Search Results for “Mutige Entdecker bleiben” • We Refugees Archive

“When I approached her, she said that the seat was hers because she was German.”

Selafet Hizarçi about experiences of discrimination

Selafet Hizarçi came to Germany from Turkey in 1969, where she immediately began to work, learn the language and started a family. As part…

“Our neighborhood also held together. No matter what nationality.”

Selafet Hizarçi on family and neighborhood support structures

Selafet Hizarçi came to Germany from Turkey in 1969, where she immediatly began to work, learn the language and lateron started a family. Within…

“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…

“I have to list my curriculum vitae so that by the title ‘refugee’ I do not erase everything I have achieved.”

Alaa Muhrez: Refugee is Only a Word

On an unusually bright morning in Berlin I was sitting alone, sipping a cup of coffee and hesitating over a loud noise. This word…

“We are expellees, banished.”

Bertolt Brecht: On the Term Emigrants (1937)

Bertolt Brecht’s poem on the difference between emigration and exile

“They were emigrants first and only second, what they really were”

Lion Feuchtwanger: Gloomy guests

In his novel Exile, Lion Feuchtwanger describes the grim situation of the German refugee community living in Paris.

“Academic Emigrants in Turkey” Liselotte Dieckmann

“Only tired and frightened we are,
Before we find ourselves a new.”

Hanna Fuchs: Etiquette for refugees

Hanna Fuchs’s poem Knigge für Flüchtlinge, which she wrote in 1945 in Switzerland under the pseudonym Hansi Fuchs, deals with important questions of her…

“The aim and work of this encouraging, thriving American organization is to secure the freedom and continuance of a non-Party German artistic and scientific culture for the present and for the future.”

Memorandum on the Founding of a German Academy in New York. June 1936

This memorandum clarifies the creation of the German Academy of Arts and Sciences together with the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom in New…

Alphabet of Arrival Cooperative workshop with people in exile in Berlin

“Of course, renouncing Germany does not mean growing roots elsewhere at the same time.”

Reflections of Fritz Rudolf Kraus on Being a Foreigner in Istanbul and Accepting Turkish Citizenship

In this 1938 letter to Leonie Zuntz, Fritz Rudolf Kraus (1910–1991) describes his feelings about the exilic condition in Turkey. He wonders whether he…

“But for most it was a period of emigration, a refuge in hard times for which we were grateful, but not a second home as America has become for us.”

Liselotte Dieckmann on Istanbul as a City of Refuge and Transit

After a short stay in Rome, Istanbul became a city of transit for Liselotte Dieckmann (1902–1994), a German scholar of German Studies. She lived…

“Stambul, on the other hand, is a hope because it is a single field of rubble from which some magnificent jewels stand out.”

Letter from Martin Wagner to Walter Gropius, May 1935

In this letter, the former Berlin city planner Martin Wagner, who went to Istanbul exile in 1935, reports on his first time in Istanbul,…

“I therefore firmly believe that we will all come together again in the same work, provided we remain young enough, and do not succumb to resignation.”

Letter from Martin Wagner in Istanbul to Ernst May in Tanganyika, Dec. 1935

In his letter to Ernst May from 1935, the former Berlin city planner Martin Wagner, who went to Istanbul exile in 1935, reports on…

“From one job to another. How rushed is in this country.”

Hertha Nathorff’s first difficult experience as refugee in New York

Hertha Nathorff, née Einstein (1895-1993) was a German pediatrician, psychotherapist and social worker. Until 1934 she worked as a senior physician at the Red…

“The other very particularly important difference was that I wasn’t going into the unknown and having to look for something out there somewhere, but had already found a temporary job…”

No Aimless Escape – Ernst Eduard Hirsch as a Privileged Emigrant in Istanbul

Ernst E. Hirsch reflects on his privileged emigration to Istanbul with the help of the Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland (Emergency Society of German…

“Why do most Germans only know old stereotypes about other societies?

“Why do most Germans only know old stereotypes about other societies?“

The Syrian-Kurdish writer Widad Nabi has been living in Germany for 5 years. She does not see any distance between her and her German…

“So I must try, as difficult as it is, to find something suitable abroad”

Auerbach’s Efforts to Emigrate

Berlin-born Romance philologist, literary and cultural scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), now considered the founder of the discipline of comparative literature thanks to Palestinian postcolonial…

“I feel like a bird in exile, I no longer belong to a country, I fly from country to country with my thoughts, feeling longing for how I am in each country.”

The longing of the bird

In her essay, Alaa Muhrez not only describes her own reflections on the topics of “homesickness”, “identity” and “exile”, but also takes up the…