CHAPTER FIVE

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Artist Émigrés

AS HAS BECOME evident from preceding chapters, emigration from Germany was a fixed component of the Third Reich narrative. In that context, “emigration” may be a euphemism, because it usually denotes an orderly process of leave-taking from the home country and the approved and regulated arrival in a new host country, even if it causes economic and psychological hardship for the émigré. But the exodus from Germany between 1933 and 1941 was not orderly and occurred almost always under political rather than economic pressure, even though there could not have been a single emigrant whose forced withdrawal was not, at the same time, accompanied by financial sacrifice. There were two other demographic characteristics of this modern human flood. It constituted the largest departure of Germans from their home country since the abortive revolutions of 1848–9. Moreover, the emigrants, who because of the pressures applied to them should more properly be called refugees, belonged for the greater part to a single ethnic grouping, the Jews, whether they were assimilated into German mainstream society and sometimes baptized Christians or had been born in Austria or the European East and originally were Orthodox Mosaic. If outside pressure may be easily understood as a catalyst for emigration, the question arises how many Germans, Jewish or not, left the Third Reich motivated by individual conscience. Since Jews must be immediately classified as a victim cohort, this question would concern the so-called Aryans, some of whom might not have been bothered by the Nazi regime had they stayed in Germany after January 1933, although nothing was a certainty. One such person who could have belonged in this category was Harry Graf Kessler; independently wealthy and a reclusive homosexual, he might have been left alone, even in homophobic Nazi Germany. As it turned out, Kessler, via Mallorca, moved to France.1 Another was the writer Thomas Mann, but he was married to a Jew who would have come under scrutiny. A third was Bertolt Brecht (also with a Jewish wife whom he constantly betrayed), who professed Communism, which, had he continued to uphold it in Germany, would have landed him in a concentration camp.² Besides, Communism advocated its own brand of totalitarianism, hence Communists who left for the Soviet Union were exchanging one inhuman political system for another. Such a people transfer would not have occurred under circumstances upholding human rights and freedoms.

Mann and Brecht were two exceptional writers who had been setting the pace, already famous in Germany and the world long before 1933, who found getting out of Hitler’s Reich and continuing to make a reasonable living abroad not beyond their capabilities. In that sense both – Brecht less so than Mann – were atypical of the vast majority of musicians, painters, writers, and personalities from film and stage who, mostly Jewish, had to leave, having to overcome severe obstacles, usually of two kinds. One was to manage and survive the process of departure, with all that this entailed on German soil, where, for example, entry visas for a foreign country had to be obtained and, eventually, over 90 percent of an emigrant’s financial assets had to be surrendered to Nazi authorities, including the payment of a “Reich flight tax.” The other was to secure a suitable welcome in the host country, with the aim of becoming naturally integrated in a new, and strange, society, even if one planned to return. Ideally, this process would ultimately result in commensurate employment in some form of cultural activity, humane acceptance by new neighbors and employers and, not least, potential social mobility for one’s offspring (such as the child Peter Gay, the future historian) through tolerance and the requisite formal education.³ In all these matters, those countries reacted in a variety of ways, with none that could be said to have been ideal from a humanitarian perspective. Not least, how a cultural immigrant was treated depended, to a large degree, on their disposition, skills, prior levels of training, linguistic ability, and willingness to adjust. Altogether, the story that follows is not a happy one, even for those artists and intellectuals whom fortune had smiled upon.

All told, the emigration from Europe of German-speaking men and women due to the Nazi regime affected approximately half a million individuals, including academics, artists, and intellectuals. After having sustained many encumbrances due to National Socialist harassment before they could cross the borders, in addition to difficulties imposed by putative host countries such as visa delays, scores of new problems had to be overcome by immigrants upon arrival in their land of exile. Here economic difficulties easily ranked first, because the entrenched Depression from the late 1920s had led to widespread unemployment and nationalist politicians were reacting by invoking restrictive immigration laws.4 Among those emigrants Jews overwhelmingly were in the majority. Until the annexation of Austria in March 1938, 129,000 Jews left the German Reich, followed by 118,000 from both countries in 1938–9; and after the outbreak of war until 1945, when this had become all but impossible, just over 31,000 fled. According to Werner Röder and Herbert Strauss, altogether 278,000 German-speaking Jews left the Reich during Hitler’s dictatorship.⁵

Which were the main host countries of this involuntary exile, and what were the complications specific to them? In the East there was the Soviet Union, which drew mostly Communist emigrants, and not too many of them. One of the few was Friedrich Wolf, a multitalented physician and author of poetry, stage plays, and novellas who had helped put down the Kapp Putsch in Berlin during March 1920 and later joined the German Communist Party (KPD).⁶ Another was Carola Neher, a beautiful German actress who emigrated to the Soviet Union at the age of thirty-two shortly after Hitler’s rise to power; she had once collaborated with Brecht, a lover, and Kurt Weill. Denounced as a Trotskyite by fellow German expatriate Gustav Baron von Wangenheim during Stalin’s purges, she died of typhus in June 1942 on the way to the Gulag, after years in prison.⁷

The Czechoslovak Republic (CSR), once part of the Habsburg Empire, appealed to many German emigrants because of its Western values and pro-Western leanings, guaranteeing a lifestyle congenial to Berliners and Viennese; it had been the seedbed of much of German culture. Although it required no entry visa, residency, until Hitler’s invasion of the region by early 1939, was granted only to refugees traveling directly from Germany. Unemployment was rampant in the CSR, and work permits or financial support were very hard to obtain.8

Sweden was open to political refugees for asylum, but here there was no special consideration of Jews; even so, once there, Jewish exiles suffered from indigenous anti-Semitism and the hostility of Swedish Jews. Here, too, the authorities cited unemployment as a reason for non-admission. Still, in November 1938, at the time of Kristallnacht in the German Reich, 1,200 German and Austrian emigrants were living in Sweden, of whom about 800 were allowed to work. However, the Swedes tightened their entry conditions by the time the war broke out, so altogether there were only 4,600 refugees in the country by May 1945.⁹

If Switzerland was seen as anti-Jewish, this too may have reflected a more general xenophobic stance. For an outsider, except perhaps someone world-famous, it was clear that possibilities for gainful employment did not exist here; the notorious Alien Police (Fremdenpolizei) made certain that permanent residence was granted only to those, like Thomas Mann or Erich Maria Remarque, who could prove financial independence. But even then new competition was feared, as Gottfried Bermann Fischer found out when he wanted to move his father-in-law’s Fischer publishing company to Zurich. Nonetheless, there were approximately 10,000 German-speaking refugees in Switzerland during the war, some of whom even enjoyed a transitory right of asylum.¹⁰

In France, native anti-Semitism was enhanced by the xenophobia of French Jews (about half of the total Jewish population), who hated immigrant Jews from eastern Europe and resented more coming in from Austria and Germany, right into the Vichy era. Restrictions took hold under all cabinets, with the exception of the short-lived administrations of the Jewish Prime Minister Léon Blum, between 1936 and 1938.¹¹

As for the United Kingdom, even though, as a parliamentary democracy, one might have expected it to be a most welcoming sanctuary, it accepted only a modicum of refugees until the November 1938 pogrom. The reason was, once again, xenophobia, in particular anti-Semitism, combined with unemployment fears, for many Britons were then on the dole. Overall, there were at least 55,000 German-speaking people in the country by the war’s beginning, until, during the Wehrmacht’s invasion of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, widespread anti-German public opinion took hold. Paradoxically, the Jews, formerly of Germany and Austria and shunned by their home countries, now found themselves victimized in Britain as “enemy aliens.” After the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill had issued the order “collar the lot,” newcomers from these two countries (and from Fascist Italy separately) were interned, and many were forced to undertake dangerous voyages, for what was meant to be temporary internment, to Australia and Canada. In the end, Great Britain was host to 78,000 immigrants, with virtually all of the detained free by May 1945.12

Because Britain had been handed the territory of Palestine as a mandate by the League of Nations after World War I, it was able to curtail German-Jewish immigration to that traditional Zionist haven as well; but despite all the odds, between 1933 and 1941 approximately 55,000 refugees arrived at those Middle Eastern shores. Whatever could have been done to facilitate work for those newcomers the British were observed to prevent; those immigrants had the best chances of employment who chose to toil with their hands – not exactly something artists and intellectuals were used to doing.¹³

In North and South America conditions varied. In the North, Canada proved uncompromisingly resistant to any kind of immigration from central Europe, especially where Jews were involved. The reasons were traditional Jew hatred in the ultramontane province of Quebec, alongside an anti-Semitic bureaucracy under the cabinet of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who himself was obsessed with an idiosyncratic idolization of Adolf Hitler. When in May 1943, The New York Times passed the judgment that Canada, along with the United Kingdom, could do a whole lot more for the Jews of Europe, one senior official in Ottawa was heard to remark that the newspaper was not to be taken seriously, since everyone knew it belonged to Jews and was controlled by Jews.¹⁴ Particularly grim conditions prevailed in Central and South America: bureaucratic red tape, corruption, xenophobia, and lack of work commensurate with talent.¹⁵ As for the Caribbean – it was difficult to be granted residency there, because of prejudices, bureaucratic barriers, and widespread corruption on the part of island governments. Peter Gay remembers that only fate prevented him from boarding the refugee ship St. Louis in the spring of 1939. He had arrived with his family in Havana, Cuba, on a different ship a few weeks earlier (and later migrated to the United States). The St. Louis became sadly famous, as it docked in Havana without permission to discharge its émigré passengers, who subsequently were also refused by immigrant authorities in Miami (and later in Canada). The steamer had to return to Europe and landed with its human cargo of 936 in Belgium. About a third of those who were not fortunate enough to settle in the United Kingdom were thereafter caught in occupied western Europe by the Nazis, interned, and murdered.16

If between 1933 and 1945 only a few hundred refugees managed to make it into Canada, the United States accepted approximately 132,000 German-speaking immigrants – the highest absolute number of any country in the world.¹⁷ This occurred against a background of tight restrictions leveled at immigrants in the historic past, when quotas had been working against Jews and southern Europeans. That trend had begun, for the twentieth century, with specific pieces of legislation in 1921 and 1924 and was resumed between 1929 and 1937, in cumulative steps, in the wake of the Great Depression, although emigrants from Austria and Germany, including Jews, were now less affected, because they did not exceed any nationality quotas. This changed after the November 1938 pogrom; in 1939–40 the Austrian and German quotas were fully met. After Himmler had prohibited the exodus of Jews from the Reich in October 1941, and again after America’s entry into the war that December following the attack on Pearl Harbor, refugee immigration was reduced to a trickle. In any event, at all times there were specific difficulties for Jews trying to reach the United States; obtaining American sponsorship as a precondition for a visa was only one of several; another was the forewarning that any would-be newcomers would be met by rampant anti-Semitism.¹⁸

Altogether, so it has been ascertained, the United States took in nearly 48 percent of all exiles from German-speaking areas, Great Britain took 10 percent, Palestine 8 percent, and Switzerland 4 percent. Somewhat over 7 percent of all the immigrants to the United States were academics, intellectuals, or artists in one form or another. Among the last-mentioned, some 682 were journalists and writers, 465 were musicians, and 296 visual artists.¹⁹

POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS

In the mid-1930s, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s oldest son and himself a refugee, asked a serious question: “What would a neurologist from Berlin do in Australia, what a lawyer from Frankfurt in Guatemala?”²⁰ Mann’s query addressed the frequent incompatibility of German or Austrian training with professional job certifications specific to refugee countries. This applied the higher and more specialized one’s formal education was. For example jurists, who had been trained in Roman law and often had assumed positions in government and administration, in the United Kingdom had to master the Anglo-Saxon law code, which necessitated re-education, leaving many as lower-level law clerks. Similar stipulations were in force in the United States and Sweden.21 Physicians fared somewhat better, because the medical arts are more universal than the juridical ones and, in this case, professional codes did not deviate so significantly from country to country. Putting it more succinctly: there was only one way to remove an inflamed appendix. A professional adjustment being a relatively minor matter, England had admitted over 100 refugees to a medical retraining course of studies already in 1933, although the competition was fierce.²² Something similar was happening in the United States, where physicians constituted the largest proportion of all exiles, individual cases of hardship notwithstanding.²³ Wilhelm Reich, for instance, a one-time pupil of Sigmund Freud, after arriving in New York from European exile in Oslo, received a position as associate professor of medical psychology at the New School of Social Research in the spring of 1940. But no sooner had he started there than he occupied himself with what he abstrusely called “orgon energy,” allegedly a power deriving from sexual orgasm and empirically quantifiable. Over this he had a row with Albert Einstein, who was based at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Studies in nearby Princeton, and it was not long before Reich was dismissed from the New School, on the way to losing his mind and being institutionalized.²⁴ Dr. Käte Frankenthal, who was thrice condemned by the Nazis as a Jew, a lesbian, and a Freudian psychiatrist, arrived in New York in 1936, after frustrating sojourns in France and Switzerland. Nowhere in Europe had she been allowed to practice medicine, and her stay in New York did not spare her the experience of first selling ice cream on the streets and then going from door to door peddling stockings, before an established colleague took her in as an assistant.²⁵ Heinrich Simon, the elderly proprietor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, emigrated via Switzerland and Palestine to New York in 1934, and there found nothing more than a job as a music teacher. One day in May of 1941, as he was walking home, he was accosted by thugs and barely made it to his apartment. Having sustained mortal wounds to his head, he died that same night; his killers were never found.26

