The exodus of men, women and children fleeing from the Nazi regime was one of the largest diasporas the world has ever seen. It sparked an international refugee crisis that changed society and continues to shape our culture and community today. The years between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi era in Germany, and the war years, 1939 to 1945, were a time of destruction, upheaval and misery throughout Europe and beyond. Displacement and death, whether in war or civilian life, became everyday experiences, for young and old alike. Families were torn apart by enforced emigration or deportation. Parents were separated from their children, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters. Interned in camps that spread across the globe from Shanghai to the United States of America to the Isle of Man, they became strangers in a foreign land and often the only link they had to their former lives were letters exchanged with friends and family. These scarce postal communications, therefore, assumed huge significance in the lives of both sender and receiver, one that is hard to imagine today in the age of instant communication. Fleeing from the Fuhrer is an unusual collection of correspondence that shows the incredible nature of this worldwide emigration and the indomitable spirit of these refugees. Each postcard, envelope and item of ephemera tells its own unique story and is reproduced in full colour, making this a fascinating resource for anyone wanting to understand this poignant part of our international history.

Yvonne Kapp, best known today for her biography of Eleanor Marx, was a remarkable woman whose life spanned virtually the entire twentieth century. Time Will Tell charts her life: 'enfant terrible' in London, the literary editor of Vogue in France in the late 1920s, work for anti-fascist refugee committees in 1930s' London, research for the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the British Medical Research Council, then, in her later years, work as a translator and a biographer. Kapp is a gifted writer on the details of family life and a fine recorder of shifting political and cultural patterns. Accounts of the many encounters she had with various important figures-Quentin Bell, Rebecca West, Paul Robeson, John Heartfield, Melanie Klein and Herbert Morrison, to name only a few-are expertly woven into the fascinating story of her own life. This is the autobiography of a woman who took issue with the dominant political movements of her age, with Fascism and with Communism, while at the same time reflecting on the changing cultural and political climate in Britain during her lifetime.

This is an unusual book, telling a story which has hitherto remained hidden from history: the surveillance by the British security service MI5 of anti-Nazi refugees who came to Britain fleeing political persecution in Germany and Austria. Based on the personal and organisational files that MI5 kept on political refugees during the 1930s and 1940s - which have only recently been released into the public domain - this study also fills a considerable gap in historical research. Telling a story of absorbing interest, which at times reads more like spy fiction, it is both a study of MI5 and of the political refugees themselves. The book will interest academics in the fields of history, politics, intelligence studies, Jewish studies, German studies and migration studies; but it is also accessible to the general reader interested in Britain before, during and after the Second World War. -- .

New essays on the influence of politics on 20c. German culture, not only during the Nazi and Cold War eras but in periods when the effects are less obvious. The cultural history of 20th-century Germany, more perhaps than that of any other European country, was decisively influenced by political forces and developments. This volume of essays focuses on the relationship between German politics and culture, which is most obvious in the case of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, where the one-party control of all areas of life was extended to the arts; these were expected to conform to the idealsof the day. But the relationship between politics and the arts has not always been one purely of coercion, censorship, collusion, and opportunism. Many writers greeted the First World War with quite voluntary enthusiasm; others conjured up the National Socialist revolution in intense Expressionist images long before 1933. The GDR was heralded by writers returning from Nazi exile as the anti-fascist answer to the Third Reich. And in West Germany, politicsdid not dictate artistic norms, nor was it greeted with any great enthusiasm among intellectuals, but writers did tend to ally themselves with particular parties. To an extent, the pre-1990 literary establishment in the Federal Republic was dominated by a left-liberal consensus that German division was the just punishment for Auschwitz. United Germany began its existence with a fierce literary debate in 1990-92, with leading literary critics arguing that East and West German literature had basically shored up the political order in the two countries. Now a new literature was required, one that was free of ideology, intensely subjective and experimental in its aesthetic. In 1998, the author Martin Walser called for an end to the author's role as "conscience of the nation" and for the right to subjective experience. This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany. William Niven and James Jordan are readers in German at the University of Nottingham Trent.

The Austrian Centre was established in London in 1939 by Austrians seeking refuge from Nazi Germany, of whom 30,000 had reached Britain by the outbreak of World War II. It soon developed into a comprehensive social, cultural and political organisation with a theatre and a weekly newspaper of its own. A Communist-influenced organisation, it also followed a distinct political agenda. In the first book on the cultural and political life of Austrian refugees in Britain, Out of Austria assesses and evaluates the Austrian Centre's activities and achievements, while also examining the Austrians' often fraught relations with their British hosts. It gives a fascinating insight into such figures as Sigmund Freud, who became the Centre's Honorary President during his final months and the poet Erich Fried, then an unknown seventeen-year-old, and sheds light on the interaction of politics and culture against the background of exile in wartime Britain.

Berthold Jacob war einer der bekanntesten deutschen Journalisten und Pazifisten der Weimarer Republik, der als Anti-Nazi und Jude schon 1932 Zuflucht in Strassburg fand. Im Marz 1935 wurde er durch die Gestapo uber die schweizerisch-deutsche Grenze entfuhrt und in Berlin verhaftet, was internationales Aufsehen erregte. Mit einer grundlichen Einfuhrung versehen, enthalt der vorliegende Band bisher unbekannte und unveroeffentlichte Briefe und andere Dokumente, die eine detaillierte Chronik der Bemuhungen der Freunde im Exil entwerfen, Jacob aus seiner Berliner Haft zu befreien. Zugleich wirft das Buch ein neues Licht auf die schwierigen, nervenaufreibenden Lebensumstande antinazistischer Exilanten in den Emigrationslandern Europas.

The Austrian Centre was established in London in 1939 by Austrians seeking refuge from Nazi Germany, of whom 30,000 had reached Britain by the outbreak of World War II. It soon developed into a comprehensive social, cultural and political organisation with a theatre and a weekly newspaper of its own. A Communist-influenced organisation, it also followed a distinct political agenda. In the first book on the cultural and political life of Austrian refugees in Britain, "Out of Austria" assesses and evaluates the Austrian Centre's activities and achievements, while also examining the Austrians' often fraught relations with their British hosts. It gives a fascinating insight into such figures as Sigmund Freud, who became the Centre's Honorary President during his final months and the poet Erich Fried, then an unknown seventeen-year-old, k and sheds light on the interaction of politics and culture against the background of exile in wartime Britain.