The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton

"In the years 1938-1941, Princeton was home to an extraordinary constellation of émigré intellectuals-including a particular quartet of thinkers: the novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and perhaps the least well known of the group, a professor and polymath at the Institute for Advanced Study, Eric Kahler.

This book aims to tell the story of their intimate artistic, political, and intellectual activity during the years of Mann's residence in Princeton as a Professor of Humanities at Princeton.

The group, who met one another often, mainly at the house of Kahler or Mann, was termed by Charles Greenleaf Bell, a young poet and ardent disciple of Kahler, the "Kahler-Circle." They were fiercely productive scholars.

During Mann's residence, he finished his "Goethe-novel" Lotte in Weimar; composed a surrealistic Indian novella The Transposed Heads; and resumed work on the last novel in his epic tetralogy Joseph and His Bro