hitler's Exiles is written rather than
oral, its emphasis on day-to-day lived
experience seems very much in the
Terkel tradition.
Anderson's sources include archives in
the United States, London and Berlin,
newspapers like the German-American
Aufbau and German and English books.
One person heard about the project and
sent him 300 pages of letters written by
his mother. "There's a lot of material still
in people's drawers," he says.

— Sandee Brawarsky

New On CD

Symphony No. 4 "Memorial Candles";
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