Eugen Banauch. Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada 1940–2006

Abstract

One of the most important consequences of the leftist turn in German literary criticism in the late 1960s was the discovery of a whole new canon of texts written by authors forced to leave the German-speaking countries after the Nazi takeover in 1933. To be sure, renowned authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann or Franz Werfel had always received attention, but many writers – or artists, or scientists – who had not previously been acknowledged at home remained largely unknown and unread. The openings of the canon which occurred in the post-Sixties also benefitted authors in exile – albeit more for political than literary reasons. This distinction, of course, had become as obsolete as the traditional canon itself. Some thirty years after the discovery of exile literature, with the Sixties at a historical distance, the self-interest of German and Austrian critics in acknowledging exile writers had become apparent. By repatriating these authors, the children of the perpetrator generation tended to rehabilitate their own reputation as much as address the wrongs that had been committed vis-à-vis the exiles. Thus their reluctance to acknowledge these writers’ full biographies. Instead of focusing on their lifetime achievement and looking at them as the literary personalities they had become in the course of four, or five, or six, decades, they reduced them to the exilic condition. In short, they focused on the losses, not only to the exiles themselves but also to Germany and Austria, and neglected the gains made in the New World. In order to change this one-sided approach, the catastrophe defined by Germanistik was to be complemented by the new beginning analysed and commented on by American Studies. A number of investigations of Austrian and German exile writers began to be undertaken in American Studies in the 1990s, including Franzi Ascher-Nash, Mimi Grossberg, Anna Krommer, Felix Pollak, Johannes Urzidil and Wieland Herzfelde. The most recent – and a very successful example – is Ingrid Gehrke’s study of Carl Djerassi, the father of the “pill” and a chemist-turned-writer who wrote, looking back at his career: “If I hadn’t been born a Jew, I wouldn’t have left Vienna and would doubtless have ended up as an Austrian physician ...” – rather than becoming a world-famous scientist. Eugen Banauch’s study of four Jewish exile writers in Canada, however, is the first to solidly bring together the many theories and approaches connected with American cultural studies on the one hand and exile literature on the other. The