Rediscovering the "Other Germany": A New Edition of the Works of Stefan Andres

Abstract

Stefan Andres (1906–1970) was born the son of a miller in the Mosel region of Germany and, following an aborted attempt to join the Catholic priesthood, studied German, art history and philosophy in Cologne, Jena and Berlin. Despite early successes with strongly autobiographical novels and the award of an Abraham Lincoln scholarship which enabled him to spend time writing in the south of Italy, an encounter which was to have long-lasting consequences, he found it difficult to establish himself in Nazi Germany. Following the loss of his job with the Cologne radio station in 1935 owing to his inability to produce the required certificate of racial purity for his “half Jewish” wife Dorothee, the subsequent two years were spent in a state of constant fear of arrest. The famous novella El Greco malt den Grosinquisitor, with its study of responses to tyranny was published in 1936, and in 1937 the family finally managed to secure permission to leave Germany for the isolated southern Italian coastal of Positano which was to become the family refuge until 1950. Despite enormous physical hardship and the tragic death of a young daughter through illness, the period of “voluntary semi exile” (Wagener 227) and quasi-“inner emigration” proved to be highly productive and decisive for the writer’s development. In the middle of work on his large-scale allegorical reckoning with the Third Reich, Die Sintflut, Andres produced his second “master novella”, Wir sind Utopia as well as numerous short prose works, many of them historical texts with veiled oppositional content which were published in newspapers in Nazi Germany.