Abstract
This article considers the importance of the ties of friendship between members of the Viennese social elite and Americans who came to Vienna for professional reasons, as well as travelers who, despite the ravages of World War I and the poverty in its aftermath, were keen on encountering the lively cultural scene there. They were joined by expatriates who disliked the adoption of the Volstead Act as well as emissaries of philanthropic institutions. The resulting transatlantic networks helped alleviate the negative consequences of nativist agitation in the United States against mass immigration, which had peaked in the first decade of the twentieth century and had led to the quota laws of 1921 and 1924 that limited the admission of European immigrants, especially from southern and eastern Europe. After the political turbulence and severe economic problems experienced by Austria and ending with the Anschluss, many Jewish intellectuals and artists were forced to look for a safe haven, but admission to the United States was dependent on affidavits generously provided by friends and acquaintances. On the basis of unpublished letters examined in several American archives, the essay shows that the refugees received help from foreign correspondents encountered in Austria, such as Dorothy Thompson, from whose support fellow journalist Marcel Fodor and author Carl Zuckmayer benefitted. The cultural critic H. L. Mencken similarly sponsored the admission of the family of the late Viennese anglicist Leon Kellner, and the generosity of Thornton Wilder extended to a number of refugees. Not every such effort, the article shows, was successful.
Many studies have illustrated the enormous challenges faced by refugees from Austria and Central Europe after the Anschluss and of displaced persons after the end of World War II. Literary and cultural historians seem to have been less conscious of the important role played by the personal friendships that had developed between Americans and Austrian citizens in the interwar years, and of how these friendships later fostered the attempts of refugees and exiles to be admitted to the United States despite the restrictions of the quota laws. This essay aims to fill this gap by pointing out the (laudable) efforts of quite a few American individuals to assist those threatened by the events of eighty years ago, when Austria vanished from the map of Europe and the friends and acquaintances of these Americans were in grave danger and needed concrete assistance through affidavits ensuring financial support. The paper also shows how a few years later similar action appeared necessary when displaced persons from Central Europe desired to find relief in the United States through their earlier contacts and friendships with American visitors who offered a ray of hope in their sad lot. The current heated global political debate about refugees and their claims to support and assistance—granted by individuals if not by many governments—lends topicality to these reflections.
That such personal intercession was indispensable in the 1930s and 1940s was a consequence of the seemingly unrestricted arrival of hundreds of thousands of emigrants who crossed the Atlantic in the first decade of the twentieth century. The influx of so many newcomers engendered strong opposition. Among the newcomers were more than a million people from the crownlands of the Habsburg monarchy, both from the various parts of Cisleithania and from the Kingdom of Hungary, who hoped to find a new home in the United States or to secure temporary work there, as has been shown in recently published essays and monographs.1
In the year 1907, when immigration peaked with the arrival of almost 1.3 million people, the opposition organized by the nativists grew more vehement and the work of the Dillingham commission (1907–1911) began. Its voluminous reports, and the agitation during World War I against “hyphenated” Americans, led to the adoption of the quota laws of 1921 and 1924.2 These laws were intended to curb immigration from the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, limiting the admission of individuals from this part of the Old World. This was done by imposing annual quotas—in 1921, laws limited immigration from specific countries to 3% of that country's population in the United States in 1910; then, with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, immigration numbers were further reduced to 2% of their former compatriots in the United States in 1890. The aim was to ensure that nationalities who had been less represented in the country should not come in such large numbers. While the ceiling of 150,000 new arrivals per annum (excluding South America and Canada) adopted in 1924 reduced the large wave to a trickle, still quite a few thousand were admitted from the predominantly German-speaking parts of Western Hungary, which since 1921 had been integrated as the province of Burgenland into the small Republic of Austria.
