Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico 9781503634695, 9781503635968

Citation preview

Unexpected Routes

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U N E X PEC T E D ROU T E S Refugee Writers in Mexico

Tabea Alexa Linhard

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Tabea Alexa Linhard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Names: Linhard, Tabea Alexa, 1972– author. Title: Unexpected routes : refugee writers in Mexico / Tabea Alexa Linhard. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022048966 (print) | LCCN 2022048967 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503634695 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503635968 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Authors, Exiled—Mexico—History—20th century. | Authors, European—Mexico—History—20th century. | Exiles’ writings, European—History and criticism. | Fascism and literature—History—20th century. | Exiles in literature. Classification: LCC PN495 .L425 2023 (print) | LCC PN495 (ebook) | DDC 809/.892069140972—dc23/eng/20230315 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048966 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048967 Cover design and photograph collage by Susan Zucker Maps designed by Sophie Binder Typeset by Elliott Beard in Sabon LT Pro 10/15

To Aitana, Emilio, and Guillermo

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments xi Ch a p t er One



Beautiful Friendships



The Emotional Geographies of Old and New Homes

1

Ch a p t er T wo

33

Chapter Three



Ships of Fools: Silvia Mistral

52

C h a p t e r F o ur



Transit and Chance Encounters

74

Chapter Five



No Solid Ground: Max Aub

98

Ch a p t er six



A Mexican Sector in Berlin: Anna Seghers



Yearning for Mexico: Ruth Rewald

116

Ch apter Seven

143

Ch a p t er Eigh t



Magical Zapatistas: Gertrude Duby

169

Chapter Nine



Landscapes of Grief: Egon Erwin Kisch

194

Chapter Ten

Afterlives 218 Notes 235 Index 273

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Illustrations

Figures 1 Federico (Fritz) Freudenheim, “Von der Alten Heimat zu der Neuen Heimat!” [From the old home to the new home!], 1938.

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2 “Con ‘rumba’ a México” [On the way to México].

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3 “Despedida. Hasta Luego! Hasta Luego! [Farewell! See you later! See you later!].

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4 “En la Martinica. Duérmete niño, que viene el coco . . .” [In Martinique. Sleep, little baby, the bogeyman is coming].

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5 Germaine Krull, “Le peintre cubain Fernando Lam accompagné d’une femme non identifiée” [the Cuban Painter Fernando accompanied by a non-­identified woman].

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6 Germaine Krull, “The children cross the line, Neptune festival on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle.”

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7 Leopoldo Méndez, “Deportación a la muerte” [Deportation to Death].

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8 Alfredo Zalce, “A poster advertising a meeting in Mexico City supported by the Liga Pro-­cultura Alemana on the subject of the place of women in Nazi society, 1939.”

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9 The original cover of Ruth Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko.

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10 One of Paul Urban’s illustrations for Ruth Rewald’s Janko. 163 Der Junge aus Mexiko. 11 Paul Urban’s illustration for the final page of Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko.

164 ix

x

L i s t o f Illu s t r a t i o n s

1 2 “How Long Behind Barbed Wire?”

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1 3 “Gertrude’s Angsttraum, Weihnacht, 1940” [Gertrude’s Nightmare, Christmas 1940].

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14 Dora Schaul, “Five o’ clock Tea.”

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1 5 Dora Schaul, “Dessin du Depart.”

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Maps 1 Unexpected Routes.

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2 Silvia Mistral (1931–­1939).

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3 Max Aub (1939–­1942).

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4 Anna Seghers (1933–­1947).

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5 Ruth Rewald (1933–­1944).

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6 Gertrude Duby (1933–­1950).

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7 Egon Erwin Kisch (1933–­1947).

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Acknowledgments

Al m o s t a d e c a d e a g o I happened upon two very moving works that inspired me to write this book: the first piece is a story, Anna Seghers’s “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen”; the second one is a map, Fritz Freudenheim’s “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat!” The famous author’s novella and the twelve-­year-­old’s drawing of his f­ amily’s escape route from Berlin to Montevideo made me realize that there was so much more to learn (to write, to draw) about the ways in which individuals experienced forced displacement in the 1930s and 40s. The result is a book that I could only complete with the aid of the many individuals and several institutions who have supported me along the way. The responsibility for this book’s shortcomings is mine alone. A 2014 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies gave me the gift of time to pursue the very different threads that come together in this book. I received support in the form of Faculty Research Grants from Washington University in St. Louis that made it possible to travel to archives in Germany (especially the Library of the Ibero-­ American Institute, IAI, and the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin), Spain, France, and Mexico. A fellowship at Washington University’s Center for the Humanities came just at the right moment. Yet all the time in the world could never give me what the generosity of all those who read many versions of different parts of the book did: Amy Sara Carroll, Sarah Casteel, Dalia Kandiyoti, Ryan Long, Erin McGlothlin, Anne Parsons, Tim Parsons, Anca Parvulescu, Mauricio Tenorio-­Trillo, and Anne Treeger. I am also grateful for the readers who provided extremely thorough and helpful reports to Stanford University Press. The members of the Genealogías de Sefarad Research Group, Stacy Beckwith, Rina Benmayor, Esther Bendahan, Daniela Flesler, Dalia Kandiyoti, Asher Salah, and the late Adrián Pérez Melgosa, deserve special recognition, as being part of this group has been one of the xi

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Ack nowledgmen ts

most productive and joyful experiences in my career. I am grateful to my colleagues and students in my two homes at Washington University, Romance Languages and Literatures and Global Studies. I would not have made it without the support of Gigi Werner, who has taught me to see, and Kim Winn, who has taught me so much more than to breathe. As much as I challenge the very idea of “roots” in this book, my family and my friends on both sides of the Atlantic have always made me feel rooted. Thank you for your endless hospitality, for being my travel companions, for laughing and crying with me, for taking me on city walks and up very tall mountains, for the joy of happy hours and the merriment of Karaoke parties. My mother, Karin Linhard, passed away before I started writing this book, but her memory was and will always be my guide. I want to thank my father, José Linhard, for teaching me so much more than a first love for Casablanca, and my sister Mirjam Mahler, still the only one who laughs at my jokes, for her strength and creative spirit. Guillermo Rosas has listened to, read, and tolerated more about this book than anyone probably ever will, making the years it took me to write it, with their share of sorrows, still wonderful. Emilio Rosas Linhard and Aitana Rosas Linhard have grown and changed in these years. Nothing makes me as grateful as their smiles, their continuous and yet loving challenges, and just their presence in my life. And I am of course thankful to my most unexpected, and yet most faithful companion, Houdini. My gratitude goes to Margo Irvin, Cindy Lim, Chris Peterson, and Emily Smith at Stanford University Press for helping make this book a reality, and to Nicholas Murray for his careful editing. I also want to thank Sophie Binder, who designed the maps, Olivier and Michka Assayas and Irene Freudenheim for allowing me to reproduce images that belong to their personal archives, and Adrián Méndez Barrera, Pablo Méndez Hernández, the Anna-­Seghers-­Museum-­in Berlin, the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and the Folkwang Museum in Essen.  An earlier version of a section of chapter 3 appeared in the article “Writing Mobility, Writing Stillness: Silvia Mistral’s Transatlantic Displacements” (Comparative Literature Studies 60, no. 1 [2023]). I am

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grateful to the journal’s editors and anonymous readers. An earlier version of a section of chapter 5 appeared in the article “No Solid Ground: Max Aub’s Roots and Routes” (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 23, no. 2, [2017]). I am grateful to the journal’s editors and anonymous readers.

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Ch a p t er One

Beautiful Friendships

T h e f i r s t VC R m y f a m i l y ever owned came to us with a Betamax tape of a film recorded from television, commercials and all. The film was Michael Curtiz’s 1941 feature Casablanca. My parents assured my nine-­year-­old self that I would enjoy the movie about one of the greatest love stories ever told. I indeed ended up loving the film and understanding very little of it. Over the years I have watched it countless times, and while the film was never longer than its 102-­minute run, with every viewing it became increasingly complex. Casablanca may be a love story, or several love stories, but love is merely a backdrop to a much more interesting account about escape and survival. Casablanca reveals the attitudes that refugees fleeing from fascism had vis-­à-­vis racial structures brought about by centuries of conquests, occupations, and human trafficking. The film does all this with certain Hollywood conventions, particularly its exotic setting that looks nothing like the place it is supposed to represent, given that Casablanca was shot entirely in Southern California, and leaving the fate of the world in the hands of two white and male heroes: resistance fighter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and American gin-­joint owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). And yet, somehow, I remain fascinated by Casablanca, not so much because of the stories about love it may tell, but because of the many stories the film does not, cannot, or simply was not ready to tell. A voice, a path, a few images, and a map: these elements make up the opening credits of what may be the most popular story about refugees’ escape routes during World War II. We learn that, with the coming of the war, “many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.” Lisbon was “the great embarkation point.” Yet not everybody could reach the Portuguese capital, as this entailed crossing Spain, then under Francisco Franco’s rule. Thus “a torturous roundabout refugee trail sprang up.” The trail extended “from 1

