Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
The Berlin Summer of Thomas Wolfe: A Southern Mountaineer Author's Bizarre Sojourn in Nazi Germany, As Recounted in _You Can't Go Home Again_
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can't Go Home Again (1940) makes copious, and characteristic, use of the author’s life experiences. In Book VI of You Can’t Go Home Again, “I Have a Thing to Tell You” (“Nun Will Ich Ihnen ‘Was Sagen”), Wolfe recounts a time when his blossoming literary fame collided with some of the grimmest historical developments of the 20th century. Wolfe, whose debut novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) had achieved great popularity in Germany, learned that, under the laws of the Nazi regime, non-German authors could not take the royalties for their book sales out of Germany; such authors could gain access to their royalties only by traveling to Germany and spending those royalties in the country. This strange turn of events meant that in the summer of 1936, Wolfe found himself experiencing celebrity status, with money to burn, in the cruelest dictatorship on earth. Wolfe, a Southern Mountaineer author who often critiqued the social injustices and inconsistencies he saw at work in his Western North Carolina homeland, parodies the travel literature of the time as he turns his perceptive gaze toward a totalitarian society where the vast majority of citizens take it for granted that, sooner or later, their Fuehrer will lead them into war. Because Wolfe died in 1938, before the beginning of the Second World War, this section of You Can’t Go Home Again provides a particularly valuable insight into the horrors of Nazism, written without the benefit of post-1945 hindsight.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Paul Haspel is an instructor in English at Central Carolina Community College. His research interests include literature and culture of the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay regions.
The Berlin Summer of Thomas Wolfe: A Southern Mountaineer Author's Bizarre Sojourn in Nazi Germany, As Recounted in _You Can't Go Home Again_
Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can't Go Home Again (1940) makes copious, and characteristic, use of the author’s life experiences. In Book VI of You Can’t Go Home Again, “I Have a Thing to Tell You” (“Nun Will Ich Ihnen ‘Was Sagen”), Wolfe recounts a time when his blossoming literary fame collided with some of the grimmest historical developments of the 20th century. Wolfe, whose debut novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) had achieved great popularity in Germany, learned that, under the laws of the Nazi regime, non-German authors could not take the royalties for their book sales out of Germany; such authors could gain access to their royalties only by traveling to Germany and spending those royalties in the country. This strange turn of events meant that in the summer of 1936, Wolfe found himself experiencing celebrity status, with money to burn, in the cruelest dictatorship on earth. Wolfe, a Southern Mountaineer author who often critiqued the social injustices and inconsistencies he saw at work in his Western North Carolina homeland, parodies the travel literature of the time as he turns his perceptive gaze toward a totalitarian society where the vast majority of citizens take it for granted that, sooner or later, their Fuehrer will lead them into war. Because Wolfe died in 1938, before the beginning of the Second World War, this section of You Can’t Go Home Again provides a particularly valuable insight into the horrors of Nazism, written without the benefit of post-1945 hindsight.