In that respect the physician and writer Dr. Martin Gumpert proved more successful, as he had possessed a practice in Berlin and, once in New York, underwent an English-language examination, after which he was allowed to practice medicine again. What helped him was that New York State, of all states in the American union, for a while had the most tolerant admissions policy for medical doctors.²⁷ An author of several books, Gumpert was periodically a romantic partner of Erika Mann and a friend of Klaus Mann, and hence attuned to the artistic interests and activities emanating from the circle surrounding Thomas Mann, spanning not just New York but southern California as well.²⁸

Mentioning Gumpert, Klaus and Erika Mann in one breath calls for some caution. Any references to the unusually creative members of Thomas Mann’s extended family could suggest a generalization, namely that any biography of exiled German and Austrian artists, intellectuals or academics in opposition to Hitler would have to be characterized by success. This all the more so, since in hitherto existing literature many such individuals have been associated with “paradise,” usually denoting California.²⁹ But for every Thomas Mann there existed scores of writers of both genders who were far removed from the triumphs of that prince of letters, and for every Bruno Walter there was a multitude of unknown conductors jobbing away in some orchestra or dance band.³⁰ The author Franz Werfel, another famous writer, had such ordinary, even deplorable circumstances in mind when he remarked that he viewed his own success as an undeserved piece of luck, after his bestselling novel The Song of Bernadette had come out in print in 1941. “Most others are faring badly,” he warned, “they have to defeat many obstacles, with hardly any hopes of victory.”³¹ Hence it seems advisable to deal, from the point of view of a social history of culture, not just with the vagaries confronting well-known writers such as Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel, but also to look at lesser-known artistic émigrés who were denied good fortune.³² One question that will have to remain open, however, is whether all the difficulties refugees encountered after their exodus were due to exile rather than tied to their personalities, no matter what the social and political environment they found themselves in.

Distress caused by immigration and employment regulations, but also the rigors of travel, befell almost everyone, even, to some extent, the very famous. Artists in particular – and here they differed from some professions such as physicians – were not really essential to society in their countries of exile, as the native artists knew all too well; their potential for rivalrous jealousy was always a threat. Hence the new arrivals suffered more from regulations. In the United States, artists fell into the general category of immigrants issued merely temporary visas, which could be exchanged for permanent ones only after crossing the border for a second time, from Mexico or Canada.33

Various other difficulties plagued would-be residents of the United Kingdom. It was rare for someone like Sigmund Freud – an international celebrity – to be allowed to add his signature to those of other prominent signatories of the Charter Book of the Royal Society, which was brought to him after his arrival on British soil in 1938.³⁴ By contrast, when another former national of Austria, the journalist and author Arthur Koestler, finally managed to reach England’s shores after frustrating attempts to enter legally from Portugal, he knew that as a former Communist and current Enemy Alien he would immediately be arrested, which is exactly what happened. And this after Koestler, who had already worked as a correspondent for an English newspaper, had been held in French detainment camps during 1940.³⁵ Moreover, following the disaster of her acting debut in Darmstadt in 1933, the young Berlin actress Lilli Palmer, after several stressful months in Paris, was allowed into England only after hesitation on the part of suspicious border officials, even though she could produce a valid employment contract. When finally she started working for a London film company, that contract made the renewal of a residence permit obligatory every three months.³⁶ After the beginning of the London Blitz, such oppression became even worse. Palmer’s much better-known colleague Elisabeth Bergner, formerly of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin, by 1941 even had to check in weekly with the police, notwithstanding her newly acquired British citizenship.³⁷ In Palestine, residency conditions for immigrants applied that were similar to those in England, as well as in Sweden, where musicians were singled out for obstruction by the red tape of bureaucracy.³⁸

As far as musicians who arrived in Britain are concerned, some music historians have made a special study of Jewish composers such as Berthold Goldschmidt, Mátyás Seiber, Hans Gál, and Franz Reizenstein, who for long periods faced particular misery there, for reasons still unexplained. The Berlin composer Goldschmidt, who had had such a prodigious start in Germany, was virtually stalled in London (much like the Frankfurt composer Erich Itor Kahn in New York, who slogged away as a lieder accompanist). The BBC contributed substantially to these difficulties. Thus in 1940 some native composers, led by John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, pressured the broadcasting monopoly to confidentially blacklist 73 Austrian and 239 German-born colleagues, figures soon updated to 117 and 248 respectively. Between 1933 and the end of 1945 only six orchestral pieces by refugee composers were accepted for broadcasting on the radio.39

Once in a new country, the refugees usually had to get to grips with a new language. Musicians and visual artists sometimes had an easier time with that, like the composer Ernst Krenek and painter George Grosz once in the United States, who thought that expressing themselves through their art was paramount – yet even they conceded difficulties in daily social intercourse.⁴⁰ The violinist Rudolf Kolisch was condescendingly invited by the music critic Olin Downes to play chamber music with him in New York, with Downes himself at the piano. But Kolisch saw the career of his Kolisch Quartet, specializing in works by Schoenberg, destroyed by Downes’s reviews once he had declined the invitation, early in the 1940s.⁴¹

Actors were more seriously challenged by the barriers of language, because that was their principal vehicle of communication. Even very prominent actors such as Bergner and Fritz Kortner, who began their exiles in England, could never rid themselves of their German accents, despite elocution lessons. They got by on their past reputations, due to their personal charm (granting Bergner a significant edge over the often grumpy Kortner), and because they still managed somehow to impress theater audiences.⁴² Their German compatriots Albert Bassermann and Curt Goetz, however, who lost their allure because of their strong accents, simply could not compensate for linguistic deficiencies and got irreversibly stuck professionally.⁴³ Some actresses like Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, and Bergner, to the extent that they portrayed femmes fatales and the like, could sport an accent, but theater pieces or movies with German female spies in them, for example, were rare (an already much older Lenya later famously starred as Colonel Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love).⁴⁴ About his wife Lenya’s attempt to emulate American parlance, Kurt Weill quipped as late as 1949, “it is too difficult for actors with her originality.”⁴⁵ Great actors were fully demoralized once they had to play minor roles because of their chronically faulty pronunciation, never having learned a foreign tongue properly and thus being excluded from major roles thereafter.46

There were peculiar properties of language that German and Austrian writers, dramatists, and actors were conscious of, and which eluded them in different ways. German possessed certain inflections they had been used to but which now, in an English- or Swedish-speaking world, they were deprived of, as those were untranslatable. Refined or even colloquial English, on the other hand, was characterized by qualities, such as a certain idiomatic brevity, which these immigrants could never master.⁴⁷ Hence Max Reinhardt’s wife, the actress Helene Thiemig, complained in Los Angeles that one had been “alienated from one’s own language,” and Lion Feuchtwanger concurred by saying that certain turns of phrase in German were simply not translatable.⁴⁸ Notwithstanding Feuchtwanger’s further observation that once removed from the German mainstream, a writer would be bypassed by the changes in the German language over time, Thomas Mann continued to write in German, even though he took a great interest in Americanisms. Brecht did likewise, for what he had to say, often didactically, had to be formulated in his native idiom.⁴⁹ Stefan Zweig, who also wanted to continue writing in his native tongue, worked himself into a conflict after realizing, in England, that German had become the vernacular of oppressing barbarians. “We writers of the German language,” he lamented, “feel a secret and tormenting shame because these decrees of oppression are conceived and drafted in the German language, the same language in which we write and think.”⁵⁰

This had something to do with age: the younger a person was, the more easily he or she could adjust to their adopted language. This was demonstrated by both Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest in 1905, and Klaus Mann, born in Munich one year later. Koestler published his first novel in English, Scum of the Earth, successfully in 1941, and Mann, who right after the war would send reports to the U.S. Armed Forces paper Stars and Stripes, asked why he should be writing in German in America, if the Germans themselves wanted to tear his tongue out.⁵¹ He wished to write in American English, said the younger Mann, in order to adequately express the changed situation of the emigrants – his father Thomas praised him for that, as he also applauded his first-born Erika who, the Nobel laureate thought, was so admirably fluent in English.⁵²

So it comes as no surprise that difficulties with a new language contributed substantially to professional failure in countries of exile, and this in every artistic medium. Technical language complexities and thorny matters of translation were compounded, moreover, by genre-specific issues, as Carl Zuckmayer found out. This successful author of stage and film dramas fared poorly as a lecturer in stage drama at the New School in New York, because he could not answer questions relating to American dramaturgic practices. For instance, how many minutes would have to pass before the love or sex subject (his wrong translation of the love or sex interest) was introduced. Before he lectured in New York, Zuckmayer had worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter – as did many of his compatriots – but he had found this like working on an assembly line and had given up. Eventually this German writer, who had one Jewish parent, retreated to a farm in Vermont.53 In Britain, the Berlin playwright Julius Berstl found the format of English “salon plays” difficult to get used to: tea was served in act one, cocktails were served in act two, and whiskey in act three.⁵⁴

Artists who, like Zuckmayer, fell short at academic institutions because they lacked the requisite pedagogical experience or could not fit in as teachers, were common among the highly cultured émigrés. Stefan Wolpe was a left-leaning composer who deplored the ignorance of his colleagues at the Jerusalem Conservatory, when he wrote in 1938: “The fakers of a new Jewish culture show contempt for the powerful, rich music-cultural heritage of Europe,” and he called them illiterates squatting on the ill-gotten fruits of their ignorance.⁵⁵ His colleague Krenek, equally interested in dodecaphony as Wolpe, said he had discovered “the stuff of dilettantes” when he came upon a young American composer who, he thought, had been seduced by ignoramuses. Krenek found himself in a deplorable situation at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie in New York State, where he was being spied upon; not surprisingly, his contract was allowed to lapse in 1942.⁵⁶ And the painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, once a renowned teacher with the German Bauhaus faculty, was out of a job as founding director of the New Bauhaus – the American School of Design, in Chicago – after it had to close its doors for lack of money in 1938.⁵⁷

Artists such as Moholy-Nagy needed a certain, culturally predetermined, sounding board that could simply not be transferred from central Europe to foreign countries. Because he thought no one in London cared about good art, Kurt Schwitters, a pioneer of the Dada movement, became a depressive in England: “Only a few friends know what good art is.” Similarly, economically deprived German refugee artists made no impression with their art in provincial Sweden. Of course none of them were known in that new country, including Peter Weiss, who at that time tried his hand at oil painting, before he became an internationally famous dramatist much later. As unknown artists these émigrés felt useless, just like those German musicians in England who simply could not secure employment for themselves, try as they might.58

Despite all the odds, one-time greats continued in their quest for recognition, money, and fame. Elisabeth Bergner was successful on London stages until in 1940 she played “Boy David” in an eponymous play written for her by the creator of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie – which the critics savaged. Thereupon she left London for Hollywood with her husband, the director Paul Czinner, but Hollywood’s aura sickened her. When she was summoned by the mogul Louis B. Mayer in anticipation of a prospective film part and asked to turn around slowly and lasciviously, she stormed out of the room and moved with Czinner to New York. By the time she returned to Britain after the war, she had lost her former appeal.⁵⁹

The famous if ever controversial Brecht fought his own demons. During a first visit to the United States in the fall of 1935 his musical Die Mutter, with a score by Hanns Eisler, was rehearsed by New York’s Theater Union on Broadway. But its members violently disagreed with him, so that Brecht returned to Europe in a huff. He was back in America at the start of 1942, this time in southern California. At first he tried his luck as a film scriptwriter, but none of his drafts were accepted. His subsequent attempt to stage, together with his former collaborator Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera, as an Afro-American street ballad starring Paul Robeson, went awry. And when a Hollywood film about Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in June 1942 in Prague, Hangmen Also Die, was released to the public, Brecht’s credits as co-author were missing, much to his dismay.⁶⁰

Brecht’s relationship with Fritz Lang, who had directed the film, was, at best, a terse one. Lang’s own productivity suffered and his artistic profile in Hollywood was on the wane because he never appeared without his signature monocle, which lent him the air of an authoritarian Teuton. He certainly behaved like one, for instance when his American film crew wanted a break for lunch and he adamantly refused. The first of his film scripts, dating back to 1934, was turned down by his superiors at MGM, so that he resorted to B-movies. No one bothered to remember the former Fritz Lang who had made Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, film classics of the Weimar era. Lang typically could not comprehend that in Hollywood, unlike formerly in Babelsberg, the directors did not make the big decisions, but producers and the mighty men like Mayer who owned the film companies did. Instead, Lang found that he was being dictated to and that he had to work within a certain time limit – not at all Lang’s style, when he was used to being his own boss.61

