OCTOBER 1943 SAW THE PUBLICATION of a remarkable—albeit problematic—volume of essays edited by Emil Ludwig and Henry B. Kranz and released by Farrar & Rinehart. It bore the title The Torch of Freedom: Twenty Exiles of History and included contributions by such celebrated figures as André Maurois, member of the Académie française; the German authors Yvan Goll and Heinrich Mann; and the Austro-Hungarian writer and publisher Hans Habe (1911–77), as well as a number of other European intellectuals and political activists. What this motley group of contributors had in common was their own experiences of exile. The editors’ banishments had placed them in a position of connoisseurship, eminently equipped to provide insights into the lives of the twenty historical figures of exile portrayed in the volume. Exile, so Ludwig and Kranz’s logic went, had granted the authors a privileged status as interpreters of the exilic condition: “The exiles of today,” Ludwig and Kranz stated in the preface, “can enter into the experience of the exiles of yesterday, can understand their motives, their suffering, their hopes, their destinies” (vii). Such affinity is valuable, the editors argued, because the sheer scale of modern exile compelled them to understand this condition, which was “not an invention of our times” but was affecting more people than at any other time in history. The biographical sketches in the volume, then, served as a window on a condition that is not easily defined but manifests itself in the fate of individuals such as Simón Bolívar, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Émile Zola, and Sun Yat-sen. The editors’ approach is inductive: from the various biographies readers can infer a meaning of exile that is universal. Its trustworthiness is augmented by the authors’ shared exile, which produces the following formula of authenticity: exiles writing about fellow exiles in the age of exile.

Light in the Dark: Exiles as Torchbearers

Whatever this condition called exile might be, Ludwig and Kranz left no doubt that it was a condition of greatness bestowed on influential men (there is not a single woman among the twenty exiles covered, though Madame de Staël would certainly have deserved to be included). All the exiles “were important in their day or became important many years afterward. They were poets, kings, scientists, statesmen, peasants, and soldiers” (vii).