April 23, 2009 - October 11, 2009

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Publishing in Exile brings together for the first time literary works published by these German-speaking exile publishers in the United States during the Third Reich. Displayed along with the original books, rare photos, letters, and archival material are several unique manuscripts that characterize the writing done during this dark time, such as Thomas Mann's, Joseph der Ernährer [Joseph the Provider] and Franz Werfel’s, Die wahre Geschichte vom wiederhergestellten Kreuz [The True Story of the Restored Cross], as well as materials from collections in Germany and across the United States. Many of the titles published by the exile presses in the U.S. were written by authors banned by the Nazis: Jewish writers, Marxists, pacifists, internationalists, and other undesirables, but some were classics that were out of line with Nazi dogma, such as Grimm’s Märchen.

The exhibit features the seven most prominent publishers who issued German-language literary texts in the United States between 1940 and 1950. Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, editor-in-chief of Fischer Verlag in Berlin, after attempting to work in Vienna and Stockholm, finally fled to New York. There he founded L.B. Fischer Corporation with Fritz Landshoff, who had published many exiled authors in his Querido Verlag in Amsterdam before he too was forced to leave Europe. Wieland Herzfelde introduced socialism into publishing in the U.S., forming the only author-run press among the exiles, Aurora Verlag. Art dealer and publisher Otto Kallir reestablished his small Viennese house, Johannespresse, in Manhattan, mainly to publish the work of his friend and fellow exile, the poet Richard Beer-Hofmann. On the West Coast, Ernst Gottlieb and Felix Guggenheim joined together as Pazifische Presse to produce deluxe editions of German fiction. Master of international modernism, Kurt Wolff, together with his French partner, Jacques Schiffrin, started Pantheon Books, which went on to have an illustrious history in American publishing. Against the odds, these émigrés brought out new books by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Oskar Maria Graf, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anna Seghers, Franz Werfel, and Arnold Zweig, among others, as well as reissuing classics by Hölderlin, Goethe, Hauptmann, and Rilke—all in the original language.

The exhibition opens on April 23 with a symposium, at which a panel of experts will describe the experience of publishers in exile and the crucial assistance they gave fleeing authors, reopening the case file of important cultural work done on foreign soil during the war.

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