The German Historical Novel in Exile After 1933
Calliope Contra Clio
Description:... Historical fiction, from the epic tales of the ancients to Gone With the Wind and Roots, "demonstrates an inherent need in man to come to terms with his heritage in literary form." When the writers and readers are exiles, their need becomes especially poignant. The dual historical-artistic nature of the historical novel legitimates its claim to be a distinct genre. Two of the post-1933 exiled German novelists, Lion Feuchtwanger and Alfred Döblin, saw the historical novel's function as "to collect, preserve, and transmit the reality, not the mere facts, of great historical events and personages." The analysis of a cross-section of the work of these two and eight other leading German novelists in exile--Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, Wolfgang Cordan, Bruno Frank, Robert Neumann, Edgar Maass, and Joseph Roth--confirms the view of Döblin and Feuchtwanger and reveals that "an indebtedness to Neo-Romanticism and a basic humanist attitude are common to all the authors."
Although 1933 marks the largest migration of writers into exile known to modern history, their experience and their subsequent novels share attributes with the fictional expressions of exiled writers from places as varied as Argentina, Poland, South Africa, and the Soviet Union.
Show description