Exiled In Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present

Book excerpt: The fascinating story of émigré intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars — including Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, George Grosz, Erik Erikson, Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang — who fled Nazi Germany and changed America. Heilbut provides a vivid narrative of how they viewed their new country and how America reacted to their arrival as the atom bomb was being developed, the Cold War and McCarthyism were underway, and Hollywood dominated moviemaking. “The son of Jewish immigrants who fled Germany, Anthony Heilbut grew up in New York. Exiled in Paradise, a social history he wrote more than 35 years ago, is still the most immersive account of the German-speaking exiles who came to this country between 1933 and 1941 and of their outsize influence on the culture they found here... Mr. Heilbut provides an absorbingly detailed chronicle of some of these immigrant lives — among them Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder and Cold War physicists.” — Donna Rifkind, The Wall Street Journal “Still the best book on the topic” — Phillip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review “Insightful ... valuable and stimulating ... For some readers, especially the children of generations of émigrés, the book will provide a background to their most basic intellectual assumptions.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times “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 “The story of these refugees has 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 foreigners. It is a way of revealing to Americans themselves what their country really is like.” — Ariel Dorfman, The Washington Post “Anthony Heilbut has exercised impressive scholarship, and even a touch of poetry, to get to the heart of this diaspora.” — Time