Exilliteratur

German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Their books, newspapers, and magazines were smuggled into the homeland and both read and distributed in secret by the German people. In his political thriller The Blond Spider (1939), Hans Flesch-Brunningen, writing under the pseudonym Vincent Burn, wrote a story involving two Germans. Some anti-communist Russian writers and publishing houses in Berlin, Paris, London, and New York after the October Revolution saw themselves as the continuation of an older and better Germany, which had been perverted by the Nazi party. Among German personnel, the libraries of the camps used to intern German prisoners of war in the United States very often included Berman-Fischer's paperback editions of German Literature banned under censorship in Nazi Germany.