SOURCE: Krispyn, Egbert. “A Year of Decision.” In Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile, pp. 45-58. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978.

[In the following excerpt, Krispyn analyzes the political and social climate of Germany in 1935-36, commenting on why such writers as Thomas Mann and Arthur Koestler chose to continue writing in exile.]

While the emigrants were arguing among themselves about the true nature of exile literature and its contribution to the antifascist cause, Hitler pressed forward relentlessly with his political battle plan for the stabilization and expansion of his power. His first objective was the Saar territory which since the end of World War I had been administered by the League of Nations. In January 1935, in accordance with the terms of the Versailles peace treaty of 1919, a plebiscite was held to decide the future of this French-German border region. The exiled and Saarlandian antifascists of all ideological hues naturally strongly opposed the reunification of the province with Germany and spared no effort to put their case before the people. To a large majority of the population of the area, the Nazi propaganda and the apparent political and economic achievements of the new regime in Germany proved to be irresistible. The overwhelming vote in favor of joining the Third Reich forced all those who had publicly expressed their opposition to National Socialism to join the ranks of the exiles.

The free, democratic, and legal decision of the Saarland to become a German province showed that Hitler had strong popular support. It made the ineffectiveness of the exiles in opening the eyes of the world to the real nature of the fascist regime painfully obvious. Kurt Tucholsky once again drew the only correct conclusion with his observation that the Germans really wanted National Socialism and that the exiles fooled themselves with their talk about a “better Germany” that they allegedly represented. Tucholsky's extreme but justifiable skepticism had from the beginning prevented him from joining the exile cause. Now his despair became so deep that he washed his hands of Germany completely. In a letter, he wrote: “I won't have anything to do anymore with this country whose language I speak as little as possible. May it perish—may Russia conquer it—I'm through with it.” And a few days before his pessimism concerning the future drove him to suicide, he found a striking image for the illusoriness of the exiles' hopes and aspirations in the face of the world's shortsightedness and indifference: “My life is too valuable to me to place myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears. Not me.”

Valuable as his life was to Tucholsky, he gave it up rather than witness the seemingly irreversible decline of the civilized Western world. A few months after Tucholsky's suicide, Hitler embarked on the next, decisive phase of his plans for world conquest. While in the annexation of the Saar region the Nazis had triumphed by legal means, they acted in open defiance of their international obligations when early in the following year they occupied the Rhineland. The Locarno Pact of 1925 had reaffirmed the stipulation of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty that Germany was not allowed to maintain military installations or troops in the area between the Rhine and the French border. This had been the price exacted by France in return for its approval of a moderation of Germany's World War I reparations payments. As was to be expected the continued demilitarization of this region rankled in the German people. It proved to be a fruitful propaganda topic for the Nazis in their attacks on alleged traitors and enemies of the state. Hitler's decision in March 1936 to send his armed forces into the territory was therefore enthusiastically applauded by the people. In a subsequent referendum both the Rhinelanders themselves and the rest of the Germans almost unanimously approved the action.

This illegal military occupation of the Rhineland was a direct challenge to the Allies. For a while it seemed as if the Führer's daring act would provoke France to military countermeasures. It was a very tense situation in which the fascist regime itself was at stake, but in the end the Western powers backed down and accepted the accomplished fact, letting Hitler get away with his flagrant, aggressive breach of the letter and the spirit of Locarno. The failure of the democracies to call the Führer's bluff in the remilitarization of the Rhineland was due to the adoption of an “appeasement” policy toward Germany. It reflected their more or less pious belief in the dictator's basic political sincerity and in the limited nature of his objectives.

All in all the Rhineland incident once more brought home to the exiles that they were acting in a political vacuum. Neither the statesmen of the Western powers nor the German people paid any attention to their warnings that the Führer would lead Germany and the rest of the world to disaster. This sobering experience of their isolation came at a time when the literary emigration was already in a state of anxious turmoil. There was widespread and deep concern not only for the continued existence of the exile publishing industry as such but also for its political integrity. At issue was a strange and never fully explained deal between the Nazis and the leading publishing house of Fischer.

Under the terms of the agreement the German authorities allowed the firm to split into two separate branches. The Jewish owner and his “non-Aryan” employees were permitted to leave the country and set up business as an exile publisher. For that purpose the Nazis even allowed them to take along a stock of some 780,000 volumes by those Fischer authors who were banned in Germany. Gottfried Bermann Fischer was further enabled to take nearly one half of the firm's business capital and his considerable private assets out of Germany as well. After an unsuccessful attempt to settle in Switzerland, the new exile publishing enterprise was with the Nazis' blessings founded in Austria. Meanwhile the non-Jewish section of the firm continued to do business inside Germany with works and writers that were acceptable to the authorities.

