Intellectual Migration and Exile Studies

Seit dem Erscheinen des so genannten Bergier-Berichts im Jahre 2001/2002 kann die Rolle der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg als weitgehend erforscht gelten . Der Bericht ermöglichte es auch, einen Gesamtüberblick über die schweizerische Flüchtlingspolitik zu gewinnen . Doch obwohl der Einberufung der Expertenkommission im Jahre 1996 historische Arbeiten vorausgingen, welche die vorherrschende Vorstellung der Schweiz als ein seiner humanitären Tradition folgendes Asylland und Bewahrerin der Demokratie kritisch hinterfragten und als Teil einer nationalen „Rechtfertigungsideologie“  betrachteten, damit auf der Ebene von in den 1930er Jahren offiziell propagierten – und bis heute wirksamen – Werten, Leitbildern und Ideen ansetzten, befasste sich die Bergier-Kommission nicht mit deren Vermittlern: hommes des lettres, Gelehrte und Schriftsteller . Gerade an der Schnittstelle zwischen einer – unten noch auszuführenden – Kultur der „Geistigen Landesverteidigung“, die zu stärken die schweizerischen Schriftsteller von den politischen Autoritäten aufgerufen waren, und der Haltung gegenüber Flüchtlingen jedoch lässt sich, so die These des vorliegenden Beitrags, zeigen, wie komplex und kontrovers das Verhältnis der Schweiz zu Deutschland auch im Feld der kulturellen Produktion war und welche Schwierigkeiten sich aus dem doppelten Selbstverständnis des Alpenlandes, einerseits als ein Ort der Zuflucht für Fremde, andererseits als eine selbständige, sich von den sie umgebenden totalitären Regimen abgrenzende helvetische Gemeinschaft, ergaben.

The Asian continent is a neglected area of ​​historical exile studies. The publication provides an overview of the particularities of exile during the Second World War in Asia. It introduces the volume "Exil in Asien" (Exile in Asia) of the series "Erinnerungen. Lebensgeschichten von Opfern des Nationalsozialismus" (Lives Remembered. Life stories of Victims of National Socialism) of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. The paper contextualizes the 23 autobiographical recollections (some in German, some in English) of Austrian exiles in the volume, both historically and in terms of content. The chapters refugee policy; routes into exile; Asia amid decolonisation, state formation, civil wars and the Japanese wars of conquest in East and Southeast Asia; settlement plans; climate, hygiene, health and culture as challenges to be overcome; Western music, medicine and technology as “export hits” in Asia; exile under Japanese occupation; exile in war areas; after the war – the continuation of the journey; and transit stations in transitional societies illuminate the special conditions for German-speaking exilees to Asia during World War II.
More about the volume :: https://www.nationalfonds.org/volume-4-lives-remembered

RIASSUNTO In questo lavoro di ricerca si intende individuare e analizzare le dinamiche migratorie del retorno a partire da un testo fulcrale della letteratura portoghese del secondo Novecento, O Esplendor de Portugal di António Lobo Antunes, percorrendo le vicende storiche della decolonizzazione portoghese che riportò forzosamente in patria quasi mezzo milione di persone. Il mio progetto è infatti quello di analizzare il fenomeno alla luce dei canoni della moderna critica della letteratura di migrazione, chiedendo se sia possibile definirlo come un romanzo di migrazione, o un romanzo di " contro-migrazione ". Uno dei punti nevralgici della letteratura di migrazione, infatti, è proprio lo spaesamento e sconvolgimento permeante la narrativa causato dal vivere (e sopravvivere) alle dimensioni spazio e tempo in modo forzato. Infatti, ritengo che i quattro protagonisti del romanzo di Lobo Antunes presentino e rappresentino questo sfilacciamento dell'esistenza in modo consistente e carico di valenza di simbolica. In questa lettura intendo far risuonare quelle dinamiche psicologiche che definiscono (o offuscano?) il concetto di identità di chi, come i returnados, ha vissuto nella condizione di " migrante " nella sua stessa patria.

What is the nature of the Spanish modernity in which the Francoist dictatorship culminates, what are its determining factors and who are its architects? Tiempo de exilio proposes a critical response to these questions through an inquiry into the developments of Spanish modernity since the Second Republic. The book focuses specifically in the work of exiled republican intellectuals to investigate other possibilities of modernity that were abolished when they were expelled by Francoism and once again when their memory was not recovered by the democratic state. The result is a vision of the development of the modern project in Spain that runs counter to its most triumphalist versions and argues in favour of a place for exile in the history of modern Spanish democratic thought.

دراسة الواقع الديني في المناطق الآمنة من الشمال السوري شاركت بها من خلال ورشة في كلية العلوم الإسلامية من جامعة غازي عنتاب التركية
ورقتي البحثية بعنوان
الحالة الإيمانية في المناطق المحررة
تناقش الورقة البحثية خاطة طريق لطلاب العلم لننشاط العلمي الدعوي في المناطق الهشة فكرياً كالمناطق التي تم اخراج داعش منها والتي تحتاج فترات من التعافي الفكري الإيماني للحماية من الصدمات والارتدادات الفكرية.

