House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

Writer Heinrich Mann, brother of the more famous Thomas, was a leading literary figure in Weimar Germany and an outspoken opponent of fascism. He escaped Germany just before Hitler’s ascent to power in February 1933. The Nazi regime subsequently burnt his work and placed him on a wanted list.

House of Exile is a biography of Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger which essays the invisible, unnameable, uncountable aspects of what was lost for these and other ‘incurably European’ refugees from fascism. Despite the decade Juers spent researching it, in style her book is more like a novel than a conventional biography, deeply imagined, and often beautifully written. Juers, who was born in northern Germany and has a migrant’s awareness of the frailness and coincidentality of much human connection, works with a huge palette, cramming snippets of other lives – Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Daniel Solander – into her book.

Whether readers find this intrusive or fascinating, ultimately *House of Exil*e is not only a gripping human story but a rewarding exploration of the fate of the artist’s sensibility under the Third Reich.