House of Exile

In 1933 the writer and political activist Heinrich Mann, meticulously dressed in a suit, starched collar and bow tie, escaped from Germany carrying nothing more than an umbrella and a briefcase filled with manuscripts. Soon, he knew, the Nazis would come for him. He never saw his homeland again.
Evelyn Juers' extraordinary book is a unique imagining of the unconventional love affair between Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger – a tall, blonde ex-barmaid twenty-seven years his junior – recounting their flight to France and then to Los Angeles, as Europe descended into barbarism.
In House of Exile their story is intricately interwoven with others from their circle of friends, relatives and literary contemporaries: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, among others. It gives us a poignant glimpse of a generation of remarkable writers who were determined to carry on living, reading and working in wartime – in ship's cabins, train compartments and shabby rented rooms – even though it seemed the civilized world was coming to an end.
This is a story of family, love, loss, war and how lives are connected and defined by writing. Above all it is about the strange, dislocated existence of the émigré, and exile in all its forms. Evelyn Juers enlarges the boundaries of biography to provide a new perspective on the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, giving an intimate, sensitively imagined and unique view of an extraordinary time in history.