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 5
The Decision to Flee and Experiences of Flight 74
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 120
Support Networks 84
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 111
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 60
Archive 201
“The first months absorbed all our strengths to build a new life.”
Elsbeth Weichmann: Paris, a New Beginning
Social Democratic politician Elsbeth Weichmann (1900-1988) describes her arrival and the first months in the French capital in 1933, after she had to flee…
“We do not give up hope and confidence so that we can continue to live.”
Good Morning, Berlin
Kefah Ali Deeb came to Berlin in 2014 and spent six years writing a taz column about her old home country Syria and her…
This is Berlin.
6
Max Diamant in Emigration
The pictures from his daughter’s private archive show Max Diamant (1906-1992) with family and friends in Paris, Mexico and Germany.