Sanary-sur-Mer: How the Riviera's Exile Writers' Haven Became Provence's Most Literarily Haunted Luxury Address
March 27, 2026 · 13 min read
Between 1933 and 1942, the small fishing port of Sanary-sur-Mer on the Var coast — population approximately 5,000, its principal activities the cultivation of flowers and the catching of sardines — became, by a convergence of historical tragedy and geographical accident, the unofficial capital of German literature in exile. Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich. Bertolt Brecht. Lion Feuchtwanger. Arnold Zweig. Franz Werfel. Stefan Zweig. Ernst Toller. The concentration of literary genius in this single, modest commune during the years of the Nazi ascendancy was without parallel in the history of European letters — a phenomenon that the writer Ludwig Marcuse, himself a Sanary exile, described as "the capital of German literature" and that the literary historian Magali Laure Nieradka later documented as the most remarkable intellectual community of the twentieth century.
The Arrival: 1933 and After
The story begins, like so many stories of the twentieth century, with a book burning. On 10 May 1933, three months after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, organised bonfires consumed the works of Jewish, socialist, and politically inconvenient authors in university towns across Germany. The writers whose books burned had, in many cases, already left the country; those who had not did so now. The question was: where to go? Paris was the obvious choice for political exiles, and many went there. But a significant number — drawn by an existing network of literary connections, by the mild climate and low cost of living, and by the presence of Aldous Huxley, who had been living in Sanary since 1930 and whose enthusiasm for the town was infectious — chose this unremarkable fishing village on the western edge of the Riviera.
The choice was not arbitrary. Lion Feuchtwanger, whose novel Jud Süss had made him one of the most commercially successful German writers of the era, had visited Sanary in 1929 and was enchanted. He rented the Villa Valmer, a substantial property on the hillside above the port, and established himself as the centre of a social and intellectual circle that would, within four years, include virtually every major figure in German literary life. Thomas Mann arrived in 1933, taking a villa near the coast where he continued work on the Joseph tetralogy. Brecht came briefly, impatiently, before moving on to Scandinavia. Arnold Zweig and his wife settled into a quiet routine of writing and sea-bathing. The cafés around the port — particularly the Marine and the de la Tour — became the sites of literary conversations of such density and urgency that waiters, it was said, learned to recognise the important customers not by their faces but by the intensity of their arguments.
The Port: Provençal Authenticity
What the exiles found in Sanary — and what the contemporary visitor still finds, remarkably intact — was a Provençal fishing port of such unforced authenticity that its beauty registered not as spectacle but as daily life. The harbour, shaped like a natural amphitheatre, shelters traditional pointu fishing boats painted in the vivid colours (blue, red, green, yellow) that have distinguished the Provençal fishing fleet for centuries. The quayside, lined with plane trees and the pastel-façaded buildings that house restaurants, cafés, and fish markets, creates a setting of such visual completeness that the eye requires no supplements: no monuments, no grand architecture, no designed perspectives. Everything is present because it is functional; everything is beautiful because it is unselfconscious.
The Wednesday morning market — one of the largest and most celebrated in the Var — fills the streets around the port with stalls selling the produce of the Provençal hinterland: olives from Bandol, goat cheese from the hills, honey scented with lavender and thyme, the magnificent tomatoes and aubergines of the coastal plain, and the cut flowers (Sanary's original industry) whose colour and fragrance transform the commercial transaction into a sensory immersion. The market has operated continuously since the medieval period, and its survival — unthemed, uncommercialised, attended primarily by locals rather than tourists — is a testament to the town's stubborn resistance to the transformation that has homogenised so many Provençal communes.
Villa Lazare: Feuchtwanger's Resistance
Lion Feuchtwanger's story in Sanary — which began with prosperity and literary success and ended with imprisonment and dramatic escape — encapsulates the experience of the exile community in miniature. After moving from the Villa Valmer to the larger Villa Lazare (renamed in his honour) on the road between Sanary and Bandol, Feuchtwanger established a working routine of remarkable productivity, completing several novels including The Oppermanns (1933), one of the first literary responses to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, written in Sanary within months of the events it describes.
