Chapter One Introduction Large numbers are difficult for the human mind to grasp. We do not have the facility for mental representation of mega-number

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2 Chapter One Introduction Large numbers are difficult for the human mind to grasp. We do not have the facility for mental representation of mega-numbers like the world population of five billion or the UK population of 58 million, the six million murdered Jews in the Holocaust. 1 Recognizing this human trait, this book does not investigate unimaginable figures, but focuses on the creative imagination of five individuals and their attempts to identify spaces for resistance created in their writing. Nonetheless, it is clear that none of their creative work would have been possible had Anna Gmeyner, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied, Hermynia Zur Mühlen and Selma Kahn been murdered like many others. The first four survived because they found refuge in Britain, Selma Kahn emigrated to Palestine. At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, around 78,000 refugees, not including children who came with their parents, are said to have been resident in the United Kingdom. As 10,000 had come to the UK and then left again, the final number of German, Austrian and Czech refugees who managed to escape by coming to the UK must be set at over 80,000. This makes the United Kingdom the country that took in the largest number of refugees in proportion to its population. This has led to the myth of exemplary British hospitality, which in turn has been challenged by historians, 2 1 Ruth Barnett, The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational Dialogue on the Kindertransport Experience in Wolfgang Benz, Claudia Curio und Andrea Hammel (eds), Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Kindertransporte 1938/39 Rescue and Integration, Vol.23, No.1, Fall 2004 (Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press), p See A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and the Refugees from the Third Reich, (London, Elek, 1973) and Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979). 7

3 pointing to the restrictive and inhumane aspects of the British immigration policy. Louise London in Whitehall and the Jews has given this discussion detailed consideration, 3 attempting to move beyond its narrow focus and to integrate her findings about immigration policy and Jewish refugees. In her view they are central to British history. 4 It is remarkable that there was still a need to make this statement at the turn to the twenty-first century. According to Anne Karpf in her book The War After, which is an innovative autobiography, partly an account of her life as the daughter of Shoah survivor parents and partly a socio-historical analysis of the British attitude towards the Shoah, January 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was the occasion for an eruption of British [ ] media interest in the Holocaust. 5 The year 2001 was the first year when 27 January was marked as Holocaust Memorial Day. Although it was set up by the British government to remember a number of genocides in the twentieth century, its main focus is the murder of millions of European Jews by National Socialist Germany. This ideological commitment to foreground the Shoah was by no means uncontroversial, but it is symptomatic of an awakening of the British public and British officialdom to a period in European history, which had hitherto mainly been looked at from the perspective of the British role in the war victory. This change can be read as part of a more reflective attitude towards the problems of ethnic relations as well as a contemporary concern with the emerging multicultural society of the future. But it is also due to the increasing awareness of the part that refugees from National Socialism have played in British society. Texts written by former German-speaking refugees have become a significant factor in this development. The publication of autobiographies of former refugees, especially those by well-known figures such as the publisher George Weidenfeld, 6 has received public attention because 3 Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 London, Whitehall and the Jews, p Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London, Heinemann, 1996), p George Weidenfeld, Remembering My Good Friends (London, HarperCollins, 1995). 8

4 of an interest in the biographies of the successful. There is also the widespread belief that greater authenticity can be gained from nonfictional writing. There are many texts by former refugees, though, that have largely been ignored within the British cultural sphere. The body of texts written by women exile writers is such a neglected area. The fact that Anna Gmeyner s Manja, one of the best German novels of the 1930s, was forgotten for fifty years, requires some explanation. Thus this book sees it as its task to integrate these narratives within the field of cultural studies internationally, but especially in Germany and Austria and Britain to avoid continuing the exclusion of certain stories. This introductory chapter will chart the development of the various research areas such as exile studies, women s exile writing, the social history of the refugee experience and the concept of the everyday which have influenced this project. Many people have aided the development of this book. I would like to thank my DPhil supervisor Professor Edward Timms, my present and past colleagues and friends at the Centre for German- Jewish Studies, especially Samira Teuteberg, Chana Moshenska and Deborah Schultz, and the Humanities and Library staff at the University of Sussex. I am also eternally grateful to the members of the Feminist Theory Reading group, especially Charlotte Adcock, Bridget Byrne and Jude Reddaway for their furious sisterhood and to the child care staff at the University of Sussex Creche and Nursery and Elm Grove After School Club (behind every successful woman is a successful nursery!). Thanks to all my friends, especially Francis Clark-Lowes, Davina Dunn, Sharon Krummel, Karin Kuckenburg, Niamh Moore and Barbara Schreiber. Both my parents Marion and Karl Ludwig Hammel and my parents-in-law, Christine and Brian Hubble have been very supportive over a long period of time and I would like to express my sincerest gratitude. My children Sara, Max, Leah and Alex Hammel have helped me understand many things for which I will always be grateful. 9

5 Exile Studies in Germany, Austria and Britain Exile studies, as a discipline has been at a crossroads for a decade. Especially in Germany and Austria, academics have been taking stock during the last ten years: in 1996 the International Exile Studies Yearbook series published its fourteenth volume entitled Rückblicke und Perspektiven. 7 In this volume Bernhard Spies outlines the fate of exile studies in connection with political and cultural changes in German Studies and in Germany. Focusing on the study of German literature, he points out that until the 1970s academic research into the works of exiles was received at best with indifference and at worst with intense suspicion. In the 1970s the political climate in Germany changed and a short period of intense interest and public awareness followed, fuelled by a desire to find and explore proponents of a different, better Germany. 8 Over the last ten years, according to Spies, exile studies researchers have had to contend with the view that further study was obsolete and the field of exile literature has been comprehensively and well researched: the project was deemed to be finished, even by academics who had formerly been engaged in the research of exile themselves. After a further decade of intensive research activity the same discussion was again brought up at he Annual Conference of the German Gesellschaft für Exilforschung in Zürich in 2006: since the Annual Conference in 2004 in Bologna the symposia programmes have included papers on refugee groups thematically and chronicologically outside the migration from National Socialist Central Europe between 1933 to The Zurich conference had the Europäische Fremdenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert as its theme and included comparative papers on the Jewish Egyptian refugees trying to emigrate to Switzerland in 1956 as well as the 7 Claus-Dieter Krohn, Erwin Rotermund, Lutz Winckler and Wulf Koepke (eds), Rückblicke und Perspektiven. Exilforschung. Ein Internationales Jahrbuch. Band 14 (Munich, edition text +kritik, 1996). 8 Bernhard Spies, Exilliteratur ein abgeschlossenes Kapitel? Überlegungen zu Stand und Perspektiven der literaturwissenschaftlichen Exilforschung in Krohn, et al. (eds), Rückblicke und Perspektiven, p

6 Hungarian refugees being welcome in Switzerland the same year. Again the discussion about the future of the discipline was raised and the main options outlined: (a) we could retain the relatively narrow focus on the National Socialist enforced emigration, researched within conventional biographical, socio-historical or literary-historical boundaries; (b) we could broaden our research in the more general direction of refugee and migration studies or (c) we could shift the conceptual boundaries of the discipline towards a discussion of exile in connection postmodern notions such as marginalization, delocalization, transit-culture and hybridity. The latter path towards a redefinition of exile seems to be more prevalent in North American academia: in May 2004 at Ohio State University Alexander Stephan organized a conference on Exile and Otherness. New Approaches to the Experiences of Nazi Refugees and the resultant edited volume with the same title managed: to open the gate a little onto the landscape where scholars from different fields [...] can apply concepts like diaspora, otherness, delocalization, estrangement, border-crossing or displacement productively to the analysis of the experience of refugees from Hitler s Germany. 9 September 2006 has seen another US conference organized under the auspices of the North American Association for Exile Studies on the theme of Exile and Travel at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Its call for papers emphasizing the connectivity between movement, border crossing and forced displacement is a hopeful indicator that this conference will open the gate a little wider still. The case of Exile Studies within the British academic world is a very special one: the study of those who were exiled from Central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and made their home in Britain has only been systematically developed since 1990, when the Aberdeen Exile Symposium was organized by J.M. Ritchie and Donald Mc- Laughlin, and the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile 9 Alexander Stephan, Introduction in Stephan (ed), Exile and Otherness. New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees. Exile Studies 11 (Berne et al., Peter Lang, 2005), p

