'This book attempts to do for German exile culture what Mark McGurl's The Program Era did for American prose. Ponten shows how various masterpieces of mid-century literature and social science were the product of intellectual networks connecting émigrés with US scholars and with government institutions. The result is a highly exciting revision of the standard picture of wartime culture!' Tobias Boes, author of Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

'Diving into the gray waters of 'memorandum culture' with the courage to explore its hidden recesses, Ponten has not only fashioned a refreshing new account of the collaboration of European émigrés and American intellectuals in the struggle against fascism, he has provided a boldly original model for anyone curious about the fluid realm of inchoate ideas before they congeal into the familiar landmarks of conventional intellectual history.' Martin Jay, author of Magical Nominalism

'This is a remarkable study of the intellectual front against fascism. By excavating the 'gray literature' of reports, memoranda, and pamphlets, it demonstrates that the confrontation with Nazism created new modes of thought-including by Margaret Mead, Franz Neumann, David Riesman, and Siegfried Kracauer-that shaped not just the war effort, but postwar intellectual life as well. An extraordinarily compelling- and novel! - history.' Jeffrey K. Olick, author of In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949