Despite the problems experienced in Hollywood by artists like Bergner, Tinseltown naturally attracted immigrant actors who, even if eventually successful, went through very hard times. Walter Weinlaub, who had been chased out of German theaters by the SA, arrived in Hollywood to take a job as a dishwasher, potato peeler, toilet cleaner, and postman’s helper.⁶² Even after they had landed a part on a movie set, these actors continued laboring in after-hours jobs as taxi drivers or barkeepers. As Hitler showed himself to be more belligerent, Austrian or German Jewish actors with thick German accents eventually became successful portraying Nazis in anti-Nazis movies, the most prominent of which would turn out to be Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring the Hollywood-entrenched (Jewish) American Edward G. Robinson, in 1939. The director was Anatole Litvak, originally Russian-born but recently from Berlin, who had already made his name in the Old Country. The plot consisted of the smashing of a Nazi fifth column in America, with the crime-buster played by Robinson, joined by the likes of Francis Lederer (the Nazi villain), Hans von Twardowski, and Lotte Palfi. During the planning of the film, 150 German émigré actors had thrown their hats into the ring, hoping to be hired by the Warner Brothers studio. Some who were hired changed their names for fear of Nazi reprisals against relatives left behind in Germany. This turned out to be one of altogether 180 anti-Nazi films produced in Hollywood until 1945, ironically providing more work for persecuted Jews in Nazi roles, something they knew how to value economically but fretted over emotionally, the experience proving too close to home.⁶³

One formerly great central European show-business entrepreneur, Max Reinhardt, tragically foundered, after being confronted by huge obstacles. A resident of the United State since 1934, and having done some work for the Hollywood Bowl, he created the first of four movies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was financially risky even though artistically sound. In 1937, Reinhardt produced, together with Werfel and Weill, the Broadway musical The Eternal Road, which, also of high quality if much too long, flopped again at the box office. Next, Reinhardt opened an actors’ academy on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, for which he contracted the film directors William Dieterle and John Huston, as well as the formerly Viennese composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold as instructors. Greta Garbo too was to make an appearance, certainly to take in what was going on and perhaps to learn something. Alas, nobody showed up. After the academy had declared bankruptcy, Reinhardt once again turned to Broadway, where he produced the musical Rosalinda, an adaptation of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, which actually was well reviewed. The premiere of this production by the New Opera Company occurred in October 1942, and a month later Reinhardt was busy with a Jacques Offenbach adaptation, Helen Goes to Troy. But then, a year later, he died, having been bitten by a dog with rabies, and having been laid up in a New York hotel room with few visitors. He was seventy years old, ostracized by former pupils and colleagues who, long residents of America, were now thriving in Hollywood as film personalities, movers and shakers.64 “In reality, he died twenty years ago,” remarked Alma Mahler-Werfel, not without bitterness, as she herself had to make ends meet in exile.⁶⁵

There was a strong negative correlation between professional precariousness and economic well-being. To say that not everyone did as well in both regards as Thomas Mann is a truism, as he drew on his private fortune back in Switzerland and since 1938 received consulting and lecturing fees in the United States until, after 1944, royalties from his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers boosted his earnings yet further. His friend Feuchtwanger also was an exception, since he was able to resort to non-German royalties, so that, when it became necessary, he could easily exchange a villa on the Côte d’Azur for an impressive residence in Los Angeles.⁶⁶ Kurt Weill hit it rich in 1943, after the triumph of his musical One Touch of Venus on Broadway, and so did Franz Werfel with his bestsellers Embezzled Heaven and The Song of Bernadette.⁶⁷

All four of those knew, however, that they were the chosen few. Most of the artist refugees were indigent; virtually all of them were living on the edge, beyond even the impecuniousness customarily expected of disciples of the muses.⁶⁸ Even formerly famous artists fell into this category, among them Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Heinrich Mann. The unsteady Brecht had to support a family of four, to say nothing of female companions, and with earnings of 125 dollars a month in those years this was hardly possible.69 Like Brecht, Döblin and Heinrich Mann were chronically underpaid as scriptwriters in Hollywood, with Mann having to bear the additional cost of dealing with the alcoholism of his wife, Nelly Kröger. In 1943 in New York, George Grosz was financially as badly off as Max Reinhardt, who took pains to explain to his son Gottfried how it felt to be unable to pay telephone bills or to drive with threadbare car tires.⁷⁰ Both Krenek and Zuckmayer for years did not know how to get by, Zuckmayer having received a $1,000 advance from the Viking publishing company, for a book that was never to be written. “We were just one step above pauperization,” wrote the bestselling author years later.⁷¹

Hence a brutal retooling frequently was the order of the day. In the mid-1930s, Koestler worked as a handyman in Paris, musicians in Tel Aviv would sell hotdogs or open a hat store. Julius Berstl, after considerable experience in Berlin theater, managed to stage his play Der lasterhafte Herr Tschu (The Licentious Mr. Chu, 1922) in London, but when he could not live on the proceeds even for one month, he began weaving scarves for the black market.⁷²

Consequently, these artists’ moods became even more unstable and they took to criticizing, often unreasonably, what was new to them and they thought they could not stand. One object of disdain, in America, was the stodgy white bread, which they held to be inedible. For many refugees this became a symbol of decline from European civilization, enough to cause depression. For Brecht as late as 1944, this was significant enough that he planned a film, together with Charles Laughton, which he wished to call “The King’s Bread.”⁷³ Everything was better at home, was the émigrés’ constant complaint, if natives asked them how they were doing, and Bergner wrote to her fatherly friend George Bernard Shaw that she felt “hopelessly European.” “Pride will have a fall, Liesl,” he replied.⁷⁴

In countries such as England, the United States, and Sweden these central European artists and intellectuals had to abide what they saw as manifestations of provincialism, certainly in low culture but also in what passed as high culture.⁷⁵ In the United States, to escape from an environment suffused with “The American Way of Life,” and failing to integrate easily, some tried to isolate themselves in colony-like settlements and met in European-style salons. Alma Mahler-Werfel held a salon (in Los Angeles and later in New York), and so did Salka Viertel (in Los Angeles) – diasporas within diasporas – that were conceived on the elite principle and barred lesser, unknown, compatriots.76 Yet even these salons did not serve their purpose of social support and spiritual sustenance for fellow travelers if other, vaunted, émigrés made a point of staying away from them – as did the overly critical Marlene Dietrich from Viertel’s salon in Hollywood.⁷⁷ The soprano Lotte Lehmann from nearby Santa Barbara also never showed up there, although she was, individually, friends with Bruno Walter and members of the Mann family – sometime guests at Viertel’s. Salka Viertel, once an acting student at the Reinhardt seminar in Berlin, had separated from her husband Berthold Viertel, a poet, screenwriter, and director, eventually living with Reinhardt’s son Gottfried. Berthold Viertel, originally from Galicia like his wife and la Bergner, was yet another artist who had found the United States unbearable, preferring to make his way in England where, as he said later, he found himself unable to create anything of real significance.⁷⁸

In England other trivialities plagued the newcomers. Artists and literati from Vienna, for instance – notably Stefan Zweig – missed their coffee houses, and for many the English went to bed too early and nobody cared to drop by and say hello.⁷⁹ In the United Kingdom one had to accept that the human boundaries between immigrants and native-born subjects of the Crown were higher than in America, because the British paid heed to formality, as Oskar Kokoschka found out. In order to infiltrate the British art world, he had managed to be invited for tea by the director of the Tate Gallery and was then asked to donate a painting. Kokoschka had, instead, expected to be asked to sell one. Later the artist received the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), which, jested the British cultural historian John Willett, was usually awarded to second- and third-ranking figures of the art world, as well as obscure major-generals.⁸⁰

One who particularly suffered in Britain was Stefan Zweig. Because he was of the opinion that its citizens, in spite of their good will, could not understand the changed central European geopolitical situation, he retreated into self-isolation. Somehow he found it impossible to get close to H. G. Wells and that devotee of German culture, Shaw, both of whom he admired. When the war broke out, he was just sitting there, “immobile, staring into empty space like a condemned man in his cell, walled in, chained to senseless, impotent, waiting and waiting.” Later he moved to the attractive little city of Bath, but did not stay there long. In 1940 he traveled with his new wife, Lotte, to far-away Brazil, and from there, already resigned to isolation, he kept up sporadic contact with émigrés in the United States.81 His namesake Arnold Zweig felt equally isolated in Palestine, but now he despised the Hebrew language and, unlike before, hated Zionism.⁸²

Depression and frustration suffered by the exiles were exacerbated by tensions dividing larger and smaller groups. Edward W. Said, himself a refugee from Palestine, has in more recent times called this a situation in which exiles were exiled again by other exiles.⁸³ Such exile within exile, whether real or perceived, may have been short-lived, nonetheless for those affected it meant their world was falling apart. Both Feuchtwanger in Exil and Klaus Mann in Der Vulkan have tried to describe such feelings in their literature about exile.⁸⁴

These tensions were often caused by personality clashes, of a kind that would have occurred in the home country, but other tensions seem to have been specific to exile. Arnold Schoenberg, for example, could not forgive Bruno Walter for neglecting his compositions in concerts he conducted in exile, and in a circular to friends of 1934 the composer called Walter “a repugnant pig,” adding, “whenever I think of him, I get sick.”⁸⁵ Nine years later Weill called Marlene Dietrich a “stupid cow,” after she had turned down the main role in his musical One Touch of Venus.⁸⁶ Weill also disdained Otto Klemperer, as did Paul Hindemith when he was traveling from his Swiss exile to the United States. “The Klemperer couple could be observed fighting with one another openly and clandestinely,” Hindemith carped, “in which Johanna almost always had to capitulate, in her frequent and unsatisfied thirst for something alcoholic.”⁸⁷

Alma Mahler-Werfel was Gustav Mahler’s widow, Walter Gropius’s ex-wife, Oskar Kokoschka’s former mistress, and now married to Franz Werfel. Not Jewish herself, but having had to flee her native Vienna in the company of her persecuted Jewish husband, she took on the whole world every day in a mood of abject resentment. Seemingly paradoxically, she was a former confidante of the authoritarian Austrian ex-chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and, still, a great admirer of Mussolini. She paid tribute to the early, successful, Nazi campaigns in the war and would annoy Werfel, whom she sometimes whistled for when she wanted to see him, and acquaintances with her praise for Europe’s fascists. In Chicago, Moholy-Nagy, who was Jewish, had disagreements with his former Bauhaus boss Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was not, after Mies had left the German Reich and joined him. And although Fritz Lang thought he could rule over the denizens of the movie world, he felt inferior to the émigré intellectuals, in particular those who frequented the get-togethers at the houses of Thomas Mann, Salka Viertel, and Alma Mahler-Werfel. So he usually retreated into a corner with a martini in hand.88 Stefan Zweig was shocked once when Hanns Eisler and Brecht appeared in his London apartment, acting like rowdy hoodlums. But apart from his contempt for these two idiosyncratic artists, Zweig disliked the entire group of emigrants, whom he called the last wave and the most terrible, “all these writers who never really were writers.”⁸⁹

A particular problem of interpersonal relations in America affected the Jews in their dealings with each other. Here anti-Semitism increased considerably between 1938 and 1946, for which Hollywood served as a prism. The Jews from eastern Europe had built up the film industry, which did not prevent influential moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn from inviting German-Jewish film practitioners to Hollywood, at the beginning of Nazi rule.⁹⁰ But then the already established eastern Jews pronounced their devout Americanism, in order to be seen as good patriots and thus to pre-empt anti-Semitism; this again did not go down well with the newly arrived Jews. To avoid tensions between established eastern Jews and the new arrivals from central Europe, Fritz Lang emphasized the non-Jewishness on his mother’s side and played on their Catholicism, whereas Fritz Kortner, who had been born in Vienna as Nathan Kohn, sometimes thought he was patronized by eastern Jews and, at other times, ignored.⁹¹

Given Thomas Mann’s Olympian status, relationships between individuals with him at their center were most sensitive and could be prone to all manner of misunderstandings, jealousy, and ill will. He himself had to contend with those who always begrudged him his place in the sun, but he also had ideological foes such as Brecht and the psychologist Erik Erikson, who believed he had betrayed Germany. At the end of the 1940s, Alma Mahler-Werfel, who was a dreadful schemer and whom Mann’s wife Katia described as “by nature fairly evil,” provoked an alienation between the novelist and Schoenberg. The composer justly accused Mann of having passed him over in his new novel Doktor Faustus, as the historic founder of the twelve-tone serial technique. This, after Mann had sought out Schoenberg’s advice about music theory, including the inner workings of dodecaphony.92

Thomas Mann had demonstrated earlier how his haughtiness could potentially damage relationships, in his dealings with the satirical draftsman and painter George Grosz and the budding author Arthur Koestler. Grosz happened upon the Manns during their visit to New York in 1934. He had made the mistake of appearing late for lunch at a restaurant with Thomas and Katia Mann and then behaved quite out of order. During their conversation Mann, as was his wont at that time, insisted the Hitler regime would not last long, whereas Grosz, much more realistically, disagreed. As one reviews details of this meeting today, it is clear that the senior, mature novelist could have resorted to a more forgiving attitude and have ended the encounter in a conciliatory mood.⁹³ Koestler visited Mann a few years later in Switzerland, to interview him as the journalist he then was. But the novelist was unapproachable, behind a “wall of protection – courtesy and coldness,” with which he intimidated the younger writer, adding insult to injury when he compared himself to Goethe. Koestler judged later that, unlike Dostoyevsky, Mann had shown no sympathies for the lowly and the downtrodden of this world.⁹⁴

Thomas Mann’s personal coldness, combined with egocentricity, often came through in his private dealings with his family, in his villa in Pacific Palisades, California. He cherished moderate drinking on a daily basis, but he could not stand his sister-in-law Nelly, who came from a demi-monde background, especially after excessive consumption of alcohol. He called her vulgar. Thus he attended her funeral, after her suicide in December 1944, only out of respect for his older brother.⁹⁵ As far as his relationship with Heinrich was concerned, it was always a tense one, apart from the problems with Nelly. His son Klaus, too, was a problem for Thomas Mann, as he was an unstable, homosexually often promiscuous young man with a high degree of sensitivity, who wanted so much to be like his father and who agonized over so many of the ills of exile, including the knowledge that he was half-Jewish.⁹⁶

The degree of marginalization suffered by the exiles, when they were forced by economic necessity to work in menial occupations instead of their artistic vocation, frequently depended on how they compared the new cultural landscape to the central European one, and what consequences arose from this. One measure on which these could be based was the dichotomy between higher and lower culture, to which they were exposed – as in classical versus light music, or serious stage play versus comedic film. These consequences could also be based on a quality evaluation within a certain genre, perhaps by negatively comparing the conservatory training of American musicians with that of German ones. Often such individual judgments were interdependent, with the end effect of reinforcing the overall culture shock.

