“Rot-Weiss-Rot bis in den Tod!” — Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiss in Paris

From the moment the Nazis grabbed power, many Austrian writers living in Germany knew that the game was up if they stayed on there. Some, like Robert Musil and Stefan Großmann, simply returned home to carry on writing there as best they could. Fortunate enough to be supported by a Viennese foundation bearing his name, Musil continued working on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, whose second volume had appeared in Berlin in December 1932. To remind the public of his existence as he worked on the next installment, Musil published a collection of shorter items with the Humanitas Verlag in Zurich, ironically entitled Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers of a Living Writer, 1936). In the prescient and challenging essay “Unabhängiges Österreich” (Independent Austria), published in Klaus Mann's Amsterdam-based journal Die Sammlung, Großmann turned his attention to the state of the nation itself following the events of February 1934. This essay was promptly banned there.2 Such experiences may explain why many other Austrian writers domiciled in Germany chose not to return home as the country sank into its own form of fascism. A large proportion of these non-returning expatriates were Jews, often with roots in the former “Kronländer” rather than the new Austria. Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiss were two such emigrés who, like Heinrich Heine a century beforehand, travelled to France in the hope it would provide a refuge from Germany's rottenness.