House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles

by Evelyn Juers

Evelyn Juers' extraordinary book is a unique imagining of the unconventional love affair between the writer and political activist Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger - a tall, blonde ex-barmaid twenty-seven years his junior - recounting their flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, to France and then to Los Angeles. In "House of Exile" their story is intricately interwoven with others from their circle of friends, relatives and literary Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, among others. It gives us a poignant glimpse of a generation of remarkable writers who were determined to carry on living, reading and working in wartime - in ship's cabins, train compartments and shabby rented rooms - even though it seemed the civilized world was coming to an end. This is a unique portrayal of the strange, dislocated existence of the emigre, and how lives are connected and defined by writing. Evelyn Juers enlarges the boundaries of biography to provide an intimate, sensitively imagined view of an extraordinary time in history.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Germany

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Evelyn Juers is the copublisher of Giramondo Publishing and HEAT magazine. She has lived in Hamburg, Sydney, London, and Geneva. She has a PhD from the University of Essex, and her essays on art and literature have appeared in publications around the world.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and mainly well written biography of Heinrich Mann (Thomas Mann's brother) and his wife Nelly Kroeger-Mann. It is primarily about their years of exile as Heinrich was outspoken about Hitler and they were forced to leave Germany in 1933, going first to France and then eventually to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Nelly was by this time quite unstable and often drunk, and eventually committed suicide in 1944, with Heinrich dying of natural causes a few years later.

As you can probably imagine, Thomas Mann features heavily in the book especially with regard to the competitive feelings he had towards his brother, as he always felt that he was a better writer than Heinrich. Thomas is certainly more famous among English speaking readers, and most of Heinrich's books were never translated into English.

I only really had two problems with the book. The first being that for most of the book, Virginia Woolf is mentioned on almost every page, with diary entries and musings etc., until she finally, and famously, commits suicide. And as far as I can see there was no connection between her and the Manns at all, so what her purpose in the book was, I have no idea, except that both she and Nelly committed suicide.

The other problem was that for a fairly lengthy section of the book, it is written almost as a diary with very short, staccato like sentences, some being only a couple of words.

But, all in all, it was a fine book, and is recommended for anybody who likes literary biographies, as I do. They are really the only kind of biography that I read.

[Post Scriptum · Rating 2 out of 5]

No. Se prendo un libro nella “Collana saggi”, non voglio leggere altro che un saggio. Se mi trovo una brodaglia romanzesca, m’innervosisco. E ho ragione. Perché se avessi voluto leggere un romanzo sui Mann avrei cercato nella “Collana narrativa”.
Invece ecco qui una serie di citazioni in corsivo di cui non si riporta la fonte bibliografica (e anche questo è parecchio irritante), mescolate a svenevoli parti narrative. No.

E c’è anche un po’ di presunzione, signora Evelyn.
Leggo:

”C’è un romanzo biografico di Joachim Seyppel intitolato Abschied von Europa [“Addio all’Europa”, 1975] […]. L’opera è piuttosto scadente, soprattutto perché l’autore-narratore è davvero troppo preso dal celebrare la propria storia e dal mettersi in competizione con i temi che tratta.”
Non ho letto quel romanzo. Potrebbe aver ragione. Rimane però un atto di presunzione questo commento, giacché non stava facendo critica letteraria.

P.S. Se volete, leggetelo come opera narrativa. Altrimenti cercate altro.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve read any number of fictionalized biographies—about Henry James, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.—that I have quite enjoyed. This book doesn’t know whether it is a novel or a biography—though it calls itself a biography--and so doesn’t truly succeed at either. I don’t get any real sense of Emma or Heinrich as people. Sentences like this: “In 1919 Emmy Johanna Kroger responded to the future as birds reply to light with song” tell me more about the author than about the subject. If you want to have an omniscient narrator, have the courage of your convictions and write a novel about your real-life character.

