Michael Lentz wrote his novel Pazifik Exil as an artist-in-residence at Villa Aurora – the former residence of writer Lion Feuchtwanger in California. Like Klaus Modick, who wrote a novel about the friendship between Feuchtwanger and writer Bertolt Brecht, Lentz brings the theme of exile between 1933 and 1945 into the present. The novel distils the exiles' works and private papers into a literary text.

At the same time, Lentz presents portraits of the members of the German exile community in California and traces the paths that brought them there. In addition to Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schönberg, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht appear as characters in the novel. In the course of the narrative, the reader learns how Thomas Mann, to the owner's chagrin, writes his successful novel Dr. Faustus in a chair lent to him by Schönberg, or of a party at which neither Brecht nor Eisler can quite break the ice with the Californian crowd. The text switches back and forth between inner monologues and third-person narration. 

Without following a strict chronology, Lentz depicts various episodes in the exile experience. At the same time, past events – ostensibly factual – repeatedly overlap with the present. The dialogues are highly fictionalised to produce scenes that are exemplary of the living conditions of the exiles. They highlight the effects of exile on their artistic work and raise questions as to the literary legacy of exile.