House of Exile

March 7, 2011
The unlikely relationship between the anti-Nazi German literary lion and a bar hostess anchors this vivid if jumbled group portrait of a lost generation of European writers. Juers, publisher of Giramondo Publishing and Heat magazine, follows novelist Mann and his second wife from their romance in Weimar era Berlin into exile in France when Hitler took power and thence to Los Angeles, where they were alienated by the empty streets and "thin civilization." Juers's attempts to impute a rich soul to her underdocumented heroine ("If Madame Bovary had fallen into her hands, I imagine what she would have loved most was its intimacy") yield mixed results: she presents a brave, warmhearted but troubled woman who comes alive mainly during repeated nervous breakdowns. The couple are ensemble players amid a swirl of fragmentary vignettes of intellectual icons, including Mann's Nobel-winning brother, Thomas; Bertolt Brecht; Freud; and Virginia Woolf, who keeps popping up with little connection to other people or events. Mundane life clashes with the catastrophic as modernist refugees grasp at love and literature while the world burns. But with lives overtaken by persecution, homelessness, suicide, and mass murder, Juers's collage gels into a haunting evocation of Europe's tragedy.