10 famous German exiles

Already in 1930, the writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate described the rise of the Nazis as "eccentric barbarism." In the spring of 1933 the whole Mann family decided not to return to Germany from a vacation in Switzerland. They first moved to France and then continued to the USA in 1938. The Thomas Mann House near Los Angeles is now a German cultural center.

While thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, who was Hannah Arendt's mentor and former lover, were joining the Nazi Party in 1933, she emigrated that same year with her husband to Paris, where she helped young Jewish people flee to Palestine. To avoid the fate of many German refugees who were being sent to internment camps in France, in 1940, Arendt fled to New York with her mother and husband.

Unlike the books by his father Thomas, Klaus Mann's works were banned by the Nazis. He emigrated to Amsterdam, where he founded the anti-Nazi exile magazine "Die Sammlung." He later moved to the US and became one of the most important representatives of German exile literature. He ruled out returning to Germany and died in France in 1949.

In the Weimar Republic, the painter mainly portrayed emancipated city dwellers. Despite her growing reputation as an artist, she was forced out of the cultural scene in 1933 because of her Jewish origins — the fact that she was baptized as a Protestant didn't matter. In 1937 she moved to Sweden, living in Stockholm, where she first portrayed emigrants and later aristocrats.

One day after the Reichstag fire in 1933, Bertolt Brecht fled with his family to Paris and later to Denmark. Soon after, his books were burned and banned. His productions had long before been disrupted by the Nazis. In 1941 the family moved to Los Angeles, and Brecht did not return to Berlin until 1949 — to the Communist side of the divided city.

The Jewish poet was part of the literary avant-garde when an SA troop attacked her on the street in 1933. The eccentric artist then fled to Switzerland, where the then 64-year-old was only tolerated and banned from working. After a trip to Palestine, the Swiss authorities denied her re-entry. Lasker-Schüler stayed in Jerusalem, where she died impoverished in 1945.

In 1934 the architect and Bauhaus founder traveled to London with his wife Ise, originally only for a project after which the couple planned to return to Germany. While they were there, the Nazis referred to the Bauhaus school as the "Church of Marxism." Gropius feared repression and remained in exile. In 1937 the couple moved to the USA; Walter Gropius became a Harvard professor.

The painter and designer Josef Albers taught at the Bauhaus, after which he fled to the USA with his wife, the textile artist Anni. The newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina, based on the Bauhaus model, took on Albers as director. In 1950 he moved to Yale as head of the art department. Anni Albers' work has been shown in exhibitions around the world.

Billy Wilder, the son of Jewish parents, had been living in Berlin since 1927, where he first worked as a reporter and then started writing film scripts. After Hitler came to power, Wilder immediately moved to Paris and a year later went on to the USA, where he became an influential Hollywood director with works such as "Some Like It Hot."

The poet followed her partner, the philologist Erwin Walter Palm, to study in Italy in 1931. The couple fled to England and from there to the Dominican Republic because of the racial laws that came into force in 1938 and made Jews public enemies. She began to write under the stage name Domin. In 1954 Hilde Domin returned to Germany.