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Manasse’s family began living in the agricultural area of Dramburg in the early 19^th century and Manasse’s memoir, The Jewish Graveyard, described his childhood in which he was thoroughly at home with non-Jewish members of the community who supported the family’s agricultural business even after 1933. Manasse completed his dissertation in 1930 under Otto Regenbogen (1891-1966) and the philosopher Ernst Hoffmann (1880-1952), but because of a disagreement over the length of his rambling 500-page study, the degree was not granted until a shortened version of the dissertation was published in 1936, by which time both Regenbogen and Hoffmann had lost their jobs because of the Nazi civil service laws. In March 1934 Manasse went to Palermo, Italy, in search of a job, but finding none went to Rome where he met the Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-99), with whom he became a lifelong friend and correspondent. Kristeller found him a job at the Landschulheim, which Manasse happily accepted, but the final illness of his father obliged him to return to Germany. At his father’s funeral in 1935 Nazi soldiers would not let Aryan mourners into the burial, which Manasse described in his The Jewish Graveyard. After this experience, he found that the old solidarity with his friends had disappeared. With Kristeller’s help he found a job teaching Latin, Greek, philosophy, and art history at a predominantly Jewish school In Florence. Italy was at the time safer for Jews than Germany, at least until the passage of the Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws) in 1938. He met the classicist Viktor Pöschl (1910-97), then a member of the SS, in Rome in 1937.  At Florence he met his future wife, Mariann Bernhard, a teacher of art and French, who was born Jewish but baptized as a Christian.  A new headmaster, appointed in 1936 as tensions were rising, upbraided both Manasse and Bernhard in a manner that both considered inappropriate. Manasse applied to Harvard but was rejected. His sister had emigrated in 1936 to Rolândia, a German colony in Brazil, since the Italian government had encouraged emigration to that colony for those suffering from the Great Depression (between 1914 and 1939, 30,000 Germans and Austrians had emigrated there). But Brazil offered no academic positions suitable to Manasse. When Bernhard became pregnant in 1937, she was fired and Manasse was forced to live off campus. He resigned shortly after and they successfully sued the school. 

A semester teaching in England thanks to the influence of the Hebrew scholar Herbert Martin James Loewe (1880-1940) provided no further employment prospects in the UK, so he returned to Florence where in May, when Hitler visited Italy, Manasse and his family were taken into custody.  In September 1938, the Leggi Razziali obliged non-Italian Jews to leave the country and he moved to Marianne’s sister’s home in Lana in the South Tyrol, where the school at San Vigilio was a refuge for Jewish German children, and where two of his old colleagues from Florence were teaching. His wife and son made plans to emigrate to Brazil while Manasse tried to get an American visa where he might find academic work. He moved from Switzerland to France, to the UK, and USA in September 1938. The following day his wife and child departed for Brazil.

Manasse landed in New York, but in order to stay he needed an academic job. He contacted the Emergency Committee which had received his dossier from the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland, a group founded in Zurich in 1933 to help academics who were victims of Nazi oppression to find jobs abroad.  William Abbott Oldfather (1880-1945) found Manasse a paltry ($250 per year) one-year offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as custodian of the University Museum. This was rejected, but just as his temporary visa was about to expire, his friend from Frankfurt, Ernst L. Abrahamson (1905-58), who had taken a position as professor of Latin and Romance Languages at Howard University in Washington, DC, found him a job in June 1939 at an historically Black institution, North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, North Carolina, which beginning in 1938 was expanding its course offerings and introducing graduate degrees in the humanities. Manasse was the only white teacher in the college but the progressive president, Dr. James E. Shepherd (1875-1947) later hired three more German immigrants. His appointment gained him his permanent visa and his wife and family joined him in December 1939. He quickly read the Black literature of the day and geared his lectures towards student concerns. Though he initially continued to seek employment that would give him research opportunities, he felt a level of acceptance despite the restrictions of the Jim Crow era in the South. His wife joined the faculty in 1948 as a German instructor and so they remained in Durham for the rest of their careers. His scholarly contribution is a series of bibliographies on work on Plato in German, English, and, finally, French.  He refused to contribute to Festschriften for Nazi supporters, particularly Otto Regenbogen (1891-1966).

His scholarly options were limited, but he threw himself into teaching, recognizing that he had fled racial oppression to finally help those who were also victims of racial oppression. He applied for American citizenship in 1944 and in the 1950s continued his Plato scholarship surveys and his work on Karl Jaspers.