The whole arrangement was highly unusual and puzzling, particularly because it involved a most uncharacteristic generosity on the part of the fascists. It could not help but arouse uneasy feelings about the new venture among the exiles who had not forgotten that Fischer played a major role in the campaign to discredit Klaus Mann and his journal Die Sammlung. In view of the circumstances the ideological commitment of the new enterprise was highly suspect. This was an all the more serious concern, as the existence of the established exile presses was very much endangered by the Fischer venture. Operating on a shoestring, the original emigrant publishers would have very little chance of surviving the competition of the large, well staffed and lavishly endowed newcomer. It seems more than likely that the Nazis by agreeing to the Fischer deal also thought they were dealing a mortal blow to the genuine, politically incorruptible exile press. As it turned out “Bermann-Fischer” in due course became one of the most important and distinguished emigrant publishers. It worked in close collaboration with the Amsterdam based firms of Allert de Lange and Querido. After the German annexation of Austria the firm moved to Sweden, where it remained active throughout the Nazi period.

Indirectly Fischer's entry into the exile publishing field benefited the antifascist cause in a very different way as well, since it triggered a chain of events that led to Thomas Mann's long overdue public endorsement of and identification with the emigration. In Mann the exile establishment gained a sorely needed focal point and a widely respected and influential spokesman. His decision to throw in his lot with the refugees was all the more effective for coming so late. For a full appreciation of its impact and of Thomas Mann's extraordinary stature within the emigration it is necessary to trace his ideological development up to this point.

More than two decades earlier at the outbreak of World War I, he like many other prominent literary figures had been caught up in the wave of patriotic fervor that swept the country. He had given expression to his somewhat exalted feelings in several essays. Then his brother Heinrich Mann in a piece ostensibly dealing with the French writer Emile Zola launched a sharp attack on the intellectual supporters of misguided nationalism. Thomas quite rightly took it personally and countered with a voluminous work entitled Observations of a Non-Political Person (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), in which he took issue with the spirit of cosmopolitan intellectualism and aestheticism that in his opinion was contrary to the essence of German culture. Unfortunately very few people, not even brother Heinrich, had the perseverance to read the entire work. This general unfamiliarity with the details of his arguments caused widespread misunderstandings about Thomas Mann's political views, the most serious being the notion that the novelist utterly rejected democracy as a political system. In reality he criticized only the democratization of Germany along capitalist lines “in the Roman Western sense,” and the “inner annexation of Germany by the empire of civilization” as opposed to the realm of culture.

Even those who on the basis of an incomplete reading and understanding of the Observations accused Thomas Mann of being a reactionary nationalist should have been aware that as early as 1923 he had renounced in no uncertain terms the opinions expressed in that work. At that time he delivered a speech “About the German Republic” (“Von deutscher Republik”) in which he urged support for the Weimar state, which in many ways embodied the very ideas he had attacked in the Observations. From this point on he left no doubt whatsoever about his political stance. Five years before the Nazis came into power, their party press already abused him in print. The fascists even then regarded him as an adversary because of his alleged francophile outlook—the same thing he himself had held against his brother fourteen years earlier. In October 1930 Thomas Mann gave a lecture in Berlin in which he sounded an outspoken warning against National Socialism and came out in support of the Social Democrats. The Nazis, knowing what to expect, had infiltrated the audience and started fights and other disruptions in an effort to prevent Mann from speaking, but he refused to let himself be intimidated and calmly finished reading his paper.

Two years later again he gave a press interview in which he declared himself strongly opposed to Hitler and his party. Around the same time he expressed his antifascist attitude in a talk before Austrian laborers in the Vienna suburb of Ottakring. The Nazis also associated Thomas Mann with the bitingly satirical political cabaret “The Peppermill” (“Die Pfeffermühle”) which opened in Munich on 1 January 1933. Even though the novelist was not directly involved in this enterprise, he certainly had strong links with its leading figures. His daughter Erika directed the cabaret and together with her brother Klaus wrote most of the texts which heaped ridicule on the National Socialists.

In February 1933 Thomas Mann had been invited to address the Socialist Cultural Society in Berlin. Since he was unable to attend personally he sent the text of his speech to be read for him. Although the meeting was banned by the Nazis his connection with this opposition organization was duly noted as further evidence of his hostility toward the new rulers. In a clear gesture of defiance Mann in December of the same year, while living in a colony of exile writers in the south of France, refused to join the official German literary organization, the “Reichsschrifttumskammer.” Early in 1935 Thomas Mann had once more gone on record as an antifascist with his paper “Europe, Beware,” which was distributed at an international conference in Nice.

