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Catherine Epstein, Mario Keßler. Westemigranten: Deutsche Kommunisten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR., The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 767–768, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab342
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In Westemigranten: Deutsche Kommunisten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR, Mario Keßler tells the story of some forty-nine German leftists who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi years and returned to communist East Germany after 1945. The book’s subtitle translates to “German Communists between USA-Exile and the GDR,” yet formal criteria for membership in the group is unclear. Some belonged to the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) prior to Hitler’s rise to power, but others did not. Some neared the party in exile, but since the KPD did not maintain a formal organization in United States, they could not join the party’s ranks while abroad. Meanwhile, individuals such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and novelist Stefan Heym, both of whom receive ample coverage in the book, never belonged to a German communist party at all.
In the United States, KPD members or fellow travelers had to hide their communist sympathies. Some, including Gerhart Eisler, the most prominent KPD underground functionary in the United States, came under FBI surveillance. Despite the alleged threat that German communists and other leftists posed, Keßler’s book documents just how little influence they had on their host country: the KPD grouping achieved very little in the way of uniting the Left under an antifascist umbrella or changing US views of the Soviet Union. Pervasive anticommunism, sectarianism, and lack of resources, including poor language skills, limited their reach.
