After the success of their jointly published 1939 book Escape to Life, Erika and Klaus Mann swiftly began working on a follow-up project, which was issued by the New York publisher Modern Age Books in early 1940 under the title The Other Germany. Complementing their numerous lectures – educational talks about Germany, which they held across the USA – the siblings used their programmatically titled book to pursue the goal of convincing the Anglophone public of the existence of an “other Germany” beyond the Nazi regime. In their judgement, the fact that the majority of their fellow countrymen consorted with the dictatorship is more an expression of despair than of ideological conformity: “In all truth and justice we maintain that the overwhelming majority of the German people are bitterly disillusioned with Hitler. This majority urgently desire to be rid of him.”

The basic assumption that the German people suffered political paternalism by a despicable regime – whether due to their naiveté, helplessness or despondent resignation – was publicly shared, at least initially, by numerous intellectuals who emigrated after 1933. According to their understanding, they themselves represented the true, real German culture, against which Nazism has sinned. As a slogan, “The Other Germany” thus meant a confrontational challenge and self-assurance in equal measure. The book of the same name by the Mann siblings, however, did not meet with a big audience: Only one print run was published and even after the War, it was never translated into German.