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In the mid-1920s, Mr. Weingrod replied the following to the question “How did you come to Paris?” posed by the journalist Joseph Roth: 11Moses Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was an Austrian-Jewish writer and journalist. Born in the Galician Shtetl Brody, he came from a Jewish merchant family on his mother’s side and from the Hasidic milieu on his father’s. His first writings were written during his German studies in Vienna. The First World War, during which he volunteered for military service, and the subsequent collapse of the Habsburg Empire became groundbreaking events for him, which he addressed several times in his novels such as The Radetsky March or The Capuchin Crypt. And while Roth does not allow himself to be clearly classified politically, in relation to the Habsburg Empire it can be said that he changed more and more from a left-wing critic of the monarchy into a conservative Habsburg nostalgist and idealist, as research has diagnosed for many Galicians. Even during his military service, Roth began to write reports and feature pages for newspapers. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he worked for various newspapers, and in 1925 he moved to Paris for a year as a correspondent. From 1926 he was commissioned to write travel reports, which took him to the Soviet Union, Albania and Yugoslavia, the Saar region, Poland and Italy. In 1933, he fled to Paris, where he died in 1939 of pneumonia after severe alcohol addiction.

Europe looked different after the First World War. Great multiethnic empires such as the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires disintegrated into smaller nation-states, whose birth was accompanied by violent conflicts and resulted in statelessness of millions. In 1926, there was talk of up to 9.5 million refugees seeking a place of refuge in Europe. 33Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19th ed. Two million of them came to France, where they were welcomed with sometimes more, sometimes less open arms. [4. For an examination of the developments of the French migration regime in the 1930s, see Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Among the Western European states, France was the country that opened its doors most widely to refugees in the interwar period. This had little to do with selflessness: After World War I, France actively needed and recruited workers from Eastern and Central Europe and the former French colonies to rebuild the destroyed economy. In the 1920s, France had 150,000 Yiddish-speaking migrants from Eastern Europe, 55Nick Underwood, Staging a New Community: Immigrant Yiddish Culture and Diaspora Nationalism in Interwar Paris, 1919-1940, dissertation, University of Colorado, 2016, pp. 2 65 000 stateless Armenian genocide refugees, 66Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 11. 150,000 Russian Émigrés who escaped the October Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war, 77Katherine Froshko, France’s Russian Moment: Russian Emigres in Interwar Paris and French Society, dissertation, Yale University 2008, p. 2. Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the disintegrating Ottoman Empire as well as anti-fascist political refugees and migrant workers from Italy, Belgium, Spain and Poland. 88Italy (1926: 760,000; 1931: 800,000), Belgium (1926: 325,000; 1931: 250,000), Spain (1926: 320,000; 1931: 350,000), and Poland (1926: 300,000; 1931: 500,000). Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrang Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 1919-1939 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1985), S. 38.

Compared to many others, Weingrod’s arrival and settling in Paris in Roth’s portrayal seems to be accompanied by happiness. The fate of the Hungarian Communist writer and journalist Paul-Adolph Löffler, who escaped Miklós Horthy’s fascist regime in 1924 like thousands of other Hungarian citizens 991921: 9000; 1931: 19 000 to Paris, was different. Like many other foreign workers in France, Löffler suffered from recurrent unemployment, growing xenophobia and political and social exclusion. Löffler foresaw on the very day of his arrival that Paris would be a place of longing for him, one that regularly disappointed him:

Exile capital of antifascism

On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler came to power, Joseph Roth rightly felt compelled to flee and chose Paris as his city of refuge. In a letter to Stefan Zweig, he wrote farsightedly, “that we are driving great catastrophes. Apart from the private ones – our literary and material existence has been destroyed – the whole thing leads to a new war. […] Do not have any illusions. Hell reigns.” 1111Joseph Roth, Letters 1911-1939, Cologne 1970, p. 249. Roth was one of 25,000 German fugitives who fled to France by the summer of 1933, the majority of whom were Jewish and/or intellectual, and after the “Anschluss” of Austria, the Munich Agreement and the Pogrom Night 1938 swollen to over 30,000 refugees from the Nazis. Overnight, German literature found a new home in Paris with exile publishers and the press and representatives of German anti-fascism. Harry Graf Kessler 1212Harry Clemens Ulrich Kessler (1868-1937) grew up in France and England as the child of the German banker Adolf Wilhem Kessler. He was an art collector, patron of the arts, writer, and publicist, and was instrumental in promoting organized pacifism. In March 1933 he traveled to Paris and would not return to Germany. He spent the last four years of his life on Mallorca and in southern France. He was buried in the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery. For a detailed account see Hans-Ulrich Simon: Kessler, Harry Graf von. In: New German Biography (NDB), volume 11 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977), p. 545 f. (digitized). noted in June 1933 that the entire “Kurfürstendamm is pouring over Paris. 1313For a general discussion of the role and symbolic power of Paris for German-Jewish refugees in the 1920s and 1930s,see Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), 79-95; for the quote, see Harry Graf Kessler, diary entry of June 22, 1933, in idem.., Tagebücher, 1918-1937, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Frankfurt: Island, 1961), p. 725. In 1934, in the words of Anson Rabinbach, Paris was transformed into the “capital of anti-fascism. 1414Anson Rabinbach, “Paris, Capital of Anti-Fascism,” in: Martin Jay (ed.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Essays in Honor of Martin Jay (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 183-209. In addition, in the 1930s there were about 15,000 to 20,000 illegal Jewish fugitives from Eastern Europe who fled anti-Semitic persecution.

Thanks to the fact that France became the terre d’asile (country of asylum) after the First World War, the refugees of the 1930s could count on the already existing infrastructure of aid organizations that jumped to the side of the various groups and were also a contact point for refugees to organize themselves politically. Thus, a committee of fugitives not only paid for Joseph Roth’s hotel room; 1515Roth to Stefan Zweig, Letter of May 8, 1936, in Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth: Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), p. 851. He also engaged himself in organizing Nansen passes for fugitives from Austria, and published his works in exile publications 1616Roth to Stefan Zweig, Letter of August 19, 1935, in Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth: Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 759-760. Hannah Arendt, 1717Hannah Arendt (1906-1974) was a Jewish German-American political theorist and journalist whose work on National Socialism and totalitarianism, the phenomenon of statelessness and refugee existence is fundamental and also groundbreaking for We Refugee’s archives. For exact biographical data, see https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/biografie-hannah-arendt.html. who escaped to Paris in the fall of 1933, worked for the Zionist organizations “Agriculture et Artisanat” and “Aliyah des jeunes” to prepare Jewish youth for emigration to and life in Palestine, and gave lectures at the exile institution Freie Deutsche Hochschule Paris, founded in 1935. For many, but by no means all, she got to the heart of the matter when she wrote:

Arn Beckerman 1919Arn Beckerman (1897-1943) was a communist writer and journalist who originally came from Biała Podlaska and emigrated to Paris in 1926. During the First World War he was taken prisoner of war and deported to Frankfurt am Main for forced labor. In 1918, he was mobilized for the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War and was again captured under Symon Petlura – a Ukrainian commander who fought for an independent Ukrainian nation state and was responsible for a large number of the pogroms perpetrated against the Jewish population, to which up to 200,000 Jewish women*Jews fell victim. From 1922 he lived in Warsaw and moved to Paris in 1926, where he worked for various (international) Yiddish newspapers and published several monographs. He was deported from Drancy and murdered in Majdanek on March 6, 1943. For more information, see Y. Spero, G. Kenig, M. Shulshteyn and B. Shlevin, Yizker-bukh tsum ondenk fun 14 umkumene Parizer yidishe shrayber (Paris: Farlag Oyfsnay, 1946), 26-73 in his writings, a vision of Paris in which the French and Ashkenazi culture interwoven and the city transformed itself into the capital of a “Yiddish country”. 2020Nick Underwood, “Aron Beckerman’s City of Light: Writing French History and Defining Immigrant Jewish Space in Interwar Paris,” in Urban History (October 2015), 1-17th ed. Others like Herman Kesten 2121Herman Kesten (1900-1996) was born in 1900 in the Austro-Hungarian Podwołoczyska into a Jewish family. In 1904 the family moved to Nuremberg, where Kesten grew up. During the Weimar Republic, he advanced as a writer to one of the main representatives of the literary “New Objectivity”. In 1933 he fled to France, where he was active in the emigrant milieu, and after brief internment in 1939 in the French camps of Colombes and Nièvres, he fled as an “enemy alien” with a visitor visa to the United States, where he supported numerous artists persecuted by National Socialist Germany. In the postwar period, he returned to Europe, stimulated fierce debates as PEN president and took an active part in the literary life of the Federal Republic were enchanted above all by Paris. “What a dream exile is,” he wrote to a friend. For with the crossing of the border into France, terror became “foreign,” at least for a certain time. 2222Herman Kesten to Ernst Toller, March 23, 1933, quoted from Mark M. Anderson (ed.), Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America (New York: The New Press, 1988), pp. 135-136; quoted in: Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), pp. 79-95, p. 90. For Walter Benjamin 2323Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and cultural critic associated with the sphere of activity of the Frankfurt School, who to this day is a pioneer in various academic fields such as comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory, film and theater studies, etc. In 1940 Walter Benjamin managed to escape via Paris and the Pyrenees to Portbou in Spain, where he took his own life on the night of his arrival in the face of a hopeless further flight, the past was less reassuring than predictive. His unfinished Paris study Das Passagenwerk is characterized by a feeling of crisis and despair. 2424Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), pp. 79-95, p. 85. And Benjamin was not alone with his idea of apocalypse – for good reason.

