Among the 70,000 refugees from Nazi Germany who had entered Britain by 1939 were some of the leading literary personalities of the Weimar era. This book tells the stories of five émigré writers, two Austrian, three German – the Austrian and internationally known novelist Stefan Zweig, the leading Berlin theatre critic and essayist Alfred Kerr, the writer and poet Max Herrmann-Neiße, the radical, pacifist journalist Karl Otten, and the Austrian novelist and literary parodist Robert Neumann. All were banned from publishing in Germany from which they fled for their lives. Only Zweig was already known in Britain.

Using unpublished diaries, memoirs, letters and British government records, the author follows the difficult, often dramatic and tragic lives of these men and their families in their efforts to establish themselves in British society. New light is thrown on London publishing in the 1930s and in wartime and, in particular, on the wartime BBC, especially the new German Service to which Kerr, Otten and Neumann contributed. Attention is also focused on the inevitable political differences among the émigrés, as well as on the few British writers who tried to help them.

These exile writers were harshly treated by a less cosmopolitan and more bigoted society than our own. Among the worst periods of their exile was the internment, in grim conditions, of Alfred Kerr and Robert Neumann (both Jewish) as ‘enemy aliens’ in spring 1940, a time of understandable government panic. Using the little-known journals of both writers, the author documents this dark episode in new and atmospheric detail.

This book attempts to rescue the lives and work in Britain of these five writers. In doing this, it recreates lost cultural contexts, experiences and achievements which form part of the history of twentieth-century Britain and of the continuing story of European intellectual migration and its consequences.

Published by Libris in 2000