Testimony of the Shipwrecked

By Melvin Maddocks

EXILED IN PARADISE by Anthony Heilbut; Viking; 506 pages; $20 STRANGERS IN PARADISE by John Russell Taylor; Holt, Rinehart& Winston 256 pages; $16.95

Of all the waves of immigrants that have landed on American shores since the Pilgrims, the German refugees who fled from Hitler in the 1930s may qualify as the best and the brightest. An entire civilization could be reconstructed from the writers, artists, musicians, philosophers and scientists in their desperate ranks.

Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were among the most gifted writers of their time. Artist Max Ernst made surrealism accessible to a generation. The architects-in-exile of the Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, changed the face of the American city. Middle European Physicists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller became the ambivalent stepfathers of the atomic era.

Whatever their talents and tenets, these refugees shared the experience of the shipwrecked. Anthony Heilbut, whose parents were Berlin emigres, has exercised impressive, if indulgent scholarship, and even a touch of poetry, to get to the heart of this diaspora.

With only the baggage of their memories and their accents, the refugees came prepared to be instant Americans. "I believe," Thomas Mann told his new hosts, "that for the duration of the present European dark age, the center of Western culture will shift to America. It is my own intention to make my home in your country, and I am convinced that if Europe continues for a while to pursue the same course as in the last two decades, many good Europeans will meet again on American soil." Like Brecht, who went from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Switzerland to France to Denmark before coming to the U.S., most of these good Europeans carried the fate of the wanderer in their blood. They took off their airs as they put on their work clothes, willing to do anything to survive. Composer Paul Dessau was a hired hand on a chicken farm; Writer Walter Mehring became a warehouse foreman; Philosopher Heinrich Blucher shoveled chemicals in a factory. In the sassy spirit of Berlin cabarets of the 1920s, they devised impromptu dictionaries of slang, with emphasis on "dough" and "bread." Twelve-tone Composer Arnold Schoenberg dispensed to fellow exiles his one-note advice for social success: When in doubt, smile.

At Manhattan's New School for Social Research, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, at California universities, the refugees not only adapted but also became the "advance men" of new ideas, as Heilbut puts it. Paul Tillich combined theology with aesthetics; Hannah Arendt made philosophy and history partners in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Einstein continued to measure the boundaries of space as he weighed the causes and cures of war.

"Refugees," Brecht observed, "are refugees as a result of changes, and their sole object of study is change." For a while these restless minds seemed to be doing Americans' homework for them, analyzing everything from jazz to soap opera to advertising techniques. But the enchantment was one-sided.

According to Heilbut's debatable thesis, after Pearl Harbor the German Americans were thought of as just one more group of aliens. After World War II, the McCarthy period seemed to strike an ominous and familiar chord. Mann, who had found in California his Eden, came to dismiss it as "an artificial paradise," America as a "soulless soil." Einstein complained that Americans, shortchanging their idealism, were not American enough. Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that only in the U.S. could Freud's prescription for human dignity, Lieben und Arbeiten (love and work), be realized. But he became "increasingly critical of the American Establishment." Arendt spoke for a whole generation when, shortly before her death in 1975, she confessed, "I somehow don't fit."

This sense of alienation is easy to understand. The subjects of Heilbut's study were, after all, no ordinary group. Most were intellectuals who would have been restless in any culture. It is doubtful, for example, if Brecht ("Wherever I go, they ask me, Spell your name") would have been happy anywhere on earth. Others, like Mann, never really understood the nation they first overpraised, then cursed for being imperfect. Some, like Writer Gerhardt Eisler, were Communists, hypocritical in their horror at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Heilbut's defense of these emigres seems disingenuous: "If Einstein or Thomas and Klaus Mann were back and could observe the Ku Klux Klan in Connecticut or the Moral Majority in New Jersey . . . one doubts if they would feel inclined to apologize for their earlier misgivings."

Some of the refugees found the U.S. a far from terrifying place even in the '50s. Most of them were quartered in a New Weimar set among palm trees. In Strangers in Paradise, John Russell Taylor, film critic of the Times of London, tells ironic tales out of court about the Hollywood settlers. Actors like Conrad Veidt and Otto Preminger, fleeing from Hitler, were hired to impersonate Nazis in war movies. Ernst Lubitsch, eager to propagandize against the Third Reich, directed a delicate, tentative farce, To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny as a Polish ham actor. In the film a German general appraises Benny: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." For his efforts, Lubitsch was pilloried by critics for finding "fun in the bombing of Warsaw." Sometimes the very difficulties with a new language benefited Hollywood by cutting dialogue to an effective minimum. "For me," said Director Fritz Lang, "psychology is not in the talking, it is in the action, in the movement, the gestures ... It is the behaviorisms that create the character."

Taylor's book is a parade of names, from Walter Gropius to Franz Werfel, two men who not only shared the same fate but the same wife, Alma. The anecdotes are diverting, and the history is brisk and precise. But Taylor's work lacks the tragic dimension of Heilbut's book. The difference is evident in the titles. It is one thing to be a stranger and quite another to be an exile, forced from a country, a tradition and a language, to become, in Einstein's phrase, "a bird of passage for . . . life."

The final anguish of these exiles, caught between the promises of the New World and the curses of the Old, was in belonging to neither. Nonetheless, the refugees, living out of their spiritual suitcases, made significant contributions to their adopted country. If American innocence has been tempered into something less isolated and naive, these tough teachers can be thanked in part. But they paid an awful price in their torn lives. Popular among the emigres was a story of two refugees crossing the Atlantic, one headed for America, one headed back to Europe. As their two ships pass, the old friends shout simultaneously, "Are you crazy?" With their cursed gift for awareness, the refugees understood better than anyone on either continent the black joke that history had played upon them.

--By Melvin Maddocks

Excerpt "Painter Richard Lindner said of himself, 'I am a tourist everywhere, which means an "observer." ' Once the emigre rec onciled himself or herself to this position as observer, life became too interesting to lament that if one was a tourist everywhere, one was at home nowhere. Erich Kahler did not learn English until he was close to 50, yet he wrote many works in that language. In 1954 Kahler received a note from his fellow Princetonian the matchlessly resilient Einstein about the persecution of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein understood the American's predicament, but as an outsider. 'Such a person rooted in the social community is incomparably more vulnerable,' he told Kahler, 'than a gypsy like you or me for whom the saying "Go to hell" is not a mere figure of speech, but a natural attitude.'" This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.