‘TAT UND ARBEIT, STATT PUBLICITY UND TRÄUMEREI’: ERNST TOLLER AND THE AMERICAN GUILD FOR GERMAN CULTURAL FREEDOM

Abstract

This article deals with Ernst Toller's involvement in the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, an organisation founded in 1935 to help artists and intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime to the US. It thus highlights the last months of Toller's life. As a member of the board of directors of the Guild, he was involved in important initiatives such as the allocation of grants to writers in exile. The article examines individual cases, e.g. the awarding of a scholarship to Hermann Borchardt, with whom Toller was involved in a plagiarism dispute, and the debate over awarding a scholarship to Bodo Uhse, in which he opposed the Guild chairman and attempted to dispel political reservations about Uhse. These cases illustrate how solidarity-based action was organised in exile and was both supported and undermined by aesthetic, political, economic, and personal interests. Taking Toller and other members of the Guild as examples, the paper shows how power structures inevitably formed and had an effect within the group, which aimed to organise and support the entire German-speaking emigration; and how, therefore, the practice of solidarity between emigrants led to a ‘hopeless secondary competition amongst themselves, in the midst of the more general one’ (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951).