Study the religious reality in the safe areas of northern Syria, which I participated in through a workshop at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences of Gaziantep University in Turkey
My research paper is titled
The state of faith in the liberated areas
The research paper discusses planning a path for science students to pursue scientific advocacy activity in intellectually fragile areas, such as areas from which ISIS was expelled, and which need periods of faith-based intellectual recovery to protect from intellectual shocks and regressions.

Este artículo examina cómo los emigrados argentinos utilizaban sus experiencias en el exilio para legitimar sus proyectos de construcción nacional, a partir de los casos particulares de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi y Félix Frías1. Argumentaré que las estrategias de legitimación pasaban por las nacientes esferas públicas, y tenían dos aspectos paralelos y complementarios. Primero, se buscaba una validación desde afuera, aquella a la que la cita del título hace referencia, muchas veces utilizando una experiencia europea como prueba de calidad. El simple hecho de publicar un texto en un tercer país le daba prestigio al mismo. Esta producción « europea » no era destinada tanto al mercado europeo, sino a re-circular en América para demostrar una cierta aprobación de sus ideas en Europa. Pero el hecho de viajar o trabajar en el extranjero podía tener el mismo efecto.

In Italia, il nome di Mario Einaudi è oscurato da quello dei suoi familiari: il padre Luigi, primo presidente della Repubblica, e il fratello, l"editore Giulio. Eppure, Mario ha trovato un posto di rilievo nella cultura accademica americana. Professore di Comparative Government a Cornell dal 1945, negli anni Sessanta fondò il Center for International Studies che ora porta il suo nome, e nel decennio precedente, insieme ad altri studiosi europei, diede un importante contributo alla politica comparata. La scelta del suo trasferimento oltreoceano negli anni Trenta ebbe però ragioni politiche 1 . Einaudi infatti nacque a Torino nel 1904, e frequentò la locale università tra 1923 e 1927. Alla facoltà di Legge, lavorò a una tesi di storia delle dottrine politiche sotto la supervisione di Gioele Solari 2 . Proprio per completare la tesi, nell"inverno tra 1926 e 1927 visitò Londra, e lì frequentò la London School of Economics, partecipando alle lezioni di maestri come Harold Laski e Graham Wallace. In Gran Bretagna, però, lo studente incontrò anche don Luigi Sturzo e Gaetano Salvemini.

At the Margins of Academia offers a broad approach to the challenge of academic labor precarity and the ever-growing academic migration from Turkey to European academic labor markets, based on the author’s own experiences and on in-depth interviews with the exiled Peace Academics. To this aim, it provides a detailed analysis of the systemic background of precariousness, the specifities of the case of the exiled Academics for Peace with regard to the precarization of academic labor force in general, and the socio-emotional expressions of being kept ‘in reserve’, drawing on the exiled academics’ own narratives.
The book consists of 5 chapters that start with the structural background of precariousness, then proceed to set a framework for understanding the relation between precariousness and subjectivity, and present insights on that relation with the help of the references made to individual and focus group interviews conducted with 11 academics in exile.

The modern history of Roman law has been frequently associated with Western European political integration. Legal and intellectual historians have repeatedly looked at the geographical spread and intellectual lineages of Roman law to assess the degree of Westernization in different polities, from the Russian Empire to the British Isles. In this paper, I discuss the reception of Roman law as an aspect of the political thought of an exile from Bolshevik Russia, I hope to flesh out one of its less prominent uptakes in the intellectual culture of Europe, as a source of inspiration for Russian international law and what remained of it after the demise of the Russian empire. While the broader framework of this story reaches from the last decade of Europe’s Continental empires to the start of the Cold War, I am particularly interested in the way elements of Roman law were invoked in intellectual debates around the First World War and in the interwar period. At this time, revolutions shook not just particular empires, such as the Russian, but the legitimacy of imperial rule as such.
My main case study is the intellectual biography of Baron Mikhail von Taube (1869‒ 1961).

The paper traces how the creation and development of the disciplines of political science in the United States and in Germany have mutually influenced each other. The protagonists of both transfers of ideas pointed across the Atlantic for examples to be emulated for a useful study of politics. In an ironic twist, however, both transfers of ideas occurred at a time when the ideas to be transferred tended to be on the decline.

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 holds a very special place in the history and collective memory of contemporary Spain. As a sinister aftermath of the Civil War it has become one of the most decisive historical events of 20 th century Spain. However, due to the physical and in most cases definitive expulsion from the nation-state implied by exile, its relevance has been marginalized or plainly ignored in the context of a national history whose dominant narrative strategies turn on the belonging of its protagonists to the nation-state. Despite having been largely ignored by institutionsboth Francoist and democratic -, Spanish Republican exile invariably returns to the collective and private memories of Spain in a myriad of cultural and political events and practices and has done so for over seventy years now. The status held by Republican exile within Spanish history and historiography is thus richly paradoxical: it is both central and residual; it has been dismissed and ignored by many and yet, its absence is structurally indispensable to any understanding of dictatorial and democratic Spain. There is arguably no more resilient ghost haunting actually-existing Spanish (post)modernity than that of Republican exile.