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Paris to Marseille, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train, by auto, or by foot across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.” And there, “the fortunate ones through money or influence or luck, might obtain an exit visa and scurry to Lisbon. But the others wait in Casablanca and wait, and wait and wait.”1 Refugees indeed escaped Europe via Lisbon and North Africa, yet there were many other routes, equally tortuous and roundabout.2 The fates of some of the fortunate, and of many of the unfortunate ones, along these routes are not always remembered, as they belong to “the early history of our current political and moral failures,” contained within a “largely untouched archive.”3 This book tells some of the stories that, in a sense, begin where Casablanca ends. Shortly before the closing credits roll, Rick Blaine and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) ponder their next move: joining the resistance in the Congolese city of Brazzaville, where Charles de Gaulle had established the capital of Free France. At that point Rick voices one of the movie’s most quoted lines: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” As the men walk into the early morning fog (an unlikely phenomenon in Morocco), their bond may have been beautiful, but it was also as uncertain as the war’s outcome and their future. The film’s production wrapped in August of 1942, and while its opening in the United States coincided with the Allied invasion of North Africa in the same year, World War II and the massive displacements it caused were far from over. Casablanca is a fictional account, but it has become the most recognizable “screen memory” of the escape and exile routes of World War II. Sigmund Freud coined the term screen memories (from, the German Deckerinnerungen) in 1899: these are recollections that take the place of other more significant and often traumatic memories.4 Yet screen memories not only conceal the past; they may also provide access to it. In Michael Rothberg’s words, “The displacement that takes place in screen memory (indeed, all memory) functions as much to open up lines of communication with the past as to close them off.”5 Casablanca’s “same old story” about a “fight for love and glory” told on screens big and small, provides an opportunity to think over those other stories of encounters and connections between individuals whose paths crossed in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–­1939) and during World

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War II.6 Not only are their stories worth knowing, telling them is part of a long-­in-­the making overcoming of the twentieth century as a collective screen memory. It all starts with the opening sequence: the film begins with a shot of a map of Africa. The story of European colonialism appears inscribed by the borders of Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia, Southwest Africa, and, of course, Spanish and French Morocco. At this point, the location of the film’s setting is marked solely with a white dot.7 Once the narration, voiced by Lou Marcelle, ensues, a globe that slowly turns from a view of the Pacific to Europe has taken the place of a map, as it is in Paris where the “tortuous roundabout refugee route” originates. The sequence also is the only one with actual footage of refugees. They are fleeing on truck beds or on foot and carrying their few belongings with them. The name Casablanca only becomes visible on the map once its relevance as both a destination and a place of transit for displaced Europeans is evident. It is a location in “French Morocco,” where brave antifascist resistance fighters (and, eventually, a once-­reluctant American, now cured from his cynicism) struggle against the Nazi occupation of Europe, yet never question that Morocco, too, has been occupied by a colonial power.8 Moreover, Moroccan subjects and local languages are conspicuously absent, in spite of the film’s otherwise multilingual and multinational cast, especially when it comes to supporting roles: “Casablanca’s remarkable inclusivity as regards European refugees excludes the actual inhabitants of Casablanca itself.”9 The same phenomenon mirrors the ways in which displaced writers in the period often portray their places of transit and exile as well as the many locals they encountered along the way. In works they left behind (chronicles, poems, letters, fiction) they denounce the violence and cruelty that has forced them away from their homes, not always recognizing that violence and cruelty also were the fabric of the colonial and postcolonial societies that now offered them safety. Ironically perhaps, Casablanca’s inaccuracies, its specific historical blunders, the unrealistic early morning fog scenes, and its Orientalist trappings and scenarios, make the film a rather genuine depiction of the contradictions that marked the experiences of refugees fleeing from fascism. In fact, Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca, was a Jewish

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refugee from Hungary who had come to the United States in the 1920s.10 Moreover, the film’s “beautiful friendship” rings true, as during the global refugee crisis of the 1930s and 1940s (not the first of its kind, but still the largest in numbers until the current crisis superseded it in 2016), people’s lives intersected along unexpected escape routes and in equally unexpected places. Two more aspects shown in the film also ring true. First, escape routes were not only roundabout and tortuous, they were also very risky and required securing a long, sometimes impossible list of documents (exit visa, transit letters, safe-­conduits, entrance visas, etc.) that left refugees desperate and made bribes and forgeries a necessity. To be sure, nobody would label as “illegal immigrants” well-­known intellectuals and writers (among them philosopher Hannah Arendt) who were able to escape occupied Europe and settle elsewhere. Yet many managed to escape from fascism because they themselves (or others on their behalf) were willing to forge documents, pay bribes, or cross borders clandestinely. Second, Casablanca’s North African setting also conjures up the colonial structures and respective racial hierarchies that European refugees encountered and took along with them in their imagined maps of the places where they would eventually settle. At times they challenged these structures and hierarchies as they escaped from fascism, but they also ignored or accommodated to them. Not rarely, they also supported them. The ensuing chapters chronicle the refugees’ attempts (not always successful) to flee and their experiences in the early years of exile, when the outcome of World War II was uncertain. Alas, their multiple losses were already hauntingly clear. Routes conjures up the similar sounding roots, thereby addressing ongoing tensions between origins and stillness (roots) and displacement and mobility (routes).11 Yearning for roots, for a sense of security or an inherent sense of belonging was, and is, common for people on the move. 12 Yet escape routes took refugees to places such as Casablanca, Martinique, Mexico City, or San Cristóbal de las Casas, where stark inequalities, racial and otherwise, were a consequence of colonial rule, often justified with notions like fixed origins, static identities, and unchanging places. One of the main contradictions that this book explores is how refugees coveted a sense of rootedness, even though the world they had to flee (fascist-­occupied Europe) was one where a belief

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in fixed, eternal, essential, and rooted national and racial identities was leading to mass death and destruction. The cruel irony here is that deep historical endorsement of collective roots had led to routes of massive displacement, which in turn reinforced the allure of roots. “Home,” for sure, had its appeal, but “refuge” (i.e., safety) was more important, and so the comfortable and familiar became dangerous, while the new and strange provided safety. The sound of roots still reverberates in routes, perhaps as a constant reminder of the devastating effects of deracination. The intellectuals and writers forced away from their homes in the 1930s and 1940s had to re-­imagine a world where they were suddenly torn not only “from land, communities, traditions, and histories, but [also] from reality itself.”13 Today, the numbers of displaced people (by the end of 2022, 100 million) exceed those of World War II, and the geographies and directions of refugees’ flight routes have shifted. Yet contemporary refugee law, as well as a more general understanding of the term refugee are drawn from massive displacements in 1930s and 1940s, making the narratives and the contradictions from this period all the more relevant for understanding the plight of the displaced in the present-­day world. The experiences of refugees in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II and those of today are by no means identical, yet forced displacement in the twentieth century provides numerous lessons for current events. Referring specifically to Jewish refugees in Portugal in the 1940s and today’s refugees, Marion Kaplan addresses the shared experiences of these different communities: “Despite vast differences in time, place, religion, and ethnicity, the groups share similarities, not least being forced to flee from homes and loved ones and hoping for a safe place while waiting in limbo.”14 Grasping the history of refugees is about more than understanding a particularity with its diverse manifestations in different decades; instead, it implies considering that “refugee history is everybody’s history” and that “the politics of moving people are central to modern history.”15 Rather than providing a comprehensive account of all possible outcomes that the escape from fascism across the Atlantic may have had, this book examines individual stories of displacement, survival, loss, and grief, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions. None of these stories can or should take the place of the entirety of

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the refugee experience, but each part illuminates a whole that can never be fully grasped. Moreover, one important caveat needs to be considered here: however important and revealing the study of escape and exile routes may be, it also is a flawed endeavor. As we examine the lived experiences of “the fortunate ones,” the fates of those who could not acquire a safe-­conduit or a visa, who lacked the money to pay bribes or cover the costs of sea voyage, whom the rescue networks did not reach—­in short, all of those not saved—­haunt the stories of those who managed to escape and survive. German writer Anna Seghers (née Netty Reiling), one of this book’s protagonists, found safe haven in Mexico, yet her mother stayed behind and died in a concentration camp. In a letter dated January 2, 1945, Seghers told her friend Kurt Kersten (who, as explained in chapter 4, had just made it to New York after a long and painful odyssey that included a five-­year stay in Martinique) about the fate of her mother and sister-­in-­ law. “We only have hellish news. My mother, whom I hadn’t heard from for years, was last taken to a concentration camp in Poland, where she probably died. Rodi’s dear and very beautiful sister, a close friend since we were young girls, was also taken away with her husband and children.”16 In similar ways, contemporary discussions about refugees tend to center on what happens along the route, in camps, or on whatever impact they had on hosting nations. But what about those who could not leave? Literary texts, films, and memoirs, as well as more ephemeral texts (letters, pamphlets, even sketches) reveal that, for those able to survive in faraway lands, the presence of lost loved ones is constant, as a scene in Ai Weiwei’s 2016 documentary Human Flow, poignantly shows.17 One of the many individuals briefly telling his story in this film is Syrian refugee Ismatholla Sediqi. Audiences first meet him when he is traveling in a car with some of the film’s crew members. He is then shown walking in a muddy graveyard in Turkey. His first words are, “They all died at sea.” Sediqi goes on to narrate how five members of a family of seventeen died. His brother, Sakhi Ahmad, who lost his spouse and children, has gone completely mad. A visibly distressed Sediqi states, “The people drowned at sea. I wish they were still with us. They appear in my dreams at night. I see them in my sleep, and they tell me what to do.” The sequence ends with the camera panning along an empty

