Paris
Capitale de Refuge
“The foreigner feels at home in Paris, because you can live in this city as you would otherwise only live in your own four walls.”
Hannah Arendt
We Refugees Archive is a digital archive on refugeedom, past and present. It focuses on individual micro-histories and the city as a microcosm of refuge and new beginnings.
Cities 4
Paris
Berlin
Exile, Transit, Emergency Shelter
“Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new beginning.”
Amro Ali, 2019
Palermo
City of Accommodation?
“I don’t have any places to go, I am not going anywhere. My place is Palermo … I am now a Palermitanian.”
Kadija J., 2019
Vilnius
A Garden of Eden in Times of War?
“The writers heard about the Garden of Eden in Vilnius … They moved there when Warsaw was not able to protect them any longer in the same way.”
Emanuel Ringelblum, 1940
Topics 4
The Decision to Flee and Experiences of Flight 66
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 97
Support Networks 75
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 86
Archive 177
“My identity will always be that of the migrant.”
“My identity will always be that of the migrant.”
Diawara B. tells of the futility of his integration efforts in the hostile Italian immigration system – especially in view of the “security decree”.
“I never wanted to leave Budapest forever.”
Paul-Adolphe Löffler on the Hungarian Emigrant Community
In diary entries, the writer and journalist Paul-Adolphe Löffler (1901-1979) describes his relationship with the Hungarian community in Paris, which is shaped by longing…
11
Fred Stein’s view on Paris in the 1930s
Fred Stein (1909-1967) began to make photography his profession after his escape from Nazi Germany to Paris in 1933. With a sensitive eye and…
“I was allowed to leave for the funeral of my aunt and decided not to return.”
Benno Simoni’s life in partitioned Berlin
Benno Simoni describes how he grew up and lived as a Jew in the GDR and – until the building of the Berlin Wall…