Alice La Roche-Herzog (1907-1995)
& Wilhelm Herzog (1884-1960)
Man of letters, playwright, and editor, this convinced pacifist of German-Jewish origin leaves Berlin as early as 1929, anticipating the rise to power of the Nazis. He settled in Sanary in 1930 where he often received visits from Heinrich Mann, but could not convince him to leave Nice and settle in Sanary.
In 1933, invited by the German League of Human Rights for a brief stay in Berlin, he was pursued by the SA* and had to exile himself permanently, leaving his library of 8,000 books behind. Interned in 1939 and 1940 at the Camp des Milles, he managed to leave France with his wife in 1941, but remained stranded for four years in Trinidad before reaching New York.
*The Sturmabteilung stormtroopers are a paramilitary formation of the nazi party that played an essential role in Hitler’s march to power.
Known for his play ‘The Dreyfus Affair’ written in collaboration with Hans Rehfisch, Wilhelm Herzog, editor, left-wing writer, encyclopedist, and convinced pacifist, has regularly been coming to France since 1906.
He stays in Paris, Nice, Bandol, Six-Fours and settles periodically in Sanary from 1930 onwards. He is a scholar who loves France and publishes literary works on Balzac, La Bruyère, Stendhal, Alphonse Daudet and others in Switzerland. He starts his journalistic activities with the newspaper ‘PAN’, which brings him into contact with many personalities from the literary scene and public life. In fact, Hans Siemsen, exiled in 1940 to Sanary, publishes his first movie critique article before the First World War in the same newspaper. In 1920, Herzog travels to Russia where he meets Lenin and Trotsky.
In Sanary, Herzog meets his friends René Schickele and Heinrich Mann when the latter is passing through, as he is settled in Nice and prefers to stay there. He also becomes friends with Franz Werfel, whom he supports for the Nobel Prize in Literature. From 1934, Herzog writes texts for the Berlin daily National-Zeitung, for which he also publishes political articles under the pseudonym ‘Julian Sorel’. In May 1940, Wilhelm Herzog is interned at the Milles camp in Aix-en-Provence. He comes out of it ill and after hospitalization in Nîmes, he reunites with his wife in September in Sanary. Faced with the seriousness of his condition, Alice Herzog requests a visa for her husband to leave France for treatment in Switzerland. The request remains unanswered, despite the favorable opinion of the Sanary City Hall which supports it. In 1941, with the help of Varian Fry, the couple manages to escape via Marseille to reach the United States, which they will only reach after four years of internment in Trinidad.
After a two-year stay in New York, Alice and Wilhelm Herzog returned to Europe in 1947. They first settled in Basel, then in Munich from 1952 onward, where Wilhelm died on April 18, 1960.
TO FIND OUT MORE
The Jacques Duhamel multimedia library in Sanary-sur-Mer has a collection of books on the theme of the memory of exile in Sanary.