Word: heilbut
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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Whatever their talents and tenets, these refugees shared the experience of the shipwrecked. Anthony Heilbut, whose parents were Berlin emigres, has exercised impressive, if indulgent scholarship, and even a touch of poetry, to get to the heart of this diaspora...
...Manhattan's New School for Social Research, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, at California universities, the refugees not only adapted but also became the "advance men" of new ideas, as Heilbut puts it. Paul Tillich combined theology with aesthetics; Hannah Arendt made philosophy and history partners in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Einstein continued to measure the boundaries of space as he weighed the causes and cures...
According to Heilbut's debatable thesis, after Pearl Harbor the German Americans were thought of as just one more group of aliens. After World War II, the McCarthy period seemed to strike an ominous and familiar chord. Mann, who had found in California his Eden, came to dismiss it as "an artificial paradise," America as a "soulless soil." Einstein complained that Americans, shortchanging their idealism, were not American enough. Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that only in the U.S. could Freud's prescription for human dignity, Lieben und Arbeiten (love and work), be realized. But he became "increasingly...
This sense of alienation is easy to understand. The subjects of Heilbut's study were, after all, no ordinary group. Most were intellectuals who would have been restless in any culture. It is doubtful, for example, if Brecht ("Wherever I go, they ask me, Spell your name") would have been happy anywhere on earth. Others, like Mann, never really understood the nation they first overpraised, then cursed for being imperfect. Some, like Writer Gerhardt Eisler, were Communists, hypocritical in their horror at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Heilbut's defense of these emigres seems disingenuous: "If Einstein...
...book is a parade of names, from Walter Gropius to Franz Werfel, two men who not only shared the same fate but the same wife, Alma. The anecdotes are diverting, and the history is brisk and precise. But Taylor's work lacks the tragic dimension of Heilbut's book. The difference is evident in the titles. It is one thing to be a stranger and quite another to be an exile, forced from a country, a tradition and a language, to become, in Einstein's phrase, "a bird of passage for . . . life...