By Oliver B. Pollak in Keflavik, Iceland
In the last year while exploring the departure of my mother’s family from Germany, I read three astounding books by German writers about Germany during the 1930s.
Two are by Uwe Wittstock, February 1933: The Winter of Literature (2023) and Marseille 1940, The Flight of Literature (2024), both translated by Daniel Bowles. The third book, Weimar Under the Palms: Pacific Palisades, German Exile, and the Invention of Hollywood (2025, by Thomas Blubacher) is translated by Elisabeth Lauffer.
These three eminently readable, grounded in evidence, cultured and exciting works provide a useful and vital trail that emigres and refugees pursued to continue their professional careers and contribute to American culture. They provide a different lens than my reliable well-worn Book of the Month Club copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) by journalist William L. Shirer (1904-1993) and Holocaust accounts.
Wittstock and Blubacher, born in 1955 and 1967 respectively, represent a postwar generation of scholars who chronicle what went horrendously wrong in Germany, the decline of the Weimar Republic, Germans who felt wronged and betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles, inflation and financial disaster, Hitler’s charismatic attraction to the alienated, and the methodical manner in which Nazis infiltrated and challenged democratic political and cultural institutions focusing on the enemy, and eliminating Jews, Socialists and Communists.
German culture, literature, music, art, higher education, research in the sciences and medical training, “German Civilization,” were admired and emulated by the world. Hitler and his henchmen were pledged to rooting out the allegedly evil and the vile foreigner, the Jew.
Jews responded to Hitler’s machinations with varying speed. Some, especially intellectuals, left as early as 1933. Getting a visa was not easy. American Varian Fry and the New School for Social Research provided beacons of hope.
The rise of Hitler in 1933, the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the “phony war” were mounting wakeup calls. My English born maternal grandmother, married to my German grandfather, living in Hanover, left in the mid-1930s. My mother planned to go to Shanghai but got a domestic labor visa and left for England in April 1939. My aunt and cousin left the same month to rejoin her husband in America. Some of my Austrian father’s family may have fled to Vichy France.
My grandfather, a German Army World War One front line surgeon, injured in the arm by shrapnel, lived in a state of disbelief. He could not fathom that Germany had turned to Hitler. He had so much invested in Germany and being a proud German. Opa thought the Germans would come to their senses and vote Hitler out of office and stop the war.
Wishful thinking and dictatorship did not allow new elections. Opa would be on the last train out of Germany. Unfortunately he waited too long and the train took him in the wrong direction, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. He survived, emigrated to England and America with his German pension and reparations intact.
We are already well on the path of numerous centennials of Germany and Hitler’s road to the Second World War. Wittstock and Blubacher are invaluable guides to this disastrous human and financial catastrophe facing our grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and cousins, in their responses to survive. They would carry lifelong memories, repressed memories, and traumas as Germanophobes and Germanophiles.
Yesterday, August 12, I witnessed the Solar Eclipse As our ship neared Iceland. I am reminded of Katherine Anne Porter’s 1962 novel Ship of Fools and 1965 film depicting a 1933 voyage from Mexico to Germany amidst Europe’s brewing turmoil. Perhaps when I get home, I will reread and resee it.
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Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D., J.D., is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, a lawyer, a member of the Institute for Historical Study, and a SDJW correspondent based in Richmond, California.