When France fell in 1940, Feuchtwanger — along with thousands of other German and Austrian exiles — was interned as an "enemy alien" at the Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence. His escape, facilitated by the American journalist Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee and described in his memoir The Devil in France, involved disguising himself as a woman to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. The Villa Lazare, confiscated during the occupation, was returned after the war and has been the subject of ongoing efforts to establish it as a memorial and cultural centre — a project that, if realised, would give physical form to the extraordinary concentration of intellectual life that Sanary sheltered during the darkest years of the twentieth century.
The Diving Heritage: Underwater Archaeology
Sanary's waters contain a treasure that has nothing to do with literature and everything to do with the town's deeper history as a maritime settlement. The bay and its surroundings are among the richest sites for underwater archaeology in the western Mediterranean, with wreck sites ranging from Greek and Roman merchant vessels to World War II military debris. The town's association with underwater exploration dates to the 1930s, when Philippe Tailliez, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and Frédéric Dumas — the "Mousquemers" (sea musketeers), the trio who would revolutionise underwater diving — conducted their earliest experiments in the waters off Sanary and the neighbouring bay of Le Brusc.
The Embiez Islands, a small archipelago accessible by boat from nearby Six-Fours-les-Plages (ten minutes from Sanary), house the Institut Océanographique Paul Ricard, a marine research station that continues the tradition of underwater science that the Mousquemers initiated. The diving around the islands — through posidonia meadows, over rocky formations colonised by gorgonian fans and sponges, with visibility that routinely exceeds twenty metres — is among the best on the Var coast, and the combination of natural beauty and historical resonance creates an underwater experience of unusual richness.
Bandol: The Wine Next Door
Sanary's western neighbour, Bandol — with which it shares a continuous stretch of coastline and a complementary but distinct character — produces what many critics consider the finest red wine in Provence and one of the great mourvedre-based wines of the world. The Bandol AOC, which requires a minimum of fifty percent mourvedre in its red wines and eighteen months of barrel ageing, produces wines of remarkable depth, structure, and longevity — wines that, in the best vintages from estates like Domaine Tempier, Château de Pibarnon, and Domaine de Terrebrune, achieve a complexity comparable to the finest wines of the northern Rhône.
The proximity of Bandol's vineyards to Sanary creates one of the Riviera's most compelling gastronomic propositions: morning in the Sanary market, selecting the day's ingredients; afternoon on the terraces of a Bandol estate, tasting the current vintages against the backdrop of the terraced hillsides and the Mediterranean below; evening in one of Sanary's portside restaurants — Le Saint-Pierre, perhaps, or the Relais de la Poste — where the market's produce and Bandol's wines converge in meals of such natural integrity that the concept of "farm to table" feels redundant. Everything here is already at the table; the question is not where the food comes from but whether you have the appetite to appreciate the abundance.
Getting There & Practical Intelligence
Toulon-Hyères airport (TLN) is twenty minutes east. Marseille Provence airport (MRS) is fifty minutes west. The TGV serves Toulon (fifteen minutes by car from Sanary) with fast connections to Paris (3h45), Lyon, and Marseille. By car, the A50 motorway connects to Marseille (fifty minutes) and Toulon (fifteen minutes); exit at Sanary/Bandol.
The literary heritage trail — marked with plaques identifying the residences of the exile writers — can be walked in approximately ninety minutes and constitutes one of the most moving cultural itineraries on the Riviera. The trail begins at the port, passes the cafés where Mann and Feuchtwanger held court, ascends to the hillside villas, and returns via the coastal path. Spring and autumn are the optimal seasons — the light is gentler, the town quieter, and the literary resonance stronger when the tourist animation of summer has faded and the place can be experienced as the exile writers experienced it: beautiful, slightly melancholy, and profoundly alive.
Published by Riviera Latitudes · Part of the Latitudes Media network