The Austrian Centre was established in London in 1939 by Austrians seeking refuge from Nazi Germany, of whom 30,000 had reached Britain by the outbreak of World War II. It soon developed into a comprehensive social, cultural and political organisation with a theatre and a weekly newspaper of its own. A Communist-influenced organisation, it also followed a distinct political agenda. In the first book on the cultural and political life of Austrian refugees in Britain, "Out of Austria" assesses and evaluates the Austrian Centre's activities and achievements, while also examining the Austrians' often fraught relations with their British hosts. It gives a fascinating insight into such figures as Sigmund Freud, who became the Centre's Honorary President during his final months and the poet Erich Fried, then an unknown seventeen-year-old, k and sheds light on the interaction of politics and culture against the background of exile in wartime Britain.

Immortal Austria was the title of a theatrical pageant devised by Austrian refugees in wartime London, the name summarizing their collective memory of their homeland as a country of mountain scenery, historical grandeur and musical refinement. The reality of the country they had left, and the one to which some of them returned, was very different. This volume contains various studies of the representations of their homeland in the cultural production of Austrian exiles, including those projected by émigrés working in the British film industry, those portrayed in the historical novel and in the literary works of such notable authors as Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti and Robert Neumann. It opens with a survey of the make-up of the Austrian exile community and concludes with a study of attitudes to returning exiles, as reflected in the post-war literary journals. The volume thus offers students and teachers a vital cultural link between the pre-1934 Austria of the First Republic and the post-1945 Austria of the Second.

This book is the first comparative study of the novels written by five German-speaking women - Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen - who had to flee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added - together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann - an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers' narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the five writers' narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women's writing.

The war-time series for 1939-46, edited by A. J. Toynbee, comprises the following volumes: [v.1] The world in March 1939, edited by A. J. Toynbee and F. T. Ashton-Gwatkin.--[v.2] The Middle East in the war, by G. Kirk.--[v.3] America, Britain & Russia, their co-operation and conflict, 1941-1946, by W. H. McNeill.--[v.4] Hitler's Europe, edited by A. Toynbee and V. M. Toynbee.--[v.5] The Middle East, 1945-1950, by G. Kirk.--[v.6] The realignment of Europe, edited by A. Toynbee and V. M. Toynbee.--[v.7] The Far East, 1942-1946, by F. C. Jones, H. Borton and B. R. Pearn.--[v.8] Four-power control in Germany and Austria, 1945-1946. I. Germany, by M. Balfour. II. Austria, by J. Mair.--[v.9] The war and the neutrals, edited by A. Toynbee and V. M. Toynbee.--[v.10] The eve of war, 1939, edited by A. Toynbee and V. M. Toynbee.--[v.11] The initial triumph of the Axis, edited by A. Toynbee and V. M. Toynbee.

Eleven essays, most in English and a handful in German, reflect the experience of German and Austrian refugees who landed in Great Britain during the Nazi era. Three are case studies of academics and professionals who built new careers in England; two focus on refugee children, one concentrating on the fate of those educated at leading German-Jewish institutions, and one on the reading habits of children across two cultures; and the remaining essays examine developments in the political and cultural spheres. The index lists names only, not subjects. c. Book News Inc.

The essays contained in this volume were originally delivered as papers to a conference on the German-language broadcasting of the BBC, held in London in 2002. For over sixty years, the BBC German Service was Britain's most authoritative voice to the German-speaking world, representing a virtual paradigm of British cultural and political attitudes towards Germany and Austria - and helping to define their perceptions of Britain and the British. Despite the BBC's enormous cultural standing and influence, however, this volume is the first to evaluate the Corporation's German-language broadcasting since the BBC German Service was closed down in 1999. The essays fall into three broad categories: German-language broadcasting during the Second World War, broadcasting to Germany and Austria during the Cold War, and finally a series of personal accounts from former employees of the Service. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of broadcasting (including media studies) as well as those involved in German Studies and in German and Austrian Exile Studies.