This culture shock turned out to be not just subjectively painful, but also detrimental in the marketplace, especially when artists had been forced to doubt their own professional integrity. Such doubts did not befall everyone, certainly not Hindemith, who established his own yardstick; he downgraded American popular culture as a matter of course and even as an emigrant argued for the natural superiority of German Music.97 As the American music critic Joseph Horowitz has convincingly demonstrated, Hindemith’s judgments were reinforced, at another level, by Theodor Adorno’s definition of popular culture (Gebrauchskultur), in the course of which America’s indigenous art form, jazz, presented itself to him as a cultural disgrace. Here he was seconded by other central European geniuses like Walter, who admired few American composers, and the pianist Rudolf Serkin.⁹⁸ By Adorno’s benchmark, whoever, as a former European artist, was subjecting himself to these questionable artistic currents, as did the new Broadway composer Weill, was compromising his art. Indeed, buttonholing Weill as an “Americanized” composer who sold his European tradition for commercial gain has been an exercise western musicologists have been engaging in even during more recent times, notwithstanding that the co-creator of The Threepenny Opera, who began his career as a composer of serious music, never saw himself that way.⁹⁹ And neither did Korngold, who wrote racy scores for Hollywood films and tried to return to classical composing in his late work, desperately hoping for new recognition.¹⁰⁰ George Grosz too has been accused of having watered down his art and hence damaging his artistic persona, by painting more contemplatively in America and forsaking the brilliant acerbity of his Weimar satirical work.¹⁰¹ Analogous to these cases one could ask, as critics have done of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, whether the “literature of exile,” which called for a certain adaptation to a lower standard predominating in the new country, not least because of hoped-for financial success, had perforce to be at a lower aesthetic level.¹⁰²

Quality differentiation was something Schoenberg had to concern himself with, as he realized that his newly conceived construct, dodecaphony, was a European phenomenon not in tune with the current musical experience common in America. Not least, in California this experience was determined by patterns set by local women’s clubs, whose members resisted being exposed to new music. Yet this was necessary, for these conservative women could dispense foundation funds with which traditional concerts were financed.103 As those committees could not be persuaded in favor of Modernism, Schoenberg had had to resign himself to his twelve-tone compositions being overlooked in America and be content, instead, with performances of his tonally oriented works like Verklärte Nacht (1899/1917). So he was learning to get by. Although he kept complaining that even his German colleagues such as Klemperer and Walter would not perform his twelve-tone works in the United States, he wisely denied instruction in the new skill to his students at the University of Southern California and UCLA.¹⁰⁴

As already indicated, for many refugees their exile turned out to be a tragic journey heading towards depression and alcoholism, illness and death. “Emigration is a serious disease on its own,” noted Alma Mahler-Werfel in November 1943, “and that our friends have departed from us prematurely is not surprising.”¹⁰⁵ As early as April 1933 the art impresario and critic Harry Graf Kessler had spoken, while in Paris, of a “numbing pain” that would resound like an unstoppable bass instrument.¹⁰⁶ On the fingers of his hand Arnold Zweig counted the number of his friends who were now deceased: Erich Mühsam, Samuel Fischer, Kurt Tucholsky. “Our numbers are diminished. We are getting poorer.”¹⁰⁷

The physical and psychological privations of exile took their toll on the health of the refugees, to the extent that one can reasonably say that many died before their time. Among them was Kessler, for example, who succumbed to a heart and lung disorder in 1937 in the south of France, aged sixty-nine.¹⁰⁸ Werfel, a notorious smoker and drinker, suffered a severe heart attack in September 1943 and, after several more attacks, died in August 1945 at just fifty-six. His widow Alma did not attend the funeral, as she was heavily depressed. Not least because this formerly famous beauty was drinking a bottle of Bénédictine liqueur every day, she put on considerable weight and developed diabetes, which she cynically declared a “Jewish affliction” that should not have affected her.¹⁰⁹

Alcoholism, accompanied by all manner of psychic depression, became the emigrant’s disease par excellence. Already in Paris in May 1939 the Austrian poet Joseph Roth had become its victim; he had been addicted since 1933, and most friends agreed that he had systematically killed himself with alcohol.110 Grosz, who while in exile preferred a nefarious cocktail of absinthe and bourbon, did not die in America, but death caught up with him in Berlin in July 1959.¹¹¹ Throughout his life Koestler was a heavy consumer of alcohol, which did not help his depression. He tried several times to take his own life, once, in the spring of 1940, in France, with morphine tablets he had been given by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin poisoned himself a few months later; his suicide came as a result of his failure to escape from France into Spain. Exile Hannah Arendt has judged that he simply did not want to live any more, and above all, he hated America, where he would have been made a public spectacle of everywhere, as the “last European.”¹¹² Koestler’s suicide was belated, but it came nonetheless: he and his wife killed themselves with barbiturates in London, in 1983.¹¹³

Loneliness and nervous breakdowns also caused the suicide of Stefan Zweig and his wife, in Brazil in February 1942. This time Thomas Mann, who was not exactly a fan of Zweig’s, was moved, even if he gratuitously made the point that the life of a public person was not merely a private affair.¹¹⁴ Mann knew what he was talking about because his son Klaus was always risking his health, chain-smoking and ingesting alcohol and drugs. What a tragic contrast between father and son, one a giant in his field, the other constantly in his shadow striving for world fame, achieving little in comparison but enough even for his contemporaries to be educated and entertained! At the beginning of 1949, Klaus Mann was working on his autobiography The Turning Point, which would be published posthumously. He remembered his last meeting with Ernst Toller, the dramatist and one-time revolutionary of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (1919), a German Jew who had hanged himself in a New York hotel room in 1939. At the time, wrote Klaus Mann, he was asked to speak standing next to Toller’s coffin. “I did not dare to look him in the face. I was afraid. I was ashamed of my tears. For whom were they? Were they for him, who finally was allowed to sleep?”¹¹⁵ It was not much later after he had composed these lines that Klaus Mann took his own life, in Cannes. “I still don’t know how I shall continue with life,” wrote Erika Mann to her friend Lotte Lehmann, because at times she had been inseparable from her brother. “But I know I have to, even though no one can actually think about me without him. We were parts of one piece, as only siblings who are very close can be.”116

FALSE REFUGEES?

The question poses itself: Who exactly was an artist refugee from Nazi Germany? As has been shown, a narrow interpretation of the term would identify artists and certain intellectuals such as theater critics who were forced out of the Third Reich on or after Hitler’s assumption of power on January 30, 1933, on ideological-political, sexual-preference or racist grounds, sometimes all three. A somewhat broader definition might include children of other refugees who became artists in the new host country, or children of refugee artists who did not. While it is moot trying to arrive at a binding definition, it might be illuminating to deal with characters on the fringes who, for one reason or another, are habitually counted in the group of artist émigrés. Four cultural icons offer themselves for closer examination; they had different backgrounds and, after their exile, different roles to play; by previously accepted criteria none of them fit the picture of the main groups of refugee artists above. They were Marlene Dietrich, Erich Maria Remarque, Fritz Busch, and Lotte Lehmann.

Marlene Dietrich, born in Berlin in 1901, one year before Leni Riefenstahl, whom she knew and avoided early in her career as did Riefenstahl in reverse, had played roles in several silent films in Babelsberg until she was discovered by Josef von Sternberg during 1929 for his main role of Lola Lola in Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). Sternberg originally was a Viennese Jew who, after much hardship, had made his way to the top as a director of films in Hollywood. As he was only 5 feet 4 inches tall, he had added the “von” to his name to give him some air of distinction. It was Sternberg who had directed Emil Jannings in The Last Command of 1928 in the role of Rasputin, which won the German actor the first Academy Award earlier in 1929.¹¹⁷ With The Blue Angel, filmed as the first German sound movie in both English and German, Sternberg wanted to put Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (1905), a work critical of bigotry in Wilhelmine society, on film. Jannings himself played Professor Rath, a high-school teacher who falls for the vixen Lola Lola, totally succumbs to her sexually, and, having quit his profession, is exploited until he dies a shameful, if ludicrous, death. Dietrich, in an understated role as a coolly seductive cabaret singer, became a big name after the film was premiered at the Gloria-Palast in Berlin, on April 1, 1930. Immediately after that premiere, the new-born star boarded ship to sail for the United States, where she rejoined director von Sternberg for further filming in Hollywood.118

Legend has it that Dietrich traveled to the United States because of the National Socialists, that she was an opponent of the Nazis and the Third Reich from the beginning, and was fiercely against returning to Germany to live and work there. Some of this, mostly the events after 1939, is true; the Dietrich who promoted American War Bonds and joined the American GIs toward the end of the war to keep their spirits up in the final battles against Hitler’s tyranny is a proven figure of history.¹¹⁹ But the main question here is about her motive for leaving Germany for Hollywood in the spring of 1930. That move had nothing to do with the Nazis. At that time, they were still only a small party, its success blocked by a relatively healthy economy until the Depression in the fall of 1929, and representing 2.6 percent of the German population in the Berlin Reichstag. Granted, this would grow to 18.3 percent after the elections of September 14, 1930, but that was still a few months away.¹²⁰ After The Blue Angel had been shown to huge popular acclaim, the Nazis’ first significant reaction to it was only in July 1930, through an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, culminating in an attack on the Jews. That was directed against Sternberg, as the Jewish producer of smutty films – a genre the Weimar film industry was accused of specializing in generally. The twin reasons why Dietrich left for Hollywood were that she thought she was stuck professionally with Ufa Film in Berlin, having developed a feeling of resentment even before November 1929, when the film was beginning to be made. Moreover, after von Sternberg had entered her professional life, she fell for him personally as well; both being married (she to Rudolf Sieber, an assistant film director in Berlin), they had an affair mostly consummated at his Berlin hotel, which Dietrich was in no hurry to deny, and since she believed he was nothing short of a genius and a wonderful influence on her, future episodes with him in Hollywood would be both romantically rewarding and professionally fruitful. (Dietrich’s idea then was to establish a new life in Hollywood for herself and have her husband and their child Maria Elisabeth join her.)¹²¹

Even before her departure from Germany, Dietrich must have realized, of course, that what she stood for in the German film world was anathema to Nazi weltanschauung. Even then she was openly bisexual, having had an affair with the popular Berlin comedienne and cabaret personality Claire Waldoff, and had Jewish friends.122 If she had stayed in Germany after 1930 and up to 1933, it is possible that she would have adjusted to Nazi rule and, in particular, to Goebbels’s ways in Babelsberg – like many others, including (reluctantly) Hans Albers, the supporting male character in The Blue Angel, and (enthusiastically) Emil Jannings. She might even have eclipsed Riefenstahl, who had been hoping for the Lola Lola role in the film, but then went on to star in her own self-directed movie, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). That impressive work of 1932 notwithstanding, Goebbels could see that Riefenstahl was attracted to Hitler himself and hence he attempted repeatedly to recall Dietrich from Hollywood and make her the number one star actress in his Babelsberg empire. Dietrich certainly had the potential for this; this role was later filled by Zarah Leander. Dietrich is known to have joked several times in Hollywood that if she wanted, she could return to Germany at once, and her true feelings in Hollywood are not known, because there she suffered both romantic disappointments and professional crises. However, she did apply to become an American citizen in 1937, causing a vicious polemic in Julius Streicher’s smutty tabloid Der Stürmer, and thereafter, from what one could observe, she identified with solid American values, the most important of which was democracy. Anyone who wished to see her as a refugee from Nazism after that could have been justified.¹²³

