The Arrival of Hannah Arendt
This film describes the arrival of Hannah Arendt - a Jewish, German-American political theorist and publicist - in New York and her reflections on flight and helping people start over.
Release Thursday
Thomas Mann joins German Academy
Office of Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein
Room 704, Hotel Bedford
Following his break with Nazism, Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winning German author, has just become a member of the German Academy of Arts and Letters, an association of German refugee writers, artists, scholars and creative thinkers, dedicated to keeping German culture alive in exile. The Academy is a branch of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, an organization founded by Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein, now being organised in New York under the temporary chairmanship of Professor Robert M. MacIver of Columbia University. Members of the Academy also include Klaus and Heinrich Mann, son and brother of Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Alfred Neumann, Joseph Roth, Professor Veit Valentin, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Rudolph Olden, Bruno Frank and
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Thomas Mann (1875-1955) born in Lübeck, Germany was a nobel-prize winning writer. The first novel he published was “Gefallen” which was printed in the newspaper “Die Gesellschaft” in 1894. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim and they had six children together. In 1924 he made his first public political speech “Von deutscher Republik” in which he defended the Weimar Republic. In response to the Nazis he held the speech “Deutsche Ansprache – Ein Appell an die Vernunft” in 1930. He decided to emigrate to Switzerland in 1933 after the official take over of Germany by the Nazis; he continued on to the United States of America in 1938, where he became a citizen in 1944. He left the USA for Switzerland in 1952 after being accused by Congress of being a communist. He spent the rest of his life in Zürich.
Thomas Mann was an important part of keeping German culture alive outside of the German Reich during and after the second world war. The American Guild for German Cultural Freedom was an organization founded in 1935 that helped German artists, writers and intellectuals in exile whose ability to work was affected by the facist government in Germany. The goal of the organization was to help keep German culture alive outside of Germany, as it was unable to survive and prosper within its borders. The American Guild for German Cultural Freedom helped these people through financial aid and the creation of deals with publishers. The refugee experience of the German exiles varied for each individual. One of the main struggles of refugeedom is the adaptation to a completely new place and finding a support system. The American Guild for German Cultural Freedom tried to help German exiles with that adaptation, so that they would be able to simultaneously also focus on their work. Mann being an emigrant who already had a name for himself before the rule of the Nazis was able to help younger, less-known artists, writers and scholars make a name for themselves outside of the German Reich. Thomas Mann in this text above is advocating for the creation of a German Academy in New York, through the aid of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom.
Thomas Mann becomes a member of the German Academy in New York © Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945 der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek – German Exile Archive 1933-1945 from the German National Library.
