An entire forgotten corpus of US writing on the Nazi German enemy boomed in a matter of a few years, peaked during World War II, and collapsed within months of the war ending. For a fleeting moment in history, significant parts of the intellectual world in the United States converged to provide a cool-headed analysis of the Nazi threat and a clear identification of the enemy. Starting in 1944, these writers also offered an elaborate plan for a postwar re-education that would transform the National Socialist German nation into a democratic ally. Readers alarmed by the current resurgence of authoritarianism will learn from the work of those activists who analyzed Nazi Germany during World War II. This book, the first monographic study of this literature, provides pointed introductions to the main intellectual projects, their unique collaborative spirit, and their epochal results.

‘This book attempts to do for German exile culture what Mark McGurl’s The Program Era did for American prose. Ponten shows how various masterpieces of mid-century literature and social science were the product of intellectual networks connecting émigrés with US scholars and with government institutions. The result is a highly exciting revision of the standard picture of wartime culture!’

Tobias Boes - author of Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

‘Diving into the gray waters of ‘memorandum culture’ with the courage to explore its hidden recesses, Ponten has not only fashioned a refreshing new account of the collaboration of European émigrés and American intellectuals in the struggle against fascism, he has provided a boldly original model for anyone curious about the fluid realm of inchoate ideas before they congeal into the familiar landmarks of conventional intellectual history.’

Martin Jay - author of Magical Nominalism

‘This is a remarkable study of the intellectual front against fascism. By excavating the ‘gray literature’ of reports, memoranda, and pamphlets, it demonstrates that the confrontation with Nazism created new modes of thought-including by Margaret Mead, Franz Neumann, David Riesman, and Siegfried Kracauer-that shaped not just the war effort, but postwar intellectual life as well. An extraordinarily compelling- and novel! - history.’

Jeffrey K. Olick - author of In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949

‘Frederic Ponten’s book sheds light on an important and yet previously overlooked dimension of intellectual collaboration and resistance during WWII. Blending intellectual history, print culture studies, and literary theory, Enemy Literature is a welcome addition to our understanding of European and American intellectual life amid the specter of Nazism.’

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen - author of The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History