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
“We exist darkly in the city of light. We and other thousands.”
Fight against Loneliness
The writer and journalist Paul-Adolphe Löffler (1901-1979) writes about the initial loneliness he suffered during his first period in Paris without his family, as…
“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…
“We certainly want to be a voice for refugees.”
Hussam Al Zaher on Journalism and kohero Magazine
“For me, even the air is political”: In an interview, Hussam Al Zaher talks about the founding of kohero Magazine, an online magazine for…
“I faced discrimination as a journalist and as a woman […] But it was natural for me.”
Nazeeha Saeed about discrimination against minorities in the Gulf and in Europe
Nazeeha Saeed, a journalist from Bahrain who lives in exile in Paris and Berlin since 2016, speaks about the discrimination against minorities and the…