Hitler's Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe by Volkmar Zühlsdorff
2006; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 101; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2006.0368
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
Resumoii82 Reviews developed. A sharper focus on discourse analysis and the concept of 'habitus' could have illuminated the historical development of German discourses on work aswell as the tensions and similarities between national and international, gender-oriented and class-based concepts that shaped the cultural and political history of theWeimar years. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM MATTHIAS UECKER Hitler's Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance inAmerica and Europe. By VOLKMAR ZUJHLSDORFF. London: Continuum. 2004 [actually published 2005]. xv + 240 pp. ?1I2.99. ISBN o-8264-7800-x. Volkmar Ziihlsdorff's book represents the first detailed and comprehensive account of the German Academy of Arts and Sciences in Exile, an institution set up in I935 with two main aims: to secure the survival of German culture during the Hitler era, and to become 'a cultural equivalent to what, in politics, would be termed a government in exile' (p. 36). If the latter ambition was never to be fulfilled (a fact for which Zuhlsdorff holds the short-sightedness of the Allied governments largely responsible), there can be no doubt that the Academy and its aid organizations, the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom and its British equivalent the Arden Society, served the German cultural diaspora well. In projecting the emigr&s as the true representatives of German culture, they not only influenced powerful elites in the USA and Britain but also provided important psychological and financial support for the emigres themselves. Leading figures such as Thomas Mann, Freud, and Rudolf Olden, to each of whom a chapter is devoted, lent their name to the project, but its spiritus rector was a young nobleman of impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, Prinz Hubertus zu Lowenstein. As the Prince's deputy, Zuhlsdorff witnessed the genesis of the Academy and the development of its organizational structures, publicity stra tegy, and fund-raising projects, on all of which he writes informatively (important documents are included in the appendices). The Arden Society played an important part in rescuing exiles trapped in Czechoslovakia at the end of I938, among them the poet Jesse Thoor-'one of the great literary discoveries of the exile era' (p. io8), but today relatively unknown. In the USA theAcademy recruited the aid of the great and the good, and by I938 modest scholarships could be provided for over i6o emigres struggling tomake ends meet, many of them eminent. The outbreak of war soon shifted the focus to rescuing those stranded in Vichy France, a task which the Emergency Rescue Committee and other groups were bet ter equipped to carry out. Two crises preceded the demise of the Guild in January I941. A literary contest, offering the prospect of publication in the American mar ket, attracted 177 entries, but when the award went to a virtually unknown writer, Little, Brown and Co. judged the work unsuitable for an American readership. De spite the disappointment and the recrimination this embarrassing outcome provoked, Ziihlsdorff surprisingly describes the contest as 'avaluable contribution to anti-Nazi German culture' (p. 153). He is oddly vague too about the reasons why the Prince resigned from the Guild in June I940, and in unquestioningly giving the 'inner em igration' equal status with both the exiled diaspora and the resistance inGermany as representatives of the 'other Germany' he passes in silence over an often bitter debate which has raged formore than sixty years. His valuable account makes it persuasively clear, however, that the Academy did uphold the best traditions of German culture in dark times, and that for this it deserves immense credit. UNIVERSITY OF BATH IAN WALLACE ...
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