German Exilliteratur is the name for a category of books in the German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 written by writers of anti-nazi attitude who fled from Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 (Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

) between 1933 and 1945. Works of Exilliteratur were written and published by dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

 authors who fled abroad in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed

Annexation

Annexation is the de jure incorporation of some territory into another geo-political entity . Usually, it is implied that the territory and population being annexed is the smaller, more peripheral, and weaker of the two merging entities, barring physical size...

 Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 by the Anschluss

Anschluss

The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

in 1938 and abolished the freedom of press and started to prosecute the authors whose books were banned

Censorship

thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...

.

Many of the European countries where they found refuge, were later occupied by Nazi-Germany as well, which caused them again to look for safety elsewhere, by emigrating to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 or taking cover in the "underground

Resistance during World War II

Resistance movements during World War II occurred in every occupied country by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation, disinformation and propaganda to hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns...

". Before the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 many of these writers, especially of Jewish origin and with communist

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 sympathies had found refuge in The Netherlands.

Between 1933 and 1939 prolific centers of German exile writers and publishers emerged in several European cities, like Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zürich, Prague, Moscow as well as across the Atlantic in New York and Mexico. Well known for their publications were the publishers Querido Verlag and :nl:Verlag Allert de Lange in Amsterdam and Oprecht in Zürich. They served the German community outside Germany with critical literature, and their books were also smuggled into Nazi-Germany.

The best known exile writers include Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

, Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch was a 20th century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists.-Life:Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately...

, Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher.Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx and, as he always confessed, by novelist Karl May. He was also interested in music and art . He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno...

, Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin was a German expressionist novelist, best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz .- 1878–1918:...

, Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger was a German-Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht....

, Bruno Frank

Bruno Frank

Bruno Frank was a German author, poet, dramatist, and humanist.Frank studied law and philosophy in Munich, where he later worked as a dramatist and novelist until the Reichstag fire in 1933...

, Oskar Maria Graf

Oskar Maria Graf

Oskar Maria Graf was a German author.He wrote several socialist-anarchist novels and narratives about life in Bavaria, mostly autobiographical.In the beginning Graf wrote under his real name Oskar Graf...

, Heinrich Eduard Jacob

Heinrich Eduard Jacob

Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party...

, Hermann Kesten

Hermann Kesten

Hermann Kesten was a German novelist and dramatist. He was one of the principal literary figures of the New Objectivity movement in 1920's Germany.The literary prize Hermann Kesten Medal has been given in his honor since 1985....

, Annette Kolb

Annette Kolb

Annette Kolb was the working name of German author and pacifist Anna Mathilde Kolb. She became active in pacifist causes during World War I and this caused her political difficulties from then on. She left Germany in the 1920s and her works were banned during the Third Reich...

, Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist...

, Emil Ludwig

Emil Ludwig

Emil Ludwig was a German author, known for his biographies.-Biography:Emil Ludwig was born in Breslau, now part of Poland. Ludwig studied law but chose writing as a career. At first he wrote plays and novella, but also worked as a journalist...

, Heinrich Mann

Heinrich Mann

Luiz Heinrich Mann was a German novelist who wrote works with strong social themes. His attacks on the authoritarian and increasingly militaristic nature of pre-World War II German society led to his exile in 1933.-Life and work:Born in Lübeck as the oldest child of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann...

, Klaus Mann

Klaus Mann

- Life and work :Born in Munich, Klaus Mann was the son of German writer Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia Pringsheim. His father was baptized as a Lutheran, while his mother was from a family of secular Jews. He began writing short stories in 1924 and the following year became drama critic for a...

, Erika Mann

Erika Mann

Erika Julia Hedwig Mann was a German actress and writer, the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and Katia Mann.-Life:...

, Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

, Ludwig Marcuse

Ludwig Marcuse

Professor Ludwig Marcuse , was a philosopher and writer of Jewish origin....

, Robert Musil

Robert Musil

Robert Musil was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels...

, Robert Neumann, Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...

, Ludwig Renn

Ludwig Renn

Ludwig Renn was a German writer. His real name was Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golßenau.Born in Dresden into a Saxon noble family, he fought in World War I on the Western Front. He wrote the book Krieg on his experiences...

, Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth, born Moses Joseph Roth , was an Austrian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for his novel of Jewish life, Job as well as the seminal essay 'Juden auf Wanderschaft' translated in...

, :de:Alice Rühle-Gerstel and Otto Rühle

Otto Rühle

Otto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder with along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring...

, Felix Salten

Felix Salten

Felix Salten was an Austrian author and critic in Vienna. His most famous work is Bambi .-Life:...

, Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers was a German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.- Life :...

, Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet.- Biography :Born in Prague , Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods. His mother, Albine Kussi, was the daughter of a mill owner...

, Bodo Uhse

Bodo Uhse

Bodo Uhse was a German writer, journalist and political activist. He was recognised as one of the most prominent authors in East Germany.-Early years:...

, Max Brod

Max Brod

Max Brod was a German-speaking Czech Jewish, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is most famous as the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka...

, Arnold Zweig

Arnold Zweig

Arnold Zweig was a German writer and anti-war activist.He is best known for his World War I tetralogy.-Life and work:Zweig was born in Glogau, Silesia son of a Jewish saddler...

 and Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.- Biography :...

.