But in the minds of many, not even all these demonstrations of Thomas Mann's political viewpoint were conclusive evidence of his critical attitude toward the new regime. Among both Nazis and exiles some uncertainty remained about the firmness of his commitment to the antifascist cause. His disavowal of Die Sammlung and the fact that he continued to be printed and published in Germany kept such doubts alive. Mann's studied and emphatic personal neutrality and aloofness toward the emigration did nothing to convince the exiles that his heart was in the right place. Their doubts were further strengthened by the fact that even at the beginning of 1936 the German authorities, despite Mann's repeated provocations, had not yet stripped him of his German citizenship.

Under these circumstances Thomas Mann was regarded as a somewhat dubious figure in emigrant circles at the time Fischer set up shop in Vienna. On that occasion Leopold Schwarzschild as editor of the journal Neues Tage Buch commented that the exiled writers included just about the entire German world of letters as far as it was worthy of note. With the same ambiguity that had marked some of his earlier utterances and actions, Thomas Mann burst into print to protest this view. In doing so he may have acted out of consideration for Fischer's remaining business interests in Germany and his own stake in them. In any case at this point the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung became embroiled in the public controversy.

In the issue of 26 January 1936, there appeared an article by Eduard Korrodi, a Swiss journalist with pronounced Nazi sympathies. He entered into the argument between Schwarzschild and Thomas Mann with the intention of alienating the novelist from the emigration and claiming him for the fascists' side. To this end he reversed Schwarzschild's claim that practically all German authors of importance had left their native soil. Korrodi asserted that the exiles constituted a worthless segment of German literature. To bolster his opinion he said that they were all Jewish and that they wrote nothing but cheap novels. Korrodi went on to contrast Thomas Mann with these allegedly inferior writers. Mann was not really in exile; he just happened to have been living outside Germany since early 1933. He was a great artist and, moreover, he was not Jewish.

Thomas Mann proved to be above this kind of flattery. In an answering letter of February 1936 he stressed the great contributions the Jews had made to German literature over the centuries. In that connection he also took issue with the fascist notion that the Jews had to be eliminated to protect the German way of life. According to Mann, Nazi anti-Semitism was really directed against the essential Christian and ancient aspects of German civilization itself. He further corrected Korrodi's statement that the exiled authors were all Jewish by reciting the names of a number of them, including himself and his brother Heinrich, who were not. Mann also addressed himself to the Swiss journalist's attempt to downgrade exile literature because it consisted largely of novels. Mann made the point that this genre was not inferior but had established itself as the leading literary form in Europe generally. The novel was far more relevant to the politically turbulent times than any other kind of writing. Thomas Mann did not content himself with rebutting Korrodi's arguments; he condemned the Nazis in the strongest terms and, adding insult to injury, taunted that for the past three years they had been unable to decide whether to revoke his German citizenship. His letter concluded with an impassioned affirmation of his own allegiance to the emigration.

There continued to be exiles who had serious reservations about Thomas Mann. Some were envious of his great reputation or presumed prosperity. Others disagreed with his political or literary orientation. But by and large his outspoken reply to Korrodi made Mann the key figure of the emigration. His reputation as a champion of the exile cause was further solidified when the Hitler regime, convinced at last that he could not be wooed into their camp, deprived him of his German citizenship. The blacklist concerned was published in December 1936, but it did not leave Mann stateless. His prominence and his friendly private relations with President Beneš had enabled him to obtain Czechoslovak nationality for himself and his family.

Later in the same month the Nazis took further action against him. The University of Bonn announced that the honorary doctorate it had bestowed on the novelist many years before had been rescinded. Thomas Mann's reaction in this instance was more pithy than his letter to Korrodi, which out of consideration for the journalist's Swiss nationality had been couched in respectful terms. Mann's response to the dean of the university opened with a reference to the “depraved powers that are destroying Germany morally, culturally and economically” and concluded with the prayer that God might help the abused country and teach it to make peace with the world and itself. The document is a deeply personal statement of position and principles. Owing to the status of the author and the vibrant conviction of his words, it almost assumed the significance of a charter for exile literature as a whole.

Of particular interest was the passage dealing with the relation between the creative and the political concerns of the emigrants. Thomas Mann did not assign priority to one over the other but spoke out for a synthesis of the two on a linguistic level: “The mystery of language is great; the responsibility for language and its purity is symbolic and spiritual, it is by no means only of artistic but also of general moral significance, it is responsibility itself, human responsibility as such, also the responsibility for one's own people, keeping its image pure before the eyes of mankind, and in it the unity of humanity can be experienced, the totality of the human problem that does not allow anyone, least of all in these times to separate the spiritual-artistic from the political-social and to isolate oneself from the latter in an elevated ‘cultural’ realm.”

