In 1933, the English poet W.H. Auden told his friend Stephen Spender, “I entirely agree with you about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers.” It’s a surprising confession. He’d later travel to Spain to serve in the Republican medical corps, praising the soon-to-be vanquished loyalists in the Marxisant poem “Spain 1937.” He befriended the socialist playwright Ernst Toller, whose elegy he penned when Toller, in penurious exile from Nazi Germany, killed himself. He married Erika Mann to help save her from the Nazis. And his poetry registered the rise of Europe’s fascist regimes. “September 1, 1939” exhorted future historians to “Find what occurred at Linz / What huge imago made / A psychopathic god.” In “Danse Macabre” (1937) he saw “the Devil has broken parole and arisen, / He has dynamited his way out of prison.”
