Friedel & Alfred KANTOROWICZ

Friedel (1905-1968) & Alfred Kantorowicz (1899-1979)

A doctor of law, theatre critic and later journalist and writer, this communist opponent of the Nazis came from a family of the upper bourgeois Jewish-Berlin bourgeoisie. A close friend of Feuchtwanger and Brecht from his student days, he joined the Communist Party in 1931. As soon as Hitler came to power, he emigrated to France. In 1934, he founded the Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek in Paris to collect all the writings banned and burnt by the Nazis. From 1936 to 1938, he fought in the International Brigades in Spain, then returned to Paris and Bormes. At the start of the Second World War, he was interned first at the C.R.E.* in Toulon, then for a few days at Les Milles and again in 1940 after the Nazi invasion. After his release, he found temporary refuge with his wife in Sanary, before escaping to the United States in May 1941.

*Alien Detention Centre

As soon as Hitler came to power, Alfred Kantorowicz went into exile with his companion Friedel in Paris, proud to be among the first hundred or so opponents expatriated by the Nazis and stripped of their German nationality. In Paris, he co-founded the Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil (Federation of Writers in Exile) and met other emigrants such as Heinrich Mann. A member of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschland), he joined the International Brigades in Spain in 1936, along with other German volunteers, and met Ernest Hemingway, who helped him financially during his exile.

In 1938 he returned to Paris. Thanks to Thomas Mann, he was supported, like other emigrants, by the American Writers’ Association. Friedel worked as a secretary, improving the couple’s daily life. As life was less expensive in the South of France, they considered settling either in Le Lavandou, where a number of Austrian emigrants were already staying, or in Sanary, where their friends Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz and Alma Mahler-Werfel and other intellectuals were staying for a few weeks in the summer. But in the end they settled in the old village of Bormes-les-Mimosas, in a small house below the château-fort. They were still there when the Second World War broke out and on 8 September 1939 it was decreed that all men of German and Austrian origin between the ages of eighteen and fifty had to report to the Camp de Rassemblement in Toulon. In the barracks at Mourillon, Kantorowicz got to know and appreciate the painter Anton Räderscheidt, Feuchtwanger’s neighbour in Sanary. On 15 September, the group was transferred by train to the Les Milles camp in Aix-en-Provence, where Kantorowicz met up with his friend Feuchtwanger and other old acquaintances. This first internment was short-lived and ended on 23 September 1939.

The second internment at the Les Milles camp took place on 21 May 1940 after the Wehrmacht entered France, and this time the women were not spared. They were sent to the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees, where the conditions of their internment were catastrophic. As the situation became increasingly difficult for nationals of an enemy country, Kantorowicz seized the first opportunity to escape. During a train transfer to another camp, he jumped from the moving carriage. After a perilous odyssey, Kantorowicz stayed temporarily in Marseille and was finally able to marry Friedel on 16 November 1940. A month later, they met again at the Feuchtwangers‘ villa in Sanary, who had already emigrated to the United States.

Sanary was the last place where Alfred and Friedel Kantorowicz found refuge at the end of 1940. They shared their worries with Anton Räderscheidt and Ilse Salberg, Erich Klossowski and Hilde Stieler, Franz, Helen and Ulrich Hessel, Friedrich Wolf and his partner Ruth and their baby Catherine. To keep warm, they burn the shelves of Feuchtwanger’s library and cut down the trees in Räderscheidt‘s garden, living in total destitution and trying to leave this inhospitable asylum as quickly as possible.

In February 1941, Friedel and Alfred Kantorowicz went to Marseille to obtain the necessary documents for emigration to the USA. Thus began a grueling series of hurdles. Eventually, they managed to board a ship and, via Martinique and Santo Domingo, reached the USA on June 16, 1941, arriving before the iconic Manhattan skyline. After five happy years in New York, they returned to Germany in 1946 and settled in East Berlin. The couple later separated but continued their professional association. Following the suppression of the East German uprising in June 1953 and the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956, Kantorowicz distanced himself from the GDR regime and fled to West Berlin. He died on March 27, 1979, in Hamburg, though he never renounced communism.