After the collapse of the monarchy, the collective experience of poverty and even hunger by people in urban centers, as well as the absence of opportunities in rural districts, strengthened the pull factors students of emigration have recognized as important. The reports sent back to relatives and friends in the correspondence of emigrants played a major role,3 and their ties functioned as elements in simple networks, facilitating the decision to leave familiar surroundings.4 But while the desire to begin a new life in North America continued to appeal to individuals in Central Europe, there was also a mass movement in the opposite direction. The restrictions imposed on American society through the adoption of the Volstead Act after the ratification of the 18th Amendment, which went into effect in January 1920 and prohibited the production, sale, importation, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, contributed to the temporary exodus of many young Americans, especially those artists and prospective writers who had come to know Western Europe with the expeditionary force in World War I and who resented the puritan strain in American politics. In the 1920s, more than 20,000 Americans formed a colony of expatriates in Paris, and many of them later moved on to other European cities.5 The grave economic troubles in several European countries and the devaluation of their currencies permitted young Americans even with limited financial resources to live comfortably in Europe, benefiting from the favorable exchange rate of the dollar. This was particularly true of Germany and Austria, where astronomical inflation rates ruined many middle-class families, while transatlantic visitors profited from this imbalance. And the accounts of these residents drew further newcomers, who at least to some extent were willing to interact with the local population in these European countries.
There were other reasons why the networks established between Americans residing in Europe and including locals in various parts of Europe grew in size and significance. One of these reasons was the emergence of news agencies that provided regular and systematic reports on political and social events in European countries, especially the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy. There was an increased interest of the American public in the (dramatic) developments in Central Europe.6 The appointment of many foreign correspondents in the capitals of European countries in the first decades of the twentieth century catered to the perceived need to cover the evolution of those societies and offer factual accounts of the state of affairs in the Old World, especially after the catastrophe of World War I. As a result, American journalists acting as correspondents favored Vienna as a preferred point of observation from which to observe current events in the successor states and the Balkans.
That there was also some competition and rivalry between American media helps explain why, for instance, two major Chicago papers with a claim to reporting international news each had their own representative in Vienna in the early 1930s: the Chicago Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune.7 The American journalists located in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s interacted with each other but also established close ties to members of the local elite, forming friendships with them. This was to have significant consequences in the following years.
Among the foreign correspondents who were later to extend help to endangered Austrian or German citizens was Dorothy Thompson, whose role as a critical voice influencing the opinions of a broad readership in a United States hesitant to get fully involved in World War II should not be underestimated.8 Her initial impressions of Vienna, where she arrived in 1921, were disseminated by the Philadelphia Public Ledger and then the New York Herald Tribune, and her knowledge of the developments in Central Europe was eventually disseminated to the readers of the New York Post. Thompson drew attention to the plight of the Viennese when reporting about food riots late in 1921, but she also stressed the unquenchable thirst of the Viennese for music and offered detailed and lively accounts of the customs and social structures of a location she had fallen in love with.
One important element in her affinity to Vienna was her close friendship with one of the most active local educators and philanthropic activists, Eugenia Schwarzwald.9 The very close relationship between the American journalist and media personality and the Jewish educator and activist, who had originally come from the easternmost crownland of the monarchy and had run a high school for girls where she had employed several members of the artistic elite (Oskar Kokoschka, Arnold Schönberg, etc.), is mirrored in their extensive correspondence. It also includes testimony of Thompson's deep distress at the end of her first marriage to the Hungarian intellectual Josef Bard, and her temporary happiness when courted and then wedded by Sinclair Lewis. The correspondence also contains comments on the various political crises in Austria (such as the Civil War of 1934) until the catastrophe of the Anschluss. In the following months, Thompson tried to help Eugenia, who had been abroad, and her sick husband Hermann, a retired senior civil servant, who had earlier also written many personal letters to Dorothy and had great difficulties when trying to leave annexed Austria for Switzerland to be reunited with his wife. Thompson extended an invitation to them to come to the United States and made an effort to secure an academic position for Eugenia Schwarzwald, but the project did not materialize because the couple died in Zurich—first Hermann in August 1939, then Eugenia in August 1940—before the plan could be implemented.10
Thompson's generous support by providing funds and preparing the necessary affidavits, however, enabled other refugees to gain a foothold in the United States. Among them was her sometime mentor in the profession, the polyglot Hungarian journalist Marcel Fodor, who had taken her under his wing after her arrival as a novice in the profession in 1921. Through his connections she became aware of important impending events, and together with him she had covered the second fruitless attempt by the Habsburg emperor and king of Hungary, Karl, to return and reclaim the crown there in November 1921.11 Together with another prominent journalist, John Gunther, who was similarly indebted to Fodor for guidance and advice at the beginning of his stay in Vienna, she sponsored a lectureship for Marcel Fodor in Illinois after his flight from Austria following the Anschluss. The extremely competent Fodor quickly managed to find suitable work in the profession and was to fill important positions as a journalist in the media. He returned to Europe after the war and even functioned in the capacity of a policy director of the “Voice of America.”
