The Cold War and German Inner Emigration

This chapter ranges across inner and outer emigration in the German case, beginning with the debate about inner emigration in 1945 but going on to consider the Cold War implications of the inner-vs.-outer distinction. East German literary culture was more associated with outer, while West German literary culture was associated with inner emigration. The chapter argues that the distinction between the actual literary production of the two kinds of emigration was not as great as is sometimes believed, since even many literary emigrants did not, for the most part, write novels or plays that dealt directly with life in Nazi Germany, let alone denounce the Nazis directly and explicitly. One can also speak of something like inner emigration subsequently even in East Germany, although East Germany celebrated the work of the ‘outer’ emigrants. The argument is made with reference to novels by outer emigrants (such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945) and Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943). Hesse’s novel, for example, very much has the spirit of much of the inner emigration even though he left Germany long before the Nazis came to power.