Oskar Maria Graf
WriterAn important event at the beginning of Oskar Maria Graf’s exile was his angry protest “burn me!” against the book burnings of 10 May 1933. Yet Graf’s exile had already begun with the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February. At this time Graf was in Vienna and never returned to Germany.
Alexander Granach
Actor, WriterWhen Alexander Granach emigrated from Germany on 29 March 1933, he was one of the most successful expressionist actors in Germany. In the political theatre of Berlin – in the ensemble of director Erwin Piscator, among others – he was a popular actor.
Olga Grjasnowa
WriterOlga Grjasnowa spent the first years of her life in Baku, Azerbaijan. When she was eleven, she and her family left the Soviet Union.
Walter Gropius
Architect, DesignerWhen Walter Gropius went to England in October 1934, he did not think that he would spend the next two and a half years living there. His planned stay in England was connected to a project that he was working on.
George Grosz
Painter, Graphic designerIn 1932, the painter George Grosz received an invitation to teach at New York’s Art School, the Art Students League, upon which he embarked on his journey to the USA without delay. The attitude towards art held by the one-time communist, member of Berlin’s DADA scene and critic of German bourgeois society had already begun to change at that time and he no longer saw art first and foremost as an instrument for improving people and society.
Lea Grundig
Painter, Graphic designerAs a Jew, a communist and an artist, Lea Grundig was persecuted and vilified by the Nazis. From 1933 she was an active member of the anti-fascist resistance and saw herself – until her expulsion from Germany – as an artist in domestic exile.
Martin Gumpert
Publicist, WriterIn his autobiography Hölle im Paradies (Hell in Paradise), Martin Gumpert describes a walk through the suburb of Wedding in his hometown of Berlin. He had moved into a guesthouse and behaved as if he were a foreigner. Shortly afterwards, this became a reality: in 1936 the Jewish doctor and writer emigrated to America.
Joseph Hahn
Graphic designer, WriterAt first Hahn wanted to be an art teacher in his native Bohemia, but he broke off his studies in order to dedicate himself entirely to art. In 1937 he went to Prague to study painting at the academy of arts.
Jakob Haringer
WriterAlthough little other than a cover address in Breslau is known of Jakob Haringer’s life in exile in the years from 1933 to 1935, his exile work opens in spectacular fashion. In his Deutschland-Ode [Ode to Germany] published in 1934 in the exile publication Neuen Tage-Buch, Haringer strikes the tone of sharp, emotional indignation typical of this early period of anti-Fascist exile poetry and pours condemnation on the new rulers: “The brown plague has crept in and suffocated you, / In cowardice they have gagged and bedevilled you - / My most beautiful country.
John Heartfield
Painter, Graphic designer, Illustrator“We noticed, or maybe I noticed in particular, that the pencil was too weak to convincingly hammer it home to people what one had to say at the time.” (ed. trans.) (John Heartfield, radio interview, 1966) Heartfield saw his art as a tool in the fight for what was right.
