In 1942 Lionel Feuchtwanger, German émigré writer and friend of Bertolt Brecht, complained to the New York Times. American officials would not let him visit Brecht as they both intended to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Nazi book burnings. Assuring American readers that Brecht and he had fled fascism with nothing but praise for America's democracy since their arrival in the US, Feuchtwanger could not see why they were not allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes, to speak in public, or to go out after 8 p.m. Had American readers misinterpreted their work that drastically?

Few anecdotes from the modernist archive so forcibly illustrate that passage between Anglo-American and European modernism has never been easy. Linguistic and cultural hurdles have always made certain patches of European modernism rather exotic to non- continental readers. One such exotic patch are the so-called ‘historical avant-gardes’ of futurism, expressionism, Dada and surrealism, among others, which had no clear equivalents in the US and Britain during the 1910s and 1920s. Common sense dictates that this absence of a concurrent pendant to the European avant-gardes in part can be led back to differences in politics. European avant-gardists operated in a far less stable political context than modernists in the US and Britain. Indeed, the crisis of civilisation, the passing of an old order and the coming of a new announced in the European fin de siècle soon made room for an unprecedented ‘age of extremes’ in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the ‘short century’ that went before our own.