As Thomas Mann was writing his letter to the dean of the University of Bonn, the struggle between the fascists and their opponents had moved beyond the literary sphere onto the battlefields of the Spanish civil war. Armed conflict had broken out earlier in the year as the final result of political tensions that had been building up in Spain for a long time. A left-leaning republican government had legally come to power, but the country's nobility and the Roman Catholic church banded together to overthrow it and establish a fascist regime instead. Socialists and Communists united in a popular front resisted this revolution from the right.

This internal issue took on implications of much greater magnitude. Hitler and Mussolini had entered into an alliance known as the fascist Axis and decided to use the civil strife in Spain as a dress rehearsal for their own planned war of conquest. In flagrant disregard of all international agreements, they supplied the forces of General Franco, the military leader of the right-wing insurrection, with troops and equipment. The new German air force, then being built up by Hermann Goering in defiance of the Versailles peace treaty, also took part in the civil war. Under the name “Condor Legion” it used the opportunity to train its pilots, test its airplanes under combat conditions, and experiment with new strategies of air warfare—particularly the bombarding of civilian population centers.

When the involvement by the Axis was first suspected but not yet proven, the German exile writer Arthur Koestler was assigned to investigate the matter as an undercover agent for the Communist Party. In the years before Hitler's rise to power he had worked as a journalist for the big Berlin newspaper concern of Ullstein. A Communist Party member since 1931, he took his political commitment seriously enough to pass on to the Marxists the diplomatic information that he came across in his professional capacity. In 1933 he was caught at this and lost his job in disgrace. He thereupon went to Russia, where he spent almost a year before moving on to Paris. He was active in the production of antifascist propaganda literature until the Communist Party ordered him to look into the question of German and Italian participation in the Spanish civil war.

Koestler's career as a spy in Spain came to an untimely end when he happened to run into a former newspaper colleague from Berlin who meanwhile had become a Nazi. He recognized Koestler, who posed as a right-wing journalist, and tipped off the fascists. Just one hour before a warrant for his arrest was issued, Koestler managed to flee to Gibraltar. Undeterred by this narrow escape he returned to Spain later in the year on other secret missions. Early in 1937 his luck ran out when the same informer succeeded in having him arrested by Franco's forces. The incident caused a furor, and all over the world much sentiment was aroused in his behalf. Eventually so much pressure was exerted on his captors that after some three months' imprisonment he was released on the condition that he would not return to Spain again.

Arthur Koestler was but one of many volunteers of different countries and from different parts of the political spectrum who had recognized the historic significance of the conflict in Spain. They wanted to contribute their share to the fight against the totalitarianism that threatened to engulf Europe. In contrast to Koestler's cloak-and-dagger activities most of those who came to the aid of the republicans did so as members of the International Brigades. These army units often bore the brunt of the military operations against the fascists. Not surprisingly the foreign volunteers included a goodly number of German exile writers. Dedicated to the cause of antifascism but frustrated by the ever more apparent political futility of their literary activity, they eagerly seized this opportunity to engage in a more direct confrontation with the enemy.

One of these literary exiles who took up arms against Franco was the novelist Gustav Regler, who ranked high on the Nazis' list of enemies. As a journalist in the twenties he had published a story that led to the public exposure and conviction of the perverted and criminal Julius Streicher, one of Hitler's oldest cronies and a prominent figure in the National Socialist movement. In 1933 Regler left the country and settled in Paris where he, like Koestler, took part in various antifascist publishing ventures. As a native of the Saar territory he also became involved in the propaganda battle that preceded the plebiscite of January 1935 and was much disheartened and disillusioned by the outcome.

In 1936 Regler, a somewhat unorthodox Communist, went to Moscow. He undertook this trip in connection with a projected biography of Loyola that was sponsored by the Party. Regler actually intended to criticize Stalin's ruthless dictatorship indirectly in his book by implying a comparison between the Russian strong man and the founder of the Jesuit order. During his stay in Moscow, Regler became aware that a political crisis was brewing involving the old-guard Communists in whose circles he mainly moved. In the middle of August the issue came out in the open with an official announcement that a number of prominent Leninists were to stand trial. They were charged with organizing and participating in the preparation of acts of terror against the leaders of the Party and the government.

This was the start of the infamous Moscow show trials that were to have ideological repercussions throughout the world. The Russian dictator was shown to resort to judicial murder of the real founders of the Soviet state in order to bolster his own absolute personal power. As a result Communists everywhere lost faith in the Stalinist version of their political gospel. Many Marxists broke with the Party but others clung to it in the desperate hope of somehow salvaging their ideals in spite of the grim and bloody realities in Russia.