In contrast to Marlene Dietrich, Erich Maria Remarque had an anti-fascist pedigree when he left Germany, settling in a house in Porto Ronco, near Ascona on the Swiss side of Lago Maggiore, in 1931. He had been born in 1898 and lived through World War I as a soldier, though less at the front lines than he later suggested. But he lost close friends at the front, which imprinted many a horror on his mind. Unlike Ernst Jünger, he saw the soldiers not as heroes who championed war for war’s sake, but as victims in conflagrations that ought to be avoided. Thus he came to write his third and most famous novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), as a convinced pacifist, but not someone overtly interested in politics. After serialization in 1928, he published it as a book the next year. “It was a confession of personal despair,” observes Modris Eksteins, “but it was also an indignant denunciation of an insensate social and political order, inevitably of that order which had produced the horror and destruction of the war but particularly of the one that could not settle the war and deal with the aspirations of veterans.” After its appearance, the instant success of the book enabled Remarque to leave behind him a shifty ten years in odd jobs and indifferent public-school teaching, and a flaky first novel he later disowned. Multitalented, he could also write poetry, paint, and play the piano and organ – all his life he loved music. At the same time, this middle-class youth from provincial Osnabrück was socially insecure if eagerly upwardly mobile, aspiring to social prominence and sometimes wearing an officer’s uniform and fancying a baron’s title he had no right to. Handsome and always fastidious with clothes, in 1925 he married the beautiful dancer and actress Ilse Jutta Zambona, of Italian-Danish descent.124

When his pacifist novel appeared, it sold 640,000 copies in the first three months and within one year had been translated into some twenty languages. Immediately, Remarque was controversial in Germany, with most on the political right accusing him of insulting the German army, and some on the left of enriching himself by glamorizing the Kaiser’s battlefield. The Nazis, even before the auspicious national vote in September 1930 that made them the second-largest party in the Reichstag, were already vocal enough to put up fierce opposition. Their anger increased when Universal Studios in Hollywood made a movie of the novel that year. Maxwell Anderson, Kurt Weill’s friend, wrote the screenplay, and the film won two Academy Awards. During its world premiere in Berlin, Nazi storm troopers at the behest of Goebbels disrupted its German version, releasing white mice and tossing beer bottles and stink bombs into the Mozartsaal cinema. After further turbulence organized by the Nazis, republican authorities banned the film in December 1930, as dangerous to the public peace. Goebbels renewed this ban early in the Third Reich, while copies of Remarque’s famous novel went up in flames during the May 1933 book burnings.¹²⁵

Granted, Remarque had become instantly rich and famous at the age of thirty, and he began a lifestyle as an internationally feted show-business star. He acquired all the accouterments of luxury such as exotic cars, sojourning in France and, eventually, the United States, while holding on to his house in Switzerland. In both Europe and America, he was to carry on a serious affair with Marlene Dietrich, mostly between 1937 and 1940. One might wish to think that Dietrich, during the late 1930s, was politically sensitized by Remarque, conditioned into accepting an anti-fascist value system on behalf of universal humanity, as the author had developed it for himself years before, even though he remained, outwardly, apolitical. For there is no question that Remarque’s chief motive for securing permanent residence in Switzerland between 1931 and January 29, 1933, the day of his final departure from Germany, unlike Dietrich, had not been professional frustration and romantic longing, but the realization that in a Germany drifting irremediably to the extreme right, there was no future for a confirmed democratic pacifist. Hence classifying him as an artist refugee would be more justified in Remarque’s case than in the case of Dietrich.126

The cases of conductor Fritz Busch and soprano Lotte Lehmann are different to those of both Dietrich and Remarque because, before they left for foreign shores, they attempted to negotiate a deal with the Nazi regime. To conceal this later, they concocted dissembling narratives. Whereas Busch tried to remain in Nazi Germany on his terms, the Austrian and American resident Lehmann attempted to accommodate herself from the outside. Their faked legacies today cast their claims as refugees in serious doubt.

On March 7, 1933, Busch, a World War I veteran with no regrets and politically on the right, was conductor of the Saxon State Opera in Dresden. According to memoirs both he and his wife Grete had carefully composed, he was dismissed that day, after combined machinations by both the SA and the Saxon regional government, on account of his alleged opposition to the Nazi Party early in the Weimar Republic. Following these events, Busch went into self-imposed exile and continued working in Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, and Glyndebourne in England.¹²⁷

What is true is that the Nazis objected to Busch for a number of reasons, even before January 1933. His younger brother was Adolf Busch, a concert violinist, who had married a Jew and taken up residence in Basel in 1926. Adolf Busch was a declared enemy of the Nazis, befriending the brilliant young Jewish pianist Rudolf Serkin (the object of contempt for Elly Ney), who later married the couple’s daughter.¹²⁸ As for Fritz Busch, a sizeable faction of Nazi deputies in the Saxon Landtag since the end of the republic had clamored for cutting the culture budget, affecting the state opera much more heavily than he himself considered necessary. Moreover, the conductor was accused of patronizing Jewish friends and artists, of spending excessive time on leave as a guest conductor, mainly in Berlin, and of claiming an exceptionally generous salary as well as considerable vacation time. The latter charges could be documented, but Busch was entitled to these privileges contractually since before 1933. There were several personal intrigues against the Busch family in Dresden, preceding his dismissal in March.129

Although members of the Dresden opera orchestra had been pressured by the local government to take a stand against Busch, one musician wrote to Richard Strauss that Busch had always been “very popular with the orchestra.”¹³⁰ Minor irregularities were conceded in the letter, however, of the kind that could easily have been settled by either side.¹³¹ The pro-Nazi music publisher Gustav Bosse admitted that Busch may have stepped out of line, because, as alleged, he was constantly striving to move away from opera in favor of concert performances, especially in Berlin. Still, Bosse deplored that a conductor of Busch’s caliber had been “tarnished in this manner.”¹³²

Bosse, who resided in Regensburg in southern Germany, was not able to see through the cabal that was at the bottom of this affair, and the point about “opera” was really moot. The facts were that behind the scenes a link was being constructed between the conductor and Göring, who, under the influence of his fiancée the actress Emmy Sonnemann and his major-domo in cultural affairs, Heinz Tietjen, wished to attract Busch to Berlin. Sonnemann had been friends with the Busch couple during their earlier years at the Stuttgart Opera, and when Busch had moved to Dresden in 1922 and the actress to nearby Weimar, the three of them continued their friendship. By 1932, Sonnemann had been bringing along her “chap,” the stunt flier and businessman Hermann Göring, who was already high up in the Nazi Party hierarchy. Before the clash of March 7, 1933, she had telephoned Busch from Berlin, to tell him of Göring’s interest in hiring him. As acting Interior Minister of Prussia and Minister President-designate, Göring was able to employ more than one music director in the capital. Hitler was not expected to interfere, as long as his favorites, the conductors Krauss and Furtwängler, were not affected.¹³³

After the Dresden debacle Busch visited Göring a few times, as the latter seemed to hold out hope for a new job as opera director in Berlin. A close reading of archival sources suggests that Busch would have accepted any such position and not have left Germany at all. But Furtwängler, after all, stood in the way in Berlin, and another, potential, role for Busch in Bayreuth as festival director did not suit his plans. Besides, he had already been approached by the Nazis to do some publicity work for them in South America.134

In each of their books, the Busch couple maintain that the telegram inviting the conductor to stage a German opera season at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires came as a godsend just as he was being forced to give up his Dresden position.¹³⁵ Yet archival documents show this to be an outright fabrication. For although Busch had been invited to Argentina in the 1920s, this latest invitation had been rigged with the assistance of Reich authorities, after Busch had repeatedly consulted with Hans Hinkel. At that time Hinkel, who later worked exclusively for Goebbels, was also in Göring’s employ as commissar in the Prussian Ministry of Education (responsible for “de-Jewifying” German culture). Since Göring could not find a space for Busch in Berlin, the plan was for him to give several performances in Buenos Aires. He was to be placed in the company of German artists objectionable to the Nazis, including Jews, to give the impression to the South Americans of a much larger tolerance in the regime for unwanted persons than actually existed. Whether Busch knew it or not, on his tour to South America, which lasted until late 1933, he was constantly observed by a specially appointed Nazi mole.¹³⁶

After the return from Argentina, Busch hoped to be rewarded with an appropriate post in Berlin.¹³⁷ This, however, did not happen, so Busch now had to content himself with whatever European offers came his way, as well as repeated tours of South America. By 1934 he was able to assume the musical directorship of the Glyndebourne Opera in Britain – a prestigious if not a lucrative venture. Busch was soon earning his principal income in New York at the Metropolitan Opera, in Buenos Aires, and at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. Having failed to obtain Swiss citizenship, even with the help of Thomas Mann, who was a close friend of his violinist brother Adolf, he took out Argentinian papers in 1936. Until the outbreak of the war Busch received several offers from the Germans to conduct in the Reich, but now he turned them down. Prevented from international travel by hostilities, he settled permanently in Argentina in 1941, with, as he thought, a spotless anti-Nazi record.¹³⁸

The lyric soprano Lotte Lehmann, born in 1888 near Berlin, after several seasons in Hamburg had become the star of the Vienna Opera by the early 1920s and was the reigning diva in Europe by the beginning of the 1930s. Highlights of her midlife career included singing the lead role in Richard Strauss’s new opera Die Frau ohne Schatten and performing in some of his other works. All the same, around this time she was becoming restless, casting about for new, exciting, opportunities beyond Austria, whose citizenship she had attained. Always impressed by wealth, titles, and fame, she was open to influence by other, perhaps even more prominent, personalities. After her first engagement in the United States, when she was sailing back to Germany on the ocean liner Bremen in December 1930, she chanced upon Marlene Dietrich who was returning to Europe for the first time since the premiere of The Blue Angel. At that moment, the stately Lehmann desperately wanted to be like her, and wanted her attention. On the promenade deck of first class, whenever the new Hollywood star sauntered by, Lehmann would intone, softly, but with what she thought was a raunchy voice, Lola Lola’s song: “From head to toe, I’m made for love . . .” Alas, the glittering Marlene, once demurely trained in the classics on the violin, pretended not to see the older woman and paid no attention to this novel rendition of her famous movie song.139

Nonetheless, a couple of years later the opera singer thought she could change her fortunes for the better. For an explanation, our narrative must move forward to 1966. In that year, Lehmann published an article in which she told her many followers that at the start of the Nazi regime she had received a call from Göring, summoning her from Vienna to Berlin for a few guest appearances; money was no object. After an interview with Göring himself, for what appeared to be a permanent changeover at his Berlin State Opera, Lehmann was eventually promised “a fantastic amount,” plus a villa, a generous life pension, a castle on the Rhine, and a riding horse. Lehmann wrote that she half agreed to a contract, taking Göring’s provision – that she never sing outside Germany again – not very seriously. She said she laughed at his last remark that no critic would be allowed to write bad reviews about her, otherwise he would be “liquidated.”

When the final version of the contract arrived, so the article continued, “it contained no word about all that Göring had promised,” causing Lehmann to complain to Berlin and reserving, among other things, her right to perform outside Nazi Germany. According to the article, Göring dictated a reply, “a terrible letter, full of insults and low abuse. A real volcano of hate and revenge.” Lehmann concluded her story with the remarks: “This was the end of Germany for me, Hitler’s Germany!” Despite attempts to get her back, the singer never returned to the Third Reich.140

Lehmann’s 1966 article, which made her look like a victim of the Nazis, was based on real events, but they had taken a totally different course. As documentary evidence discovered in an obscure Viennese archive reveals, the meeting took place on April 20, 1934, with Göring, in his capacity as head of the Prussian State Opera, and Generalintendant Heinz Tietjen, Göring’s major-domo in cultural affairs. It was the result of efforts by Göring, Tietjen, and Strauss to effect some reforms in the state opera system that could have included the hiring of new stars. Berlin conductors Furtwängler and Robert Heger heard about this and Heger, a personal friend of Lehmann’s from his Vienna days, encouraged Lehmann to put out feelers, since she was known to be interested in new opportunities. As in the 1920s, the singer was concertizing frequently in Germany, and the regime change in January 1933 did not affect her in the least. In so doing, she chose a different course from her friend Arturo Toscanini, who had an early falling-out with the Nazi regime, and from her old mentor, Berlin-born Bruno Walter, who had been physically forced out of Germany. One of Lehmann’s highlights in the Third Reich was singing, on November 13, 1933, under Furtwängler’s direction, as Strauss initiated the Reich Music Chamber in Berlin. Strauss’s friend, the storm trooper and music critic Hugo Rasch, enthused in the Völkischer Beobachter that the singer’s art was opening a new era of Nazi-organized music in the Third Reich, as he was especially impressed with her “unblemished way with song.”¹⁴¹ And on November 9 of that year, a Nazi holiday, Lehmann had performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus from which Walter had been expelled not so long before.¹⁴² Unsurprisingly, at the end of the first year of Nazi rule Lehmann received a letter from Walter’s wife Else, in which she chided the singer for her insensitivity, merely for the sake of money, while artists with a conscience such as Toscanini were attempting to impose sanctions on the Hitler regime. “How I deplore the fact that you sing so much in Germany,” she wrote. “You know very well that all artists who have been excluded from Germany, Aryan and non-Aryan, German and foreign, heart-warmingly declared their mutual solidarity and stayed away. It would have pleased me if you, too, had joined that protest and intermittently had turned your back on Germany.”¹⁴³

