A Life in Two Worlds: An Experiment in Autobiography

A Life in Two Worlds is the autobiography of a man who lived two lives, one as an Expressionist dramatist in the cultural ferment of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the other as eminent teacher and scholar of German literature after his emigration to the United States in 1936. In these pages, Hitler’s Germany is seen from the inside, as is American academic life in both its positive and negative aspects. Innovative in its form, this book successfully mirrors the discontinuities and disorder of modern experience. Further, it treats with insight and originality such universal themes as the centrality of choice in human life, the problems of aging, and, particularly relevant in the contemporary world, the fate of the exile and outsider.