Regler's reaction was typical in this respect. The trials confirmed all his worst fears about Communism, which up to this point he had hesitated to confess even to himself. He was dismayed and shocked by Stalin's callously cynical betrayal of the cause to which he had dedicated his life. Nevertheless he was not yet prepared to admit that the germ of totalitarianism was inherent in the ideological foundations of Marxism. He therefore sought to recapture on the battlefields of Spain the spirit of idealism that had originally led him to become a Communist. The Spanish civil war had broken out while Regler was in Moscow, and the progress of the conflict had been followed with passionate interest by him and everyone else as a decisive contest between the forces of good and evil. Now the military campaign seemed to offer a chance for him to cleanse himself of the corruption of Stalinist Russia. On the battlefield he might be able to atone also for his futile literary and propagandistic efforts on behalf of the Party, with which he continued to maintain a formal allegiance.

In the fall of 1936, after many bureaucratic delays and obstructions by the red functionaries, Gustav Regler went to Spain. He took with him a gift from the Communist International Writers Association for the republican forces. It consisted of a small truck, a press for printing pamphlets, a projector, and some propaganda films. When Regler had handed over this somewhat symbolic present he joined the forces that were defending Madrid against the troops of Generalissimo Franco. Gustav Regler was no newcomer to front-line action. While still in his teens he had served and been wounded in the First World War. Now he took an active part in the fighting around the Spanish capital. From that perspective he had nothing but contempt for the Communist Party officials who were attached to the republican army, for they seemed much more concerned with their own endless intrigues and power struggles than with the fate of the Spanish state.

A short time later Regler himself was appointed as a political commissar to the nationally and ideologically mixed twelfth International Brigade. (The numbering of these troop units started with eleven.) He carried out his functions in an undogmatic spirit. Rather than insist pedantically on absolute, rigid adherence to the dogmas of Communism, he used his influence to keep up the spirit of the soldiers. They certainly needed all the encouragement he could give them, since both in numbers and in quantity and quality of equipment they lagged far behind the enemy. Regler's unorthodox, humanistic faith in the power of the word manifested itself in the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937. Over the disdainful objections of militarists and Marxist stalwarts, he belabored the opposing Italian fascist troops with leaflets and rather highbrow propaganda speeches broadcast over large loudspeakers. This psychological warfare allegedly persuaded many of the fascist soldiers to defect to the republicans. In any case the engagement ended in the defeat of the revolutionaries. Three months later Regler was seriously wounded in the fighting around Huesca when a grenade hit his car, forcing the end of his active military career. When after four months he came out of the hospital he was sent to America to raise money for the loyalists.

Regler later used his personal experiences in the Spanish civil war to continue his struggle against the fascists by literary means. On his way to Mexico in 1939 he was for a while the guest of Ernest Hemingway, whom he had met and come to admire in Spain. In Key West he wrote his semiautobiographical novel The Great Crusade to which his host supplied a foreword. The book did not make any attempt to gloss over the tensions and frictions between the different political factions within the International Brigades. Regler also dwelt on the self-defeating dogmatic narrow-mindedness and paranoia of the official Communist Party representatives. Nevertheless The Great Crusade ended on a positive note. In the battle of Huesca that ended Regler's fighting days, the loyalists had scored a military victory over the forces of Franco. From a literary standpoint it was entirely justifiable to conclude the novel with this promising scene, yet in a larger context Regler distorted the truth about the Spanish civil war in closing his book on this upbeat note.

Guadalajara and Huesca were no more than retarding moments in a development that inevitably had to lead to the military defeat of the republicans. In March 1939 the fight was over and a fascist regime was established in Spain. Once again the world had ignored the handwriting on the wall. The legal government of Spain had in its hour of need been deserted by Russia no less than by the Western democracies who had failed to supply vitally important military and medical supplies and food. Some statesmen had paid lip service to the righteousness of the loyalist cause. In reality the republicans had been diplomatically and militarily abandoned by all those who refused to see the plight of Spain for what it was: the preamble to the most disastrous war ever waged. From this perspective Regler's ultimately rosy picture of the loyalist prospects in The Great Crusade was more than just a literary device to round out his story. It symbolized the desperate longing of the emigrant writers for some hopeful sign, some bright spot on the horizon. During six years in exile they had seen the international situation grow steadily worse. All resistance, whether with the pen or with the gun, appeared to be fruitless as the fascist scourge spread further and further. The exiles' hardship and sacrifice seemed wasted and the future more bleak than ever.