When René Schickele left Germany in September 1932, he was of the opinion that the Nazis’ coming to power was only a matter of time. He rented out his house in Badenweiler and settled with his family in Sanary-sur-Mer. What he initially planned as a temporary stay turned into an exile without return.

René Schickele lived during the years of his exile in Sanary, St. Cyr-sur-Mer, Nice and Vence. He was in close personal contact with the emigrants who lived here and was for many, as a politically wide-awake observer and a pacifist from the very start, a much sought-after conversational partner. Suffering from ill health, he withdrew completely from political activities. Ludwig Marcuse characterised Schickele’s attitude with the following words: “He became a very quiet emigrant. […] Had he been undermined by the experience of the Weimar Republic? The hate was still there, but not the belief, and no longer the drive to make himself heard. […] Perhaps his sick heart did not permit him his earlier militancy.” In 1916, during the First World War, René Schickele, as editor of the antimilitary magazine Die Weißen Blätter (The White Pages), went into exile in Switzerland, and in the Weimar Republic he had supported German-French understanding. He was close to Annette Kolb and Thomas Mann and at first tried, like them, to continue publishing his books in Germany. For this reason he also refused to work on Klaus Mann’s magazine Die Sammlung (The Collection). However, already in 1934 he changed to the exile publisher Allert de Lange, where two of his books appeared. His final book, Le Retour (The Return), from 1938, was also his first written in French.

Selected works:
Weiß und Rot (Gedichte, 1911)
Benkal, der Frauentröster (Roman, 1914)
Das Erbe am Rhein (Romantrilogie 1925, 1927, 1931)
Die Witwe Bosca (Roman, 1934)
Die Flaschenpost (Roman, 1937) 

Further reading:
Bentmann, Friedrich (Hrsg.): René Schickele. Leben und Werk in Dokumenten. Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl 1974
Kolb, Annette / Schickele, René: Briefe im Exil 1933-1940. In Zusammenarbeit mit Heidemarie Gruppe herausgegeben von Hans Bender. Mainz: v. Hase & Koehler Verlag 1987