No Happy
End: The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration
to the U.K. and U.S., 1933-1945 will focus on the emigration
of German-speaking intellectuals to the United States and the
United Kingdom during World War II. It is during this time that Bard welcomed many distinguished
émigrés from Europe. These scientists, artists,
teachers, and writers included Stefan Hirsch, the precisionist
painter; Felix Hirsch, the political editor of the Berliner
Tageblatt; the violinist Emil Hauser, founder of the Budapest
String Quartet; the labor economist Adolf Sturmthal; the psychologist
Werner Wolff; and the philosopher Heinrich Bluecher, husband of
the outspoken philosopher and political activist Hannah Arendt.
The first
in a series of events leading up to the conference will be a three-day
closed Workshop. As part of
this workshop, Bard will host a public Roundtable
Discussion call On Exile.
No
Happy End will take place in August
2002 and coincide with the thirteenth annual Bard
Music Festival, which focuses on the Austrian Composer Gustav
Mahler. At the peak of his career conducting in Vienna in the
late nineteenth century, Mahler, despite being baptized as a Catholic,
resigned from the Vienna State Opera in the face of increasing
criticism from an anti-Semitic press. He left Vienna for New York,
where he spent the remaining years of his short life conducting
first the Metropolitan Opera and later the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra. The widespread American reception of Mahler's music,
however, had to await the arrival of Hitler's exiles.
