The German Genius

Royal Academy.
    A German Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Exile was established, intended as a form of resistance to Hitler. Thomas Mann headed the literary section (in America) and Freud the scientific division (in London). 1
    In Germany itself, artists such as Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, and Oskar Schlemmer retreated into what they called “inner exile.” Dix hid away at Lake Constance, where he painted landscapes; that, he said, was “tantamount to emigration.” Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel removed themselves to obscure hamlets, hoping to escape attention. Ernst Kirchner took his life.
    The immigration to the United States was the most important and significant. As a result, the landscape of twentieth-century thought was changed dramatically. It was probably the greatest transfer of its kind ever seen (see Chapter 39).
    In addition to the artists, musicians, and mathematicians who were brought to America, scholars were also helped by a special provision in the U.S. immigration law, created by the State Department in 1940, which allowed for “emergency visitor” visas, available to imperiled refugees “whose intellectual or cultural achievements or political activities were of interest to the United States.” 2 Max Reinhardt, the theater director, Stefan Zweig, the writer, and Roman Jakobson, the linguist, all entered the United States on emergency visas.
    Of all the schemes to help refugees whose work was deemed important in the intellectual sphere, none was so extraordinary, or so effective, as the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) organized by the American Friends of German Freedom. The Friends had been formed in America by the ousted German socialist leader Paul Hagen (also known as Karl Frank), to raise money for anti-Nazi work. In June 1940, three days after France signed the armistice with Germany with its notorious “surrender on demand” clause, requiring France to hand over any non-French person to German authorities, the committee’s members held a lunch to consider what needed to be done to help threatened individuals in the new, much more dangerous situation. The ERC was the result, and $3,000 was raised immediately. The aim, broached at the lunch, was to prepare a list of important intellectuals—scholars, writers, artists, and musicians—who were at risk and would be eligible for special visa status. One of the committee’s members, Varian Fry, was chosen to go to France to find as many threatened intellectuals as he could and help them to safety.
    Fry, a slight, bespectacled Harvard graduate, had been in Germany in 1935 and seen what Nazi brutality was like. He spoke German and French and was familiar with the work of living writers and painters. Fry arrived in Marseille in August 1940 with that $3,000 in his pocket and a roster of 200 he had memorized, judging it too dangerous to carry written lists. These names had been collected in an ad hoc way. Thomas Mann had provided the names of German writers at risk, Jacques Maritain a list of French writers, Jan Masaryk the Czechs. Alvin Johnson, president of the New School of Social Research in New York City, submitted names of academics, and Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, supplied the names of artists.
    Fry soon grasped that not all the people on his list were in mortal danger. The Jews were, as well as the more outspoken, long-standing political opponents of Nazism. At the same time, it became clear that if many of the very famous, non-Jewish “degenerate” artists were protected by their celebrity in Vichy France, there were far more lesser-known figures who were in real danger. 3 Without referring back to New York, therefore, Fry changed the policy of the ERC and set about helping as many people as he could who fell within the ambit of the special visa law, whether they were on his list or not. He set up his own clandestine network using the French underground, which transported selected refugees out of France into Portugal, where, with a visa, they could sail for America. He found a “safe house,” the Villa Air Bel, north of Marseille, and there he equipped his refugees with false documents and local guides who could lead them via obscure and arduous pathways across the Pyrenees to freedom. 4 The best-known figures who escaped in this dramatic fashion included André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (who had written a critical biography of Hitler),