'Escape to Life'

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. This compendium, adopting the title of a volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals’ thinking when it was translated into English and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky.

The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle and aspect deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual’s work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, himself a German exile, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced together in this book for the first time.

Eckart Goebel, New York University, USA; Sigrid Weigel, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.