Zwischen zwei Welten

A successful writer, whose keen powers of observation and humanist convictions naturally drive him to openly criticise the Nazi regime, is forced to leave his homeland and emigrate to the USA. His wife and two children are already in New York. His wife works in a department store, he takes over the household, buys offal for lack of money, which almost kills the family. But then things take an extraordinary turn: just as the couple are ready to give up their last support, namely each other, in order to perhaps secure a future for the children through new relationships, fate presents a deus ex machina, a publisher who publishes the gloomy texts of the harried European. Money comes into the house, and the intellectual family man decides to do something monstrous - he begins, far away from the American metropolises of civilisation, as a small farmer in order to dedicate himself physically to the large, foreign country, even to devote himself to it, and thus make it his new home, at least for his children. 'Between Two Worlds' (written in 1942/43) is an autobiographical novel. In it, Heinrich Hauser (1901-1955) describes his escape from Germany and his life on the farm near Albany, N. Y. He lived a fairly isolated life in the USA, keeping in touch only with George Grosz, who appears as a character in the novel. Hauser returned to Germany in 1948 and became editor-in-chief of 'Stern' for a short time. The manuscript for 'Zwischen zwei Welten' was found in his estate and is now being published for the first time. In it, Hauser once again proves himself to be one of the great stylists of the German language. His works are published by Weidle Verlag: 'Donner überm Meer', novel (2001) and the Ruhr area reportage 'Schwarzes Revier' (edited by Barbara Weidle, with an afterword by Andreas Rossmann, honoured by the Stiftung Buchkunst).