House of Exile
The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner, Nelly Kroeger, fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as Heinrich's family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks.
In House of Exile, Heinrich and Nelly's story is crossed with others from their circle of friends, relatives, and contemporaries: Heinrich's brother, Thomas Mann; his sister, Carla; their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth; and, beyond them, the writers James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Evelyn Juers brings this generation of exiles to life with tremendous poignancy and imaginative power. In train compartments, ship cabins, and rented rooms, the Manns clung to what was left to them—their bodies, their minds, and their books—in a turbulent and self-destructive era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unlikely relationship between the anti-Nazi German literary lion and a bar hostess anchors this vivid if jumbled group portrait of a lost generation of European writers. Juers, publisher of Giramondo Publishing and Heat magazine, follows novelist Mann and his second wife from their romance in Weimar era Berlin into exile in France when Hitler took power and thence to Los Angeles, where they were alienated by the empty streets and "thin civilization." Juers's attempts to impute a rich soul to her underdocumented heroine ("If Madame Bovary had fallen into her hands, I imagine what she would have loved most was its intimacy") yield mixed results: she presents a brave, warmhearted but troubled woman who comes alive mainly during repeated nervous breakdowns. The couple are ensemble players amid a swirl of fragmentary vignettes of intellectual icons, including Mann's Nobel-winning brother, Thomas; Bertolt Brecht; Freud; and Virginia Woolf, who keeps popping up with little connection to other people or events. Mundane life clashes with the catastrophic as modernist refugees grasp at love and literature while the world burns. But with lives overtaken by persecution, homelessness, suicide, and mass murder, Juers's collage gels into a haunting evocation of Europe's tragedy.
