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In 1933 the prominent author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger were forced to flee Germany, finding refuge first in France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Their paths were crossed in turn by those of other writers and artists displaced by war or their beliefs, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth and Kurt Schwitters. In Paris, London and Los Angeles, all around the globe, in train compartments, ships cabins, hotels, rented rooms, bombed buildings, and prison cells, they retreated into what they had left - their bodies, their minds and if they were lucky, their books and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, they built their own annexes to the House of Exile.
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