The difficulties of those seeking a safe haven in the United States for which they needed affidavits of U.S. citizens promising support, and the crucial importance of networks also appear in the case of the prominent German dramatist Carl Zuckmayer. Thompson had first met him in the mid-1920s in Berlin in the company of Eugenia Schwarzwald, who had mentored the playwright's young second wife Alice in her school in Vienna. Thompson was to describe this encounter in her introduction to the English translation of the first—and short—autobiography of the playwright, entitled Second Wind (1940), after his flight from Europe when he had found asylum in the United States.12
Zuckmayer, faced with animosity because of his anti-militaristic stance in his plays and then ostracized by the Nazis in Germany, had spent much time in Henndorf on the Wallersee lake, north of Salzburg, in Austria, where he had acquired a property in the 1920s. He had moved there permanently soon after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In the following years he was visited there by many writers and artists who were persecuted in Nazi Germany, and also by Dorothy Thompson. On March 15, 1938, he and his family escaped to Zurich and then to the United States via Paris and Rotterdam. They had lost their German citizenship, and their possessions in Henndorf and Vienna were confiscated. Zuckmayer's later full-length autobiography, Als wär's ein Stück von mir, contains an eloquent testimony to Thompson's generous support, which seems to have included her personal intervention on his behalf with President F. D. Roosevelt. But her generous help and that of Ben Huebsch, an important figure in the world of publishing, and other friends did not prevent major challenges for the Zuckmayers in the following years. After some employment in Hollywood, Zuckmayer temporarily functioned as a lecturer in the New School for Social Research, a position he owed to the support of Erwin Piscator. From spring 1941 onward, however, he tried to make his living as a farmer, after having leased a backwoods farm in Vermont in the neighborhood of Thompson's Twin Farms.13 The district had, indeed, such a concentration of émigrés from Central Europe that many people, including John Gunther, referred to it as the “Sudeten Vermont,” alluding to German-speaking areas in the west of Czechoslovakia.14
Apparently the formidable critic of American Puritanism and the “Booboisie” H. L. Mencken was also occasionally in Vienna, as some letters suggest, and was also a node in a network of transatlantic friends. While in Vienna, he certainly met academic individuals such as Leon Kellner,15 whose career as the professor of English at the University of Czernowitz had ended during the occupation of the crownland of Bukovina by the Czarist troops in World War I. Kellner's application for permission to teach again at the University of Vienna, where he had earned his “venia legendi” [the right to lecture (“habilitation”)] in 1890, was not accepted in 1919.16 His knowledge and competence as a student of Shakespeare and as the author of histories of both British and American literature was, however, appreciated by Mencken.
That Mencken functioned as a mediator in a transatlantic network including the family of Leon Kellner, who himself had passed away in 1928, can be inferred from his communications with his friend, the novelist James Hergesheimer, who visited Vienna in 1931 during the preparation for a commissioned book misleadingly entitled Berlin, as it describes the atmosphere of other European cities as well, including Budapest and Vienna.17 In Hergesheimer's travelogue, which offers a fairly superficial picture of the Austrian capital and stresses the nostalgia of its inhabitants for the imperial past, the author Hergesheimer meets Leon Kellner's two daughters in Café Herrenhof. One of the two, Dora Sophie, later also functions as the hostess of a party in Berlin that Hergesheimer attends and describes in his travel book.
