Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865)
- Part II Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
- Part III Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
- 20 The Essay and the Twentieth-Century Literary Magazine
- 21 Germans in Amerika: Written Possibility, Uninhabitable Reality
- 22 The Essay and the American Left
- 23 The Native American Essay
- 24 Conservatism and the Essay
- 25 Opinions and Decisions: Legal Essays
- 26 World War Two to #MeToo: The Personal and the Political in the American Feminist Essay
- 27 Self-Portraits in a Convex Mirror: The Essay in American Poetry
- 28 The American Essay and (Social) Science
- 29 Philosophy as a Kind of Writing
- 30 The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion
- Part IV Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
21 - Germans in Amerika: Written Possibility, Uninhabitable Reality
from Part III - Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2024
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865)
- Part II Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
- Part III Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
- 20 The Essay and the Twentieth-Century Literary Magazine
- 21 Germans in Amerika: Written Possibility, Uninhabitable Reality
- 22 The Essay and the American Left
- 23 The Native American Essay
- 24 Conservatism and the Essay
- 25 Opinions and Decisions: Legal Essays
- 26 World War Two to #MeToo: The Personal and the Political in the American Feminist Essay
- 27 Self-Portraits in a Convex Mirror: The Essay in American Poetry
- 28 The American Essay and (Social) Science
- 29 Philosophy as a Kind of Writing
- 30 The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion
- Part IV Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
Summary
By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.
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- The Cambridge History of the American Essay , pp. 361 - 377Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023