Überwacht—Ausgebürgert—Exiliert. Schriftsteller und der Staat (review)

Alexander Stephan's most recent book is a compilation of 21 previously published essays spanning three decades and held together by the author's focus on the relationship between writers, intellectuals, and the state. An attentive student of censorship, cultural coercion, and intellectual politics, Stephan offers valuable insights into the inner workings of such different institutions as the FBI and the German Ministry of the Exterior during the Third Reich. His various essays show convincingly the extent to which states, whether a stable democracy such as the United States, an "all people's state" like the Soviet Union, or a bombastic but—in its early years—deeply uncertain Third Reich, engage in aggressive surveillance of their intelligentsia, and maintain vast systems of intelligence under the guise of national security interests.

Part I, "Überwacht. Das FBI und die deutschen Exilintellektuellen in den USA," comprises six essays that capture the surveillance of suspicious (read: leftist) German exiles, also referred to as "Communazis," in the USA, which lasted well into the 1950s. As Stephan's painstaking archival research reveals, prominent exiles such as Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht (code name BB-1), Klaus and Erika Mann, and Hanns Eisler were closely monitored by teams of special agents who tapped their phones, read their mail, and solicited input from acquaintances to establish the degree of their "security threat." Feuchtwanger, that "chief literary Kremlin crawler," was scrutinized closely by J. Edgar Hoover personally. Stephan reveals how deeply involved the director of the FBI was in the surveillance of the German exile colony, focusing increasingly on moral behavior, as Erika and Klaus Mann's files show. Stephan places the FBI efforts within an absurdist bureaucratic continuum, not limited to the United States, fueled by a paranoid anxiety toward the subversive powers of marginalized groups. Offering a peculiar window into the exiles' daily lives, each FBI file ultimately serves as a reminder of the "Gier von Geheimdiensten" to which so many exiles were exposed.

In Part II, "Im Visier des Auswärtigen Amts," Stephan turns his attention to the surveillance and ultimate expatriation of German exiles by the Third Reich's Ministry of the Exterior, retracing the various pseudolegal maneuvers that allowed Nazi Germany to strip thousands of dissidents of their nationality. His essays convey that the Nazi regime met little resistance in its diplomatic corps, whether in London or Paris, which proved by and large unobstructively compliant with orders from the Berlin bureaucracy to provide detailed information about the exiles' whereabouts and actions. Stephan's analysis of thousands of documents reveals ironically that, whereas the exiles felt mostly powerless, they were considered a real and permanent threat to the stability of the Reich well worth the exorbitant surveillance expenditures. Stephan opens up a radically new perspective on the exile communities, points to important research desiderata for which he provides the critical parameters, and as such infuses fresh energy into the field of Exile Studies which has in recent years suffered from signs of fatigue.

Part III is entitled "Exil und Politik," a title too broad to provide thematic or methodological cement for the six essays it comprises. That said, individually Stephan's studies manifest a remarkable eye for detail, a deep care for his subject—in particular the writings of Anna Seghers—and an ability to offer both breadth and depth: intellectual, literary, and artistic exile; Georg Lukács's early contributions to Marxist literary theory; the KPD-in-exile's political and cultural plans for a new, postwar Germany; Anna Seghers's amalgam of realism and idealism, her "Alltagsperspektive," and the striking overlap of fiction and fact in her novel Das siebte Kreuz; Seghers's return to Berlin and her increasingly marginalized position in the GDR; and Soeren Voima's successful attempt in Das Kontingent to build upon Brecht's political play Die Maßnahme. Stephan is most convincing in his two essays on Anna Seghers, about whom he has written widely and whose depiction of life rooted in...