After the Anschluss, Mencken was very active on behalf of this Jewish family. As the standard biography of H. L. Mencken by Fred Hobson relates, Mencken wrote numerous letters for Kellner's grandson, submitted affidavits to the U.S. State Department, petitioned the U.S. Consul in Australia (where the young man was temporarily interned), and pledged that he would personally “take care” of Stefan Benjamin “in case he [ran] into difficulties” in the United States. He interceded as well for Kellner's second daughter and nephew, and he spent a great deal of time, in particular, helping Kellner's granddaughter, Hannah Arnold, a medical student, who had recently escaped from Vienna only to be trapped in Zurich. He besieged the authorities in Washington with requests for papers, signed her affidavit, and agreed that he would “provide financial assistance” for her if necessary. Mencken sponsored several members of the Kellner family, thus “quietly helping Jews to escape Hitler's terror” and bringing them to the United States.18
At least equally effective was the support the dramatist and fiction writer Thornton Wilder gave those whom he had come to know during several visits to Austria between 1928 and 1937.19 In general, Wilder greatly liked Austria and the Austrians, and he deplored the threat posed to their continued existence by Hitler's Germany. His many unpublished letters show that the hospitality Wilder and his sister Isabel, who accompanied him on his first visit to Vienna in the fall of 1928, enjoyed from Herberth Herlitschka and his mother20 established close personal ties with Wilder's primary German translator and fostered future visits to the city. Wilder's admiration for the theatrical genius of Max Reinhardt motivated these anyway. Herlitschka was always the first contact in Vienna for the author, also during a longer stay in September and October 1935. Their correspondence during the thirty years of their friendship21 reflects their excellent rapport. It survived the various challenges that accompanied Herlitschka's later exile in England, where he tried to establish his own publishing house and had to cope with the inevitable economic problems. As Isabel increasingly functioned as her brother's agent and advisor, she was repeatedly involved in Herlitschka's correspondence with Wilder, and both Herbert Herlitschka and later his wife sometimes wrote to her about certain problems connected with the texts Herlitschka hoped to translate. Wilder was, however, eager to honor his ties to Lucy Tal, the widow of Ernst Peter Tal, the owner of the publishing house that had brought out the German translations of his early work,22 who had in February 1939 also left Vienna after the Anschluss.23
It was in this connection that Wilder, eager to explain his duties to other friends and acquaintances, mentioned a number of people whom he had met socially during his sojourns in Vienna or Salzburg and who had been ostracized in Austria after the Nazi takeover, reduced to indigence, and had fled. The ties of friendship that had developed prompted Wilder's characteristic generosity in helping those in need. He listened to their appeals.
Wilder had twice visited Sigmund Freud in October 1935, and he had reported an intriguing conversation verbatim to his close friend, the modernist American writer Gertrude Stein, who was permanently living in France (Paris and Biligny). “The beautiful old man,” who had speculated about Shakespeare's sonnets and about the role of religion, had also hinted at the possibility that his (absent) daughter Anna might be a potential partner for the American bachelor Thornton Wilder.24 Reminding Wilder of their conversation, Freud three years later in October 1938 wrote to him from his exile in London and appealed to him on behalf of Dr. Ernst Waldinger, a poet, who had “married the American-born daughter of a sister of mine,”25 and Wilder acted accordingly. In his letter to his friend Herlitschka, also in exile in England, he mentioned his own efforts on behalf of “a number of Viennese … trying to help them find work.” He listed Dr. Bermann, Dr. Franz Lehner, Hertha Schweiger, Dr. Ernst Waldinger,26 and others.27
It would go beyond the scope of this article to discuss here in detail the close cooperation between Wilder and the equally exiled Max Reinhardt, whom he had admired from the outset of his career and whom he had met in Vienna and in Salzburg in the 1930s, and with whom he collaborated in California and in New York on his adaptation of Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen. Wilder's first version, The Merchant of Yonkers, was not a success as it had only a short run on Broadway from late December 1938 onward, but in 1954 the revised play, The Matchmaker, won great acclaim and had a record run on Broadway, from December 1955 onward, after the productions of the farce in Edinburgh and London.
