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 69
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 104
Support Networks 80
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 90
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 44
Archive 181
“Everyone is running, rushing as if he were pursued.”
Herman Kruk describes the flight from Warsaw
Herman Kruk writes in his diary about his flight from Warsaw to Vilnius, September 1939.
“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…
“Of course, it stays the same, […]
If I say home, not Heimat”
If I say home, not Heimat”
The Slight Difference
Poem by Mascha Kaléko
Nepenthe
Nepenthe
Maaza Mengiste’s short story describes traumatic experiences of flight with many mythological allusions.