GERMAN 100
Exiled in America:
Disorientation, Nostalgia, and
Culture Shock
Professor Anna Guillemin
MWF 9 - 9:50
This course considers the experience of exile shared by German-speaking
writers and intellectuals in the 1930s and 40s. We will explore the ways
expatriation shaped the work of emigrés to the U.S., both in their encounters with
America and in their contacts with the Germany they left behind. Thrown into
Californian mass culture, metropolitan New York or patrician Princeton, these
writers responded with a mixture of disorientation, nostalgia and culture shock.
Among others, we read Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Klaus
Mann, Anna Seghers, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Oskar Maria Graf,
Albert Einstein and Erwin Panofsky.