This book is an account of what happened to some of the best German writers and journalists after they fled the Nazi terror to find shelter in France. It is a tragic intellectual drama that unfolds over seven years, and features writers such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth, as well as H. G. Wells, Andr Malraux, Aldous Huxley, and Andr Gide. It recounts how persecuted writers settled in a colony in the south of France; how they tried to counter-attack, aided by British and French writers; how they quarrelled among themselves; and how they sought to alert the...

Before Hitler comes to power Otto Abetz is a left-wing Francophile teacher in provincial Germany, mobilizing young French and German idealists to work together for peace through Franco-German reconciliation and a united Europe. Abetz marries a French girl but after 1933 succumbs to the Nazi sirens. Ribbentrop recruits him as his expert on France, tasking him with soothing the nervous French, as Hitler turns Germany into a war machine. Abetz builds up a network of opinion-moulding French men and women who admire the Nazis and detest the Bolsheviks, and encourages them to use their pens to...

Before Hitler comes to power Otto Abetz is a left-wing Francophile teacher in provincial Germany, mobilizing young French and German idealists to work together for peace through Franco-German reconciliation and a united Europe. Abetz marries a French girl but after 1933 succumbs to the Nazi sirens. Ribbentrop recruits him as his expert on France, tasking him with soothing the nervous French, as Hitler turns Germany into a war machine. Abetz builds up a network of opinion-moulding French men and women who admire the Nazis and detest the Bolsheviks, and encourages them to use their pens to...