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grave. Human Flow does not return to Sediqi’s story; it is up to the audience to reflect on what he endures in his ongoing search for safety. Even though he may be able eventually to attain a protected legal status (in Turkey, perhaps elsewhere), chances are that he will experience this agony indefinitely—­“sometimes,” in the words of author Vinh Nguyen, “for an entire lifetime.”18 To paraphrase Nguyen, to be a refugee is both a legal designation and a subjective experience, and nothing is “temporary or short” about these. Human Flow addresses the current global refugee crisis, the greatest human displacement since World War II, and Nguyen’s study primarily draws from the wars in Vietnam, yet the ways in which the displaced during World War II conceptualized and wrote about their experiences as refugees share traits with these two works. Six decades before Ai Weiwei completed Human Flow, Seghers wrote the novella “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen” [“The Dead Girls’ Class Trip”] in Mexico City.19 The author had only recently learned of her mother’s death in a concentration camp, and she was also recovering from a severe traffic accident. Netty, the story’s main character, is a circumspect and melancholy refugee in Mexico (the autobiographical elements are evident: Netty is Seghers’s given name) who eventually returns to her German hometown, miraculously restored to its prewar life. And so is the author’s dead mother: “She stood there cheerful and erect, destined for family life full of work and all the ordinary joys and troubles of everyday life, not for a painful, gruesome end in some remote village to which she had been banished by Hitler.”20 Yet when Netty tries to embrace her mother, she suddenly appears to be out of reach: “I hesitated before the first landing. I was suddenly much too tired to hurry up the stairs, as I had intended to a moment ago. A grayish blue fog of weariness engulfed everything. And yet it was bright and hot all around me, not dim the way it usually is in stairwells. I forced myself to climb up to my mother. The stairway, in my gloomy haze, seemed unattainably high, indomitably steep, as if it were ascending a cliff wall.”21 The narrator soon finds herself back in her actual reality. She is not a young adult in Germany, but a middle-­aged refugee in Mexico who had to leave her mother behind, and who remains haunted by her absence. Human Flow and “The Dead Girls Class Trip,” two very different works from different parts of the world, created in different historical moments, show that

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not paying attention to who and what was irrevocably lost means missing part of the stories of forced displacement, no matter how or when such stories take place. Unexpected Routes is about refugees who could count on the necessary connections to make their escape possible, yet even those privileges did not save some from incarceration in camps, and others from deportation and death. Becoming a refugee never is a choice; in poet Warsan Shire’s words, “No one leaves home unless home chases you.”22 And, as it were, home is truly never abandoned: the ghosts of lost first and essential intimacies never go away, as both Ai’s film and Seghers’s novella poignantly show. Nevertheless, claiming the term refugee as Hannah Arendt did—­albeit uneasily—­in her 1943 essay “We Refugees” is important. 23 The term refugee brings together a range of stories of displacement while simultaneously revealing the radical heterogeneity of the experiences of people “who were compelled to negotiate difficult journeys to a place of relative safety,”24 or for whom, to cite Shire again, home had become the “mouth of a shark.”25 And shark mouths were everywhere in the 1930s and 1940s. The aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II led to quickly changing geopolitical circumstances that shaped specific escape routes across the European continent, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. Between 1939 and 1945 refugees from both Spain and Nazi-­occupied Europe used the same escape routes across the Pyrenees. 26 Countless Spanish refugees fled north after the Republic’s downfall, yet in France they would face another war and soon another defeat. And before the tracks of the Spanish refugees vanished from the trails that took them across the mountains, they were covered by the footprints of another group of desperate people, stateless Jews and other antifascists on the move. Back then, what turned an individual’s legal status from citizen to refugee or to stateless individual changed quickly and erratically, as did borders between nations, making escape routes viable on one day and impossible the next. The same can be said for the rules, or lack thereof, for the travel documents that were necessary for leaving occupied Europe. Walter Benjamin’s death in Portbou (Catalonia) may be the most well-­known story about the tragic consequences of such inconsistency, which made him a member of a community to

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which nobody wanted to belong. 27 Yet the well-­known philosopher and cultural critic is far from the only individual who ended up literally and metaphorically trapped in the borders between Spain and France, between Francoism and Nazism. As Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt point out, “Benjamin died alone and afraid in a strange town, sharing the fate of many unknown refugees who succumbed during their flight or exile.”28 The historians here conjure up the inscription on a glass panel that is part of Dani Karavan’s memorial “Passages” in Portbou, a monument that, while dedicated to the memory of unknown refugees, nevertheless is a tribute to a famous philosopher. The text on the glass panel, taken from Benjamin’s own writing, reads: “It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.” And the vicissitudes of Benjamin’s death encompass the uncertainty of escape: he had procured all but one of the necessary travel documents (his French exit visa was missing), but fearing the worst, he killed himself. The sad irony here is that the others who had crossed the Pyrenees with him were allowed to continue their journey. Until reaching a safe refuge in Americas, anything could happen and there was no way to predict what the next day would bring. In today’s world the number of the displaced has exceeded the number of those who were forced from their homes in the 1930s and 1940s; the demographic differences between these two moments have increased exponentially, as have (in some nations more than in others) rejections of and negative rhetoric about people forced across borders. Whereas the developed world accepts only a very small percentage of today’s refugees, the burdens and responsibilities tend to fall on neighboring countries, often states in crisis, as a consequence of “accidents of geography,” as James Hathaway puts it. 29 Moreover, as in the 1930s and 1940s, some neighboring countries become mercenary refuges—­willing to keep millions of refugees in terrible conditions for a price that Europe or the United States (consider the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” that the US government first implemented in 2019) often happily pay. Accidents of geography also explain why, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II, most of the displaced crossed borders between the home countries left behind and neighboring

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nations.30 The developments of the war as well as specific local policies pushed refugees across more and more borders, borders that also shifted and, as the war progressed, became increasingly difficult to cross. Geography thereby was central to the lived realities of refugees, not only because many of them had to consult atlases or globes in order to locate an unknown country that would become a place of asylum, but also because the distance the refugees had to cover until they reached that very place became a crucial, and sometimes treacherous, part of their realities. Chapter 2 provides more detail about if and how escape routes can be mapped. The refugees wrote about crossing great geographical distances, chronicling how the different places they passed through and the places where they settled touched their “inner lives,” changing them and changing those places.31 These transformations do not always remain physically visible. The external marks of the unexpected routes may have vanished, yet they persist in what that the refugees produced about their experiences. This becomes evident in works that, like Arendt’s above-­ mentioned 1943 essay, were written before the end of World War II. In these rather raw documents, the authors, who could not know the outcome of the war, bear witness to the many forms of loss that resulted from their multiple displacements along “torturous roundabout refugee trails.”

Refuge in Mexico While refugees ended up in many different places around the globe, in Unexpected Routes Mexico brings the fates of several displaced individuals together. Mexico City, specifically, already had become “both a refuge for the world’s radicals and a battlefield for world radicalism” years earlier.”32 La ciudad was not Moscow or Paris and yet it was full of interests, agents, and intellectuals from all over the world. It was not peaceful, as it had just come out of a bloody and messy revolution, yet it surely knew less violence in 1919 than Berlin, Barcelona, Philadelphia, or Chicago. It was not a decadent European city whose cultural life would have gone, as it were, from Spencerean or Nietzschean surmenages to German-­like impressionism and disenchanted radical van-

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guardism. It was, however, the laboratory where, in 1919, such notions as “the nation,” “the people,” “the Revolution,” as well as “authenticity,” “race,” and “avant-­garde” were being experimented with in a Mexican and in a more than Mexican fashion. 33

Yet not alone the allure of this cultural effervescence, that had already drawn such figures as US author Katherine Anne Porter in the 1920s or French dramatist Antonin Artaud a decade later, explains why the country became an important site of refuge. Immigration policies and the initiatives of individual leaders played a crucial role here. Mexico’s most notorious exile may have been Leon Trotsky: he arrived in 1937, to be assassinated by Ramón Mercader at his home in 1940. Yet the country’s historical relationship with refugees expands far beyond this specific case. It was during Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency (1934–­ 1940) that refugees from Spain’s defeated Republic found safe haven in Mexico. Between twenty-­and twenty-­five thousand Spanish exiles settled in Mexico, carrying the burden of defeat, displacement, and loss with them; for some the burden would never ease. Yet the Spanish exile community also thrived in Mexico, creating important cultural and academic institutions. Transtierro, a neologism coined by philosopher José Gaos, communicates the notion that the Spanish refugees conceive of themselves more as trans-­placed than as displaced, especially once it became evident that their stay in Mexico would not be a mere interlude, but a long, new life that would last until the death of Francisco Franco in 1975.34 The word destierro is commonly translated as “exile” or even “banishment,” but the term literally means “unearthing,” and it accurately connotes the refugees’ experiences in the initial years of displacement, when some of the works discussed in the ensuing chapters were written. The uprootedness of the early years eventually transformed into a new sense of belonging in Mexico.35 Yet these developments were not immediate; exile in the 1940s was different from what it would grow into in later periods, particularly once it became evident that Franco’s rule would not be overturned any time soon, and that Mexico had become the refugees’ permanent home. The Spanish refugees’ rooting in Mexico depended both on their actual political and intellectual visibility during the Republic and the

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civil war in Spain, as well as on each exile’s own sense of uprootedness. Some, like Catalan writers Pere Calders and Joan Sales, had not been very prominent during the Republican years in Catalonia and thus returned to Spain in the early 1960s. As fervent Catalanists, and as writers in the Catalan language, they deemed their presence in Barcelona indispensable and, after all, they were considered not particularly dangerous by the Franco regime. But someone like the above-­mentioned Gaos, who had occupied an important and visible position in the last government of the Republic, could not dream of returning. By 1975 many had remade their lives in Mexico—­the transterrados that were no longer desterrados. Many had Mexican children and families and, like Max Aub, returned to Spain only to visit, becoming disenchanted with a transformed country that barely remembered them. It was in these early years of exile that the Spanish also coincided with another group in Mexico. Once president Manuel Ávila Camacho took office in 1940, and as the Spanish rebuilt their lives in their new home, political leaders with leftist sympathies, most prominently labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, continued supporting the arrival of a more specific group of the displaced: intellectuals and writers fleeing Nazi-­occupied Europe. The fame of many of the refugees (from Spain, Germany, and German-­speaking countries) and the numerous forms of antifascist cultural activity that flourished in Mexico during the war years turned the country into an epicenter of antifascist resistance. Historians and politicians have long used Mexico’s welcoming of this group of refugees as a proof of Mexico’s hospitable and progressive policies. Yet, as Daniela Gleizer has shown, Mexico was actually far less open to Jewish and Eastern European refugees than has been commonly assumed. Cárdenas’s and Ávila Camacho’s government accepted refugees, but their migratory policies were closely linked to US quotas and policies.36 And Mexico also was not the place where everybody wanted to settle, at least not at first. The above-­mentioned Seghers ended up forging close connections in Mexico, where she lived in relative safety for five years. She had originally hoped to find refuge in the United States, but the authorities denied her entry, using her daughter’s alleged poor health as an excuse. And so Seghers and her family settled in Mexico in 1942, as did many of her friends and intellectual collaborators. As Pablo

