About the Book
Thomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi Germany, and feted in his new country as “the greatest living man of letters.” This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley Corngold tells the little known story of Mann’s early years in America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted émigrés in Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the Circle’s nascent years in Princeton, were “stupendously” productive.
In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces the Circle left behind during Mann’s stay in Princeton, treating literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary history, and the Circle’s afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in the 20th century, and the experiences of an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers who gathered together to mourn a lost culture and to reckon with the new world in which they had arrived.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Abbreviations for Citations
Introduction
1. Thomas Mann in Princeton
2. Erich von Kahler: Mann’s Best Friend
3. Hermann Broch in Princeton
4. Mann and Einstein
5. Goethe and the Circle
6. Did Einstein Read Kafka’s Castle on Mann's Recommendation?
Towards a Conclusion
Appendix 1: A Chronicle, with Commentary
Appendix 2: Lili Kahler Remembers.
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author :
Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine and Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. He has edited 11 books, including the Norton Critical Edition of Kafka’s Selected Stories (ed. and trans., with preface, notes and critical apparatus) and the Modern Library edition of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (ed. and trans., with introduction, notes, and critical materials).
Review :
Weimar in Princeton is an authoritative, stylistically adroit, fully engaged work that, with a subtle wit, guides readers in the most pleasant way across an ideal university campus. … It is a new, irreplaceable standard work on Thomas Mann's intellectual biography and a major contribution to transatlantic literary history. (Bloomsbury translation)
The real magician here is Stanley Corngold, who has pulled Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle out of his Mind in Exile hat. With the focus on Mann’s brother exiles in Princeton—Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein--the book has been released in the Bloomsbury series, New Directions in German Studies.
With verve, elegance, and inimitable wit, Corngold provides indispensable insights into the crucial first phase of Thomas Mann’s American exile by focusing on the electrifying circle of artists, intellectuals, and scientists at Erich Kahler’s home in Princeton. Astonishingly rich in ramifications, Weimar in Princeton is an eminently readable and inspiring exploration of this most luminous collective caught within the century’s darkest epoch.
Stanley Corngold’s brilliantly nuanced book is a pendant to his The Mind in Exile and completes his in-depth exploration of this important part of Thomas Mann’s intellectual journey. This account of Mann’s everyday intercourse with figures like Einstein, Hermann Broch, and especially Erich Kahler is enlightened and enlivened by Corngold’s sly wit and engagingly elicits the civility, intellectual breadth, and sense of community Mann experienced during the Princeton years. Corngold writes for the “happy few” who relish the life and works of Thomas Mann. Weimar in Princeton will surely enlarge that fortunate circle.
Zeroing in on a particular place during a brief moment of time, Stanley Corngold uncovers a wealth of cultural, political and personal interactions never before adequately explored. The specific grain of sand in which he discovers this forgotten world is Princeton, New Jersey between 1938 and 1941, where a remarkable group of Central European exiles coalesced around the towering figures of Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hermann Broch, and Erich Kahler. Corngold fashions a moving and insightful account of their struggles to cope with the loss of their old culture and meet the challenges of the new. Weimar in Princeton is a sprightly, always engaging micro-narrative of a unique moment in twentieth-century trans-Atlantic intellectual history.