From city of refuge to transit city

When, in early 1939, some 1.5 million Spanish Republican Civil War refugees began a literal exodus to France, many of them to Paris and its environs, it became all too evident that France had changed from a country of refugees to a country of forced transit. 2525Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 2. For although the French authorities in the late 1930s would have been very well prepared to accept Spanish civil war refugees “humanely” in the meantime, domestic and foreign policy as well as economic developments obviously spoke against this: Immigration was to be severely restricted under the right-wing government of Édouard Daladier, thus making it more difficult for refugees to remain in France. 2626Scott Soo, The routes to exile: France and the Spanish Civil War refugees, 1939-2009 (New York : Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 1-3.

Nevertheless, Spanish-Republican civil war refugees moved to the outskirts of Paris, where the so-called “Little Spain” had existed in La Plaine Saint-Denis since the first half of the 20th century. Various Spanish migrants* had moved here over the years. In 1931, Spaniards* made up the largest immigrant community in La Plaine Saint-Denis with 4.5 percent of the total population. When the Civil War raged in Spain, some ethnic Spanish men between the ages of 18 and 46 left the Plaine Saint-Denis to return to Spain to fight in the Republican camp. Those who remained in “Little Spain” organized support networks for communists or anarchists. 2727” La petite Espagne de la Plaine-Sainte-Denis “, https://www.tourisme93.com/la-petite-espagne-de-la-plaine-saint-denis.html (accessed July 28, 2020).

From Martians in the 1920s, Spanish fugitives and refugees in general became lepers in the late 1930s, who, due to the shift to the right and a radicalizing French nationalism, were to have no place in society. France in the interwar period was characterized by competing political forces, most of which separated immigration policy from refugee policy for various xenophobic and/or anti-Semitic reasons. 2929Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 9.

From the end of the capitale de refuge

The declaration of war in 1939 meant the end of Paris as a city of refuge. Mass internment of refugees took place. 3030Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 3. When Hitler went on a tour of German-occupied Paris on June 23, 1940, two million Parisians* had already left the city. The day before, the German-French armistice treaty had been signed as a result of the French defeat against the German Wehrmacht. The treaty divided France into a German-occupied north and an unoccupied but collaborating south, with Vichy as the seat of the French government. The persecution of foreigners and Jews began with two so-called “Jewish statutes” to exclude Jews from public life and culminated in the deportations of foreign and French Jews to German extermination camps in German-occupied Polish territories, carried out by the French police and administration.

