Reading with Kristine von Soden: Writing by the sea, in exile after 1933

"The world ends more quietly here," said Bertolt Brecht about his place of refuge on the Danish island of Funen. Nowhere was he more productive than in the former fishing village of Skovbostrand near the old seafaring town of Svendborg.

However, very few of those expelled from Hitler's Germany succeeded in gaining a foothold and making new contacts in their forced exile. Deprived of their publication opportunities and readership, many suffered from extreme isolation and financial hardship, but at the same time found inner stability in the beauty of the seaside nature and were inspired to write by the aura of Ostend in Flanders, Ibiza or the coasts of Italy.

Using selected letters, poems and prose pieces by Bertolt Brecht, Irmgard Keun, Rose Ausländer, Walter Benjamin and Else Lasker-Schüler, among others, the author and exile researcher Dr. Kristine von Soden paints a vivid picture of that time - with many facets and details that have long since been forgotten.