Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (2007)

Caught by Politics recalls the exile of German and European visual artists and film practitioners in the United States. The book traces the paths and aesthetic strategies of Hitler exiles in the United States as ones of productive encounters and ironic cultural masquerades. While stressing creative transformations and performative self-reinventions, the accounts don't ignore the hardship of forced displacement. Caught by Politics encourages the reader to revise dominant and one-sided understandings of modernist culture and instead to engage with the various cross-cultural dialogues between European and American artists. Whether discovering the work of visual artists such as Max Beckmann and George Grosz, of designers such as Jakob Detlef Peters, or of directors and popular film practitioners such as Hans Richter, Edgar Ulmer and Peter Lorre, all authors understand their object of study not in isolation from other media of expression, but as part of the effervescent circulation of images typical for modern industrial society.