arts in exile

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• 20 April 1933

  The French Minister of the Interior Camille Chautemps issues generous special decrees for the intake of refugees. However this is rescinded on 16 October due to the large quantity of refugees from Germany.
• 25 April 1933

  The "Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities" is passed; it introduces quotas for Jewish school and university students.
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  Klaus Mann writing German-language handbills during his military service in the US army, Italy 1944

  United States 5th Army / Monacensia. Literaturarchiv und Bibliothek München. Sign. KMF 135, courtesy of Frido Mann

  May 1933

  Public confrontation between the writers Gottfried Benn and Klaus Mann
  In a personal letter to Gottfried Benn, Klaus Mann writes “What could have caused you to put your name – that has been for us the embodiment of high standards and a simply fanatical purity – at the disposal of those whose lack of standards is absolutely without parallel in European history and from whose moral impurity the world turns away in disgust?” Benn reacted in a public letter “Answer to the literary emigrants” in the Deutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung: “And so there you sit in your bathing resorts and take us to task, because we are working on building a new state […]. You wish upon this state and its people war inflicted by all the foreign nations in order to destroy it, bring its collapse, its demise.
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  Robert Ley, head of the Nazi trade union organisation German Labour Front (DAF)

  Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2008-0922-501, photographer: not stated

  2 May 1933

  Suppression of the unions
  The Nazi “Committee for the Protection of German Labour” headed by Robert Ley replaced elected trade unionist with its commissars.  
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  Book burning on Berlin's Opernplatz on 10 May 1933
  

  Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597, photographer: Pahl, Georg

  10 May 1933

  Book-burning
  Nazi students burn the books of “undesirable” authors on Berlin’s Opernplatz. This campaign, which became known as the book-burnings, takes place all over Reich territory following the same ritual: first of all the “Twelve theses against the un-German spirit” are proclaimed and then books burned on bonfires and their authors decried.
• May 1933

  In the Netherlands, Kurt Egon Wolff's political cabaret Ping-Pong becomes one of the first cabarets to operate in exile.
• May 1933

  Establishment of the Social Democrats' Exile Committee (Sopade) in Prague
• 9 June 1933

  The Reich Association of German Writers, a mandatory Nazi association for writers, is established. Membership is denied to authors deemed politically or artistically undesirable.
• 22 June 1933

  The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) is banned. The party’s entire assets and its organisations are confiscated. SPD members are banned from exercising their professions or trades. Following this the remaining independent parties dissolve themselves by the beginning of June. 
• 1933

  In Paris the journalist Rudolf Olden publishes the Black Book, which documents the situation of Jews in Germany.