I’ve just finished reading Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann. The title is a little misleading. Though the book focuses on Heinrich (Thomas’s brother) and Nelly, it’s really a group portrait of a range of European writers and intellectuals from the Weimar era to World War II. And though it’s titled House of Exile, it opens with the back story to several of the writers and their relationships, prior to their exile from Nazi Europe. It also intersperses their story with that of other writers who never went into exile, like Virginia and Leonard Woolf. It’s not clear, throughout, whether it’s meant to be a group biography or a combination of […]