Berlin Books

Evelyn Juers - House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

Exile is a literary staple - from Ulysses sailing the Mediterranean to Hemingway in Paris, what meatier creative material can there be than lives redefined by relocation? There were plenty of these in the 1930s and 1940s. Juers has taken them - the fraught artistic sensibilities of the Manns, of Feuchtwanger, Werfel, Döblin, Benjamin, Brecht, but also Joseph Roth, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and James Joyce - and given them rooms in a vast and rambling house. She chose this analogy because "it's a capacious metaphor. It ranges from domestic to political connotations, and can incorporate actual and existential experiences of exile. Also, I'm describing a generation of writers obsessed with the idea of home, with insiders and outsiders, with dwelling places - shopping arcades, hotels, libraries, jail cells - with genealogies, elective affinities, cultural inheritance. For example, Heinrich Mann's first novel was In einer Familie;  Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks  was subtitled "Decline of a Family". Woolf advocated that a writer needs a room of her own. The name of Jakob Wassermann's character Caspar Hauser reflects ironically on the tragedy of his homelessness".

This is one part of Juers' achievement: the bringing together of such a cast under one roof. Initially, she sets the scene in Berlin and on Germany's Baltic coast: the towns and places where Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger grew up, met and became lovers. There is security and assurance in addresses (Fasanen-, Leibniz-, Kantstraße), in hotels and bars specifying locality: Woolf stayed at the Hotel Prinz Albrecht in 1929 and shopped at Wertheim.

The greater challenge  follows as Juers moves into the 1930s and place becomes unreliable, a matrix rather than a constant. Heinrich and Nelly travel to the south of France; Virginia through Germany to Italy; Benjamin to the foothills of the Pyrenees. It's a vast crisscrossing of paths, of conversations under palms, of frenzied writing at foreign tables, of last-minute English lessons, visas, seasickness.

Juers writes with exquisitely researched and applied detail, quoting from diaries, novels, letters. Did she ever worry that she might lose the thread - not only of all these personalities, but also of her narrative? "No worries. In collective biographies - Durrell's Corfu Trilogy, Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the Bible - I'm always captivated by their interweaving of an epic canvas with small intimacies. In my book, threads disappear and reappear. Biographers are selectors and connectors, that's what they do."

If this were all, it would be good enough. But what makes this book unique is Juers' intermingling of fact, fiction and semiotics. Her paragraphs on the German verb irren, for example, show how language suggests a connection between losing one's way and going mad, implying that these depressed, lonely and often suicidal exiles were damned not only by circumstance but also by etymology. Did they sense this, as they sat under a Californian sky fearing for their future, their fame and their sanity?  In Juers' contextualization, it appears entirely plausible.

And then there are those isolated moments when Juers explodes the biographical genre by including completely fictive episodes: Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Kroeger brought together on a winter street, linked by a blue satin slip. The audacity of such convergence is breathtaking. What inspired flights of fantasy such as these? "Biographical facts can shape-shift and strike out on their own. The blue slip is a red flag signifying a set of conjectures: it's an undergarment that rises emblematically to the narrative surface. It places Nelly and Virginia in one frame."

At one point, Juers quotes Wallace Stevens: "The best writing occurs on a narrow ledge between fact and fiction. That uneasy place ... called the metaphysical streets of the physical town." Juers' House of Exile, like Henry James' House of Fiction (written in self-imposed exile), is a place where imagination cuts a swathe through history, infusing it with unexpected truths. It is an extraordinary book.

March 2010 [issue 81]