The essays in this book argue that the United States served as a great attraction for economic betterment to Austrian migrants before and during World War I; yet a third of these migrants actually remigrated.

The book describes the transatlantic experience of migrants from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary who arrived in the US from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of WWI.

Günther Anders (1902, Breslau – 1992, Vienna) studied philosophy with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the 1920s. Married to Hannah Arendt he worked in Berlin as a journalist and also wrote antifascist literature.

It all begins with an idea.