THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 41
written before the First World War but
not published until 1918, is the definitive
portrait of German nationalism curdling
into chauvinism and anti-Semitism.
The most haunting of these pre-Nazi
novels is Werfel’s “The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh” (1933), which was not trans-
lated fully into English until 2012. The
book honors the valiant resistance of an
Armenian community during the geno-
cide of the First World War and after.
Werfel accomplishes a feat of large-scale
narrative control, replete with hair-rais-
ing battle scenes. He also delivers the
first great fictional reckoning with the
psychology of genocide. At one point,
the German protestant missionary Jo-
hannes Lepsius, based on a real-life
figure, encounters Enver Pasha, one of
the chief agents of the genocide: “What
Herr Lepsius perceived was that arctic
mask of the human being who ‘has over-
come all sentimentality’—the mask of
a human mind which has got beyond
guilt and all its qualms.”
A
fter 1933, the exiles had to come to
grips with a world that surpassed
their most extravagant nightmares. One
popular stratagem was to insert con-
temporary allegories into historical fic-
tion, which was enjoying an extended
vogue. Heinrich Mann produced a hefty
pair of novels dramatizing the life of
King Henry IV of France. A gruesome
description of the Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre makes one think of pogroms
in Nazi Germany, and the leaders of the
Catholic League radiate Fascist ruth-
lessness. Döblin, by contrast, immersed
himself in recent history, undertaking a
novel cycle titled “November 1918.” It
examines the German Revolution of
1918-19, with the Communist leaders
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
featured as principal characters. Döblin
seems almost to be reliving the Revo-
lution and its aftermath, in the hope
that it will have a better outcome.
A handful of émigré novels have em-
igration itself as their subject. Seghers’s
“Transit” is the classic example of the
genre, but others are worth revisiting.
Feuchtwanger’s “Exil,” translated into
English as “Paris Gazette,” is a soulful
satire, set among disputatious emigrants
in Paris. Sepp Trautwein, the protago-
nist, is a high-minded German com-
poser who transforms himself into a bel-
ligerent anti-Nazi newspaper columnist.
His finest hour comes when he invents
an absurd speech by Hitler on the sub-
ject of Wagner. Exile is a humiliation,
Feuchtwanger writes, but it makes you
“quicker, more ingenious, subtler, harder.”
A more desperate vision emerges in
the work of Klaus Mann, Thomas’s old-
est son, who labored all his life in his
father’s cold shadow. “The Volcano,”
published in German in 1939, three years
after he arrived in the United States,
registers the toll that exile exacted on
the young. In scenes anticipating Klaus’s
own fate—he died of a drug overdose
in 1949, at forty-two—characters spiral
into suicidal despair or chemical obliv-
ion. Hollywood provides no respite: “All
was false here—the palms, the sunsets,
the fruit, nothing had reality, everything
was swindle, mere scenery.” The novel’s
depiction of gay desire presumably ex-
plains why an English translation never
appeared. At the end of the narrative, a
mystically inclined Brazilian boy con-
verses with an angel, who kisses him on
the lips, takes him on a flight around
the world, and brings the consoling news
that tolerance reigns in Heaven.
Werfel, having prophesied Nazi ter-
ror in “Musa Dagh,” shied away from a
head-on confrontation with it. At the
start of his final novel, a bizarre and fas-
cinating experiment called “Star of the
Unborn” (1946), Werfel confesses his in-
ability to address the “monstrous real-
ity” of the day. In a sly way, the novel
speaks to that reality all the same. The
narrator, F.W., is transported to a peace-
ful utopia in the distant future, which
collapses into chaos. The tone is mainly
playful, even zany, but a chill descends
when F.W. visits a facility known as Win-
tergarden, in which those who have tired
of life undergo a “retrovolution” into in-
fancy and then death. The process some-
times goes awry, producing ghastly mu-
tations. It is a conjuring of the Holocaust
written just as reports of the German
death camps were appearing.T
homas Mann, the uncrowned em-
peror of Germany in exile, lived in
a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific
Palisades, which the émigré architect
J. R. Davidson had designed to his
specifications. He saw “Bambi” at the
Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chi-
nese food; he listened to Jack Benny on