The author’s favorite word is “imagine” and favorite phrase is “might have”:

“If Madame Bovary had fallen into her hands, I imagine what she would have loved most was its intimacy…” 91

“She had a flair for fashion, and I imagine her studying trends…” 207

“She might even have made felt hats for Heinrich…” 207

“She might have remembered a red pair [of gloves] she once owned.” 210

“Thomas received another visit from the FBI—you could imagine them saying, ‘Let’s drop in on the Manns, we’re sure to be offered a good cup of coffee and some delicious cake with whipped cream.’” 341


Do you see the problem? She has extended fantasies of “this is how it might have been but I have no proof of it” as in these extended wanderings of the author’s imagination:

“Perhaps she taught herself English, listening for snippets of it, repeating random phrases she had caught—gone with the wind, certainly not, joe di maggio is a new york yankee—over and over again, in the street, entering rue Rossini and crossing the marble mosaic floor of the entrance hall, then in the lift, looking out from the wrought-iron balcony, cooking, a phrasebook propped up against a bowl, as a text mixing the ingredients for plum pudding from an English cookbook she’d found.” 205

“She had a flair for fashion, and I imagine her studying trends, head shapes, prices, wearing her latest creations in cafes, restaurants, casinos and on the Promenade des Anglais. If someone admired her hat, she would produce her business card, wait for a phone call, and then receive or visit her new client for a measurement; the down payment would always have been welcome. For herself she favored the bandeau or turban, but for others she must have created cartwheels and cloches, pillboxes and hybrid cocktail hats, to be worn coquettishly. She might even have made felt hats for Heinrich; blocked into shape, sanded, brushed, lined with silk, his name embroidered on the inside rim. Millinery is mainly handwork, and so perhaps this is how they spent the best days of their French exile, she stitching, he writing, the space between them filled with birdsong.” 207


“a button popped off the décolletage of Nelly’s red velvet dress to reveal the splendid contours of her lacy bra. I like to think that the little red velvet button described a perfect arc across the table and landed right on top of Thomas Mann’s Charlotte surprise.” 302


This last quote brings me to my next problem with the book—her repetitive and biased portrayal of Thomas Mann. Almost all we learn of him is the list of drugs he had to take to sleep (repeated over and over with variations), that he had a silk bedcover (it makes an appearance I don’t know how many times—presumably to show how self-indulgent and self-involved he was), and how fond of fame he was and how jealous he was of any success of Heinrich’s. Here is bias combined with speculation:

“Received a letter from Willi Munzenberg, supported by the novelist Romain Rolland, again regarding Heinrich’s nomination for the Nobel Prize. Did he toss it in the bin?” 217

Here is bias combined with a weird omniscient narrator (did she get this from diaries, from letters by friends? Who knows but the omniscient narrator?)

“Thomas was often recognized in public. He enjoyed being told that he was famous.” 320

Thirdly, the weird flights into Virginia-Woolf-land just don’t make sense. Perhaps if it were a Dos Passos’ style montage novel it would have.

All in all, I think the author should just write a novel, call it a novel and call it a day.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through First Reads, and I was excited to get my hands on it, as the description sounded so interesting. Sadly, the book doesn't live up to its promise. It claims to be biography, but if it is, it's biography seen through a kaleidoscope dimly.

The author describes it as 'a collective biography set in an age of fragmentation and flux'. If her intent was to convey that sense of fragmentation and flux, she certainly achieved that much. The book is a series of disjointed impressionistic vignettes, not all of which seem to share any apparent connection. There are literary quotes sprinkled in between anecdotes, imaginings that may be lyrical and vivid, but certainly aren't what is normally understood as biography.

I spent much of the book a bit confused as to what exactly was going on and when. (The inexplicable story of Solander early on, before Carla's suicide, is a good example. Nominally connected to a skull Mann's sister carries with her, it rambles on for several pages for no apparent reason.) Things got a little more concrete and chronological after the first third or so of the book, but not enough to make it an enjoyable read, and certainly not enough for me to feel I learned much about Heinrich Mann or his unfortunate wife. The words 'imagine' and 'perhaps' and 'let's say that's how it was' are sprinkled liberally throughout- not something I'm used to seeing in such quantity in something that purports to be biography. In the end, I'm not even sure what to call it- fiction or non-fiction, novel or biography. I feel like it's a muddle of all of the above, and the only thing I can say with certainty is that I read it.

[Helen Epstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambitious, by turns captivating and exasperating, this sprawling book is like an enormous photomontage – that popular German art form of the 1920s – made up of textual mosaics from newspaper articles, diary entries, letters, novels or, on occasion, FBI files. These bits – words, phrases, entire paragraphs -- are usually unattributed and range from notes about literature and publishing to medication, pets, shopping for and preparing food. Juers also mines the writing of non-German writers, including Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to contextualize the time and the refugees’ situation. Both style and content are arresting and Juers has mined sources unavailable to the average English-speaking reader. But House of Exiles is a problematic work of biography and had I not been reviewing it, I would have put it down long before the ending. I was, in the end, glad to have plowed on. The work is a requiem for a lost generation of German artists, musicians and writers and those that lived for them.

