In the study of the National Socialist State and its aftermath, two unusual aspects continue to occupy historians and social science commentators. First, a factor important enough to enter into the very definition of totalitarianism is the thoroughgoing mobilization, coercive if needed, of the population of writers, teachers, professors journalists and other intellectual workers, securing cooperation - or at the least passive concurrence - in the mass-inculcation of the population in the destructive Fascist ideology. Second is the central place of dissident members of these populations in the exile. Since webs of communications with others, the majority of whom had remained in Germany, had constituted their own memberships in the populations at issue, the question of their roles in the post-war era depended importantly on the ways and means by which they restored - or refused to restore - communications with those who had remained.

Preface; Chapter 1. The "First Letters" Exile Project: Introduction, David Kettler; Chapter 2. "That I Will Return, My Friend, You Do Not Believe Yourself ": Karl Wolfskehl - Exul Poeta, Detlef Garz; Chapter 3. "I Do Not Lift a Stone": Thomas Mann's "First Letter" to Walter von Molo, Leonore Krenzlin; Chapter 4. Faust Narrative and Impossibility Thesis: Thomas Mann's Answer to Walter von Molo, Reinhard Mehring; Chapter 5. "That I Am Not Allowed for a Moment to Forget the Ocean of Blood": Hans-Georg Gadamer and Leo Strauss in Their First Letters after 1946, Thomas Meyer; Chapter 6. Return into Exile: First Letters to and from Ernst Bloch, Moritz Mutter and Falko Schmieder; Chapter 7. A Postwar Encounter without Pathos: Otto Kirchheimer's Critical Response to the New Germany, Peter Breiner; Chapter 8. An Exile's Letter to Old Comrades in Cologne: Wilhelm Sollmann's Critique of German Social Democracy and Conception of a New Party in Postwar Germany, Marjorie Lamberti; Chapter 9. First Letters: Arendt to Heidegger, Micha Brumlik; Chapter 10. Denazification and Postwar German Philosophy: The Marcuse/Heidegger Correspondence, Thomas Wheatland; Chapter 11. "It Would Be Perhaps a New Exile and Perhaps the Most Painful": The Theme of Return in Oskar Maria Graf's Letters to Hugo Hartung, Helga Schreckenberger; Chapter 12. Social Constellation of the Exile at the End of the Second World War and the Pragmatics of the "First Letters": An Objective Hermeneutic Structural and Sequence Analysis, Ulrich Oevermann; Notes on Contributors; Index.