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According to Heilbut's debatable thesis, after Pearl Harbor the German Americans were thought of as just one more group of aliens. After World War II, the McCarthy period seemed to strike an ominous and familiar chord. Mann, who had found in California his Eden, came to dismiss it as "an artificial paradise," America as a "soulless soil." Einstein complained that Americans, shortchanging their idealism, were not American enough. Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that only in the U.S. could Freud's prescription for human dignity, Lieben und Arbeiten (love and work), be realized. But he became "increasingly critical of the American Establishment." Arendt spoke for a whole generation when, shortly before her death in 1975, she confessed, "I somehow don't fit."
This sense of alienation is easy to understand. The subjects of Heilbut's study were, after all, no ordinary group. Most were intellectuals who would have been restless in any culture. It is doubtful, for example, if Brecht ("Wherever I go, they ask me, Spell your name") would have been happy anywhere on earth. Others, like Mann, never really understood the nation they first overpraised, then cursed for being imperfect. Some, like Writer Gerhardt Eisler, were Communists, hypocritical in their horror at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Heilbut's defense of these emigres seems disingenuous: "If Einstein or Thomas and Klaus Mann were back and could observe the Ku Klux Klan in Connecticut or the Moral Majority in New Jersey . . . one doubts if they would feel inclined to apologize for their earlier misgivings."
Some of the refugees found the U.S. a far from terrifying place even in the '50s. Most of them were quartered in a New Weimar set among palm trees. In Strangers in Paradise, John Russell Taylor, film critic of the Times of London, tells ironic tales out of court about the Hollywood settlers. Actors like Conrad Veidt and Otto Preminger, fleeing from Hitler, were hired to impersonate Nazis in war movies. Ernst Lubitsch, eager to propagandize against the Third Reich, directed a delicate, tentative farce, To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny as a Polish ham actor. In the film a German general appraises Benny: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." For his efforts, Lubitsch was pilloried by critics for finding "fun in the bombing of Warsaw." Sometimes the very difficulties with a new language benefited Hollywood by cutting dialogue to an effective minimum. "For me," said Director Fritz Lang, "psychology is not in the talking, it is in the action, in the movement, the gestures ... It is the behaviorisms that create the character."
Taylor's book is a parade of names, from Walter Gropius to Franz Werfel, two men who not only shared the same fate but the same wife, Alma. The anecdotes are diverting, and the history is brisk and precise. But Taylor's work lacks the tragic dimension of Heilbut's book. The difference is evident in the titles. It is one thing to be a stranger and quite another to be an exile, forced from a country, a tradition and a language, to become, in Einstein's phrase, "a bird of passage for . . . life."