Book description
Evelyn Juers' extraordinary book is a unique imagining of the
unconventional love affair between the writer and political activist
Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger - a tall, blonde ex-barmaid
twenty-seven years his junior - recounting their flight from Nazi
Germany in 1933, to France and then to Los Angeles.
In House of Exile their story is intricately interwoven with
others from their circle of friends, relatives and literary
contemporaries: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Franz Kafka
and Virginia Woolf, among others. It gives us a poignant glimpse of a
generation of remarkable writers who were determined to carry on
living, reading and working in wartime - in ship's cabins, train
compartments and shabby rented rooms - even though it seemed the
civilized world was coming to an end.
This is a unique portrayal of the strange, dislocated existence of
the migr , and how lives are connected and defined by writing. Evelyn
Juers enlarges the boundaries of biography to provide an intimate,
sensitively imagined view of an extraordinary time in history.
Evelyn Juers is an Australian writer, essayist, literary critic and
publisher. She was born in Germany, moved to Australia in 1960, and has
lived in Hamburg, Sydney, London and Geneva. She has a PhD from
University of Essex, on the Bront s and the practice of biography, and
has contributed to a wide range of Australian and international
publications. She is co-publisher of the literary magazine HEAT and the
Giramondo Publishing company.