After Lehmann had discussed with Heger how to initiate for her a change from Vienna to Berlin without making it look obvious that it was she who was behind such an action, Heger contacted Furtwängler who then approached Göring. There was a further to and fro via letter, cable, and telephone, as a result of which Göring had the singer flown to Berlin on his private airplane on April 20, 1934. After the meeting with Göring, Lehmann showed herself very satisfied and talked to her German agent Erich Simon about a new deal, as good as sealed. The poor Jew, himself already on the run, had no choice but to congratulate her. Then on tour, she waited in London for the first draft of the contract from Berlin which, when it arrived, sorely disappointed her. The suggested conditions were not attractive to her, and her emoluments were far below the level of generosity touched on by Göring in Berlin and mentioned earlier to her. She conveyed her disillusionment to Tietjen, who on May 16 sent her a devastating reply, implying nothing less than greed and pomposity on her part. Disappointment on the Berlin side was encapsulated in Göring’s condemnation that Lehmann as a quasi-Berliner and “a racially arch-German artist” had not felt German enough to consider serving the German people as a point of honor. After several more counter-arguments, some of them touching on money, the initial offer to Lehmann was withdrawn.144 Subsequently, she was declared persona non grata by the government of the Third Reich, never allowed to return, which made it possible for her later to declare that she was a victim who had been persecuted personally by the most senior leaders of the Nazi regime. Without knowledge of the true circumstances, all her followers later pandered to that myth.¹⁴⁵

How did all this have a bearing on her emigration and status as an exile? As further events unfolded, it became clear that to the extent the Nazi authorities came to resent Lehmann, she herself wanted to be regarded by the world as an enemy of the Third Reich, in order to further her chances of finding a safe haven, assuming that a career in Europe was becoming increasingly fraught with danger. Having lived in New York as a freelancing guest artist off and on since the fall of 1930, and having established valuable ties there with Jewish agents and accompanists, she was lucky enough to be in America when Austria was annexed to the Reich in March 1938. By then her carefully constructed legend could be instantly put to use to assuage suspicious Americans and deceive fellow emigrants, current or potential, especially the Jews among them. After the death of her husband Otto Krause in 1939, she moved permanently to the luxuriant coastal town of Santa Barbara in 1940 with her woman companion, a member of New York’s high society. Lotte Lehmann became an American citizen in 1945. While, throughout the duration of the Third Reich, she acquired, technically, the status of an exile in America, she was hardly in the same category as genuine fugitives from fascism.

THE CASE OF THOMAS MANN

Thomas Mann condescendingly approved of the matronly Lotte Lehmann, whom he met occasionally either in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, in the company of his daughter Erika or their mutual friend Bruno Walter, and whom, in a typically ironic overstatement, he once labeled a “splendid person.” Whereas Mann truly admired the singer’s art, he found her personally shrill and cloying, while she, not well read, was intimidated by his erudition and deterred by his cold formality.146

On the other hand, Mann disliked Marlene Dietrich and Erich Maria Remarque, whom he came across as a couple in the Warner Brothers film studio in Hollywood in April 1939. Remarque, who thought Mann had a “miserly face,” probably resented the older novelist’s arrogance, chafing at Mann’s position as the most celebrated German émigré writer. Mann had noticed Remarque’s indifferent behavior, anything but deferential, and was annoyed. About Dietrich he said almost nothing – with his homoerotic inclination, he was not given to commenting about strikingly attractive women. And yet, perhaps he resented her because when Dietrich had been cast as Lola Lola, Trude Hesterberg, his brother Heinrich’s mistress at the time, had been overlooked.¹⁴⁷

Thomas Mann’s exile from Nazi Germany had begun in earnest in 1938, after the annexation of Austria in March, when he and his wife Katia were on their fourth sojourn in the United States and he decided not just to sever himself from the Third Reich but to devote his international prestige to acting against it. Arriving at this conviction had not been easy for him. He had halted a European lecture tour at the beginning of 1933 in Switzerland, as a group of influential and nationalist-minded artists and literati, mostly from Munich, had issued a letter citing objections to his mildly critical views of Richard Wagner – the subject of his talk.148 The Manns remained in Küsnacht near Zurich, hesitating, until 1936, because a complete break with Hitler’s Germany would mean a loss of book sales in the Reich, which were considerable.¹⁴⁹ Already during these early years of the regime, a younger generation of Germans, conditioned by Nazi education, did not know anymore who Thomas Mann was.¹⁵⁰ In 1933 the faction under Goebbels had wished him to collaborate in the manner of Richard Strauss. Therefore, his books were not consigned to the flames in May 1933, in contrast to the works of his older brother Heinrich, a known Marxist. There is also some truth to the Manns’ argument that after a quiet return to Germany he might have exerted some mitigating influence there. That this was an illusion, however, was brought home to him in a series of letters from Erika, culminating in one dated January 26, 1936, in which she urged her father to terminate his status as “a non-genuine, half” emigrant, to finally declare himself and take an unambiguous stand against the Nazis. Mann thereafter became more vocal against the regime and promptly lost his German citizenship, accompanied by the loss of his honorary doctorate from Bonn. But in the same year he also acquired Czech citizenship for himself and Katia, which would enable them to travel further, in the south of France and northern Europe, for instance, and then North America.¹⁵¹

Among refugees from the Third Reich, Mann consistently exemplified a best-case scenario from many vantage points. Not the least of these was professional success. To achieve it, he was allowed – a solitary privilege granted only to him – to commence teaching courses at Princeton University, as “Lecturer in the Humanities,” and to go on lecture tours throughout the United States, beginning in the spring of 1938 and continuing until he felt he could make enough money just through sales of his books. Whereas the teaching commitments at Princeton had petered out by 1941, he was appointed to a prestigious consulting position at the Library of Congress in 1942, which was merely nominal but paid him an excellent salary.

On his university lecture tours from 1938 to 1943 he was consistently paid $1,000 per lecture, sometimes more, and he would be feted as the guest of institutes of higher learning from coast to coast, with highlights always in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His usual topics were political; early on he had a lecture prepared, “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” which hinted at the downfall of Hitler’s dictatorship as being close at hand, and, later on, so-called freedom lectures entitled “War and Democracy” and “How to Win the Peace.” Apart from universities, there were speaking engagements at other prestigious venues, such as Carnegie Hall in New York, where the “Victory” speech was announced for Friday, May 6, 1938, at 8:45 p.m. Mann read the prepared lectures in comprehensible but strongly accented English, which improved over the months; although he hated questions, they were usually permitted and answered with the help of interlocutors, only Erika at first and later also hosts on the road. Occasionally, Mann was asked to speak about his own novels, such as the very popular Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), sometimes at German departments in American universities, and it must have come as a nasty surprise to him that many of those had a German nationalist bent, some to the point of being pro-Nazi.152

Moreover, Mann was forever fortunate to be able to continue his career as a novelist almost as if nothing had happened, because he had the support of his old German publisher Samuel Fischer until his death in October 1934 in Berlin; the firm was duly expatriated to Austria, Switzerland, and then Sweden by his son-in-law Gottfried Bermann Fischer. In America, Mann’s publisher was Alfred A. Knopf in New York, who had exclusive rights to all English translations of his books. Hence, even though Mann was interrupted by his extensive lecture tours and the vagaries of moving from Switzerland to Princeton and then to Los Angeles, he was still able, during his American exile, to begin and complete five novels, the two most important of which were the fourth part of his Joseph tetralogy and Doktor Faustus. Many devotees of the novelist – who had received the Nobel Prize in 1929, from Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum, secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy and father of Kristina Söderbaum, who, as an irony of history, would later aid her husband Veit Harlan in the making of pro-Nazi films – eventually would consider Doktor Faustus to be Thomas Mann’s most important work. He first conceived this as a novella in February 1941 and finally began writing it two years later, in May. There were few émigré writers who came close to Mann’s high level of production in fiction, both in terms of quality and material rewards, the next two outstanding ones being Werfel and Remarque.¹⁵³ In fact, many exiled writers continued their craft by writing novels about exile, as did Feuchtwanger and Klaus Mann, thereby signifying that the break in their professional past was considerable. Some of those novels were decidedly inferior in quality, like Feuchtwanger’s Exil or, in English, Salamon Dembitzer’s Visas for America, excepting, perhaps, Klaus Mann’s Vulkan and Anna Seghers’s Transit.

Thomas Mann’s uniqueness in a potentially hostile world of exile was also determined by the protection he enjoyed through Agnes Meyer, the wealthy and influential wife of the Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer. This much younger woman with German roots from New York had been impressed by Mann during a previous visit to the United States, and from 1938 onward looked after his well-being in an extraordinary fashion, arranging the Princeton and Library of Congress appointments and other contacts. Eventually, she served as a financial guarantor, providing peace of mind for Thomas Mann as he built his own house in the Pacific Palisades suburb of Los Angeles, at 1550 San Remo Drive, in 1941. Nevertheless, Mann had good reason to feel annoyed by her stream of letters and, at one time, a daring show of physical intimacy, but he kept his faith with her, answering almost every letter. It is fair to say that he sold his soul to Agnes Meyer, even allowing her to inspire the last part of his Joseph tetralogy. But then again, what was he to do if he wanted to remain vocal against Nazi Germany in the public manner to which he was now accustomed? He needed her money to help out others who asked for his aid, and to help mankind to survive the fascist onslaught against the free world, which he sometimes believed would collapse in ruins. Surely, a Faustian quandary! It is, however, a fact that when Mann finally left the United States to return to Europe permanently in 1952, Agnes Meyer was one of several important reasons.154

Writing, publishing, and lecturing throughout all of North America, Thomas Mann loved traveling in the huge, comfortable trains, like the Sky Chief, that took him, always first class, from one city to another. They appeared to him as some kind of symbol of the goodness of a working democracy in the country that had now taken him and his family in. Among all the artist refugees in the United States, he may have been the only one to feel this way, not just because the others could hardly afford to travel first class and therefore did not have the leisure to contemplate the benefits of this democracy. The fact that there is hardly a complaint in Mann’s diaries about those arduous trips and there is, instead, such praise for the luxury Pullman cars conveys how genuinely this author endeavored to understand the new foreign country and how he tried to fit in. Seemingly little things, which threw many of his fellow refugees off, delighted or at least interested him, such as the typically American breakfasts (ham ’n’ eggs), often in a drugstore on the road. Here the novelist, notwithstanding his inbred aristocratic bearing, rubbed shoulders with ordinary people in a demonstration of democracy in action. This was notwithstanding that in his Los Angeles home he could employ a Viennese refugee cook, that he always availed himself of a black servant couple from the South, and that he could afford to be chauffeured anywhere in his own Buick.155

Thomas Mann cherished democracy, which he himself had only begun to understand and even champion as recently as 1922, and he saw it ideally embodied in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became possibly the only living person, after 1933, whom he chose to look up to. He was invited to see and speak with him three times, as early as 1935, but whenever they met he failed to understand why Roosevelt had not read his works nor why he, the master politician, would not be interested in Mann’s views on history and politics.¹⁵⁶ This may have poured cold water on the flames of his American love, and during his entire period there, he suffered other inconveniences, misunderstandings, and bouts of doubt. Some of these, as for the other refugees, had to do with the peculiarities of East and West Coast climates. Whereas he felt Princeton, like New York City, to be often muggy, the Californian sameness and predictably sunny weather tired him out easily and he tended to find the consistently gorgeous landscape boring.¹⁵⁷ On the whole, he thought the United States an incoherent ethnic compound, artificially stitched together, as a “colonial land, with the accomplishments of technical know-how.”¹⁵⁸ As he wrote to Bermann Fischer, he considered its people naïve in their never-ending optimism, both materially and for a better, feel-good future.¹⁵⁹ Over the years, he was disturbed by this (America lacked the qualities of European tragedy and decay that he himself was expert at conveying in his novels), and already in the early 1940s he wagered more comparisons with Europe. He decided in the end that Switzerland would be the most congenial country for his temperament and lifestyle, and he condemned Munich, most certainly because of the 1933 open letter contrived by his resentful nationalist-minded peers attacking him for his criticism of Richard Wagner.¹⁶⁰

From his pristine Olympian peak the high-strung Mann found it difficult to abide fellow refugee artists in day-to-day encounters, let alone regard them benevolently, because he found them wanting, each and every one. Since he applied a stringent set of standards to his own behavior in society (always in suit and tie, even at the writing desk) and, what was more, to his creative work ethic, he constantly found fault with members of his cohort, as he had already before 1938 in the case of Grosz and Koestler. He enjoyed social gatherings at the houses of friends and colleagues, where food and drinks were served and everybody, inevitably, spoke German – not least because he could fancy himself as the center of attention. Typically, he noted, after a party at the house of the novelist Vicki Baum in Hollywood in April 1938: “Almost exclusively German-speaking guests. Architect Neutra. The comedian, musician and actor Dr. Klemperer, Schönberg etc. Long conversation before dinner. Buffet dinner. At the end Bali film with youths in ritual trance. Convulsions. – The beautiful young male Indian dancer. – At home with Colin. Late.”161 As frequently throughout his diary entries, Mann found it impossible to repress cynical observations about others: the conductor Klemperer, a manic-depressive and mostly unhappy in America, was often observed to act and talk strangely in the company of others, in order to provoke.

