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 73
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 109
Support Networks 82
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 101
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 53
Archive 192
“I liked a bit of peace and quiet, but the political situation is not like that. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Hannah Arendt on arriving in New York
Hannah Arendt tells her ex-husband Günther Anders about the circumstances of her escape from Lisbon and her arrival in New York.
“We have never been ‘refugees’ as we are now.”
Mascha Kaléko about serious material concerns as a refugee in New York, 1941
In a diary entry in New York on June 20, 1941, the poet Mascha Kaléko (1907-1975) describes the many, mainly material, worries as a…
“It’s great when we as refugees pass on even very small pieces of information and share this knowledge and thus help each other.”
New Friendships
Alaa Muhrez talks about the new friendships she has made in Berlin and about the potential as well as difficulty when it comes to…
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…