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Neruda, who himself had been responsible for ensuring safe passage for more than two thousand Spanish refugees to Chile in 1939, put it, the “salt of the earth had gathered in Mexico.”37 Together, the refugees were responsible for joint, German-­language publication ventures, among them the newspaper Freies Deutschland/ Alemania Libre, which circulated between 1941 and 1946, and the publishing house El Libro Libre, established in November 1942, as well as for individual works about the country.38 Unlike the Spanish transterrados, most, but not all, of the German-­speaking refugees eventually returned to Europe, carrying with them actual remainders of their Mexican years (their own chronicles, books by their fellow refugees and Mexican authors, works of art, etc.) and less tangible memories they would eventually transform into works with an unmistakable sense of nostalgia for the place where they found safety and where they survived the war years.

Beautiful Friendships The protagonists of this book share important relationships—­or beautiful friendships—­with Mexico. They are listed here in a sequence that anticipates the book’s chapters: Cuban-­born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral (b. 1914, Havana; d. 2004, Mexico City), German-­born Spanish writer Max Aub (b. 1903, Paris; d. 1972, Mexico City), German writer Anna Seghers (b. 1900, Mainz; d. 1983, East Berlin), German writer Ruth Rewald (b. 1901, Berlin; d. 1943, Auschwitz-­Birkenau), Swiss-­born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby (b. 1901, Innertkirchen; d. 1993, San Cristóbal de las Casas), and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (b. 1885, Prague; d. 1948, Prague). Over the years, these individuals lost, acquired, and regained different citizenships, and none of their lives ended in the same country in which they had begun. All of them endured painful losses, sometimes hard to put into words, but even this did not stop them from writing about their experiences and producing complicated, sometimes even controversial works. The diverse worldviews of refugees from the 1930s and 1940s were products of the times in which these individuals grew up, and so their chronicles often leave the racialized structures and hierarchies they encountered along their escape routes unquestioned. They were no “paragons of virtue,” but brilliant, prolific, as well as flawed, complicated,

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and contradictory human beings who had to endure ordeals difficult to imagine.39 Mexico changed them, and they also changed Mexico as they adapted to their new homeland. Those from German-­speaking countries had also to adapt to a new language, even to a “ghostly existence,” to being “an untethered phantom in need of a new life,” and also to living with the ghosts of who and what had been left behind.40 Refugees have existed since ancient times, yet the twentieth century saw the birth of the “modern refugee,” in Lindsey Stonebridge’s terms, “the negative of the modern citizen.”41 The protagonists of this book were refugees before the 1951 Refugee Convention established a specific legal status that led to the contemporary understanding of a refugee as “a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-­founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him-­or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.”42 The legal category, born in 1951 in relation to the problem of displacement caused by World War II (the “Displaced Persons” or “DPs” living in camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy) and contested in our age of populist nationalism and increasingly fortified borders, mirrors the situations in which the writers discussed in Unexpected Routes—­ and countless others—­found themselves during the refugee crisis in the 1930s and 1940s. Back then, just like today, refugees crossed borders with and without the necessary travel documents. They traversed oceans and seas on ships built for cargo, not people, that did not always make it to shore. Some ended up as “undesirables” (a label for foreign nationals that preceded the Nazi occupation of France and subsequent division of the country into two zones) in prison camps. Others settled in countries that were partially or wholly unknown before they were forced away from their homes. The displaced adjusted to new environments, new professions, and new languages, making translators and translations indispensable. The “rupture of our private lives,” as Arendt (also a refugee, yet with certain privileges) writes in “We Refugees,” shaped the heterogeneous experiences of the displaced in the period.43 And even though international protections had been put in place by the time Viet Thanh Nguyen

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and his family became refugees in the 1970s, these did not necessarily prevent multiple and complicated losses: “To become a refugee is to know, inevitably, that the past is not only marked by the passage of time, but by loss—­the loss of loved ones, of countries, of identities, of selves.”44 Home, occupation, and the familiarity of daily life and language were not the only losses the displaced endured during the first global crisis: they carried with them the burden of having survived while many others, often loved ones, could not escape the violence of war, repression, and genocide on the continent. Except for Rewald, who was put to death at Auschwitz in 1942, all other writers discussed in this book found asylum in Mexico, where they gathered in the early 1940s. Yet their routes to Mexico were as intricate as the accounts that they wrote about them. The six protagonists came of age in the early twentieth century; the youngest among them, Silvia Mistral (née Hortensia Blanch Pita), was born in Havana in 1914. Not only her youth but also her immigrant and working-­class childhood make her an exception in this group: Mistral was the daughter of Spanish sugar-­ plantation workers expelled from Cuba in 1931, and this meant that by the time she found herself aboard the Ipanema, a converted cargo ship, on her way from France to Mexico in 1939, she had already crossed the Atlantic three times. Roughly half a million Spaniards had to flee the country after Franco’s victory in 1939, and Mistral was among the few who were not new to transatlantic crossings. The first stopover in the Western Hemisphere for the Ipanema was Martinique, then under French colonial rule. A mechanical failure made staying on the Caribbean island necessary. The delay only lasted a few days, but it was long and important enough for Mistral to document it in a chronicle of her voyage, a text she eventually published in Mexico as Éxodo: Diario de una refugiada española [Exodus: The Diary of a Spanish Refugee] (1940), the first memoir of a Republican exile to appear in print.45 Two years after Mistral spent just three days in Martinique, a group of far more famous, but just as imperfect individuals—­also no “paragons of virtue”—­arrived at the harbor in Fort-­de-­France, aboard the Paul Lemerle, a vessel carrying a human cargo of more than three hundred refugees in 1941. Among the passengers were Anna Seghers, anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss, surrealist poet André Breton, Rus-

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sian writer Victor Serge, artist Wifredo Lam (whom some liked to call the “Cuban Picasso”), and photographer Germaine Krull. Most had become “undesirables” in France. Political and not mechanical reasons explain why the Paul Lemerle’s first stopover in the Americas was an island in the Caribbean. The above-­mentioned individuals’ flight from fascism had occurred thanks to the “Martinique Plan,” a specific route that for roughly one year, between 1940 and 1941, made it possible for a limited number of refugees to flee from Nazi-­occupied Europe to the Americas and reach, as Seghers put it, “the Westernmost point of France administered by Vichy.”46 Martinique was one of the sites where European refugees encountered colonial structures and racial hierarchies that the displaced sometimes challenged, sometimes tolerated, and sometimes supported. Another one was Djelfa (Algeria), where other undesirables were imprisoned in a camp, euphemistically called “camp d’internement et de travail” (internment and work camp) or “centre de séjour surveillé” (guarded stay camps). The Vichy government confined roughly 900–­1,000 other undesirables in Djelfa, including members of the Communist Party, veterans of Spain’s Republican army and of the International Brigades, and stateless Jews. While French officers oversaw the camps, local soldiers guarded the detainees, making both the European prisoners and the North African guards experience a new and racially charged power dynamic. Between November 1941 and May 1942, Max Aub was a prisoner of war in Djelfa, where he wrote his Diario de Djelfa, a collection of poems based on his experience at the camp.47 Born in Paris to a German father and a French mother, Aub had grown up in Spain, where his family had settled during World War 1. Aub had left Spain on February 1, 1939 (the Nationalists won the war two months later), and his strong ties with Spain’s now defeated Republic led to several arrests and shorter stays in prison camps in France. By 1941 he had become sufficiently undesirable so that in the eyes of the local authorities, confinement in camp in Algeria was warranted. Fortunately for Aub, he had the kind of connections that made it possible for him to eventually make it to a place of safety. Gilberto Bosques (1892–­1995), the Mexican consul in Marseille, sometimes called “the Mexican Schindler,” had already advocated for the writer when he was

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sent to the Le Vernet camp in France in 1940.48 Bosques continued supporting Aub and eventually made his release from the Algerian camp possible in May of 1942. Trying to make it to Casablanca, he was detained one more time in Oujda (Algeria), before finally embarking on the Serpa Pinto, the ship that took him to Veracruz, where he arrived on October 1, 1942. Seghers had arrived in Mexico a year before, and Mistral had been living in Mexico since the summer of 1939. Aub settled in Mexico City in 1942 and continued to be an impressively prolific author who never shied away from writing in any genre: he published short stories, poetry, plays, novels, screen plays, memoirs, and even fake biographies so ingenious that his fictional co-­founder of Cubism, Jusep Torres Campalans, even made it into some art encyclopedias. Aub himself was behind the Cubist works that Torres Campalans had supposedly created.49 Yet Aub’s creative genius did not stop him from lamenting that he did not belong anywhere in the world. He famously stated in his journals that “being from nowhere” damaged him. 50 It therefore is hardly surprising that one of his most famous pieces is a novella about a Mexican waiter, so riled by the customers in the café where he works (the noisy Spanish exiles and their constant and vociferous proclamations of what they would do once Franco was gone) that he decides to travel to Spain and kill the dictator himself.51 This is of course not the way things ended, and while the Spanish dictator solidified his power in Spain, eventually not dying in a coup, but in his bed in 1975, Aub, Mistral, and many others rebuilt their lives in Mexico, always writing and, in a sense, always yearning. While Aub remains largely unknown in the Anglophone world, his novels, plays, and poems are more widely translated and re-­issued than any of Mistral’s works. She also continued writing but ended up doing what so many other female refugees did: authoring whatever could pay the bills. Indeed, more famous husbands of less famous spouses regularly continued writing as though they had never become refugees, while the women frequently ended up becoming the breadwinners, focusing on more lucrative but far less prestigious genres: translations, children’s literature, advice columns, and housekeeping tips in newspapers and magazines.52 When Spanish poet León Felipe, also a refugee in Mexico, wrote the prologue to the first edition of Éxodo, his much more recognizable name

