Jonas Mekas
I Had Nowhere to Go
Author(s) Jonas Mekas
Artist(s) Jonas Mekas, Tobias Klett
Format softcover book
Year 2017
Language(s) English
Pages 469 pages
Description
Jonas Mekas worked with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon and many others. In New York, he was an influential figure of the New American Cinema, although he began directing relatively late. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee the Nazis for copying leaflets. They were interned for eight months in a labor camp in Elmshorn. The Soviet occupation prevented him from returning to his native Lithuania after the war and, classified as a "displaced person," he lived in displaced persons camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. Towards the end of 1949, he and his brother emigrated to New York. In his autobiography "I Had Nowhere to Go," he recounts his survival in the camps and his arrival in New York. Mekas describes a universal story, that of an émigré who can never return home, whose solitude in the new world becomes the symbol of the human condition.