This book analyzes the exile ontology of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991). Karolina Enquist Källgren connects Zambrano’s lived exile and political engagement with the Spanish Civil War to her poetic reason, and argues that Zambrano developed a theory of expressive subjectivity that combined embodiment with the expressive creativity of the human mind. The analysis of recurring literary figures and concepts—such as new materialism, the confession, image, the ruin, the heart, and awakening— show how a comprehensive argument runs as a thread through her works. Further, this book situates Zambrano’s thought in a larger European philosophical context by showing how Zambrano’s poetic reason was directly related to her unconventional exile readings of Martin Heidegger, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Xavier Zubiri, among others.

Publications commentées :
- Olga Medvedkova (dir.), Les Européens : ces architectes qui ont bâti l’Europe (1450-1950), coll. Pour une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2017 ;
- Marie Gaimard, Caroline Maniaque (dir.), “Exils et migrations des architectes, des urbanistes, des paysagistes à l’ère contemporaine”, Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère, n° 2, 2018, journals.openedition.org/craup.

in Archiscopie, n° #17, février 2019, p. 96-99.

The paper uses Franz L. Neumann's concept of the political scholar to sketch the intellectual development of the political thought and the political engagement of Karl Loewenstein as an example of the intellectual migration of German scholars in the mid 20th century. In looking for the lasting importance of the study of the intellectual migration, it is argued that the political scholar no longer finds a space in academia, but is rather found among movements of global activist and global citizens.

Based on two case studies of diasporian Syrians this paper examines  the role of archiving while being 'in exile'. Through anthropological parallelisms it is shown how material and digital artifacts are being transformed into agents and simultaneously into self-imposed "traps" for the purposes of a greater ideological and existential cause.

Quotation suggestion:
Myrtsou, Persefoni (2016), "The Fame of Syrians: (Facebook) Archives As Traps", in Yurdakul, Gökçe; Römhild, Regina; Schwanhäußer; Anja, zur Nieden; Birgit, Lakić; Aleksandra (Eds.): Witnessing the Transition: Moments in the Long Summer of Migration, Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Berlin

Access the full e-book here: https://www.international.hu-berlin.de/de/internationales-profil/refugees-welcome-an-der-hu/dateien-und-fotos-1/e-book-witnessing-the-transition

תיאור הקורס:

לאחר למעלה מיובל שנים שעמדו בסימן של חרם ונידוי פוליטי ואקדמי, בשנים האחרונות אנו עדים לגל של תרגומים לעברית של כתביה של ההוגה הפוליטית חנה ארנדט (1975-1906) ולשצף של פרסומים, כתבות, מאמרים וסרטים אודותיה. המהפך הושלם, קבע עדי ערמון בעיתון הארץ ב-2012, ועתה חנה ארנדט שבה ובגדול, ״כמנצחת גדולה לעולם העברית.״ תופעה מקומית זו, ראוי להדגיש, מתלווה למגמה עולמית רחבה יותר: לצד היסטוריונים ופילוסופים גם סופרים, הוגים פוליטיים, יוצרי אמנות וחוקרי תרבות שבים אל חייה והגותה של כותבת קונטרוברסיאלית זו כדי לדלות מהם תובנות אודות משמעותם של מושגים כגון ״חירות״, ״פלורליזם״, ״טוטליטריזם״, ״הבנאליות של הרוע״, חיי פליטות (refugee) לעומת ״חיי המעשה״ או ה״ויטה אקטיבה״ (vita activa), ואף למעלה מכך - כדי להבין מהי פוליטיקה ומה משמעותה של הפעולה הפוליטית ושל האזרחות המקנה חברות בקהילה פוליטית.
לסמינר זה מוזמנים להצטרף סטודנטים המעוניינים להרחיב את ידיעותיהם בתולדות המחשבה הפוליטית במאה העשרים ולאלה המעוניים לנוע על הציר המחבר בין היסטוריה אינטלקטואלית-מערבית להיסטוריה יהודית. לסמינר שלוש מטרות עיקריות. ראשית, הוא נועד לספק מבוא להגותה של ארנדט, ובמסגרתו נעיין בכתביה המרכזיים, בהם יסודות הטוטליטריות (Origins of Totalitarianism) על המהפכה (On Revolution), אייכמן בירושלים (Eichmann in Jerusalem), המצב האנושי (The Human Condition) כמו גם במבחר כתביה בנושאים יהודיים. שנית, הקורס יציע כלים לניתוח הגותה בהקשר היסטורי, תוך מתן תשומת-לב רבה יותר לשינויים שחלו בהגותה של ארנדט במהלך השנים וכן באמצעות השוואתה להוגים בני זמנה ומעגלים אינטלקטואלים נוספים. שלישית, הקורס מבקש לדון באופן ביקורתי בהתקבלות (reception) של הגותה של ארנדט בשנים האחרונות, ולעקוב אחר תהליך הפיכתה לגיבורת תרבות.