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was an important endorsement of the work. And yet the fact that the poet could not stop himself from highlighting that Mistral’s voice was innocent, maternal, and ideal for telling stories, shows that women’s writing generally came with certain qualifications because, as he claims, “Women know how to tell good stories and with simplicity.”53 Felipe may have meant to praise Mistral, and yet it is hard not to see a condescending tone that he did not use when referring to male writers. These domestic dynamics were, at least to some extent, different but no less complicated in Seghers’s case. She came from a Jewish family, was a deeply committed antifascist, and had joined the German Communist Party in 1928. She and her family had to leave Germany in 1933, fleeing first to Switzerland and then settling in France until 1941. Once the Nazis marched into Paris, Seghers managed to flee to Marseille. As had happened with Aub, Bosques helped her procure a Mexican visa. Yet one of the first problems the family encountered was that the visa was for Seghers’s nom-­de-­plume, Anna Seghers, and did not include the name given at her birth, Netty, and her husband’s last name. Seghers’s husband, the Hungarian social scientist László Radványi, had been interned as an “undesirable foreigner” in the Le Vernet prisoners camp in May 1940, and from there he was sent to another camp, Les Milles. With Bosques’s assistance, the family was eventually reunited, and they embarked on the Paul Lemerle on March 24, 1941. After a long a journey, the family arrived in Mexico City on June 30, 1941. In Seghers’s own words, her path to safety in Mexico was not only labyrinthine but also raised the specters of colonialism: “It took us longer to get here than it did Columbus,” she recalled in 1944.54 The route took the Seghers-­Radványi family from Marseille to Martinique, Havana, Ciudad Trujillo (as Santo Domingo was known between 1936 and 1961), and New York. The family finally arrived in in Veracruz on June 30, 1941. While Seghers and her family were safe in Mexico, new hardships awaited them. As mentioned earlier, Seghers was involved in a severe car accident in Mexico City: she was run over and left for dead on a major thoroughfare. Yet despite the adversity Seghers endured in those years, she learned to love Mexico, a place that she considered to be “ideal for artists” and where the “atmosphere was stimulating.”55 Her correspon-

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dence shows that she was proficient enough in Spanish to communicate with at least one of her Spanish-­speaking friends, the Cuban designer Clara Porset, who had fled from Cuba to Mexico a few years earlier. Despite all the hardship, Seghers never stopped writing. On her way to Mexico, she penned one of her most seminal works, the novel Transit, and she wrote the already mentioned “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip” shortly after the accident that almost took her life. The short story appeared in Mexico and in Spanish translation before it was published anywhere else, and the novel, probably the most well-­known reflection of what it meant to be a refugee trying to make it out of fascist-­occupied Europe, was first published as Visado de Tránsito in 1944. Yet Seghers did also not write in isolation: like her close friend Egon Erwin Kisch, she was part of a German-­speaking exile community, committed to showing the world that German was not just the language of Nazism. Seghers and Kisch were, with Bodo Uhse and Rudolf Feistmann, the co-­founders of the Heinrich Heine Klub, established on November 7, 1942, on the ninth anniversary of the Nazi book-­burning that took place in Berlin.56 Yet in spite of Seghers’s efforts to keep the German language alive as more than the language of Nazism, and in spite her love for Mexico (she became a citizen in 1947), remaining there after the end of the war was never an option. Seghers felt the pull of a familiar language, and that it was her duty to the country of her birth to collaborate in the construction of a new Germany, the German Democratic Republic, or GDR. Her husband, though, stayed behind for some years, as an influential economist and pioneer in the production of income-­distribution statistics. While Seghers claimed in 1943 that she was not planning to write about Mexico, she eventually changed her mind and published several novellas with Mexico as leitmotiv: Crisanta (1951), Die Heimkehr des velorenen Volkes [The Return of the Lost Tribe] (1965) and Das wirkliche blau [The Real Blue] (1967). And while most of “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip” takes place in Germany, what gives the story its coherence is its Mexican framing. When Seghers returned to Berlin, she took Mexico with her, not only as a memory, but also in the works of art, documents, and books that traveled back to Europe with her. Among the many books in Seghers’s and her husband’s personal library is a signed copy of Aub’s Diario de

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Djelfa. The fact that Aub and Seghers lived in Mexico City in the 1940s and that the above-­mentioned Bosques was responsible for the visas that enabled both to flee from France (Seghers) and French territory (Aub) makes it easy to anticipate, perhaps to hope, that the copy that Seghers brought to Berlin would contain underlined and annotated passages, providing clues about the authors’ shared experience of displacement and refuge. Yet the actual book disappoints: the volume indeed includes a dedication to Seghers and Radványi from “su amigo” (your friend) Max Aub, and a date, March 1944. The book’s pages, however, have never been cut open. Understanding the meaning of unexpected routes and beautiful friendships therefore takes more work than locating a book in a personal library in Berlin’s Adlershof neighborhood, where the writer’s old home, today the Anna-­Seghers-­Museum, still stands. At least some of this work entails looking for other commemorations, some more visible than others, that belong to what can be called a memorial landscape of flight, which may not always be about survival. An example here is the “Mémorial de la Shoah” in Paris. It features a “Wall of Names,” where the names of more than seventy-­six thousand Jews deported from France are engraved. The list includes eleven thousand children, many of them also shown in photographs on an adjacent wall. One of these is a toddler with dark curly hair and a sweet face: Anja Schaul, born in Paris in 1937 and put to death at Auschwitz in 1944, two years after her mother, Ruth Rewald had suffered the same fate. Today, an elementary school in Les Roisiers-­sur-­Loire, a small town about three hours from Paris where Ruth and Anja had been hiding, carries Anja’s name. Anja’s photo and the school named in her memory are the most visible traces of this child’s brutally short life. While these remainders are in France, Ruth and Anja also have an intimate relationship with Mexico: in 1934, while living in exile in France, Rewald published Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko [Janko. The Boy from Mexico], a work about statelessness written for children and young adults that shows that Mexico already had a profound significance for antifascists like Rewald, who never had a chance to get to know the country where her most well-­ known book takes place.57 Rewald also coincided with Seghers in Paris, where she had settled after 1933. Seghers was part of a jury who awarded Rewald an honorary mention in a literary contest sponsored by an exile

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organization. While Seghers and Rewald had much in common (both were writers, antifascists, Jewish, mothers, and had become refugees), after the fall of France their lives took very different turns. As mentioned earlier, Seghers eventually was able to leave Europe and find refuge in Mexico, together with her family. Meanwhile, Rewald was alone with a young daughter during those trying times. Her husband, the attorney Hans Schaul, followed Rewald to Paris once he was no longer allowed to practice law in Germany. Yet he was not in France for long: in 1936 he went to fight in Spain with the Tschapaiew Battalion of the International Brigades. He returned to France in 1938, and his participation in the war in Spain and his Communist affiliations led to consecutive incarcerations, first in camps in France and, eventually, in Djelfa, where Aub wrote his Diario de Djelfa, the book gifted to Seghers and Radványi. In Djelfa, Schaul received the last letter Rewald ever wrote to him. It was a coded message about her imminent deportation to a death camp in the East: “My dear Hans, time has come. I’m going to work at the harvest. I don’t know where . . .”58 The fact that Schaul had fought with the Republicans during the civil war in Spain further increases the chance that Aub and Schaul, two husbands fearing for their wives, two fathers fearing for their daughters, may have exchanged experiences as they survived the hunger, the pain, the unbearable weather, and the solitude of incarceration in French Algeria. Once they were freed from the prison camp, the men took very different paths: Aub settled in Mexico, where he was reunited with his family. Schaul, now alone, eventually returned to the now Soviet-­occupied country of his birth, which would later become the German Democratic Republic. While a conversation between these two prisoners of war in Algeria may have occurred, no evidence for such an encounter exists. A more tangible connection here is, again, their relationship with Mexico. Schaul was not a writer, but his spouse certainly was. Her untimely death made it impossible for her to ever leave Europe, yet in 1934 (roughly a decade before Mexico became an important part of the lives and works of other writers who, like her, had been forced away from their home) she first imagined and then published Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko. While back then Rewald did not know that Mexico would eventually offer asylum to antifascist refugees, the book’s prescience is uncanny. Janko’s Mexican