Joseph Roth died of pneumonia in 1939 after a severe alcohol addiction and did not live to see the start of the war and its fatal consequences for Jewish life in Europe that he had predicted. In early May 1940, Hannah Arendtwas interned as an “enemy foreigner” for four weeks in the Gurs camp, from which she managed to escape. She reached New York City via Lisbon in May 1941. Walter Benjamin also tried to reach New York via Spain and Portugal on a visa for the United States, but he took his own life in the Spanish border town of Portbou on the night of September 26-27, 1940, for fear of being extradited to the Germans. Paul-Adolphe Löffler remained in Paris and joined the Resistance during the German occupation. He was one of the few for whom Paris remained the center of life until his death in 1979. The Yiddish journalist Arn Beckerman, who had placed all his hopes in Paris, was, like many other left-wing Yiddish-speaking migrants and fugitives, also active in the Resistance. On March 6, 1943, however, he was deported from Drancy on Transport No. 51 and murdered in Majdanek at the age of 46. 3131Nick Underwood, “Aron Beckerman’s City of Light: Writing French History and Defining Immigrant Jewish Space in Interwar Paris,” in Urban History (October 2015), 1-17, 17th ed. What happened to Mr. Weingrod is unknown. But he, like all the other named, unnamed and unknown new arrivals in Paris, had irrevocably inscribed himself in the texture of the city.

Through the various communities of new arrivals, Paris became a mosaic of diasporic inscriptions. Even today, buildings remind us of these new communities and shape the migrant cityscape like silent signposts. Using refugee voices, the We Refugees Archive uncovers traces of the past, which were co-written, rewritten and rewritten by the memories, ideas, visions of the future and experiences of the emerging heterotopia of refugee communities in Paris.

