Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany. Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning by Johannes F. Evelein (review)

In his recent book Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany Johannes Evelein investigates a diverse set of exile narratives from Nazi Germany, convincingly presenting them as writing that crosses time and space. He discusses exile as a unique and extraordinary condition that might help us to understand the conditio humana itself while offering a fresh and different perspective on life (1). Therefore the author portrays exile as part of a larger, profound narrative that reaches into the past and metamorphoses into a continuum of crossreferential texts by twentieth-century German émigré writers.

The study explores five different aspect of the exilic continuum in regard to German literary figures. The first chapter delineates German history from the year 1789 until the end of World War I as producing waves of emigrants from the areas of politics, literature, science, and the arts. Evelein anchors exile as a phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century within Germany’s autocratic nation-building project. Especially the exile in Switzerland of avant-garde figures was crucial for the creative development of the Dada movement, which was fueled by the rejection of normative thinking and by a fascination with the absurd, constituting a culture of protest at a time when European nations were waging war on each other (40–42).

The second chapter explores the cultural heritage of exile across time and space and its influence on the output of literary émigrés from Nazi Germany in more detail. Their search for meaning in exile and the quest for guidance led them to previous transnational figures and stories of exile, which provided crucial historical context, kinship, patterns, models, and a means to confront their own predicament in the early twentieth century. In their intertexual and crossreferential works, the exiles from Nazi Germany create an awareness of a shared destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) and a shared relationship (Schicksalsverwandtschaft) across generations of historical exiles (10, 35). Many modern exiles (i.e., Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Lion Feuchtwanger) evoked the preceding exilic authors in their literary contributions in search of meaning in a senseless situation, while their own writing became an act of remembrance of their own times and experience, self-referential in its relationship to language itself. This established a mimetic connection and interplay with exilic antecedents to recreate other worlds (51–52, 54). Questions of exile discussed in this segment persist to this day: Can writing turn into a surrogate home, when exile creates a void within a writer? Is modern day exile more complex than its antecedents? Can the experience of exile be recreated through the mimetic power of art? The author inspects how one can grapple with the fundamental experience of otherness in exile, and the role that memory, belonging, time and place, and the longing for connectedness play by engaging Joseph Brodsky’s notion of exile as a metaphysical condition. By discussing exile in its multifaceted complexity, Evelein seeks to go beyond metaphysics in his analysis (59–62).

In chapter 3, the author further examines exile as a radical condition for banished writers who were cut off from their readership and language in terms of a process of falling, not entering, into exile, of becoming rather than being (84–85). Exile is explained as a rupture and comes with an awareness of alterity that seeks to find connectedness again through the power of imagination, inspiration, and writing; it is also an asset, not a liability alone as Theodor W. Adorno interpreted it (106). Writers such as Anna Seghers, Franz Werfel, and Thomas Mann understood writing itself as a means to construct distance and confrontation with the circumstances of exile, to produce new perspectives and meaning that are transformative, and to facilitate actively humanist views that are simultaneously retrospective and future oriented (103–108).

Evelein explores the challenges of exile and its demands on authenticity, morality, and geography as well as its difficulty with temporal and spatial elements in...