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nationality is largely symbolic, as the book is more about the situation in Europe than about Mexican history or culture, a trait that this novel from 1934 shares with some of the depictions of Mexico that appeared in the works of authors who settled there in the early 1940s. These writers produced a rich collection of works about their country of refuge. The 1910 Revolution as well as the country’s indigenous cultures become important themes in their works. Yet the unsafe worlds these authors left behind in Europe also are a constant, sometimes overwhelming presence, even for Gertrude Duby, who, unlike the other Germanophone writers discussed in this book, ended up staying in Mexico for the rest of her life.59 Not long after Seghers and Kisch (who returned to his native Prague, now in Socialist Czechoslovakia) left Mexico, Duby, who moved in the same circle as Seghers and Kisch did in Mexico City, also relocated: she settled in the Southern state of Chiapas. Duby’s legacy includes ethnographic work about the Lacandón Maya, photography, as well as the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom, located at the home that she and her husband, the Danish anthropologist Frans Blom, purchased in 1950 in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Na Bolom (today, a cultural association, museum, archive, community center, hotel, and restaurant), is a visible reminder of the fact that Mexico once was a haven for European antifascists.60 Born Gertrude Elizbeth Lörtscher in Innertkirchen (Switzerland), Duby differs in additional ways from the other antifascist writers: she was not Jewish, and while crossing borders was never easy in this period, the Swiss embassy made her journey to the Americas (via Genoa) less meandering and dangerous than were the crossings of many of the other writers. Since Duby could count on at least some consular support as she left Europe for the Americas, the term refugee would be a misnomer for her experience of displacement. Refugees have no diplomatic representative to turn to and therefore require help from grassroots organizations (among them Dr. Edward Barsky’s Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee, or JAFRC, an organization that Duby supported during a short stint in New York) or from representatives of nations able to provide asylum. Note, however, that Swiss neutrality could not prevent Duby from being imprisoned in France. She was arrested in Paris in 1939, first incarcerated in the “Petite Roquette” prison, and eventually taken to the internment

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camp of Rieucros, together with other “undesirable” women, among them Spanish refugees, Roma woman, and others. Among them was the Czech writer Lenka Reinerová, who would meet up again with Duby in Mexico, and Dora Schaul (née Davidson), a Jewish woman from Berlin who had joined the resistance during the occupation of France and later married Hans Schaul, Ruth Rewald’s widower. Dora Schaul even drew a few sketches of Duby and of other women at Rieucros. Duby was liberated on March 6, 1940, likely with the help of the Swiss embassy. She then traveled to New York, where she collaborated with the above-­mentioned Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee. She made it to Mexico later that year and quickly found employment as a social worker at the Ministry of Labor. Her first trip to Chiapas was a life-­changing one. Duby, who spent the rest of her life in Southern Mexico and with the Lacandón Maya, became a renowned photographer, ethnographer, horticulturalist, and staunch environmentalist. She is far better known in relation to the Lacandón world than as a Swiss-­ born antifascist forcibly displaced from Europe. Her obituary, published in the New York Times in December 1993 describes her as a “Chronicler of Mayan Cultures.”61 Today, visiting San Cristóbal de las Casas without hearing about the Asociación Cultural Casa Na Bolom and Duby is next to impossible. The Gertrude Duby archive at Na Bolom contains the above-­mentioned sketches that Dora Schaul drew in a French concentration camp, yet how they got there remains a mystery. Na Bolom may be the most enduring trace that Mexico once was a safe haven for European antifascists on the move. Yet that does not mean that other traces, far less visible, are any less significant. Among these are Kisch’s 1945 Entdeckungen in Mexiko [Discoveries in Mexico], a collection of chronicles that, like Seghers’s works written in the same period, appeared simultaneously in German and in Spanish translations with Mexican publishers.62 Even though the essays collected in the book are the works of a foreign visitor, the text was well received in Mexico. The oldest of this group of six writers, Kisch was born in Austro-­ Hungarian Prague in 1885. Like other Jewish writers who came of age in the same milieu, he only ever wrote in German. He was a corporal in the Austrian Army during World War I, joined the Communist Party  in 1919, and lived in Berlin during the years of the Weimar Republic. Kisch

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was first arrested the morning after the Reichstag fire, February 28, 1933. He was incarcerated in the Spandau prison, where, many years later, Nazi leader Rudolf Hess would become the institution’s last and most infamous prisoner. Back in 1933, Kisch’s Czech citizenship still offered some protection from further tortures or even a death sentence. He was eventually freed from Spandau and banished from Germany. The arrest and deportation did not make him desist from his antifascist activism. In 1934, a visit to Australia as a delegate to an antifascist conference turned Kisch into an illegal immigrant. When Australia’s right-­leaning government refused to allow Kisch to enter the country, the fifty-­year-­old decided to jump from the ship’s deck to the quayside in Melbourne, breaking his leg. He eventually was granted permission to enter the country but had to endure the humiliation of passing a dictation test originally designed to keep non-­Westerners from immigrating to Australia. The test was in Scottish Gaelic. Other hurdles were equally outrageous, but expected in the period, including paying a steep fine. None of these stopped Kisch, and four months after his “big jump,” he was able to address a crowd of more eighteen thousand attendees in Sydney, bringing the cautionary tale of the early years of Nazism to his Australian audience.63 It was clear that Kisch was willing to defy just about anything to continue expressing and sharing his antifascist views, and so remaining in a continent taken over by Nazism was not an option for him as 1939 came to an end. By the time Kisch arrived in Mexico, the fifty-­six-­year-­ old writer had not only seen the world, but had also written about it. His travels had taken him from the Prague of his birth to Vienna and then to Berlin, where he moved in 1921. From there he traveled to North Africa, the USSR, Soviet Central Asia, the United States, China, Australia (as already mentioned), Spain during the Civil War, and many other places. The United States was the last country he visited before settling in Mexico in 1940, even though this time around (in contrast to his first visit to the United States between 1928 and 1929) Kisch did not have a chance to plan a road trip from California to New York, to spend time with Charlie Chaplin and Upton Sinclair, or to write an acerbic chronicle about life in a country that turns out to be everything but what his book’s title—Paradies Amerika—­indicates.64 As a reviewer in the Ber-

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liner Tageblatt put it, Kisch had “discovered America anew, but from its backside.65 After arriving in New York in December of 1939, Kisch received orders to stay aboard the ocean liner that had taken him across the Atlantic. This experience may have conjured up memories from the last time he was not allowed to disembark. Five years later and five years older, he was no longer willing to risk and life and limb, as he had done in 1934, not only because he may have become more cautious and probably wanted to avoid another broken leg, but also because the outbreak of World War II and the reluctance of the United States to welcome displaced Europeans had made his situation more vulnerable than it had been in 1934. Kisch’s original destination was not the United States; he had received a visa for Chile and another one for Mexico. Given that there was no such thing as a direct route from Europe to South America, Kisch needed to make it to New York first, where the local authorities did not recognize the Chilean documents. Like Seghers roughly a year later, he was detained at Ellis Island, a Gefängnisinsel (prison island), as he wrote, guarded by the Statue of Liberty.66 Unlike Seghers and her family, Kisch was allowed to leave Ellis Island and stay in the country for two months, but only after several interrogations and a hefty fine. When his spouse, the Vienna-­born Gisela Kisch (née Lyner) eventually arrived in New York, she also was subjected to interrogations and other indignities, and by the time all the bureaucratic matters were solved, the Chilean visa had expired. Fortunately, a Mexican visa was still available, and so the couple crossed into Mexico on land at Laredo on November 24, 1940. The long and complicated journey to his Mexican exile did not cure Kisch from his penchant for adventures, and so he continued doing what he had been for his entire adult life: traveling and writing about his journeys. He also became an intellectual leader of the community of German and Austrian antifascists.67 His Entdeckungen in Mexiko, appeared with El Libro Libre, a press founded by the community of German exiles in Mexico that supported the publication of twenty books in German and six in Spanish between 1942 and 1945. One of Seghers’ most renowned novels, Das siebte Kreuz [The Seventh Cross] also appeared with the

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same publisher in Mexico. The book’s cover, designed by Leopoldo Méndez, a renowned Mexican artist, brings together the book’s antifascist theme with Mexican printmaking traditions.68 Méndez’s cover for Seghers’s book is an artifact that reveals entangled histories: it emerges in a time and place to which the experiences of refugees and the work of local creators equally belong. Yet not all products of this period show such a sense of balance. The writers adapted their art to their new homeland, in some cases turning Mexico into an empty canvas where they could project their fears and hopes or coopting Mexican history and narratives to suit their own stories. Even though their works are informative about the country’s history, its artistic production, and its contemporary politics in the 1930s and 1940s, certain preconceived notions and stereotypes about Mexico and Mexicans stubbornly persist. To state it differently, crossing the Atlantic (or, arguably, any other sea or any border) usually did not necessarily lead to a guaranteed unlearning of myths and fictions about other places and people. Mistral, Aub, Seghers, Kisch, Duby, and even Rewald, who only reached the country in her imagination, all looked for Mexico, yet what they found remained inextricably linked to what they left behind in Europe. Mexico became the focal point of their writing, but also so much more: the embodiment of a yearning, the object of a conquest that was both literary and erotic, a place that could alternate between a “locus ameonus” and “locus terribilis.”69 Yet this hardly means that the six authors discussed in this book, as well others who shared their experiences (some, by far not all, are mentioned) essentially wrote the same text. The ensuing chapters do not and could not cover all the works that Mistral, Aub, Seghers, Rewald, Duby, and Kisch wrote in their lifetime. They focus instead on what they produced while on the run and (except for Rewald who was killed before she could ever leave Europe) once they had settled in Mexico. While the content of their writings shares many traits, the form varies significantly. These six writers, as well as others mentioned in the pages that follow (among them photographer Germaine Krull, who chronicled her journey aboard the Paul Lemerle and her stay in Martinique, or journalist Kurt Kersten, who also recorded his own and much longer stay on the same island), and countless