When Thomas Mann, mostly on the U.S. East and West Coasts, engaged with people in conversation and debate on the subject of exile, he expressed strong opinions, sometimes also about persons not in his immediate vicinity. In the case of the poet Joseph Roth, for example, Mann denigrated his lonely death in Paris in May 1939 as that of a “drunkard,” without showing any trace of empathy.¹⁶² Mann’s relationship with Brecht was consistently acrimonious, even before their controversy in May 1943 about who in Germany should be blamed for the rise of National Socialism.¹⁶³ He judged Zuckmayer’s writing skills as “mediocre,” and even found fault with his friend Albert Einstein’s lecture at Princeton University, which he characterized as “very incomprehensible.”¹⁶⁴

And as much as Thomas Mann liked Werfel as a friend – probably the closest friend he had after the writer Bruno Frank and Bruno Walter – Werfel got on his nerves more than once and he disdained his literary output. When in December 1942, Werfel, in the middle of a group of guests, loudly decreed that a peace was in sight after the imminent debacle of National Socialism, Mann was exasperated, blaming an obviously lesser man who had dared to make political predictions in his presence.¹⁶⁵ Hence it comes as no surprise that Mann declined to back a possible candidacy of Werfel for the Nobel literature prize, and he usually cringed when the powerful Alma accompanied her husband. It was clear that Mann, as in the case of Remarque, found it difficult to abide Werfel’s American financial success.166

Mann sustained a special relationship with Theodor Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg, toward the middle of the 1940s, while in the process of writing Doktor Faustus, a novel inspired by a modern musical theme. Although he had always been interested in classical music, especially Wagner, he possessed only scant knowledge of the violin and little of the piano, on which, nonetheless, from early on he was fond of noodling themes from Tristan und Isolde. As already noted, next to conversations with the twelve-tone innovator Schoenberg, and apart from musicological information he received, he also gained considerable insight into harmony and music theory through talks with Adorno. As a musician and music critic in his former life, Adorno had been a pupil of Schoenberg’s student Alban Berg, and now, although he was engaged with Max Horkheimer, on the East Coast, in the formulation of a new social philosophy, he liked to help Mann out. Yet a third musician useful to Mann was the composer Hanns Eisler, who had also studied under Schoenberg.¹⁶⁷

Schoenberg, Eisler, and Adorno had Jewish roots, and what appears to have been their smooth relationship with Mann highlights his fundamental sense of tolerance of different ethnicities, cultures, and apposite ideologies (as he had demonstrated in his evaluation of American society in general); this was so important in the diaspora of fugitives from European fascism. Eugene Meyer, who looked upon the charitable actions of his wife Agnes towards Mann with benevolent bemusement, was also Jewish. This is not to say that Mann was entirely free of conventional anti-Semitism, of the kind that Germany’s educated classes easily harbored against Jews from the last thirty years of the Wilhelmine Empire. Mann had been much more strongly anti-Semitic in his youth, but he had married a Jewish girl from a closely acculturated, even privileged, family, and in his private circle of relationships an anti-Jewish stance was not discernible, at least not at that time. It was only on certain occasions in America that Jews he did not know well but found easy to stereotype got under his skin, of a type he had known in Europe and obviously disliked.¹⁶⁸ His was a selective caution against Jews. He was genuinely shaken when his in-laws, Alfred and Hedwig Pringsheim, were driven by the Nazis from their Munich mansion on Arcisstrasse, forced to stay in close quarters near Lake Constance, until in October 1939 they were allowed to seek refuge in Switzerland, all of their fortune having meanwhile been confiscated.169

Several American Jewish organizations assisted Mann in the planning of his speaking tours, such as the Wise Temple in Cincinnati, the Shalom Temple in Chicago, and the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in St. Louis – where up to 3,000 people came to hear him.¹⁷⁰ Jews were also instrumental in Mann’s work with refugee organizations and the monthly political broadcasts he did for German listeners via the BBC from October 1940 on. In these he made certain to address the terrible fate of European Jews as it was unfolding before him, such as when he deplored the transport of French Jews from Vichy France to the death camps of the European East in September 1942. At a time when most people outside Germany claimed ignorance, Mann, significantly, was conversant with these crimes. These broadcasts were also listened to by exiles, particularly in Britain.¹⁷¹

Mann showed solidarity with other refugees when German immigrants without American citizenship were required to have themselves registered as “Enemy Aliens” under the existing Alien Enemy Act, recodified after World War I. After the German declaration of war on the United States in December 1941 presidential proclamations 2526 and 2527 under this act provided for Italians and Germans in America to be apprehended, restrained, and secured. Hence in February 1942 he joined other prominent exiles such as Walter, Toscanini, and Einstein in sending a telegram to Roosevelt to draw attention “to a large group of natives of Germany and Italy who by present regulations are, erroneously, characterized and treated as ‘Enemy Aliens’.” These people had fled to the United States because of “totalitarian persecution” and therefore had lost their citizenship. “Many of these people, politicians, scientists, artists, writers, have been among the earliest and most farsighted adversaries of the governments against whom the United States are now at war.” The signatories wanted the president to draw a line “between the potential enemies of American democracy on the one hand, and the victims and sworn foes of totalitarian evil on the other.”¹⁷² Roosevelt, however, left the restrictions in place, having wisecracked that “as a lot of opera singers,” Italians were not to be feared, whereas Germans were different – “they may be dangerous.”173 Restrictions meant, for instance, that for an affected person there was a local curfew of 8:00 p.m. and that he or she was not allowed to travel more than five miles from their private residence without official permission.¹⁷⁴ Despite such entreaties as Mann’s and Einstein’s, however, the strictures remained in place until the refugees had acquired American citizenship or until the end of the war, whichever came first.

Despite his personal hauteur, Mann remained generous in listening to cries of help and extending empathy and tangible assistance to many refugees where he could. In 1940 already he was receiving “mountains of mail, mostly distress signals.”¹⁷⁵ He wrote a letter to a close acquaintance, the prominent New York journalist Dorothy Thompson, to ask for assistance to be extended to Annette Kolb, a writer and Munich friend of Katia Mann’s; Kolb had left Germany already in 1933 and her works were on the Nazi blacklist.¹⁷⁶ In April 1941, Mann considered a request from Fritz Stiedry, a Jewish conductor who had arrived in the United States via the Soviet Union and in New York kept up the New Friends of Music Orchestra, for which he needed funds.¹⁷⁷ He wanted $20,000, which Mann thought he might get from Agnes Meyer. It is doubtful that she gave such a large amount. But Mann asked for just $1,000 a couple of months later, for “emigrant aid,” which she promptly paid.¹⁷⁸ And in 1943 he conceived the plan for a “New School” on the West Coast, to assist “the impecunious writers.”¹⁷⁹

Mann’s capacity for personal empathy was large in principle because he himself was highly sensitive and used to suffering. Apart from the psychological difficulties due to the fundamental change in moving from Europe to North America and then constant moves on the North American mainland, his physical constitution deteriorated over time. Sixty-three years old when he arrived in the United States to stay, he had to fight all manner of health irregularities and a few serious ailments, aggravated by uncertainty regarding his future. Although in this respect he resembled fellow refugee artists, there were two distinct differences from many of them. First, he never succumbed to alcoholism, even though he was consuming hard liquor and beer on a daily basis and during Prohibition took leather cases with spirits along on the trains.¹⁸⁰ Second, thanks to sufficient personal wealth and excellent connections, he could avail himself of first-class medical help speedily and at all times. Mann was also unique in that he had been interested in the etiology of human disorders for a very long time and thought he could interpret many of their symptoms, as he had showed in his novels Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, and was to show again in his last great work, dealing with the demise of the syphilitic Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus. But only in some respects was the composer Leverkühn an image of himself.

Mann confessed to suffering from depression (as did, for instance, Stefan Zweig), although it is uncertain whether he had clinically defined manic depression, with its high peaks and deep lows, like Otto Klemperer. If so, Mann would have been especially creative during psychic highs, and his inspiration must have lain fallow during lows. There are indications in his diaries from his American period that such a correlation did exist. For example, he felt “unwell” when he was struggling with his Joseph manuscript in the morning of September 23, 1940, while in Brentwood, in the Greater Los Angeles area; in the afternoon, he dictated letters to Katia, without changes to his darkish mood.181 Less than six months later, back in Princeton, he found himself “bored, lacking concentration, and tired”; the Joseph chapter he was laboring on, in the morning and the afternoon, just did not want to take shape.¹⁸² At that particular time, this condition seems to have affected his work for at least a week.¹⁸³ In June 1942, the assassination of Heydrich (who had once wanted to put him into Dachau) and the subsequent murder of hundreds of Czech hostages affected him so severely that he decided to stop working in the afternoons, something that Mann, being the creative thinker that he was, would not endure in years to come.¹⁸⁴ In November of 1944 he again suffered from inertia, the inability to think constructively about his new Doktor Faustus novel, as he was complaining about a lack of energy on eventless days.¹⁸⁵

Depression was most obviously linked to consciousness, knowledge, and memory that directly affected a writer’s thoughts. Moreover, Mann periodically felt pain from digestive disorders that he tried to relieve with milk of magnesia, chicken broth, tea, or a brandy.¹⁸⁶ There were other ailments, such as bronchial catarrh, compounded by heavy smoking – Mann was habitually fond of expensive cigarettes and a good cigar.¹⁸⁷ One of his worst problems, albeit not life-threatening, was a tooth-decay condition requiring oral root surgery, which dragged on, from April 1941, for months and years and required complicated and expensive treatments.¹⁸⁸

If his own creative work as a novelist was affected by these maladies, it is not clear how they influenced Mann’s views on everyday politics, including the ongoing war. Did stomach pain invoke pessimism regarding the future of the free world when Hitler suddenly attacked Poland, and did relief from toothache inspire hopes of Allied victory upon Rommel’s withdrawal from North Africa? Mann himself provided at least one example pointing in the direction of such correlation. On August 3, 1941 he wrote to Bermann Fischer that he had suffered from too slow a pulse, low blood pressure, and malfunction of his thyroid glands. For the remedy, he had taken medications and now felt much better. This against a world-war backdrop that bode ill for Hitler’s Reich, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union which, Mann rightly pointed out, had unsettled the German people and even made Wehrmacht generals uncomfortable.189

At that juncture, Mann had established himself irrevocably in European, particularly German, affairs, as a man of vision, aesthetically and ethically, who in North America had no equal. This was due to the writer’s appearances in the United States previous to the decisive spring 1938 visit, as he was already known then, alongside the long-since emigrated Einstein, as the most prominent German thinker who had removed himself from the Reich. American journalists who approached Mann accepted as a matter of course that he could enlighten them, and through them the American public, on the phenomenon of European fascism, the more so since they themselves, as Erika Mann remarked on later, had few clues and were aware that no matter how many Americans there may already have been against it, there were others, especially Americans of German descent, who were for it.¹⁹⁰ Mann therefore was forced into the role of a political interpreter, even a clairvoyant, that he at first did not really know how to fill. He granted a significant series of interviews in April 1937, at the end of his third American visit, including one to Agnes Meyer, who was working as a correspondent for her husband’s daily, The Washington Post. When in the summer Mann published an article in a Zurich journal, an English translation, facilitated by Meyer, was printed simultaneously in The New York Times. That paper purported to present Mann, as he opened a “war on Nazi concepts,” as a Third Reich opponent par excellence and declared in a brief preface that he had found the Nazi dictatorship “already confounded.” In that very long piece of penmanship, in which Hitler was not mentioned once, Mann posed mainly as a champion of culture who declared, valiantly, that “we want to be artists and anti-barbarians,” intent on defending values of a free and open world, one that his idol Goethe could identify with. Upon close analysis, his was less a political than an aesthetic declaration, by which National Socialism appeared to have been generated as an accident of history rather than the consequence of decades of Germanocentric malfeasance, abetted by the machinations of an ascendant demagogue. Hesitating to accept fascisms such as Nazi creed and rule as something permanent, Mann declared that “the hypnotic spell which for a time emanated from these uniformly depressing ideas which are called ‘fascistic’ is on the wane. As an intellectual fashion, fascism can already be considered antiquated.” All the same, as if this were easily done and could be wrought beyond the realm of politics, Mann promised that “we shall help to prepare for a German power and a German State in which the German intellect can cheerfully participate, thereby realizing a genuine totality.”191

