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Sto caricando le informazioni... House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angelesdi Evelyn Juers
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Thorough research, an interesting subject-matter, so why am I a bit doubtful about it? See http://tinyurl.com/ycdqgkc
"In 1933 the prominent author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger were forced to flee Germany, finding refuge first in France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Their paths were crossed in turn by those of other writers and artists displaced by war or their beliefs, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth and Kurt Schwitters. In Paris, London and Los Angeles, all around the globe, in train compartments, ships cabins, hotels, rented rooms, bombed buildings, and prison cells, they retreated into what they had left - their bodies, their minds and if they were lucky, their books and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, they built their own annexes to the House of Exile."--Provided by publisher. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)305.9069140922Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people People by occupation and miscellaneous social statuses Sexuality; Migrants MigrantsClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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The story centres on Heinrich Mann and his lover, later his second wife, Nelly Kroeger, and on his more famous younger brother Thomas Mann. The many other writers whose lives are discussed in the pages include Bertolt Brecht and Virginia Woolf.
For me, Nelly's story is particularly memorable, and it was clearly a central concern of the author. She was 27 years younger than her husband and had spent a lot of her life in Berlin working as a barmaid, and has gone down in history as something of a bimbo. Perhaps it is significant that this portrait of her came from the letters of her brother in law Thomas Mann, who looked down on her.
In fact, she was the daughter of a fisherman, from a much more working class background than Heinrich, and had had the basic education available to a woman of her class. I really enjoyed learning about what this bookworm of nearly 100 years ago liked to read - she had quite a few books and would read in cafes before work, jotting down notes as she read. Intriguingly, her favourite books included Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Hedda Gabler, all by men about women. Juers describes the first meeting of Heinrich Mann and his future wife - she was reading in a café. This scene and many others in the book could come from a novel, but although Juers avoids interrupting her narrative with the footnotes/endnotes of a conventional biography, most of these story scenes draw on real correspondence and diaries.
Nelly also wrote down her own life story, but unfortunately for us after he read it Heinrich destroyed it and then used a lot of her work as a basis for a novel of his own. Juers is kinder to him about this than I felt reading about it.
The quality of the writing and the stories of how the subjects grew up and of the events in their lives make it all the sadder that most of them never really adjusted to new lives in exile, and many committed suicide in the 1930s and during the war.
This volume lacks some of the features that many biographies now come with. There are no photographs or pictures (most biographies now have at least one section of photographic plates). The author's Note on Sources runs to 11 pages detailing books and archives consulted but the book doesn't contain footnotes/endnotes or an index.
House of Exile is a challenging but memorable read and a fascinating approach to biography, and highly recommended. ( )