This essay discusses the drama Another Sun, a collaboration between Hitler's most outspoken American opponent, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, and Fritz Kortner, the Jewish actor from the Weimar stage whom the Nazis hated intensely. Problems of language and accents, intrinsic to the exile experience, comprise the heart of the play. The main character of the drama, an exiled actor, struggles to accept that he can no longer take on the Shakespearean roles he had so successfully performed in Berlin, due to his inability to master them in their original language. Numerous other parallels to Kortner's and Thompson's own lives run throughout the play and inform its main characters. The following analysis presents the first close reading of the drama in the secondary literature to date, and explores three main reasons for the play's failure on Broadway: transcultural conflicts, signified by the use of languages and accents in the plot; the cultural differences between the American stage and the Weimar theater; and political sentiments in the United States at the time of the drama's premiere in 1940.

For exile they change their homes and pleasant thresholds to seek a country lying beneath another sun.