Long Version

Footnotes

• 1Moses Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was an Austrian-Jewish writer and journalist. Born in the Galician Shtetl Brody, he came from a Jewish merchant family on his mother’s side and from the Hasidic milieu on his father’s. His first writings were written during his German studies in Vienna. The First World War, during which he volunteered for military service, and the subsequent collapse of the Habsburg Empire became groundbreaking events for him, which he addressed several times in his novels such as The Radetsky March or The Capuchin Crypt. And while Roth does not allow himself to be clearly classified politically, in relation to the Habsburg Empire it can be said that he changed more and more from a left-wing critic of the monarchy into a conservative Habsburg nostalgist and idealist, as research has diagnosed for many Galicians. Even during his military service, Roth began to write reports and feature pages for newspapers. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he worked for various newspapers, and in 1925 he moved to Paris for a year as a correspondent. From 1926 he was commissioned to write travel reports, which took him to the Soviet Union, Albania and Yugoslavia, the Saar region, Poland and Italy. In 1933, he fled to Paris, where he died in 1939 of pneumonia after severe alcohol addiction
• 2Joseph Roth, Jews on the move: essay (Vienna: Der Drehbuchverlag, 2014) [kindle version], pos. 820
• 3Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19th ed.
• 5Nick Underwood, Staging a New Community: Immigrant Yiddish Culture and Diaspora Nationalism in Interwar Paris, 1919-1940, dissertation, University of Colorado, 2016, pp. 2
• 6Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 11.
• 7Katherine Froshko, France’s Russian Moment: Russian Emigres in Interwar Paris and French Society, dissertation, Yale University 2008, p. 2.
• 8Italy (1926: 760,000; 1931: 800,000), Belgium (1926: 325,000; 1931: 250,000), Spain (1926: 320,000; 1931: 350,000), and Poland (1926: 300,000; 1931: 500,000). Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrang Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 1919-1939 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1985), S. 38.
• 91921: 9000; 1931: 19 000
• 10Paul-Adolphe Löffler, 1973. Journal de Paris d’un Exilé 1924-1939.
• 11Joseph Roth, Letters 1911-1939, Cologne 1970, p. 249.
• 12Harry Clemens Ulrich Kessler (1868-1937) grew up in France and England as the child of the German banker Adolf Wilhem Kessler. He was an art collector, patron of the arts, writer, and publicist, and was instrumental in promoting organized pacifism. In March 1933 he traveled to Paris and would not return to Germany. He spent the last four years of his life on Mallorca and in southern France. He was buried in the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery. For a detailed account see Hans-Ulrich Simon: Kessler, Harry Graf von. In: New German Biography (NDB), volume 11 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977), p. 545 f. (digitized).
• 13For a general discussion of the role and symbolic power of Paris for German-Jewish refugees in the 1920s and 1930s,see Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), 79-95; for the quote, see Harry Graf Kessler, diary entry of June 22, 1933, in idem.., Tagebücher, 1918-1937, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Frankfurt: Island, 1961), p. 725.
• 14Anson Rabinbach, “Paris, Capital of Anti-Fascism,” in: Martin Jay (ed.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Essays in Honor of Martin Jay (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 183-209
• 15Roth to Stefan Zweig, Letter of May 8, 1936, in Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth: Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), p. 851
• 16Roth to Stefan Zweig, Letter of August 19, 1935, in Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth: Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), pp. 759-760
• 17Hannah Arendt (1906-1974) was a Jewish German-American political theorist and journalist whose work on National Socialism and totalitarianism, the phenomenon of statelessness and refugee existence is fundamental and also groundbreaking for We Refugee’s archives. For exact biographical data, see https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/biografie-hannah-arendt.html.
• 18Arendt, Hannah, 1989: People in dark times, Munich/Zurich: Piper, p. 211 f.
• 19Arn Beckerman (1897-1943) was a communist writer and journalist who originally came from Biała Podlaska and emigrated to Paris in 1926. During the First World War he was taken prisoner of war and deported to Frankfurt am Main for forced labor. In 1918, he was mobilized for the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War and was again captured under Symon Petlura – a Ukrainian commander who fought for an independent Ukrainian nation state and was responsible for a large number of the pogroms perpetrated against the Jewish population, to which up to 200,000 Jewish women*Jews fell victim. From 1922 he lived in Warsaw and moved to Paris in 1926, where he worked for various (international) Yiddish newspapers and published several monographs. He was deported from Drancy and murdered in Majdanek on March 6, 1943. For more information, see Y. Spero, G. Kenig, M. Shulshteyn and B. Shlevin, Yizker-bukh tsum ondenk fun 14 umkumene Parizer yidishe shrayber (Paris: Farlag Oyfsnay, 1946), 26-73
• 20Nick Underwood, “Aron Beckerman’s City of Light: Writing French History and Defining Immigrant Jewish Space in Interwar Paris,” in Urban History (October 2015), 1-17th ed.
• 21Herman Kesten (1900-1996) was born in 1900 in the Austro-Hungarian Podwołoczyska into a Jewish family. In 1904 the family moved to Nuremberg, where Kesten grew up. During the Weimar Republic, he advanced as a writer to one of the main representatives of the literary “New Objectivity”. In 1933 he fled to France, where he was active in the emigrant milieu, and after brief internment in 1939 in the French camps of Colombes and Nièvres, he fled as an “enemy alien” with a visitor visa to the United States, where he supported numerous artists persecuted by National Socialist Germany. In the postwar period, he returned to Europe, stimulated fierce debates as PEN president and took an active part in the literary life of the Federal Republic
• 22Herman Kesten to Ernst Toller, March 23, 1933, quoted from Mark M. Anderson (ed.), Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America (New York: The New Press, 1988), pp. 135-136; quoted in: Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), pp. 79-95, p. 90
• 23Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and cultural critic associated with the sphere of activity of the Frankfurt School, who to this day is a pioneer in various academic fields such as comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory, film and theater studies, etc. In 1940 Walter Benjamin managed to escape via Paris and the Pyrenees to Portbou in Spain, where he took his own life on the night of his arrival in the face of a hopeless further flight
• 24Nils Roemer, “German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity,” in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3:1 (January 2016), pp. 79-95, p. 85
• 25Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 2
• 26Scott Soo, The routes to exile: France and the Spanish Civil War refugees, 1939-2009 (New York : Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 1-3
• 27” La petite Espagne de la Plaine-Sainte-Denis “, https://www.tourisme93.com/la-petite-espagne-de-la-plaine-saint-denis.html (accessed July 28, 2020)
• 28Natacha Lillo, Maître de conférences en civilisation espagnole à l’Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7). Auteur de : La Petite Espagne de la Plaine Saint-Denis (Paris, Autrement, 2004).
• 29Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 9.
• 30Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 3.
• 31Nick Underwood, “Aron Beckerman’s City of Light: Writing French History and Defining Immigrant Jewish Space in Interwar Paris,” in Urban History (October 2015), 1-17, 17th ed.