7 Studies had been founded in 1988 in Aberdeen. 10 This is all the more surprising since a number of academics in the field of German Studies were former refugees themselves. On closer inspection there are possible explanations: in the same way as former refugees in other professional groups, these Germanists living in Britain defined themselves through their academic achievements and professional status. 11 Besides Germanists with a refugee background frequently did not want to be reminded of their past lives and often painful family history; again they shared this desire with the majority of former German-speaking refugees from Central Europe who stayed in Britain. However, a remarkable change took place during the 1990s. In a number of analyses, two reasons are given for this development: firstly, the fact that former refugees are coming to the end of their lives and find the time to speak about their past and feel the desire to leave some testimony of their history behind, either mainly for their own descendants or for the world at large. Secondly, many felt compelled by the contemporary outbreaks of neo-nazi activity, xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric on the increase since the late 1980s, to tell of the ultimate consequences of such ideologies and behaviour. Traditionally German as an academic subject in Britain used to focus mainly on the study of German literature, especially on the wellknown, canonized figures of German high culture. Exile literature that was to be investigated because of its social-historical exile basis was often seen as inferior literature. Those authors like Bertold Brecht or Stefan Zweig were not studied because they were exiles, but because 10 The First International Symposium on German and Austrian Exiles took place from September 1990 in Aberdeen. In 1995 the London Group for Exile Studies joined forces with the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies to form a National research centre based at the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. See also Siglinde Bolbecher, et al. (eds), Zwischenwelt 4. Literatur und Kultur des Exils in Großbritannien (Vienna, Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1995), especially pp.7/8. 11 Rodney Livingstone, The Contribution of German-speaking Jewish Refugees to German Studies in Britain in Werner E. Mosse (ed), Second Chance: Two centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1991), pp.137/152 12

8 they were part of the literary canon and thus their aesthetic and literary accomplishments have been the subject of many academic studies. Although a late starter, the Auslandsgermanistik has been able to make an important contribution, especially to the study of the social and historical background of the German-speaking exiles. This again is due to the fairly obvious factors of close geographical proximity to the location of exile to be studied and privileged insights into the culture of the exile country. But German Studies abroad has also been able to contribute significantly to the study of specific groups of exiles and of the field outside the area of exile literature due to the different development of academic disciplines abroad. German Studies in Britain and the USA today, for example, unite the study of German literature, history, politics and many other disciplines that would be split into different schools of study in Germany. Besides, as conferences have shown, this field now attracts an interdisciplinary approach that goes well beyond the confines of traditional German Studies. 12 With these new approaches a discussion concerning the terminology used has been raging for some years, especially in Britain: on the one hand there are those who use the terms exile, immigrant, emigrant and refugee almost synonymously. Others voice a strong dislike for one term or the other, especially the term exile is disliked for its supposedly elitist connotation. This interjection comes predominantly from the side of historians involved with twentieth century British immigration history and it understandably questions the difference in terminology between this and other groups of refugees who came to Britain. It comes close to an oversimplification, however, to reject the term for its elitism. As we will outline later, exile writing should not be seen as a purely elitist occulation. Also to be able to engage with conceptual debates the long history of the exile in 12 The international conference on Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation held at the University of Sussex from September 2000 was an example for this trend. Of the twenty-five papers only four had a literary focus, the other papers concentrated on disciplines from architecture to philosophy, from art history to psychoanalysis. 13

9 politics, art and literature has to be taken into account. In this study I am therefore going to use the term exile when I am discussing issues relating to this debate, and I will use the term exile writing. I am going to use the term refugees for those persons who came from Continental Europe to the UK as their flight is the defining concept, while keeping to the established name of the discipline, Exile Studies. As we can see there are many as yet unresolved issues relating to this subject area, another indicator that will need to expand the research rather than wind it up. The tensions between the proponent of the different directions should be seen as productive rather than a sign of an exhausted research area. In a by necessity of the subject matter international field there are also inevitable differences in the approaches between the various national academies. British exile studies researchers have sometimes accused their Central European counterparts of having a museum-like approach to the subject, and have felt that they, still in regular contact with former refugees and their organizations such as the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) or the Club 43, had a more direct or real approach to eye-witnesses. These differences should not be underestimated, and should be seen as an opportunity rather that an area for insurmountable tensions. On the other, it becomes clear that the Exile Studies researchers in Britain also have to make an effort to integrate their field of study in other research areas such as twentieth century British history or English-language literature. British academia has opened up in many direction over the years and it is our duty to nudge it further in a more inclusive direction. The funding of a project to compile an Online Database of British Archival Resources Relating to German-speaking Refugees, by the government-funded Arts and Humanities Research Council is surely a public recognition of this need. We have to make sure that the outcome of this project is recognized and used beyond the confines of Exile Studies. 13 In March 2004 a project to compile an Online Database of British Archival Resources Relating to German-speaking Refugees, was established at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, by Samira Teuteberg, Edward Timms and myself. The BARGE database will be available online in