[Cecilia Moar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched. Constructed in a most unusual manner with disparate passages, long list of the names of European refugees, dairy entries, and long tracts of the thoughts of Virginia Wolfe. The writing style, whilst interesting, does not engage the reader in a connection with the characters. Its a bit like reading a very long list.
Good to have been the beneficiary of such extensive research and as a result to learn more about the build up of the second world war from the German intellectual point of view. Also to understand the great movement of people through and away from Europe, and what it was like for the displaced around the world.

[Maya Panika · Rating 2 out of 5]

As rich and dense as wedding cake, and just as hard to digest in anything more than the smallest portions, House of Exile is, according to its cover, 'the tale of the ‘unconventional love affair between… Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger'. To me, it read more like a dry academic tome about several dozen writers; Heinrich and Nelly are at the heart of it, but so thickly crowded by other lives, they’re rather hard to see.

Almost Biblical with its extensive genealogies and connections, I found the first quarter very stolid indeed, bitty, unfocussed and, frankly, dreary. Rather than the ‘intricate weaving’ of lives described in the blurb, it seemed to me to lurch heavily between its many subjectes, from Heinrich Mann to Thomas Mann to Virginia Woolf, to Kafka, to Brecht, to Joyce, or any other of several dozen subjects - switching focus from paragraph to paragraph with a bare minimum of connectivity.

It gets a lot better as it hits the years immediately preceding the war, then the war-years themselves, which are by far the best chapters. Thanks to the death of so many of the peripheral figures, the focus narrows, a narrative emerges, and the book becomes much more readable, something you read as much for pleasure as the good of your soul.

Written in a strange style, more textbook than novel and full of pluckings from diaries and letters, The House of Exile is certainly very detailed, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I took a lot of knowledge away from this book, about events and how they touched the lives of each character, but no feeling whatsoever for any them; the style is too clinical, too coldly academic to allow the people to escape from the words and become living breathing beings.

[Zoe Ferren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very lovely historical book. It is better to read in small portions to fully digest this book. Overall a great read and highly recommended. Thank you for a fast delivery.
Xoxo,
Goodreads winner

[Sarah Boothroyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting device juxtaposing contemporaneous writers (Woolf, Gide) with the Manns.

[J. Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I regret that I must agree with others of you who have reviewed House of Exile by Evelyn Juers. As an odd blend of encyclopedia and biography, it could be a treasure trove for researchers or merely the historically curious in the exodus of European intellectuals, writers, and artists to the U.S. in WWII.

However, as a dual bio of Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, it misses the mark. The first sections do focus more on those two. Yet deeper in, there is page upon page of asides to folks from brother Thomas Mann and his family, to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, Alfred Polgar, Bertolt Brecht. ... The list goes on and on.

Juers offers a helpful index to the diaries of those and a score of others in her Notes on Sources section. And thankfully she spared some poor indexer the Sisyphean task of gathering all those names and pages.

I am a student of European history, but still for me this was heavy going. My next novel deals in part with many of these Europeans who sought exile in Los Angeles, and I was eager to read of how Heinrich and Nelly had to cross the Pyrenees into Spain on foot. But that section took all of a page or two in a volume of almost 400. The oft-disparaged Nelly had to half-carry her aging husband on that perilous journey, but short shrift was given that episode.

And for me the section of the pair's life in the New World had more the feel of regurgitated diary entries than actual biography.

Juers has done an amazing job of research, but for me a much better book on a similar topic is The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind.

[prz.vanesa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Básicamente se centra en la biografía de los hermanos Mann y la esposa de Heinrich (Nelly). Algunos apuntes sobre Virginia Woolf pero para mi gusto añade demasiados detalles irrelevantes y apuntes de relleno que no está muy claro de donde salen (si imaginación de la autora o recogidos de documentos que trascendieran).
Se hace largo y aburrido y salta de un personaje a otro sin hilo lo que hace que se pierda el hilo constantemente.
A favor diré que da muchos datos históricos y sobre las vidas de los personajes y hace muchas referencias a las obras de estos y al sufrimiento que ocasionó en el mundo la guerra, Hitler y su ideología.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not an easy book to get through, especially as someone largely unfamiliar with many of the historical facts and figures it jumps between, but I'm so glad I read it. By the end I found that I was glued to it. I only wish it had an index so I could have found the pages each person was mentioned so I'd have a refresher. It would have been far easier to follow that way.

