This chapter describes in detail Neurath’s adventurous escape from The Hague with other refugees on a small boat that was intercepted by a British warship. He and his partner Marie Reidemeister were then interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, due to the encroaching threat of German invasion. The internment camps were a microcosm of Central European culture, and Neurath participated in the ‘popular university’ organized by internees of his camp. The correspondence between Neurath and Reidemeister (in separate camps) reveals their optimistic determination to continue working together, as well as Neurath’s predisposal to British culture. The Society for the Protection of Science and Learning campaigned for their release but, despite intervention from Albert Einstein, their case was not simple.

World War I sanctioned the economic rivalry between Germany and Great Britain by officially declaring the Germans political “enemies.” This created new lines of distinction in India, when the newly defined enemies were shunned from social clubs and saw their assets expropriated. German businessmen were rounded up in internment camps, supervised by Indian soldiers – a fact that challenged the (perceived) cohesion of the group of “white Western Europeans” in India. While many Indian nationalists supported Britain during the war, some took the war as an opportunity for rebellion and found support for their revolutionary aspirations in Germany. While the Indo-German conspiracy schemes during the war yielded few immediate results, they had a number of longer-term consequences, such as Germans and Indians openly reflecting on their joint interests and complementary ambitions, nationalistic Indians physically settling (and remaining) in Berlin to collaborate with German political and economic leaders, and the launch of targeted publications promoting the Indo-German alliance.

This essay places Brecht within the context of exile from Nazi Germany, follows him on his journey through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union, and reviews his years in American exile where he joined the German-speaking émigré community in Los Angeles: soon an Enemy Alien. The essay captures Brecht's lived experience of exile as it enters his writing, from his journal entries and correspondence to his numerous poems – which offer sharp insights into the exilic fate, its contemporary dimensions as well as historical antecedents. Furthermore, the essay calls attention to the precarious situation of writers in exile, deprived of publication venues and severed from audiences, and surveys Brecht's own publishing network and its virtual elimination toward the late 1930s. Finally, the essay brings Brecht into contact with other exiles, such as Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and investigates the extent to which the exilic “we” in Brecht's exile poetry – suggesting a community of exiles conjoined in their effort to combat Nazismcorresponded to an existing sense of togetherness and shared responsibility among the exiles, Brecht included: a “people's front” in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.