Leipzig Book Fair – Unserved and Unsungen

This book is very up -to -date! Wolfgang Benz writes in the foreword to “Exile”, which reports on displacements and statements from 1933 to 1945: “The history of exile from the” Third Reich “is a lesson, written at a time when people desire political asylum, in which war and civil war refugees are looking for protection and help in the country, from which citizens were once pursued and encouraged because of their attitudes or their origin, sought to escape on the arms of existential hopelessness in their home countries. “

At the center of his book, the long -time head of the Institute of Anti -Semitism Research at the TU Berlin does not put the prominent refugees from the “Third Reich”, whose exile biographies are largely known, but exile chic of people who are not in the ramp light of the history. He divides his book in chapter on the early persecution measures primarily against communists and social democrats and about the discrimination, which forced the passage into exile in a targeted manner.

One chapter deals with the places of exile, from the beginnings in the Saarbrücken, Vienna, Prague and Amsterdam, which was not yet part of the German Empire. The restrictive recording of Switzerland proved to be particularly problematic, which opened its limits – in contrast to its more open attitude during the First World War. Paris and Marseille, London, Moscow, Mexico, New York, Latin America Shanghai and Australia. The list does not claim to be complete. The conditions to get there were different, bureaucratic and politically often difficult to impossibility. Almost everywhere it was said “the boat is full” or “We are bringing ourselves into the country. To date, you hear the evil echo of these denials. The borders were almost everywhere. Generally exception: The children’s transport of the 10,000 to Great Britain with the problems of children separated by their parents – mostly forever.

The multiple exile request was Palestine, which was still a British mandate at the time. The administration there only let counted and artisanal or agricultural refugees into the country. Benz describes the countless unsuccessful attempts to illegally come into the country and names individuals from a larger amount that the mandate administration to Mauritius deported in the Indian Ocean and were caught for years under degrading circumstances. Many died of the privation there. “Fiction and reality” is the name of a chapter on literature in exile with a very readable section about the Moscow writer’s congress in the summer of 1934 and some contradictory assessments of German exilants about Stalinism and the murderous show processes against “uncomfortable” at that time. In each chapter, the exile experiences of people come up, who had to live and undressed below the attention threshold of post -war feet.

The trigger for the often difficult decision to go into exile were the opposition to National Socialism, or reprisals and threats to life and life. Where could it go if the selection is so low, with what means? With it and with the redeeming, but often disappointing arrival at the finish, exile began. But when did it end when it ended? Benz describes the experiences of individual returnees to the Federal Republic as in the GDR. And he reports of exile chic, which successfully continued in Exilland.

Every fate was different. Michael Blumenthal had to leave Berlin with his parents in 1939, worked in the USA in the private sector and under Kennedy as an ambassador and opened the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2001. Also “IMA was driven out of Berlin as a Jew,” the author quotes from “Moon above Uhlandstrasse” by Rachel Ron, “but did not cope in Palestine, then in Israel. She does not understand the language. She drives to the sea almost every day, looks at the sea for hours. This is called homesickness. It is not Berlin, which IMA is missing. Brüssow in the Uckermark. A little kaff. Where you went to wooden panties and spoke Low German. Where people knew no differences between people. Where there were no strangers. Where IMA was not yet disappointed with life. “

Wolfgang Benz: Exile. History of a displacement 1933–1945. Chbeck, 407 pages, born, 60 Fig., € 36.