With his article German Literature as Reflected by Emigrants, which appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 26 January 1936, the Swiss literary correspondent Eduard Korrodi (1885-1955) provoked Thomas Mann to write an open letter in response, in which he made his contempt for the Nazi regime public for the first time. Worried about possible sanctions from the Nazis - in particular a ban on his books - the holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature only took hesitant action following pressure from his family. Up until now he had largely refrained from making any public political statements, but he now became an increasingly prominent figure in anti-Nazi and charitable exile movements.

Preceding Korrodi’s article was a longer essay, published by the publicist Leopold Schwarzschild in his own weekly periodical Das neue Tage-Buch [The New Diary] the day before. The thesis presented in the essay, claiming that most German writers of any distinction had emigrated following Hitler’s appointment, was disputed by both Korrodi and Thomas Mann. However, the latter also vehemently opposed Korrodi’s broad assumption equating exile and Jewish literature, as well as the derogatory classification of exiled authors as mere scribblers producing works for mass consumption. Korrodi asked with contempt what exactly had been transferred abroad and claimed that there were no authors abroad that anyone would be able to name. The publishing houses Querido and De Lange, based in Amsterdam and specialising in exile literature, disputed Korrodi’s position as the mouthpiece of German literature as a result.