Born
into a wealthy and assimilated Jewish family in 1902,
and raised in Berlin, Hans Sahl quickly became one of
Weimar Germany’s most successful young critics. His
pioneering film criticism ranks with that of Siegfried
Kracauer (From Caligari to Hitler]. In his
literary essays, he was the early promoter of Thornton
Wilder and Ernest Hemingway. But when the Nazis seized
power, Sahl fled Germany. Via Czechoslovakia and
Switzerland, he arrived in France where he was interned
for a time with Walter Benjamin. In Marseilles, Sahl
assisted Varian Fry, the young American classicist known
as “the artists’ Schindler” who rescued thousands from
the Nazis including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Franz
Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel, Heinrich Mann and Wanda
Landowska.
Hans
Sahl himself escaped to the United States in 1942. In
New York City, he started a second career as an
outstanding translator, bringing Arthur Miller, Eugene
O’Neill, Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams to
German audiences.
Told
with sharp-eyed humor, Sahl’s Memoirs of a Moralist
narrates the adventures, romantic and literary, of a
young man in the heady whirl of Weimar Germany, against
the backdrop of the final efflorescence of German
Jewry.