What was the driving force that motivated Austrians driven out of their homeland after 1938 and seeking refuge in the United States and Canada to devote their professional lives to the cultivation of literature in German, thus becoming intermediaries re-tilling the intellectual subsoil of the 'perpetrator cultures' Germany and Austria in their new home? Alongside practical considerations it was certainly a love of literature, of Kafka, Rilke, Werfel, Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and their literary worlds, all of which held out the prospect of regaining a finer, more humane homeland. Throughout, however, their suspicion of German literary studies (a discipline which as early as the 1920s had vigorously supported the dissemination of nationalist and national socialist cultural ideology at Germany's universities) remained very marked indeed. At the same time, the analytic re-acquisition of literature, philosophy and art was a way of rebelling against the enforced abandonment not only of murdered friends, slaughtered relatives and confiscated property but also everything which had started to represent a home from home culturally, intellectually and emotionally.

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Inhalt: Beatrix Müller-Kampel, Lebenswege und Lieblingslektüren österreichischer NS-Vertriebener in den USA und Kanada. - Interviews: Walter Herbert Sokel, ... das wäre der Tod. Und so erfand ich mir eine Person. - Peter Heller, Mit der Psychoanalyse in der rechten und dem Marxismus in der linken Hand. - Herbert Lederer, Mein kulturelles Erbe ist Wien. - Hans Eichner, Es sind die Menschen, die Heimat ausmachen. - Egon Schwarz, Ich wurde also ein Grenzgänger zwischen den Gebieten und Kontinenten. - Harry Zohn, Ich habe mir meine Muttersprache nicht vermiesen oder rauben lassen. - Dorrit Claire Cohn, Emigranten, alles Emigranten. - Ruth Klüger, Man lernt sich irgendwie ausbreiten in der eigenen Sprache. - Evelyn Torton Beck, Ich habe die ganze Sache irgendwie überlebt mit dem Lesen.