An Interview with Exile Scholar Spalek: “It’s Detective Work”
President Lehmann, awardee Spalek: “I almost seem like an historical figure to myself.” (Photo: Maik Schuck)
30 August 2010
John Spalek is fighting against time. For forty years, he has been rescuing the estates of German-speaking emigrants in the United States. He – along with philosopher Ágnes Heller and poet Fuad Rifka – has now been conferred a Goethe Medal for his commitment. We talked with him about letters, photos and persuasion.
What significance does the Goethe Medal have for you?
Spalek: I feel honoured, but it’s far more important that exile study is acknowledged and made known through it – the Goethe Medal is recognition for working with the writers, scientists and artists who were forced to leave Germany.
You originally come from Poland and spent the Second World War with your family in the east of the country – are there still memories that are important to you today?
I am basically an emigrant myself. I left my mother tongue – Polish – and then used Russian and then German, then English, then Spanish.
Saturday, 28 August 2010. It is the 261st birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. And for the 56th time, the Goethe-Institut is awarding the Goethe Medal. This year, institute president Klaus-Dieter Lehmann is conferring the medal on the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, the Lebanese poet and translator Fuad Rifka and the American exile scholar John M. Spalek. This medal honours foreign personalities who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations. Past awardees include Pierre Bourdieu, Billy Wilder and Daniel Barenboim.
In his welcoming address, Lehmann recognized this year’s three awardees as people who advocate the autonomy and originality of culture in a globalized world and who promote imaginative dialogue between Germany and the world. With their lives’ works they have performed services that the Goethe-Institut relies on in its worldwide activities: “The aspiration and the ability to understand are the prerequisites for our work.”
You came to Germany from Poland and then emigrated to the United States at the age of 21. That is where you discovered exile studies and preserved many emigrant’s estates for research. Where and how did you find these estates?
My very first was a partial estate of Fritz von Unruh that I found in Albany, New York as early as 1970. We had to crawl into an attic and pull out the boxes.
The west coast of the United States was a centre of German-speaking emigration – were you able to meet some of the individuals personally?
Yes, because I began early enough in the mid 1960s. And that is what steered my life for the following decades. I was able to meet a large number of people, mainly in the film industry, for example the director Henry Koster, whose real name was Kosterlitz, as well as others. I knew Marta Feuchtwanger very well then, a brother of writer Bruno Frank, the son of Vicki Baum, Billy Wilder and various others. I almost seem like an historical figure to myself, because I actually knew the people.
Were these sad encounters, because the people had been forced to flee the Nazis? Or was there more an atmosphere of: we survived and will start again here in America?
The latter case; we rarely spoke about the sad parts of their experiences. Most of them were very successful; I was talking to people who had made something of themselves, who were luminaries in their fields. They were people who had made it and who were proud of it. And that’s how I, unintentionally, began collecting and founding archives.
In this work are you sort of a literary academic detective?
Definitely! It’s detective work. You search for evidence from the people’s lives that they can still remember.
You came back to the German exile museum in Frankfurt with a lot of boxes; what did you bring this time?
One of the boxes is from the photographer and writer Peter Basch. He primarily photographed beautiful women and left behind thousands of letters, documents and photos – four trunks full. This family was a saver family. They didn’t throw anything away. There were still newspaper clippings from 1910; his father produced silent films in Germany. The other individual is a certain Peter Engelmann, from a family that had to emigrate back then to Turkey and came to the United States later. His daughter gave me the estate. Then there’s Wilhelm Solzbacher – interesting for me because he had eluded me before. He was a pacifist activist and left Germany as early as 1933 because he was in danger of being arrested. I wish I had met him earlier.
At first, these boxes will be put in a room unsorted. What will happen here in Frankfurt with these estates?
They will be sorted through, organized, archived. Sometimes that takes a very long time. I wish that the public would hear about these things more frequently. But, visitors come and essays and dissertations are written.
Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht are well-known names, but Fritz von Unruh, Ernst Toller, Soma Morgenstern, Ivan Heilbut whose estates you found, these are people who are no longer widely known today. Should we deal more with the subject matter of exile?
Of course! This is German history and not the weakest part of it. These are important individuals who had to leave the country. A considerable portion of German culture was lost. What Germany lost back then ought to be rediscovered. There is a still a lot of work to be done.
How is it with the funding? Is it a battle?
Yes. But I’ve long gotten used to getting funding for increasingly shorter time spans. Currently I am looking around for new funding again. I would have liked to work another two years; there are a number of estates left. It’s not just a matter of picking up the estates, but of negotiation. Sometimes it goes very badly, but not often. And I regret it when I arrive too late. There are families that keep documents at home – then there’s a fire and everything burns; it’s all happened. Now, I usually negotiate with the children of the emigrants’ generation, that’s a bit more difficult, they often don’t speak German and have no relationship to their parents’ homeland. I have to persuade them to send the material to Germany, where their parents at one time had been made refugees; I have to assure them that the documents will be handled well and catalogued and made available to researchers.
The interview was held by Deutsche Welle journalist Cornelia Rabitz
Published with the kind permission of Deutsche Welle
