A brilliant look at the writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars—ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, and Fritz Lang—who fled Hitler's Germany and how they changed the very fabric of American culture. In a new postscript, Heilbut draws attention to the recent changes in reputation and image that have shaped the reception of the German exiles.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983 with a paperback in 1997.
Anthony Heilbut received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. He has taught at New York University and Hunter College, and is author of The Gospel Sound and Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. He is also a record producer, specializing in gospel music, and has won both a Grammy Award and a Grand Prix du Disque.
"The story of these refugees ha finally found its singular and single voice: it is that of Anthony Heilbut, himself the son of exiles. . . .His book turns into something more than a panorama about foreigner: it is a way of revealing to American themselves what their country really is like." --Ariel Dorfman, The Washington Post "Insightful, valuable and stimulating . . .For some readers, especially the children of generations of emigres, the book will provide a background to their most basic intellectual assumptions." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Anthony Heilbut has exercised impressive scholarship, and even a touch of poetry, to get to the heart of this diaspora." --Time "From one page to the next, the book transcends its stated purpose of providing a link between the history of the German-Jewish immigrants and their staggering cultural achievements to acquire the dimensions of that mysterious reality which even a Bresson cannot hope to define: a work of art." --Marcel Ophuls, American Film Magazine
"I am struck by the rich, dense, solid quality of the work. It never falls into the anecdotal (which would have tempted a lesser historian) and, without sacrificing the individual and the individual groups, arrives nonetheless at an overall view of the drama of exile."—Marguerite Yourcenar
538 pp.6 x 9
9780520301184$49.95|£42.00Paper
Apr 2018