Hermann Kesten

[1] Kesten was born in Pidvolochysk (Galicia (Eastern Europe), Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1900, a son of a Jewish merchant.

1933, when Hitler came to power, he left Germany, and in Paris Kesten began working for the Amsterdam publisher Allert de Lange.

Amsterdam became a centre of exile for German book-publishing in the 1930s and Kesten, who moved there and became part of it, took seriously the task of creating communities and preserving continuities, editing banned writers known and unknown, past and present, from Heinrich Heine to Bertholt Brecht.

Indeed, the experience of those troubled times yielded fiction and nonfiction: novels tracing contrasting fates – Die Zwillinge von Nürnberg ("The Twins of Nuremberg", 1946) – or a Jew's recovery, against the odds, of his faith – Die fremden Götter ("Strange Gods", 1949) – or biographies of seekers after varieties of freedom – Copernicus (1948) and Casanova (1952).

Kesten's periodic moves (he lived in New York, Munich, Switzerland and for many years in Rome) did not sever his links with Germany.