His unwavering commitment was also born of his personal history: “I have to confess to myself that I probably wouldn’t have been so dedicated to this exile research [...] if something about it didn’t appeal to me. There is perhaps something personal about it, in the sense that I am myself a kind of emigrant. I abandoned my Polish mother-tongue, then used Russian, then German and then English and then Spanish, etc.”, is how he himself described the connection between his origins and his interest in exile research during an Interview 2010.
John M. Spalek was born in Warsaw on 28.7.1928 and lived with his parents in Białystok, where his father was a Baptist preacher until 1939. Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the family were resettled in Saxony on account of his mother’s German origins; however, the family then moved on to Łódź. After the death of his father, Spalek and his mother fled to Germany in 1944 and settled in Gummersbach, where he began a carpentry apprenticeship. During a visit to his house in Albany in 2011, John M. Spalek pointed out with pride that he had built the kitchen there himself. Following the death of his mother, John Spalek emigrated to the USA in 1949 at the age of 21. He began his working life there as a lumberjack, which was followed by lots of odd jobs and carpentry commissions. His early years shaped him. Spalek was completely without conceit; he had little understanding of hierarchies or interest in personal accolades. He was interested in results and in safeguarding as much information about the German exile as possible. In this positive sense, he was very driven.
John M. Spalek soon embarked on his academic training in the USA. After obtaining a college degree in foreign languages and history, he accepted a place to study German at Stanford University, where he also obtained his doctorate. As he himself often stated, he found his way into exile research through his work on Ernst Toller. 1968 saw the publication of the biography “Ernst Toller and his critics” (University Press); in 1978, Spalek edited a collection of Toller’s works together with Wolfgang Frühwald (Hanser Verlag). Spalek also wrote individual studies on Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel. In 1960, he moved to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There he met many German-speaking exiles. “This is what ultimately defined my life for the next 40 years. […]. I almost see myself as a historic figure because I actually knew these people. […] I was very well-acquainted with Mrs Feuchtwanger back then, but also with Georg Froeschl, Gina Kaus and many others.” John M. Spalek became one of the USA’s leading exile researchers as well as president of the Society of Exile Studies founded in 1979, and was internationally renowned and connected.
In 1970, Spalek relocated from Los Angeles to the State University of New York in Albany. There he further intensified his research work on the German exile. In the 1970s, he was an early pioneer in collecting and describing not only biographical and bibliographic information, but also material artefacts of the German exile in the USA. His engagement with the work and biography of Ernst Toller had laid the foundations for this. Spalek investigated even the smallest of clues in order to bring the scattered information together to create an overall picture. His Toller collection, which one could admire in his home in Albany, was testimony to this.
“Spalek’s Guide to the Archival Materials of the German-speaking Emigration to the United States after 1933” (K. G. Saur Verlag) was published in four volumes between 1978 and 1997 in collaboration with the German National Library, which – as a partner institution – facilitated funding from the German Research Foundation.
Alongside describing the collections, Spalek was concerned with safeguarding the testimony of the German exile. At the State University of New York in Albany, he founded a considerable exile collection that brings together many important legacies. Spalek was always interested in thinking beyond boundaries. His interest was multidisciplinary. It is therefore not surprising that when searching for exile collections, he did not limit himself to the legacies of famous authors, but also brought together materials and information from political writers and academics. He pursued even the smallest of clues: “It’s real detective work [...] you go in search of materials, in search of the things that people can still remember [...]. Concrete evidence from the life of an author, a scriptwriter, an academic, an artist”, is how Spalek described his approach. His published volumes stand as testimony to this; they are the result of the groundwork he performed, upon which later exile research could be build.
Equally groundbreaking was Spalek’s 10-volume series “Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur seit 1933“ (“German Exile Literature since 1933”, Francke Verlag, later K. G. Saur Verlag/de Gruyter Verlag), which he published between 1976 and 2010 in collaboration first with Joseph Strelka, then later with Konrad Feilchenfeld and Sandra Hawrylchak. This series brought together biographies, bibliographies and thematic introductions to the German exile in the USA.
John M. Spalek’s contact with the German Exile Archive 1933-1945 at the German National Library began in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, what had started as a collaboration on various publications and a correspondence on issues of exile research developed into an intensive joint endeavour. Supported by the German Research Foundation, the non-profit Hertie Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Academia and Culture, John M. Spalek and the German Exile Archive at the German National Library collaborated in safeguarding the personal legacies of German exiles in the USA. This was the start of an intensive collaboration; almost daily telephone conversations and frequent visits by Spalek to the Exile Archive were a common feature of the joint project for many years. John M. Spalek brought 95 legacies of emigrated academics, writers, authors and artists to the Exile Archive in Frankfurt. These include extensive legacies encompassing many shelf-metres of material, as well as partial collections or legacy fragments containing – and thus safeguarding – initial clues. The material collected by Spalek includes such rich legacies as those of the author Ivan Heilbut and Soma Morgenstern, the physical chemist Frederick R. Eirich, the hittitologist Gustav Güterbock, the classicist Ernst Moritz Manasse and the lawyer Clementine Zernik.
Spalek was honoured for his work. In 2010, he became an honorary member of the Society for Exile Research. In the same year, he was presented with the Goethe medal in Weimar by Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, president of the Goethe institutes and former director general of the German National Library. When asked what significance this award held for him, Spalek answered: “It’s perhaps not so significant for me personally; rather, it is an acknowledgement of the importance of exile research, i.e. engagement with the authors, academics and artists that had to leave Germany. As far as I’m concerned, I do feel honoured; but it is much, much more important to me that this also serves as recognition of the research itself, and helps raise awareness of it.”
Spalek was honoured in a different way by Gregor Eppinger’s documentary “Die Koffer des Herrn Spalek” (“The Suitcases of Mr Spalek”, Sehstern Filmproduktion, 2012), which generated awareness of the exile researcher’s work among a wider audience. In 2011, John M. Spalek entrusted his research archive to the German Exile Archive. At his home in Albany, we worked with Spalek in reviewing his files full of information on German exiles in the USA – files which span many metres of shelf space – before packing them up and sending them to Frankfurt. His archive provides insight not only into the major figures of the German exile, but also into Spalek’s working methods. He wasn’t able to personally work on every case: “I would like to have worked on it another two years. There is still a series of legacies; I have large numbers of letters already typed up that I cannot send because I haven’t worked on the preceding cases yet”, he commented in 2010 when discussing the status of his work. He was unable to personally pursue a lot of things, but many of the projects he initiated have continued to develop. For example, a partial legacy from the artists Eric and Jula Isenburger, which John M. Spalek submitted to the Exile Archive, has been brought together with other fragmentary collections to create a powerful and rich legacy. This would have pleased him.
Professor Dr. John M. Spalek died in Philadelphia on 5 June 2021.
(Dr. Sylvia Asmus)
