where German cultural figures fled after Hitler came to power

From a historical perspective, the emigration of German writers and artists after Hitler came to power looks like a consistent exodus into a new life. In fact, neither the direction nor the purpose of this movement was obvious to most of them. Maybe because starting life over again is generally not a very natural activity for a person. At the very beginning of this journey, several dozen found a place that from the outside seemed like a found paradise and which, like any paradise, people had to leave.

Text: Olga Fedyanina

The main German dream is the dream of a sunny shore of a warm sea. It does not depend on the amount of money, age or profession. It is as proletarian as it is imperial, nationalist, and bourgeois. It has nothing to do with the need for rest, vacation, vacation – this is the dream of a continental Protestant man about a world that will be kind to him. About a world in which the air hugs you, the sky smiles, the earth blooms under your feet, space opens up. Like any dream, it is not entirely achievable – you cannot change geography – or rather, it is achievable either for a short time, or at the cost of abandoning everything that keeps you on your own, unkind land. Of course, this also applies to other frozen continental nations – but for the Germans, the dream is literally a few hours away.

The ideal German house is located on the Italian or French coast.

In the village of Sanary-sur-Mer, located on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, somewhere halfway between Marseille and Toulon, tourists today are greeted by a memorial plaque, and on it are several dozen German names, about half of them are familiar to the whole world. Lyon and Martha Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Franz Werfel, Ernst Toller, Erwin Piscator, Erich Maria Remarque – and a long line of Manns: Thomas, Heinrich, Katya, Erica, Klaus, Holo. Other names – writer and translator Rene Schickele, art historian Julius Meyer-Graefe – are less well known, but they are also celebrities, their fame is just not so worldwide.

The alphabetical row of names is misleading in its equalizing minimalism. It was as if some imaginary tourist bus had unloaded a foreign crowd here on the shore. In fact, they all came here at different times and in different ways, some for years, some for one season, some for a few days.

As befits a resort, it emerged gradually – and gradually gained a reputation as a “secret place”. Heinrich Mann visited here even before the First World War. Then Sanari was discovered by the British and Swiss. Then young artists appeared who liked the view of the fishing bay. Then David Lawrence hid here from the scandal surrounding the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and caught a deathly cold here. Then Aldous Huxley rented a picturesque villa here and began writing Brave New World. Then the promenade and pier were repaired. Then came the literary and theater critic Ludwig Marcuse (Ludwig has no relation to the outstanding philosopher Herbert Marcuse), who stayed for years and best of all described how early mimosa blooms here and cloves and thyme are fragrant.

The same Marcuse in his memoirs calls Sanari the capital of German literature. Some of the excessive pomp of this formulation is born not so much from the idyll of the place as from the anti-idyllic passage of time.

Sanari became the capital of German literature at the end of winter 1933.

On the afternoon of February 27, Ludwig Marcuse sat with friends in a Berlin cafe and, with all the aplomb of a literary historian, explained to them that “all this will not last long”; The Reichstag burned at night – in the morning Marcuse went to pack his suitcase. His yesterday’s interlocutors were busy with the same thing. Like some other Berliners. For example, writers Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers or future film director Billy Wilder.

In hindsight, everything looks logical – the beginning of the exodus before the impending disaster. In fact, it was an impulse, an involuntary movement of a hand that came across a hot iron. The hand, as it turned out later, was smarter than the head. The head repeated after Marcuse: this will not last long. Or even: probably, this is all completely unnecessary.

Nobody wanted to be a refugee and an emigrant—and, most importantly, to behave like a refugee and an emigrant. And the fact that dozens of regulars at Berlin and Munich literary salons by the spring of 1933 somehow naturally ended up on the Sanary embankment is one, early stage of this internal resistance, rational self-deception. We didn’t emigrate, we just went on vacation.

And Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, for example, didn’t even leave anywhere, they just decided not to return yet. Both were on trips abroad in the spring of 1933 – lectures, reports, meetings. Sanari was recommended to Thomas Mann by his children, Erika and Golo, who had been here before. The patriarch spent several nights at the hotel, complained of inconvenience and poor health, then, however, perked up and rented a house until the end of the season. Feuchtwanger immediately fell head over heels in love with Sanari – and began to look for a permanent home in which he would actually live for eight years. (For the sake of accuracy: Sanari was the main, but not the only refuge; depending on taste and means, new arrivals chose between three or four neighboring villages and bays.)

In general, life retains a resort character – not only in the summer of 1933, but also in the summer of 1934, 1935, 1936. Everyone knows everyone, everyone appreciates slander, everyone cares about the oddities of others. Common tea parties, lunches and dinners are a source of news and gossip. Feuchtwanger rented a house with 28 rooms, but he invites acquaintances who come to visit only for tea, and they have to spend the night in a hotel. In addition, he seems to have started an affair with the young artist Eva Herrmann. Huxley bought a red Bugatti. A local hairdresser ruined Erica’s friend’s perm. Thomas and Katya Mann look down on Heinrich’s new passion, Nellie Kröger “of the common people,” and are terribly worried about the Hanseatic arrogance of the entire family. During a shared lunch, the art critic Meyer-Graefe (he is not fully aware of the complex relationships in the Mann family) recalls a funny story about a Munich friend who was kicked out of a student club because of an affair with a saleswoman – the narrator is awkwardly interrupted and shouted at. Nellie is not at all at ease, the evening is ruined. But during the day, Thomas works productively on Joseph. Henry is working on Henry the Fourth. Klaus is working on Mephisto.

But the rest are almost all writers, with this special attention to detail, with a reflexive ability to peep, notice witty nuances, and diagnose each other. Those who don’t write novels write letters and diaries. Aldous Huxley takes part in joint parties, and then complains in correspondence with friends: “Flocks of literary Germans have swooped into the country like locusts.” <...> These emigrants are a disagreeable crowd, and the ravages of exile are already visible on them.” And they haven’t even begun to feel expelled yet.

In hindsight it is easy to call this life a false idyll, a reckless “feast during the plague.” You can recognize in these feasts and in this place, as if fenced off from the outside world, the sanatorium from the “Magic Mountain”. Or a cast for Lars von Trier.

But the opposite perspective is deceptive. The people who have gathered in Sanari are not waiting for the planet Melancholy, they live in anxiety, but – for now – without a feeling of their own powerlessness. They are always trying to decide, plan, change something. Thomas Mann is concerned about the German book market and his role in it: the Berlin publisher pleads not to deprive the publisher of income and readers of great books. For the sake of a British passport, Erica marries the poet W. Hugh Auden – the “colonists” begin to recklessly look for the same groom for another inhabitant of Sanari, the journalist Sibylla von Schönbeck (and find a homosexual British officer who has nothing against a fictitious marriage). In general, everyone is constantly concerned about passports, visas, and residence permits. At the nearest French consulate, in Cologne, there is a consul who sympathizes with the Nazis and does not issue visas, but, fortunately, the French consul in Zurich is much more loyal – invited friends are asked to take a detour, through Zurich.

Of course, all the “colonists” know from the very beginning that their French refuge is temporary, but when do they begin to feel that time is up? When will all table conversations become secret and overt conversations about what is needed “next”—and what that “next” might be?

Formally, only in 1940: the proclamation of the pro-Nazi Vichy government means that refugees from Germany will soon find themselves outlawed – at best, in internment camps. But by this time the history of the “forced paradise,” as the same Ludwig Marcuse called it, is coming to an end, Sanari is emptying.

Throughout this time of resort entertainment, the inhabitants of Sanary regularly find their names on the lists of authors of destroyed books and on the lists of those deprived of German citizenship. From the newspapers they learn that their houses are being searched, and then they learn that the houses themselves have been confiscated, plundered, and destroyed. By the silence of friends, they learn about their arrests – or simply that they are afraid of unwanted contact. From now on, all this happens “out there.”

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