Uwe Wittstock - Marseille 1940 - Die große Flucht der Literatur

In the organizer's words:

The event will be accompanied by a small photo exhibition of historical places and people.

June 1940: Hitler's Wehrmacht has defeated France. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and countless others who have found asylum in France since 1933. Meanwhile, the American Varian Fry arrives in Marseille to rescue as many of them as possible. Uwe Wittstock tells the stirring story of their escape at deadly risk.

"Vivid and breathless... Here you learn in detail how silence, opportunism and misunderstood restraint make brute force possible and how difficult it is to retain dignity when arbitrariness rules." Florian Illies, Die ZEIT

"A story of the great courage of individual, very different people to stand up to a monster of totalitarian politics, bureaucracy and criminality." Hilmar Klute, Süddeutsche Zeitung

It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London during a bomb scare. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is imprisoned in a French internment camp while the SS units close in.

They all end up in Marseille, from where they seek a way to freedom. It is here that Walter Benjamin delivers his last essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off on his escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of numerous German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists crossed. And it is here that Varian Fry and his comrades-in-arms risk life and limb to smuggle the persecuted out of the country. Uwe Wittstock tells the story of unbelievable courage and utter despair, of defiant hope and humanity in dark times in a densely scenic and sensitive way.

Uwe Wittstock is a writer and journalist and was editor of Focus until 2018. He previously worked as a literary editor for the FAZ, as an editor at S. Fischer and as deputy head of the features section and cultural correspondent for Die Welt. He was awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize for Journalism. His bestseller "February 1933: The Winter of Literature" (2021) was published by C.H.Beck and has been translated into nine languages.