But it seems appropriate to refer to another close relationship established during Wilder's visits to Vienna in the 1930s, when he had come to know the Jewish (Austrian) dramatist and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, whose precarious existence in his American exile is reflected in Beer-Hofmann's short handwritten letters to Wilder in German.28 Beer-Hofmann had managed to leave annexed Austria for Switzerland only with great difficulty (and afflicted with a serious heart condition) and had arrived in the United States via Italy after the death of his wife, Paula, in Zurich. Notes of thanks (for instance, dated December 30, 1940) bear witness not only to Wilder's generous support of exiled friends but also to his sharing news about the progress of Wilder's adaptation of material from the “Wiener Volkskomödie” for the stage with the exiled writer, who had lost his audience. A relationship marked by mutual respect had developed between the successful American dramatist and Beer-Hofmann, who wrote admiringly about Our Town (March 3, 1940). The psychological need of the emigrant to recall their shared interest is reflected in Beer-Hofmann's allusion to Wilder's earlier acknowledgement of having received a volume of one of Nestroy's plays as a gift from him, and to two additional plays by Nestroy that his deceased wife would have liked to give Wilder (January 19, 1940). The continuing ties of mutual respect and friendship are manifest in Wilder's conversations with Beer-Hofmann about his play The Skin of our Teeth in August 194029 and in his efforts after Beer-Hofmann's death in September 1945. He supported not only the publication of a translation of Beer-Hofmann's complex play Jaakobs Traum, for which he composed an introduction, but also tried to promote its staging with prominent actors. His very personal correspondence with Beer-Hofmann's daughters in the following decade reflects his loyalty and ongoing support for the family of his exiled peer and his legacy, as well as his interest in their efforts to reclaim confiscated property in Austria.30
But not all endeavors by Americans to assist individuals they had met in Austria in the 1930s and get them as refugees or later as displaced persons safely to the United States were crowned with success. One example may finally be described, which is linked to the “grand tour” of the eventually prominent Midwestern writer Wright Morris (1910–1998). This disadvantaged semi-orphan, the son of a restless father, had as a college student begun an adventurous year in Europe in the fall and winter of 1933 to 1934, part of which he spent in Vienna and at a strange castle in Lower Austria. The impressions collected there haunted him for the rest of his life, and in fact acted as a catalyst for his distinguished writing career. He described his experiences in Austria, where he arrived late in 1933 and stayed until March 1934, in the second of his three autobiographies, entitled Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933–1934.31 He had earlier fictionalized the events of that winter in a novel published in 1963, entitled Cause for Wonder, and drafted several versions of a long narrative.32 During the preceding month in Vienna, the impecunious young American spent time in the Students' Club of the University of Vienna, conversing with a young academic who was later to become a professor of English at German universities, Bogislav von Lindheim.33 But he also earned some money by offering conversation lessons, for instance, to a dynamic young student of history from an old Austro-Hungarian family. This young woman, who was to submit her doctoral thesis in history in the summer of 1935, was a countess, a granddaughter of Alfred Prince Windischgraetz, with property in Vienna and in Lower Austria. Less than two years later, Maria Szapáry and Wright Morris began a correspondence, in which she referred somewhat nostalgically to their shared time in Vienna and alluded to the possibility of the young, in-the-meantime married Morris, who had farming experience, to get employment on the estate of the Szapárys in Lower Austria.34 Between 1935 and 1938 the friends corresponded about a planned visit by the daughter of Count Friedrich Szapáry to the United States, but it never materialized since the political troubles in Central Europe and the outbreak of war led to a radical reversal of their roles. Maria Szapáry described in still unpublished letters from February 1946 to December 1949 her sad lot, the loss of all her possessions, and her having been interned with her aristocratic German husband, Guenther von Reibnitz, whom she had married in 1941. She then illustrated her indigent state as a refugee from Hungary, living with her two children in the American zone in postwar Bavaria and temporarily in France, working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The Morrises went out of their way to offer support and interceded for Wright's conversation partner, as Maria Szapáry put her hope in emigration to the United States. Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania were also involved, but the protracted attempts of her friends—Morris was meanwhile an established author—to get her and her two children admitted to the United States dragged on until her patience was finally exhausted. Eventually she emigrated to Australia. From Sydney she reported that she was willing to work as a nurse as she had learned humility and acknowledged the need to cope with the harsh reality of her situation.
The reasons for the lack of success of her plan to settle in the United States are not clear, but at least one can report that Maria Szapáry, who had meanwhile been divorced through an ecclesiastical decree from her first husband, met an exiled Polish nobleman and married him in Australia in February 1952. Thus, some of the would-be immigrants to North America from Central Europe had to look for alternatives; some found a new home in Australia; whereas some refugees had earlier gone to Shanghai in China. Yet ultimately, the evidence presented underlines the fact that a not insignificant number of Central Europeans benefited from their prior participation in the networks of transatlantic ties that had evolved in Vienna and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s. These connections helped them escape from dangerous situations and offered access to professional opportunities, all of which demonstrates the importance of the phenomenon illustrated in the preceding pages.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “New Perspectives on Central European and Transatlantic Migration, 1800-2000” conference, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, March 8-10, 2018, in Budapest, Hungary.
See Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer Nebmaier, and James W. Oberly, From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2015) and Annemarie Steidl and James W. Oberly, “The Transatlantic Experience: Migrants from Austria-Hungary in the United States, 1870–1930,” in “Quiet Invaders” Revisited: Austrian Immigration to the United States, ed. Günter Bischof (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017), 27–42.
See Kurt Bednar, Österreichische Auswanderung in die USA zwischen 1900 und 1930 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2017). See also Johann Chmelar, “Die Auswanderung aus den im Reichsrat vertretenen Königreichen und Ländern in den Jahren 1905–1914” (PhD diss., Vienna, 1972).
See the general discussion of these factors in the essays collected in Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Fritz Peter Kirsch, eds., Immigration and Integration in North America: Canadian and Austrian Perspectives (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2014). For the emigration of Hungarian professionals to the United States, often via Germany, and the importance of mediators who as nodes in networks facilitated the selective immigration to the United States, see Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 167–349, esp. 270–78. On the phenomenon of the emigration of East Europeans, including many Jews, despite major hurdles and controversies in the course of the twentieth century, see Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).
For the general concepts of transnational networks, see Christian Stegbauer, ed., Netzwerkanalyse und Netzwerktheorie: Ein neues Paradigma in den Sozialwissenschaften (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), and R. V. Gould, “Uses of Network Tools in Comparative Historical Research,” Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, eds. James Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–69. For the importance of ties of friendship and the establishment of the resulting networks in exile in America and elsewhere, see also the essays in Helga Schreckenberger, ed., Networks of Refugees from Nazi Germany: Continuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
On the impact of this migration to Europe in the interwar years, see Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995), esp. 295–358.
On the establishment of news agencies and the employment of foreign correspondents, see Morrell Heald, Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900–1940 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988).
The fact that in Chicago there was a particularly high number of Central European immigrants interested in the fortunes of their countries of origin may help account for this “duplication.” Prominent journalists for the two newspapers were John Gunther and William Shirer.
The full range of Dorothy Thompson's reports, essays, and broadcasts and her extensive correspondence is apparent in the Dorothy Thompson Papers at Syracuse University, her Alma Mater. On her life and career see Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), and Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990). Thompson pleaded for recognition of the harsh lot of European refugees and the catastrophic situation of Jews in Central Europe in Refugees: Anarchy or Organization? (New York: Random House, 1938) and in numerous articles, in several newspapers, as well as in radio broadcasts.
This friendship is reflected in numerous letters (more than forty) preserved in the Dorothy Thompson Papers, box 27, and in the exchange of essays and stories that Schwarzwald wanted her friend to place in American journals. For more details, see my monograph Transatlantic Networks and the Perception and Representation of Vienna and Austria between the 1920s and 1950s (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2018), esp. chapters 2 and 12.
See also the documentation in Hans Deichmann, Leben mit provisorischer Genehmigung: Leben, Werk und Exil von Eugenie Schwarzwald 1872–1940: Eine Chronik (Graz: Leykam, 1988), and Deborah Holmes, Langeweile ist Gift: Das Leben der Eugenie Schwarzwald (Wien: Residenz Verlag, 2012).
See Sanders, Dorothy Thompson, 79–80, on this intriguing episode, and Thompson's extensive correspondence with her admirer and supporter Fodor from the years 1923 to 1960, in the Dorothy Thompson Papers, box 10.
See Carl Zuckmayer, Second Wind, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Doubleday, 1940).
See the description of his challenges in American exile after his flight from Central Europe in his extensive second autobiography, Als wär's ein Stück von mir (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1966), 492–526. A more detailed presentation of the friendship between Thompson and the Zuckmayers is provided by Karina von Tippelskirch, “Central Europe in Vermont: German Exile Writers and the American Journalist Dorothy Thompson,” in Schreckenberger, Networks, 142–60, which confirms the results of my own research.
See Sanders, Dorothy Thompson, 294.