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other displaced individuals penned a wide range of texts in a variety of genres and modes of writing. Some took on new forms and transformed them; others even invented their own. Both Mistral and Aub produced works they called diarios, thereby making use of what may be the most expected form for recording a world-­changing event from a personal and intimate point of view. They penned their diarios only a few years before Anne Frank wrote “the most iconic of Holocaust texts,” and a “synecdoche for the collective victims of the Holocaust.”70 One trait that Mistral’s, Aub’s and even Frank’s diaries share is that these are not the kind of works that any of these authors probably ever intended to be known for: the circumstances of war, occupation, and displacement left them no other choice. Mistral, the self-­taught and plucky journalist, became a memoirist once she was forced to flee from Spain in 1939. As the subtitle of her book Éxodo. Diario de una refugiada española indicates, this is the diary of a Spanish refugee, and it is one of the earliest published accounts of this specific escape route. The diario, which has had several editions and has been the subject of numerous academic studies, is by far Mistral’s most well-­known work. Its prominence has defined Mistral’s literary heritage in ways that differ greatly from the way in which Aub’s Diario de Djelfa would mark his own oeuvre. Gender also plays an important role here: Aub published more and wrote in more genres than Mistral ever would, yet he did not need to cultivate the less prestigious forms that many women adopted to make a living. Be that as it may, it is noteworthy that Aub called the poems he wrote while imprisoned in Djelfa a diario. For him, poems were not only the best form in which to convey his experience behind barbed wire but, as he would later recall, they were also what kept him alive. Aub also wrote more conventional diaries, all of which were eventually published. Unlike Mistral and Aub, Seghers did not publish a diary of her experiences, as she never stopped writing fiction–­unless the many letters she wrote to loved ones and collaborators could be considered a type of diary. Still, her novella, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” does include important autobiographical elements, and it may not be far-­fetched to say that the oneiric atmosphere of this story, in which a disquieting past blends with an equally perturbing present, was a consequence of the in-

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juries the author had suffered after being run over in Mexico City. However, it would be a mistake and a missed opportunity to read Seghers’s fiction primarily as historical testimony. A case in point here is her novel Transit, a text often taken for granted as mere depiction of what life was like for the persecuted trying to make it out of fascist-­occupied Europe. The novel indeed teaches us a lot about the nightmarish bureaucracies and precarity that governed the lives of the displaced in Marseille, yet it does much more than this. Seghers’s own engagement with genre and form—­ her “existential, political and literary thriller” borrows from myth and fairy tales—­is an exploration (as chapter 6 shows) of what literature can do, even in the most precarious of moments.71 Rewald who, like Seghers, continued writing in the same genre after she was forced to leave her home, used fiction to explore and understand statelessness. The fact that she chose young readers as her audience had profound implications for the ways in which her work would be remembered (or forgotten) and, possibly, for Rewald’s own fate. As an exile Rewald wrote several books for young readers, but only saw one of them, the already mentioned Der Junge aus Mexiko, published in her lifetime. One may speculate that if she had worked in a more prestigious genre than children’s literature, Rewald, too, might have found herself on a list of talented individuals who were to be rescued. She might then have had a chance to write and publish an account of her displacement, far longer and more elaborate than the few words she sent to her husband shortly before being deported to Auschwitz. Duby may not have considered herself to be a writer at all, as she never produced any prose or verse conventionally understood as literature. She was, more than anything, a chronicler committed to social justice, and once she settled in Chiapas, her life work would forever be connected to the Lacandón Maya and to the rain forest. She also is one of the very few German-­speaking refugees who would eventually write and publish essays in Spanish. Meanwhile, her own flight from fascist-­ occupied Europe became a less visible part of her life’s work. Like Duby, Kisch also was a chronicler and yet one who, decades before the war, invented his own genre, the literary reportage that was meant to inform but also to delight his readers. While neither his style nor his aesthetic changed once he became a refugee, the experienced traveler could no

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longer write about places across the world, as he was unable to leave Mexico. As a refugee, then, Kisch wrote the only book he could, and perhaps the only one he wanted to write: a chronicle of his journeys across the Mexican Republic, a travel narrative that was well received. Being on the run, in transit, in a prison camp, and even settled in a new home unequivocally transformed not just what the refugees wrote, but also how they wrote, which in turn influenced how these works would either remain in or vanish from literary histories and national memories. In one way or another, these writers’ stories—­their conventional and unconventional diaries—­illustrate how difficult it is to remember experiences and accounts of displacements, given that these originate somewhere at the “fuzzy edges of national memory.”72 The fact that even in today’s globalized world, the “nation-­state still plays a major role in the creation of memory culture” has important implications for what the literary and cultural heritage of displaced individuals means.73 The relationships that this book’s protagonists have with the ways in which respective nations remember (or have forgotten) them vary significantly and need to be understood vis-­à-­vis how memory—­“the meaning of the past for the present”—­operates in different contexts.74 The vital importance of Mexico in the lives of the refugees cannot be overstated, but the traces of their presence in the country are uneven, particularly considering the crucial difference between the Spanish and the German-­speaking refugee communities. Not only did the former group share a language as well as a complicated history of colonization with their country of refuge, but the fact that the Francoist dictatorship lasted until the dictator’s death in 1975 made their exile permanent, turning this community, as mentioned earlier, from desterrados to transterrados. The traces of the Germanophone community are far less visible, with the main exception of Duby’s work in Chiapas and the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom. Today, the story that continues to circulate regarding the country’s hospitality to refugees is one among several myths about the past; namely, a version of history in which Mexico was and always will be a place that welcomes those in need of safety and protection or a place to build a new life. As with all myths, this one has a relationship with the lived experiences of some individuals, yet it hardly corresponds to a much more complex and not always hospitable reality.

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Memory remains a thorny issue in contemporary Spain, where the country’s violent past is still being unearthed, literally and metaphorically speaking. As mentioned earlier, most of the Spanish refugees remained in Mexico, which also shaped their ties (or lack thereof) to Spain’s transition to democracy, a process that began four decades after the displaced were forced to leave their homes. For many whose lives were now in Mexico, the end of Francoism came too late. Aub, for example, did not live to see end of the dictatorship, as he died three years before Franco would. Moreover, the fact that in Spain’s transition to democracy, “no one would be called to account judicially, nor would there be a any equivalent of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” turned the memory of war, extra-­judicial violence, and repression that marked the early years of the dictatorship into an issue that to this day continues to play out in the political and cultural arenas as well as in the courts.75 This raises the complicated question of where in Spain’s “memory wars” the refugees and their descendants would belong. Invoking Michael Rothberg’s understanding of collective memory not as a competitive memory or as “a zero-­sum struggle over scarce resources,” but as multidirectional and “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-­referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” is very valuable here, as the transterrados and their legacy are as much a part of Spain as of Mexico.76 Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory is, as the book’s subtitle states, about “remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization,” and not about Spain’s memory wars, yet his study also helps us to understand other complicated histories of violence—­not without controversy, as the debates surrounding the 2021 German translation of Multidirectional Memory show.77 Germany, of course, has its own memory wars, not only with regard to the very different versions of the past that accompanied nation-­ building processes in East Germany (where many of the refugees returned, among them Seghers and Rewald’s husband Paul Schaul) and West Germany. The responsibility for the crimes of Nazism is at the very core of the confrontation with the past, which in the late 1980s in West Germany led to the so-­called Historikerstreit, (Historians’ Dispute), a public debate about the singularity of the Holocaust. The debate was never really settled; instead, it evolved over the years, eventually trans-

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forming into what scholars call the “Catechism Debate” or the “Historikerstreit 2.0,” a debate on the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism that takes place in the German and in a global context, in a moment when more people than ever have been forcibly displaced from their homes. 78 As many of the voices involved in said debate have pointed out, understanding how the violence of the Shoah is entangled with imperial and colonial violence is not a new idea. Aimé Césaire, whose encounter with European refugees in his native Martinique is discussed in detail in chapter 4, “thought of fascism as colonialism brought home to Europe,” most prominently in his 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism.79 Hannah Arendt, a refugee herself, published The Origins of Totalitarianism, “a work that also was one of the first to suggest a colonial genealogy for Nazi crimes,” a year later.80 What is at stake in the different iterations of the Historikerstreit and in its future versions that may involve Germany and other nations responsible for massive acts of violence (even genocide) within and beyond their borders are political, historical, and social responsibilities. In more practical terms, returning to the personal and intimate experiences of the six individuals discussed in the pages that follow, this means understanding how they articulated the relationship between the violence that displaced them (fascism), and the one that afforded them relative safety in the form of passage or a new home (colonialism). Interactions between these histories played out every day and were negotiated second by second and millimeter by millimeter in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II—­that is, while refugees like this book’s six protagonists were fleeing, in hiding, or had just barely made it to a place of relative safety. While the stories told in this book will not settle the debates about the past in any national or transnational context, they may still bring us one step closer to understanding the contradictions and nuances of refugee lives. These six lives, the beautiful friendships that began between them and also with Mexico, are but a few among many similar stories. Indeed, wherever one turns, new accounts about displacement emerge. I began this chapter with a discussion of Casablanca and of the film’s significance both in relation to refugees’ escape routes during World War II and the depiction of colonial dynamics in an imagined and Orientalized