But as he had done before, Mann was to undergo a political education. After World War I, he had renounced a chauvinistic, ultra-conservative position to throw in his lot with the democracy of the Weimar Republic.¹⁹² And during his erstwhile stay in Switzerland he opted late, but he did opt publicly against Hitler, whom, in a public address after the electoral success of the National Socialists in the September 1930 elections, he had not even mentioned.¹⁹³ The relative political naïveté characterizing the New York Times exposition which, in the final analysis, minimized the fascist danger rather than accentuating it, was already less apparent in an interview he gave to that paper on his fourth arrival in the United States in February 1938. Now he was honest enough to admit that he did not “work politically” and would rather “prefer to talk about literature.” As far as the politics went, he was sufficiently prescient to realize that Hitler’s current exploits in Austria (the Anschluss was three weeks away) would not satisfy the dictator’s imperialist appetite and that Czechoslovakia “will come next.” He also, correctly, identified America as a “lone bulwark against the destruction of liberty and freedom,” but again committed the mistake of seeing in Nazism merely a singular “error of history.” Yet at least he had, this time, mentioned Hitler by name.¹⁹⁴

From March 1938 to the fall of 1940, Mann’s political opinion vacillated between precarious conjecture and well-educated guesswork, a fragile position for a man considered a sort of pundit by the American public, a role he may have doubted for himself. As he prepared for his pro-democracy and anti-Nazi speeches at American institutions in late March 1938, he deplored Hitler’s annexation of Austria, again assuring himself that this was only the beginning of Nazi imperialism, while insisting publicly that a war in Europe was rather improbable. “No one wants it,” he maintained from the end of May, claiming that Hitler was incapable of war and France too torn to wage it.195 This was irrespective of Hitler’s view, expressed already in Mein Kampf (which Mann had obviously never read), that “struggle” was a fundamental plank of Nazi ideology – “the essence of the Nazi system,” as Ian Kershaw later defined it – and oblivious to circumstances in which France had signed military mutual assistance pacts with eastern European nations since the early 1920s, should contingencies arise.¹⁹⁶

During the Sudeten crisis in the fall of 1938 and into the spring of 1939, Mann was adamant that in a pinch the Czechs would fight for the status quo, claiming at the same time that France and Britain would withdraw from conflict, despite prior alliances with the CSR. As for the latter point, he may have been aware that France’s intention of honoring the agreement with the Czechs was weak and British politicians were well aware of this. After Hitler had duped Prime Ministers Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain in Munich, Mann thought wrongly (contrary to what previously he had said after the Anschluss) that Hitler was now satiated and a war out of sight. However – and this again was prescient – he allowed that within a year of March 1939 a European war was possible.¹⁹⁷

That March, Mann published an essay about Hitler in the men’s magazine Esquire, which brought into focus, on the one hand, gaps in the author’s historical knowledge, combined with an uncertain political instinct at that time, culminating in an underestimation of the Führer, yet also, on the other hand, the beginnings of some fundamental comprehension. In stilted (translated) English he claimed that Hitler was “a catastrophe” and “a man ten times a failure, extremely lazy, incapable of steady work; a man who has spent long periods in institutions; a disappointed bohemian artist; a total good-for-nothing,” and someone who had “neither technical nor physical discipline.” But he conceded Hitler “a gift of oratory. It is oratory unspeakably inferior in kind, but magnetic in its effect on the masses: a weapon of definitely histrionic, even hysterical power, which he thrusts into the nation’s wound and turns round: He rouses the populace with images of his own insulted grandeur, deafens it with promises, makes out of the people’s sufferings a vehicle for his own greatness, his ascent to fantastic heights, to unlimited power, to incredible compensations and over-compensations.” Hitler, said Mann, had annexed Austria only as a move against “the venerable Freud, the real and actual enemy,” and through all of his political misdeeds he had brought the German people up against him.198

That Hitler was a “catastrophe” was now the free world’s general consensus, but even his worst enemies at the time would not have called the Nazi Führer lazy or incapable of steady work, certainly not after World War I. Moreover, unless Mann meant prison, it was historically verifiable that Hitler had never been institutionalized. Mann could have read up on this not only in Mein Kampf, which would have had to be used with caution, but also in two recent biographies of Hitler, by Konrad Heiden and the less credible Rudolf Olden. The first (one of eventually two volumes) had been published in German earlier in 1936 in Zurich, Mann’s European abode, and the second, also in German, in Amsterdam in 1935. Both were reviewed, as translated narratives, in The New York Times on May 24, 1936.¹⁹⁹ From these titles alone Mann could have gleaned that Hitler, though of “bizarre appearance and eccentric behaviour” (Volker Ullrich) and keeping irregular hours in bohemian circles, especially early on in Munich where Mann himself resided, had worked extremely hard at becoming a politician, in order to snake-charm the masses.²⁰⁰ Heiden, for instance, gives this, correct, impression as he writes about Hitler’s early career in Munich, from the time he left the army in 1919 to the putsch of November 1923.²⁰¹ Ultimately, having succeeded at politics by having applied immense self-discipline proved to be his genius. Mann implicitly acknowledged this when he referred to Hitler’s awesome speech-making, but he belittled it to make him laughable, when in fact, as the sociologist Max Weber had shown much earlier, a successful speaker for the masses frequently was a man, more like a shaman who did not fit a gentrified, conventional mold. In truth, Hitler’s “hysterical power” was the secret to his charisma, which had made him into the leader of half the European continent.²⁰² As for Sigmund Freud, Mann had no evidence that Hitler had ever seriously concerned himself with that pioneer in psychiatry, nor could Hitler have known, quite apart from Freud’s Jewishness, the difference between analytical (Freudian) and organic psychiatry.²⁰³ And Mann’s contention of a split between the German people and the Führer denied the very popularity Hitler had been enjoying among his subjects, at least from 1933 to early 1939 – the consequence of those political skills Mann seemed to want to question. On the other hand, Mann had put his finger firmly on the leader’s charismatic qualities as those that worked effectively on his people, without actually saying so.

Mann continued his mixed political analyses and prophesies, as during the summer of 1939 when Hitler was obviously preparing himself for war, by playing down this possibility, arguing either that European nations did not want to fight or were militarily helpless. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed on August 23, he interpreted this to mean that Hitler wished to avert war and the Soviet Union was uninterested in a partition of Poland.204 The opposite was actually true: Hitler was burning to attack Poland and, something contained in a secret protocol but already thought likely by other observers, attempted to assuage Moscow by offering Stalin the eastern half of that state, both sides proceeding with partition in late September.²⁰⁵

As the war commenced after September 1, Mann again underestimated Hitler by thinking that it would not last very long, as the Germans could not even endure one winter.²⁰⁶ But further into the conflict, Mann’s confidence in Hitler’s ineffectualness diminished, as he took the dictator’s pact with Moscow seriously, beginning to think that eventually Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would combine to fight the United States. Around this time Mann started to think more clearly about a possible intervention in the war by Roosevelt, in fact he became somewhat obsessed with that until Hitler actually declared war on America on December 11, 1941. The first such notion is expressed in his diary in the middle of April 1940, and a month later he reasoned, quite realistically, that America’s entry into the war was the more probable the more reckless Hitler, with millions under arms, showed himself. But would America not come to the rescue too late? During the fall of France in summer 1940, Mann realized that war would continue regardless of a large-scale Hitler victory, and by September he wanted the United States in the conflict more strongly than ever, even crediting Roosevelt with the power of ultimately toppling the dictator.²⁰⁷

In October 1940, Mann began his regular broadcast recordings for the BBC, in which he came out squarely contra Hitler, in the combined role of conveyer of objective news and spiritual guide to what, in the majority, he still viewed as a controlled and victimized people. This entailed more sober reportage, more thoughtful judgments, and fewer emotional asides, even though his texts, as a moral compass, were much marked by compassion. Hence he spoke for the record, in July 1942, of Hitler’s inability to achieve victory, as he himself would “always prevent it,” as indeed Hitler had done before the gates of Moscow in December 1941 and would again at Stalingrad, the demise of which Mann now saw approaching as early as the fall of 1942.208 It is possible that two years earlier, in the fall of 1940, Mann’s news sources had improved, from radio commentator Raymond Gram Swing, whom he apparently listened to on CBS, from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the journal The Nation. It is likely also that he now relied more on informed new sources from neutral Sweden and Switzerland – mostly newspaper clippings and letters that were sent to him.²⁰⁹

By early summer of 1943, because the United States was in the war and no more armistices or peace arrangements were looming, Mann was of the opinion – sooner than other pundits – that Nazi Germany was militarily finished. In August he distanced himself from the declaration of certain émigrés, supported by Brecht, which differentiated between the Hitler regime and its “allied classes” on the one side, and “the German people” on the other.²¹⁰ Several months later, as he now believed the German people were not merely victims but collectively complicit in the war, his sense of propriety allowed him to approve of the plan of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, for a division and reduction of Germany, turning it into a vast sheep pasture, to forestall renewed aggression. He continued to hold this view into early 1945, when some Allied representatives were actually devising alternative plans, providing for a gradual reintegration of the once fascist state into a civilized member of the family of nations.²¹¹

In a final evaluation of Thomas Mann’s role as an artist refugee from Nazism it is incumbent to balance the extremes of his self-perception with reality and then, perhaps, compare that with the average artist refugee. Mann was, by all accounts, an aloof and distant man who gave himself an air of untouchability and grandness. To those who did not know him better, he expressed this unmistakably during his interview for New York Times readers when in February 1938 he stated that “where I am, there is Germany.”²¹² In constant self-reflection he accepted his persona as unique, insisting that in company he be treated preferentially and with the greatest respect. He cherished being compared to Goethe and he himself made frequent references to him, especially as he was completing his Goethe novel, Lotte in Weimar, following his arrival in America in 1938.213 After receiving enthusiastic letters about this book from colleagues he typically was beside himself with joy, and in October 1940, as he was about to begin his anti-Hitler broadcasts, he treasured the remark by an unknown American soldier that he was “not only the greatest living writer, but the greatest living man in our history.”²¹⁴ At the height of the summer in 1943 he relished the notion of fellow emigrants that after a final victory over Hitler he be appointed to lead Germany, presumably as president of a new, democratic, commonweal, cognizant of past cultural achievements. He himself was suitably ironic when during a visit from Martin Gumpert they talked “much about my Führer future in Germany, from which God may save me.”²¹⁵

Suitably ironic! In fact, Mann must have been much relieved when a few months later not himself but a certain Carl von Habsburg was said to be in the running to be Germany’s new head of state.²¹⁶ This circumstance must have reminded him once more that at the core he was a poet, not a politician, and that it was as a poet that he had been endowed with extraordinary gifts some called genius. Knowing this, yet also knowing about his private insecurities, he had said as early as December 1929, during the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, that it was not he himself who was being honored, but “the German spirit, German prose.”²¹⁷ Mann had put the accent on “German” because he knew, as did all the literati, that those individuals he had portrayed in Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain were particularly German characters in very German relationships, and that he had written about those unambiguously as a German author who knew German mores and traditions well. In that sense, he was placing himself as the heir to Goethe, not only by virtue of the Nobel Prize, but also because Mann embodied the same blend of innovation, as shown in boldness of style and content, and conservatism. Goethe had been an enlightened chancellor of the duchy of Weimar, but he had also harbored conservative inclinations, as in the death sentence he upheld for an unwed mother who had killed her child; Mann, who during his American exile even sympathized with socialism and after 1949 recognized the Communist German Democratic Republic, never ceased to be the son of a patrician Lübeck senator, a conservative at heart. Hence Mann found it natural to identify with Goethe, as he did already during that interview with The New York Times in August 1937, when he said: “We want to be artists and anti-barbarians,” and, further, “the artist,” said Goethe, “must have an origin, must know from what he stems.” In the same interview Mann mentioned Richard Wagner, a fellow artist, as an inspiration, so that it was clear how he saw himself as a successor to both Goethe and Wagner, notwithstanding the criticism he was known to have leveled against the composer earlier on.218

It is against this background that one has to understand Mann’s statement that Germany was wherever he was, which at first sight is so redolent of hubris. For he added immediately that he carried his German culture in him. Since these sentences were meant to challenge Hitler, they implied that Mann, exemplifying a true German cultural tradition following Goethe, saw himself in the United States, away from fascism, as warranting a Germany without Hitler. Figuratively speaking, being on this moral high ground, he was saving both culture and Germany.²¹⁹ Mann’s New York publisher Knopf recognized this when he maintained that nowadays the writer was “Hitler’s most dangerous foe.”²²⁰ This was a few months before Mann wrote in Esquire that as uncomfortable as it felt, there existed a symbiotic relationship between himself and Hitler, whom he, again ironically, called “my brother,” not only because, however justified, both saw themselves as artists and accomplices in their undying love of Wagner, but also, even more so, because they represented opposite poles aesthetically, and certainly ethically.²²¹ They were Cain and Abel, except that in this case, Abel would survive. Justly so, because Adolf Hitler stood for intolerance and the domination of humankind, whereas Mann represented democracy and freedom. To have expressed this often privately and publicly from 1933 to 1945 and beyond, and having said it with emphasis and logic, made the Nobel laureate stand out from among all the other refugees from tyranny.