Love in exile

Edith Anderson left America for Berlin in 1947 to join her German husband - an exile from the Nazis - who had returned to his homeland to build a new country from Hitler's ruins. Max Schroeder had been a surrealist poet/playwright in his bohemian twenties, but when Edith Anderson met him in New York at the height of World War II, he was a seasoned, forty-three-year-old political activist editing an anti-facist periodical in English and German. Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls.". Immediately after the war Max returned to Berlin where he was appointed editor-in-chief of the prestigious Aufbau Press. After a long delay in Paris where she spent time with Richard Wright, Edith eventually joined him in Allied-occupied Berlin. Edith finds herself trapped in a traditional hausfrau role, made more isolating because she is a foreigner. And Max struggles to protect his outspoken wife from knowledge of the increasingly frightening political confrontation at the epicenter of the cold war, a confrontation which shatters the lives of many of their friends in the artistic community and his own idealistic hopes for a new Germany. Anderson's recounting of her involvement in circles in Paris and Berlin populated by the likes of Wright, Christina Stead, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and composer Hanns Eisler, is rich with unique anecdote and telling insights.