Suspicious but Needed: Westemigranten between U.S. Exile and Return to the GDR

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Sabrow
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233500281

This book project under the planned title "Beargwöhnt und benötigt: Westemigranten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR" (Suspicious and Needed: German Communist Émigrés Between the United States and Their Return to the GDR) focuses on the life and work of the German communist refugees in the United States, who returned, after 1945, to East Germany to help build a socialist society. It is mainly based on archival material from the US and Germany, including FBI files and personal files in the German Federal Archives and the Stasi Archives.This project will explore how the individual and collective experiences of these East German communists affected their lives and work. The group under review includes around forty individuals (around seventy with their families) who lived in the United States between 1938 and 1945-48. Among them were prominent and even famous writers, artists, and scholars, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Hanns and Gerhart Eisler, Henryk Grossmann, Stefan Heym, Alfred Kantorowicz, and Samuel Mitja Rapoport. Not all of them were members of the Communist Party of Germany, but all belonged in the US to a network that was closely linked with the party. The book will discuss the dual perception of the United States by the refugees: as a land that saved their lives and as a society that was largely racially segregated.In communist East Germany the returning refugees were welcomed and needed but likewise seen with suspicion. Their scholarly and artistic expertise could not be separated from their exile experience in the main country of "Western imperialism." The so-called Westemigranten (émigrés to the West) had to orient themselves in a society that was mainly directed by those communists who had returned from the Soviet Union or had survived Nazism in concentration camps or prisons. While many of the returnees from the US succeeded in literature, arts, science and scholarship or the media, only very few, such as Albert Norden, pursued political careers.The project will deal with the following key questions:1.) What political plans for a post-war Germany did the communist refugees conceptualize in American exile?2.) Why did these people return to East Germany and not to West Germany during the Cold War?3.) Was there a common cultural "American exile experience" that shaped the thoughts and actions of the former refugees in the GDR?4.) How did the "Westemigranten" survive the political purges of the 1950s? How was their political commitment shaped by these experiences? What were their places and positions in East German society in later years?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants