Gli esili italiani di Felix Braun

The essay reconstructs the career and ‘exiles’ of the Viennese Jewish writer Felix Braun, placing him in the rich constellation of events that profoundly conditioned his troubled vocation as a poet, as well as his material and spiritual existence. After leaving Austria in 1928, following an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a poet, Braun moved to Palermo, where he taught German literature. After ten years of what he called his ‘Sicilian exile’, he managed to get transferred to Padua in 1938. Within a few months, however, the Anschluss and the application of the racial laws forced him into a truly racist and anti-Semitic exile. On the basis of the dense correspondence with Stefan Zweig and the archival material kept in the two Italian universities, the research sheds light on the ‘tacit’ expulsion of lecturers whose weak and precarious academic qualifications did not require special decrees, resulting in the non-renewal of their contracts.