"Escape to Life"

Eckart Goebel, Sigrid Weigel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9783110258684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals' thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky.

The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual's work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• “Sticking to our language” / “an unserer Sprache festhalten:” Adorno in NYC
• Adorno’s Monsters
• Sounding Through – Poetic Difference – Self-Translation: Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts and Writings Between Different Languages, Cultures, and Fields
• From Königsberg to Little Rock: Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Childhood
• Erich Auerbach’s Second Exile
• Walter Benjamin’s Farewell to Europe
• No Place Yet: Ernst Bloch’s Utopia in Exile
• Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Losey, and Brechtian Cinema
• “Without knowing America, you cannot say anything valid about democratic politics.” Hermann Broch and the Ethics of Exile
• “Lesen Sie before the letter:” Oskar Maria Graf in New York
• Eclipse of Reason: Max Horkheimer’s New York Lectures, 1944
• I’m not there: New York as Displaced Psychogeography in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage
• Bodies: Ernst H. Kantorowicz
• Siegfried Kracauer: The Film Historian in Exile
• Identifying the impulse: Alfred Lion Founds the Blue Note Jazz Label
• A Flaschenpost Recast: Leo Lowenthal’s Late Writings
• On An Eastward Trajectory Toward Europe: Karl Lowith’s Exiles
• Ethics of Imagination: On Erika Mann’s Works in Exile
• You Can’t Go Home Again: Exiles in Klaus Mann’s The Volcano
• Voyage with Don Quixote: Thomas Mann between European Culture and American Politics
• The Returns of Herbert Marcuse
• Exile is a Flop: Soma Morgenstern over Central Park
• Stranger in Paradise: Erwin Panofsky’s Expulsion to the Academic Parnassus
• The Flight Into Orgonomy: Wilhelm Reich in New York
• Reinventing the Canonical: The Radical Thinking of Jacob Taubes
• “Almost American:” Ernst Toller Abroad
• “Inter, but not national:” Vilém Flusser and the Technologies of Exile
• Fred Stein (1909–1967): A Retrospective
• Portraits
• About the Authors