Reputations

The fissure in national identity under a fascist regime has a secondary manifestation in the exile communities, in the tendency to binary oppositions in conceptualizing and evaluating the activities of inner and territorial exiles. This chapter is a case study of the German situation which, it is argued, is also transferable to the Spanish and Catalan contexts, and to other national contexts. Beginning with Zuckmayer’s secret 1944 report for the American authorities on the moral ‘character’ of prominent German writers and artists still living in the Third Reich, this chapter traces the reception of Zuckmayer’s report since its publication in 2002, and the rise and fall of reputations of selected inner and territorial exiles after 1945 on a cultural and critical ‘stock market’ in academic and public discourse—with particular regard to the ‘1968’ caesura in West German cultural politics and the political and ideological division of Germany to 1989—and the persistence of this market model to the present day.