correction
An earlier version of this review incorrectly said that Albert Einstein was engaged in work at Princeton University in the 1930s. Einstein was one of the first faculty members at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent center which is located in Princeton but not affiliated with Princeton University. This text has been corrected.
“I am an American,” Thomas Mann said during a radio interview in 1940. If he sounded relieved, it was because he was: He had been in limbo for years. Mann left Germany in 1933, and the Nazi government deprived him of his German citizenship in 1936. He first took up residence in Switzerland and later became a citizen of Czechoslovakia. As Adolf Hitler’s expansionist intentions became clearer in the late 1930s, Mann must have realized how unsafe it was becoming for him to stay in Europe. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 probably sealed the writer’s decision to move to the United States, when he was in his 60s.
