"Die Hauptstadt der deutschen Literatur"

Sanary-sur-Mer, a small fishing town on France’s Mediterranean coast between Marseilles to the west and Nice to the east, was between 1933 and 1941 the “Capital of German literature.” It was the first staging post on the road into exile for some of the Weimar Republic’s leadings writers, among others, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel, each of whom spent some time there. But the path from being an (e)migration site to being a site remembered – a site of memory and of commemoration – was long.