Kurt Hiller — A ‘Stänkerer’ in Exile 1934–1955

One of the most prominent literary and political figures of the Weimar Republic, Kurt Hiller was associated at an early age with many –isms (Expressionism, Activism) and many groups, journals and publications — Der Neue Club (many of whose members would end up in exile in England), Die Aktion , Das Neopathetische Cabarett, Der Kondor , the Ziel‐Bucher and the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft. As a homosexual, Jew, political agitator, pacifist and anti‐fascist, Hiller was arrested early in 1933 by the Nazis and brutally treated. After release from concentration camp he made his way into exile, first to Czechoslovakia and then to England, where he remained until 1955. After internment in that country Hiller continued to be the trouble‐maker he had always been. An anti‐Communist as well as an anti‐Nazi, he refused to associate with front organisations such as the Free German League of Culture and instead set up his own splinter groups, GUDA (Gruppe Unabhängiger Deutscher Autoren) and FDS (Freiheitsbund Deutscher Sozialisten). After the war a series of books by him — Köpfe und Tröpfe, Rote Ritter, Ratioaktiv, Leben gegen die Zeit — reminded his lost readers of his brilliant prose. When he then eventually returned to Germany in the heady days of the revolutionary students’ movement he enjoyed a brief period of fame once more. Since then his fame has faded and the man Der Spiegel described as ‘the most significant hot‐head of the radical Left’ has once again become a forgotten figure, his career destroyed by some twenty years of exile.