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  • Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
  • Marion Kant
Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, by Jean-Michel Palmier, translated by David Fernbach. London and New York: Verso, 2006. 852 pp. $55.00,.

This is an extraordinary book: in its historical breadth, its command of literature, documents, and archival material, its ambitious scope, and its sweeping judgments. The study was initially published in French in 1987 with support of the French Ministry of Culture. It took nearly twenty years for the English translation to follow. Much has happened since 1987: in 1989 the fall of the Berlin wall signaled the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the socialist system, and in 1998 Palmier, a professor of aesthetics at the Sorbonne, died, only 53 years old.

The end of state socialism is highly relevant here: would Palmier have written a different book after 1989? Would he have written a study on antifascist exile at all when antifascism as a close ally of socialism was fast going out of favor? Palmier’s book preceded some of the most comprehensive and encyclopedic volumes on exile that provide today’s scholars with a vast amount of data: the International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Émigrés 1933–1945 and its German counterpart, the Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, both conceived of as complementary parts, published in New York and Munich in 1999. In addition, many smaller studies focusing on the emigration of professional groups like historians, musicians, theatre people, etc. have been written.

This is not a book about exile per se; the title indicates that we are looking at a specific part of exile: intellectuals and artists fleeing Germany. Weimar [End Page 189] stands for the ideals of the short-lived German republic that was destroyed by Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. It is dedicated to those “who died in concentration camps or were murdered by the Nazis,” “who took their own lives in exile,” and “all the German antifascists who never saw Germany again.” Its more than 800 pages are organized into two main sections: Exile in Europe 1933–1940 and Exile in America 1939–1945. Chapters within these two parts discuss stages of exile and the countries to which refugees fled, support networks, organizations and institutions such as newspapers or theatre companies, the beginning of World War II, the integration of refugees into professional life—or their failure, the breakup of the political emigration and the beginning of Mc- Carthyism in the United States.

Palmier states that within a few months of the Nazi ascent to power German culture was bleeding to death; Germany was drained of its intellectuals, its cultural life. The importance that Hitler gave to the arts as a means to subvert the Germanic racial state provided the basis for and justified the cause of the destruction of Weimar. It was a state crusade that turned its mighty force into institutional as well as personal persecution—the goal was to win the struggle against “degeneration,” in this case “degenerate” art and related intellectual expressions. It was the implementation of a systematic program that organized the assassination and elimination of unwanted intellectual life on every level and in every sphere of German life. The book burnings of 10 May 1933 became the signal that the Nazis were serious and that exile was the only answer for those who represented Weimar intellectualism. Those who fled had many reasons to do so, but exile was as much a choice to save one’s own life as it was the refusal to become an accomplice of a murderous regime. From this position Palmier then follows the paths of anti-Fascist refugees, geographically as well as intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally. But here the problems begin: what, after all, constitutes “anti-Fascist”? Non-political Jews leaving the country? Communists and socialists? Betrayed SA men who escaped after the “night of long knives”?

Two major problems of the book’s structure need to be discussed: It is misleading, to say the least, to divide such a massive book into two parts and juxtapose exile in Europe to that in the United States. This...

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