EXILED IN PARADISE by Anthony Heilbut; Viking; 506 pages; $20 STRANGERS IN PARADISE by John Russell Taylor; Holt, Rinehart& Winston 256 pages; $16.95
Of all the waves of immigrants that have landed on American shores since the Pilgrims, the German refugees who fled from Hitler in the 1930s may qualify as the best and the brightest. An entire civilization could be reconstructed from the writers, artists, musicians, philosophers and scientists in their desperate ranks.
Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were among the most gifted writers of their time. Artist Max Ernst made surrealism accessible to a generation. The architects-in-exile of the Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, changed the face of the American city. Middle European Physicists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller became the ambivalent stepfathers of the atomic era.
Whatever their talents and tenets, these refugees shared the experience of the shipwrecked. Anthony Heilbut, whose parents were Berlin emigres, has exercised impressive, if indulgent scholarship, and even a touch of poetry, to get to the heart of this diaspora.
With only the baggage of their memories and their accents, the refugees came prepared to be instant Americans. "I believe," Thomas Mann told his new hosts, "that for the duration of the present European dark age, the center of Western culture will shift to America. It is my own intention to make my home in your country, and I am convinced that if Europe continues for a while to pursue the same course as in the last two decades, many good Europeans will meet again on American soil." Like Brecht, who went from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Switzerland to France to Denmark before coming to the U.S., most of these good Europeans carried the fate of the wanderer in their blood. They took off their airs as they put on their work clothes, willing to do anything to survive. Composer Paul Dessau was a hired hand on a chicken farm; Writer Walter Mehring became a warehouse foreman; Philosopher Heinrich Blucher shoveled chemicals in a factory. In the sassy spirit of Berlin cabarets of the 1920s, they devised impromptu dictionaries of slang, with emphasis on "dough" and "bread." Twelve-tone Composer Arnold Schoenberg dispensed to fellow exiles his one-note advice for social success: When in doubt, smile.
At Manhattan's New School for Social Research, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, at California universities, the refugees not only adapted but also became the "advance men" of new ideas, as Heilbut puts it. Paul Tillich combined theology with aesthetics; Hannah Arendt made philosophy and history partners in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Einstein continued to measure the boundaries of space as he weighed the causes and cures of war.
"Refugees," Brecht observed, "are refugees as a result of changes, and their sole object of study is change." For a while these restless minds seemed to be doing Americans' homework for them, analyzing everything from jazz to soap opera to advertising techniques. But the enchantment was one-sided.