[Tami · Rating 2 out of 5]

Haven't received my copy yet, just received notice I had won. 4/16/12
Receive my copy last night and can't wait to get started. I will have to wait a little bit, I have 8 others plus my current read in front. 5/2/12
Started last night, 6/7/12
Finally finished 6/19/12

Blurb from GoodReads: In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner, Nelly Kroeger, fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as Heinrich’s family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks.

So I signed up for this book because I used to devour anything holocaust/World War II/Nazi related and this sounded right up that alley. Boy was this a difficult read. This book is more a meshup of a lot of diaries and letters between LOTS of people regarding everyday things during a time period that actually happened to be during the years leading up to and including WWII.

I would say only about 10% of it actually had much to do with the war and politics of the time period. And, even though their names are in the title, only about 20% of it was about Heinrich and Nelly. Maybe it was because I despised him so much, but it seemed like there was more about Heinrich's brother Thomas than him and Nelly in this book.

While there were small threads of thought that linked some of the 1 million other people mentioned to the Mann's, there were some that really were mentioned that had no connection at all.

It was a difficult book for me to read because there were too many people mentioned, not enough detail on any of them, and it read like finding a huge box of old letters from hundreds of people that may or may not have known each other, and may or may not have included interesting news. Oh, and there is a lot of suicide, which I really get that actually happened a lot in that time period, but the thing I kept thinking was of course, they were reading Anna Karenina. That would always push someone over the edge.

[Cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual biography as it follows the lives of two literary brothers, Heinrich and Thomas Mann. The former I have never heard of, But many years ago I can remember ploughing through a copy of Thomas's Magic Mountain. There are a number of subsidiary characters including Virginia Woolf and Lion Feuchtwangler. That name meant something as I can remember that as an adolescent a translation of his Jue Suss sat on the shelves of my local library. I did wonder what it was all about, but never borrowed it to find out. Nor did anyone else, it seemed, as I recollect it stood for many years unmoving. There are many other characters as the book deals in the main with the response by the Mann brothers and many of their friends to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Heinrich lived in France until about 1940 while Thomas was in the USA (and was eventually granted citizenship). Heinrich and others crossed the Pyrenees on foot when Vichy France started handing over wanted individuals to the Gestapo. By that time Heinrich was in his 60s and the crossing was an ordeal in itself. Eventually, he escaped to the USA together with his much younger wife, Nelly Kroeger. Things were not easy in the USA for emigres from fascism. Heinrich was under constant surveillance by the FBI because of his left wing views. The book is a fascinating view on the lives of those escaping Hitler, much of which I was unaware of. There are distressing passages when we read that one friend and another had been killed in concentration camps. Much of the book reads like a diary with short, sometimes unconnected, sentences. and hopping from character to character. Sometimes it is difficult for a non German speaker to remember all the names, but do not let that put you off.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought House of Exile when it was shortlisted for the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction, not knowing anything about its subject matter except that it was indirectly something to do with Thomas Mann. He is one of those writers I’ve heard of, but never got round to reading. It turns out that he was the brother of Heinrich Mann, the primary subject of House of Exile. (When I realised this I toyed with the idea of reading Death in Venice online but the translation is so awkward I gave up after a page or two.)
For the rest of this review see
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200...

[Carla · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book through a GoodReads giveaway.

I feel somewhat annoyed the description of the book for the giveaway seemed so much more exciting and something that I was very much interested in. However the book was so disjointed and UN-enjoyable, it was a miracle I got through it. Somewhat an academic, somewhat biography, somewhat historical, not very often enjoyable reading. Felt for most of the book I was trying to "connect", and felt little or no affinity to the characters. One reviewer suggested that you could read it and enjoy it in bits and pieces, however if I put it down, I was just afraid I'd never have picked it up again.

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this is a tough book to wrap your mind around. The author paints a vivid picture of Heinrich and his brother Thomas. My only problem with the book is the "guest appearances" by Kafka, Woolf etc. I wasn't always sure what was fiction and what was fact. Still the book adds an important look into the minds of those in Germany who chose to resist Hitler in one way or another.
I received a free copy of this book but received no compensation for writing this review.

[Destiny Esper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway. I was excited to read it, given my German heritage, but finished the book feeling a bit disappointed. The book moves extremely slow. In addition to that, some parts don't make much sense. I also found a few errors, which are always turn-offs.

[Lorraine Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tried reading this book and just couldn't keep interested in it. Will wait and may be able to read it at another time.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

The historical detail here was strong, and Juers had an awful lot to work with, but it jumped around far too much, and the experience of reading it was jarring.