arts in exile

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  Medical examination of recruits in June 1935

  Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R43590, photographer: not stated

  16 March 1935

  Adolf Hitler announces the reintroduction of compulsory military service and the expansion of the Wehrmacht to 580,000 men. This is a breach of Germany's obligations according to the Treaty of Versailles. 
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  Office building, Vesey Street 20, New York

  Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945 der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, Archive of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, New York / Deutsche Akademie im Exil, EB 70/117, © Marie-Luise Hahn 1992

  1935

  Establishment of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom
  When the American Guild For German Cultural Freedom is founded, the writer Thomas Mann, who is also president of the literature department of the German Academy in Exile says: “I consider it a social responsibility of import and urgency […] to work for the free German cultural life outside of the Reich borders […] and to preserve German culture, which is dear and important to other peoples and whose survival is valued by humanity, and to bring it through a time of darkness into the future, where it can once again find a place at home. […] It is now important to bring the lively German intellect through night and winter […].
• May 1935

  The film Abdul the Damned by Austrian director Karl Grune, with the exiled German actor Fritz Kortner in the lead role, premieres. The film takes aim at dictators Hitler and Mussolini. 
• 21 June 1935

  Writers' congress "for the Defence of Culture" in Paris
  The Congress is called into being by French writers. More than 250 participants from 38 countries respond, and the German writers attending include Anna Seghers, Heinrich and Klaus Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger.
• 8 June 1935

  In further rounds of denaturalisation, writer Bertolt Brecht, actress Erika Mann and writer Walter Mehring, among others, lose their German citizenship.
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  Reich Legal Gazette with the "Reich Citizen Act"

  Reichsgeseztesblatt, issue from 15 September 1935, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

  15 September 1935

  So-called "Nuremberg Laws" passed at the Nuremberg Rally
  This collective term refers to the race laws that had long been discussed in Nazi circles and which, using racist criteria, strip Jews of almost all their civil rights, degrading them to second-class citizens. 
• 26 September 1935

  In Paris, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and other prominent German émigrés discuss a popular front against the Nazi regime
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  Carl von Ossietzky in a concentration camp, presumably Esterwegen 

  Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-93516-0010, photographer: not stated

  27 October 1935

  Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, both German Nobel Prize winners living in exile, call for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, at the time interned in a concentration camp.
• 1936

  The Man who Fell from Germany by writer Konrad Merz is published. The novel, which deals with life in exile, is issued by Querido and brings the author to prominence in exile circles.
• 4 March 1936

  A new wave of denaturlalisation deprives writer Arnold Zweig and SPD politician Kurt Schumacher, among others, of their German citizenship.