Weimar in Exile The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America

A magisterial history of the artists and writers who left Weimar when the Nazis came to power

In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann, “the best of Germany,” refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality.

Exiled across the world, they continued the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to their return to a ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories.

The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Hanns Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides a counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.

Jean-Michel Palmier, the author of numerous works, was Professor of Aesthetics at Université Paris I specializing in German artistic movements of the 1920s and ’30s. The Académie Française awarded Weimar in Exile the Prix Eugène Piccard for a work of modern history.