The Flight of European Artists from Hitler . Filled with essays that recall Nazism in Germany and its impact elsewhere in Europe and, indeed, America, where many thousands of refugees relocated, it reflects heavily researched studies of the period on the part of contributors and the source works on which they drew.
Principal focus is on artists.
There was Kandinsky, for example, who earlier cooperated with the Fascists, and was reluctant to admit later that his 1938 departure was due to politics, as essayist Keith Holz informs us. Art and Exile examines the aftermath. These essays are starting points for other writers who contribute valuable, if often little known aspects of the condition and its outcome. Vivian Endicott Barnett brings to light the matter of support for 1930s German art in this country, and Lawrence Weschler discusses the community of artists and intellectuals who settled in Southern California, a list that includes several whom I recall hearing as speakers in a Thursday afternoon lecture series at UCLA in the 1960s. There is much here that might surprise readers, such as reference to a portrayal of Hitler in a Fool's Cap and, in counterbalance to that, one of Mies van der Rohe's submitting a swastika-emblazoned design at the Brussels Worlds Fair of 1935.