Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
- 2 Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein's Exile Studies
- 3 A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
- 4 Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
- 5 The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
- 6 First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
- 7 The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
6 - First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
- 2 Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein's Exile Studies
- 3 A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
- 4 Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
- 5 The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
- 6 First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
- 7 The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The “Things” That Happened “Over There”
On October 13, 1947, the prominent Weimar cultural critic and Nazi-era émigré living in New York, Siegfried Kracauer, composed the following letter to Wolfgang Weyrauch in Germany, whom he'd encouraged years earlier, when Weyrauch was a beginning journalist and author in Frankfurt who had treated Kracauer as his chosen mentor:
I have received your letters—including the last one—as well as the books. I am surprised that you now insist on a quick reply, after you never thought to keep up your connections with me throughout the Hitler years and even the years before. Since you overlook this circumstance, I am compelled to mention it. In the meantime things have happened that you know about—things that make it impossible for me simply to resume connections with people over there without being altogether certain of them. Such things are not forgettable. And if it is at all possible to restore trust, it is a far more difficult task than you seem to assume. You also seem to harbor illusions about our life: it has been and it is hard and difficult.
Six days later, he rewrote the as yet unmailed letter. In the revision, Kracauer replaced the colloquial suggestion that contact might resume after a while with a more personal and concrete—but also less companionable—choice of language, telescoping two of his earlier thoughts, by turning directly to the “things” whose occurrence had made it “infinitely difficult to regain trust in people from over there from whom I have not heard in such a long time.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Liquidation of ExileStudies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s, pp. 109 - 146Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011