Mencken suggested as early as September 23, 1923, that Louis Untermeyer, the poet and anthologist, should during his visit to Vienna get in touch with Leon Kellner, whom Mencken later praised as an excellent Shakespearean. See the Untermeyer Papers in the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana University.
The members of the Department of English at the University of Vienna, which was directed by the prominent linguist Karl Luick, were eager to establish and fill a second chair in the field and feared that Kellner's teaching might reduce the chances of being able to hire someone for this position. See University Archives in Vienna.
Joseph Hergesheimer, Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1931), on Vienna esp. 129–68.
Fred Hobson, Mencken: A Life (New York: Random House, 1994), 422–23.
On Wilder, who had earned a Pulitzer Prize with his novel The Bridge of San Louis Rey, see the very detailed biography by Penelope Niven, Thornton Wilder: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), and the voluminous Wilder Papers at Beinecke Library. Quotations in the following from published or unpublished correspondence by agreement of the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Thornton Wilder Papers. Reprinted by arrangement of The Wilder Family, llc., and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.
The Wilders were repeatedly the guests of Herlitschka and his mother in their home at Wiedner Gürtel 6. See also the later telegram, in which Wilder invites “Hrn u. Fr. Herlitsch[k]a to tea in the Hotel Bristol” (May 11, 1931). See Wilder Papers, especially box 42.
The correspondence later also included Herlitschka's wife as well as his mother, who had initially helped host the Wilders in their apartment.
Wilder added in a message to Herlitschka that “out of gratitude to Peter and Lucy Tal I entrusted all rights of negotiations to Frau Tal when I saw her in New York.” Herlitschka had initially prepared his versions for the publishing house of Tal, until the Anschluss compelled the widow of Mr. Tal, who also emigrated to America, to relinquish the rights to Wilder's work.
After the war this issue was again raised in January 1947, when Herlitschka asked Wilder to grant him all rights to the German translations of his plays and novels. Wilder, however, wanted to involve the “reestablished firm of Fischer” in case Lucy Tal decided not to enter the publishing business again.
This letter is reprinted in two editions of Wilder's letters, in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder, eds. Robin Gibbs Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 303, and in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward M. Burns et al. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996), 64.
See Wilder Papers, box 33, for a handwritten letter of Prof. Freud from London, dated October 10, 1938.
On Ernst Waldinger's life and poetic output, including his later nostalgic reminiscences of his Austrian home juxtaposed to the American landscape of his life in exile, and on his role as a cultural mediator, see Harry Zohn, Amerikanische “Thirty-Eighters” aus Wien als doppelte Kulturträger (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1994), 45–52.
See Wilder's Papers, box 42. On the various challenges the refugees who were admitted to the United States had to cope with, see the examples of careers described in the essays in Günter Bischof, Quiet Invaders Revisited, esp. 103–62 for the arrivals in the interwar years, and 197–286 on the refugees in the era of World War II.
See the exchange of letters contained in Wilder Papers, box 16, and discussed in the following.
See Niven, Thornton Wilder, 492.
Wilder took a keen interest in the production of Beer-Hofmann's play Jaakobs Traum, and in his daughters' efforts to regain their property in Austria after the war. See Wilder's numerous letters to them, Dr. Czuczka, later addressed as Miriam, and Naemah, Wilder Papers, box 16. On the difficulties the minority of exiles encountered when they wanted to return to Austria and Central Europe, see the essays in Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Manfred Prisching, eds., Return from Exile – Rückkehr aus dem Exil. Exiles, Returnees and Their Impact in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Austria and Central Europe (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2017).
Wright Morris, Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933–1934 (New York: Harper and Row, 1983).
Like his autobiography, the novel Cause for Wonder (New York: Atheneum, 1963) was based on Morris's encounter with odd characters and grotesque situations in the rural setting of Schloss Ranna, north of the Danube valley. See the comprehensive Wright Morris Papers at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which contain numerous drafts for a projected novel entitled “The Madman of Ranna.”
Von Lindheim was a pupil of the distinguished linguist Karl Luick. He published his doctoral thesis on the language of a medieval text in Vienna in 1937. After the war, he taught at the Free University in Berlin and then in Heidelberg. Morris relates his frequent conversations with him in the Foreign Students' Club in the winter of 1933 in his autobiography (esp. Solo, 28–43).
See the Wright Morris Papers, box 17.