SOURCE: "Richard Beer-Hofmann: The Poet as exculpator dei," in Protest—Form—Tradition, The University of Alabama Press, 1979, pp. 123-31.

In the following essay, Elstun discusses the effects of exile on Beer-Hofmann's later work, particularly Paula, ein Fragment.

The external facts of Richard Beer-Hofmann's exile can be recounted in a few brief sentences. On the evening of August 19, 1939, after a year of hiding, he and his wife Paula left Vienna for the last time, en route to the United States via Switzerland. Beer-Hofmann was seventy-three years old; his wife, sixty. She was still convalescing from the near-fatal heart attack she had had the preceding winter; consequently they were traveling in slow stages and still in Switzerland when Paula suffered a complete collapse. After weeks in the hospital she died on October 30 and was buried in the Friesenberg Cemetery at Zurich on November 2. Unable to obtain permission to remain in...