Istanbul, present
Refuge Metropolis between Normality and Precarity
“It’s an amazingly beautiful and devastatingly hard place to live.”
Alaa Hassan, 2021
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.
“It’s an amazingly beautiful and devastatingly hard place to live.”
Alaa Hassan, 2021
“We have never been so ‘refugees’ as now.”
Mascha Kaléko, 1941
“We will always stand up for our immigrant and refugee neighbors. No one can change that.”
Bill di Blasio, 2019
“There I stood, a ‘Réfugié’ disregarded in the German homeland as a Jew, chased out of his offices because of his ‘inferior’ race, emigrated under abandonment of home and hearth into the foreign exile […] as a German professor counted among the upper thousand!”
Ernst E. Hirsch
“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
“Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new beginning.”
Amro Ali, 2019
“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
“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
On June 4, 1938, the German architect and urban planner Bruno Taut, opened a retrospective of his work at the Istanbul Academy of Arts.…
In a letter from 1946, Fred Stein describes in detail the story of his family’s escape to his friends and relatives via Paris and…
The author of the novel “A Jewish Refugee in New York” Kadya Molodovsky is one of the most important Yiddish poets of the mid-20th…
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Istanbul became a place of refuge for thousands of Russian refugees who left the Soviet territories for political…