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North African landscape. A lesser known but not less poignant story is about one of the film’s many supporting actors who also was a refugee: Marcel Dalio, who plays the role of the croupier Emil. Born in 1900 as Israel Moshe Blaushild, Dalio was a well-­known actor in interwar France. So was his spouse, Madeleine Lebeau, who in Casablanca would become Yvonne, the unhappy girlfriend of a sulky and unreliable Rick. Dalio and Lebeau fled from Paris shortly before the occupation and, like so many others, ended up in Lisbon hoping to get a visa to the United States. In Lisbon, Dalio learned that his likeness was used on posters plastered in Paris, as his face was supposed to represent the Jewish type, “Le juif Suss. L’ennemi du people, quoi!”81 From there on, Dalio and Lebeau’s story is just as tortuous as the roundabout escape trails of refugees. In Marseille Dalio and Lebeau received visas for Chile that turned out to be forgeries, and so the couple was detained in Mexico, the first harbor where the ship that took them from Europe to the Americas arrived. Dalio and Lebeau (who would divorce during the filming of Casablanca) still managed to make it to Hollywood, joining the few “fortunate ones” who were able not only to flee from occupied Europe but also to continue performing as refugees in Hollywood. Perhaps ironically, the fact that Dalio ended up playing a croupier in a casino uncannily mirrors how fleeing from fascism from Europe to the Americas entailed a combination of chance and manipulation. As several scenes in the film show, the roulette in Rick’s Café has little to do with luck: Rick makes Emil maneuver the game so that a Bulgarian couple, desperate for money to secure free passage to Lisbon, win enough to make that possible. All the mentioned names, places, connections, and itineraries may conjure up the elements in Casablanca’s opening sequence: the voice, the path, the few images, and a map, especially the map. Telling the stories of some of the fortunate and of many of the unfortunate ones who moved along tortuous and roundabout exile routes—­the stories that begin when Casablanca ends—­will surely be an easier task if maps of these routes are available. Yet these maps, as the following chapter shows, may look very different from the one that opens Curtiz’s film. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on maps and on actual and imagined geographies.

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The Emotional Geographies of Old and New Homes

F r i t z F r e u d e n h e i m a n d h i s f a m i l y left Germany in 1938. The flight from Nazism took this Jewish family to Montevideo, Uruguay, making the Freudenheim’s story one more among the myriad accounts of displacement in a period when fifty million were forced away from their homes. Yet what makes this experience of migration stand out is that aboard the ship that would take him and his family from Europe to the Americas, young Fritz drew a map that was to serve him as a guide for and a reminder of his experience of displacement.1 By 2016, the total of individuals displaced during World War II was topped, and in 2022, the number of forcibly displaced people reached 100 million. Yet the fact that forced migration has now affected more lives than it did after World War II does not mean that nothing more needs to be said (or written) about the global refugee crisis in the 1940s. Indeed, the more recent movements of people allow for new reflections on past displacements and on the spatial imaginaries that accompany them. The advancement of mapping technologies, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), “Deep Maps,” and other forms of geovisualization have made it possible not only to depict but also to study the lived experience of people on the move. 2 Yet while such technologies can tell the stories of displacement in innovative manners, the benefits of much older cartographic techniques should not be overlooked. These include crayons, watercolor, and paper, which are the sole tools that Fritz Freudenheim used to create a map of his family’s escape route. The map, entitled, “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat!” [“From the Old Home to the New Home”] shows the family’s itinerary from Berlin to Montevideo (figure 1).3 33

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FIGU R E 1. Federico (Fritz) Freudenheim, “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat!” [From the old home to the new home!], 1938. Courtesy of Irene G. Freudenheim, São Paulo, Brazil. The original map is in color; the roofs of the homes in Germany are bright red.

Yet it does not just do that. Indeed, the map also tells a story about home and loss that begins in Berlin’s Levetzowstr. Nr. 6, on May 24, 1915, before Fritz was even born. An arrow points to a window on the third floor, the family’s residence. The building that today sits on that location in Berlin’s Moabit District, only a few blocks from the Spree River, does not resemble the four-­story house with the red roof that Fritz drew. The family’s home has been replaced with a modern building, as have countless other houses in postwar Berlin. On the Freudenheim map, in Mülhausen, a small city in Thuringia, roughly four hours South by train from Berlin, appears a three-­story house that also has a red roof. The date, March 27, 1927, probably indicates when the family moved away from Berlin for the first time; Fritz was less than a year old. The Freudenheims returned to Berlin in 1938, shortly before leaving the country for good. They lived in a home on

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Solingerstr. Nr.1, just minutes away from the family’s former home in the same Berlin neighborhood. An arrow points to a window on the fourth floor, right below yet another red roof. Considering the building that currently occupies that location, a multifamily home built in the 1960s or ‘70s, no visible traces of the Freudenheims are left in Moabit. Yet Fritz’s map shows that for him these two addresses are places that from his “new home” in Montevideo (where he completed the drawing) had a very specific, intimate, and lasting significance. The map not only features places, but also movement between places. Fritz drew detailed trains that connected Berlin, Mühlhausen, and Hamburg, where the family stayed for five days, from October 23 to October 28, 1938. There, the Freudenheims embarked on the Jamaïque (a ship as meticulously drawn as the trains) that first took the family from Hamburg to the port city of Antwerp, Belgium, where Fritz and his parents arrived on October 31. Roughly a week later, the journey continued to Le Havre. Arrows as red as the aforementioned roofs indicate that from the French port city, the family moved to Paris for a brief stay. They eventually returned to Le Havre, before reaching Lisbon, their last harbor in Europe and “the great embarkation point” for “freedom in the Americas.”4 Until 1938 German citizens could enter Portugal without a visa, which meant that in comparison to refugees who arrived later, the Freudenheims had slightly fewer bureaucratic hurdles to deal with. Young Fritz Freudenheim’s map imbues specific places (Levetzowstr. Nr. 6 and Solingstr. Nr. 1 in Berlin; Calle Sotelo 3918 in Montevideo) and the movements between these with emotion and meaning. The carefully drawn red roofs, the arrows that point at the windows from where the members of the Freudenheim family may have looked outside, the same trees to be found in Germany and in Uruguay all conjure up the family’s experience of what was familiar and certain. Freudenheim’s map also indicates that the family crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Jamaïque, the same ship that, as the map indicates, took them from Hamburg to Antwerp. Once the Freudenheim family left the more familiar territories behind, fewer details appear on the map. The Iberian Peninsula is a white circle, and Lisbon is its only marked location. The family departed from the Portuguese harbor on November 8, 1938, and two days later the Jamaïque stopped in Casablanca, which, together with Rabat, is the only

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other marked city on a rather tiny rendition of the African continent. No words indicate the Atlantic Ocean, yet the blue, wavy lines signal a body of water. The map’s second drawing of the Jamaïque as it crosses the ocean is larger and more detailed. It is unclear whether the same ship took the Freudenheim family all the way from Hamburg to Montevideo (local politics and rules governing maritime routes may not have permitted this) or whether Fritz chose the same name for the ship. While most South American nations do appear on the map, Central and North America are not shown. Both, the attention to South American geography and the continent’s unattached state are notable. “Map silences speak volumes,” and so do the silences of Freudenheim’s map. 5 Several reasons explain these silences, particularly considering that the map’s geographical imprecisions coexist with other more precise elements. Even though Freudenheim depicts South America without its neighbor to the North, all South American nations appear on this relatively accurate map of the continent. Like many other Jewish refugees, the Freudenheims may have spent time learning about the geography of their destination before leaving, possibly as a result of “the inextinguishable Weimar passion for tourism” but also because it is likely that the family tried to learn as much as possible about the geography of their new home.6 Atina Grossman mentions the “Baedeker guidebooks to virtually everywhere” that she found among the items “pulled out of the closet and chests” in the Upper West Side apartments of her aging relatives, all of them Jewish refugees who eventually settled in New York.7 These old travel guides stored in a New York City apartment suggest that Berlin families like the Grossmans or the Freudenheims probably spent hours looking at their eventual places of refuge in atlases and guides, wondering what their lives would be like in these remote, if not exotic, locations. In Joachim Schlör’s words, refugees constructed “mental maps” of the migration process, “by looking at an atlas, by choosing the countries of transmigration and immigration, [. . .] by hearing news from relatives about where better (not) to go, by studying the guides of the shipping companies, or by following the news about world politics before or even during World War II.”8 Yet, as Leo Spitzer writes in his memoir, Hotel Bolivia, the atlases or travel guides consulted in order to place countries, cities, or even streets on a map were often based on a very limited

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knowledge about the actual histories and geographies of the Americas.9 Spitzer, whose parents emigrated to Bolivia, recalls that the refugees’ knowledge of geography was inadequate, as was the information about the people living in the nations that could become their “new homes”: “If the refugees knew anything at all about the inhabitants of the country to which they were emigrating, it was either extremely limited or stereotypical [. . .]. Many, perhaps most, refugees had only a remote and impressionistic sense of the cultural and ethnic milieu they were entering. Spanish-­speaking, Catholic, Indian: these were terms they vaguely associated with the inhabitants of the country offering them asylum.”10 Some of this knowledge, writes Spitzer, came from geography lessons in school dating back to the earlier twentieth century, or from German travel books, among them the Baedeker guides Grossman found in her relatives’ homes. Refugees also gathered information about their new homes from other sources before they left Europe, including letters from others already settled in their “new homes,” and novels set in the Americas.11 As Spitzer recalls, “highly romanticized adventure literature—­a literature that routinely represented the landscape and people of South America as mysterious, primitive, exotic if not forbidding, and that simplified or blurred the particularity and diversity of both” contributed to the mental maps that refugees carried with them across the Atlantic.12 The adventure novels of nineteenth-­century pulp author Karl May (1842–­1912), who only left Europe late in life and to this day remains one of Germany’s bestselling writers, stood out among the books about faraway places that the refugees read when they were growing up. Notably, ideologues and supporters of the Nazi regime devoured the same novels when they were young.13 While May’s novels include a few that take place in South America and in Mexico, his books about the adventures of the noble Apache prince Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, a German emigre-­turned-­cowboy (and May’s alter ego), set in an imagined Wild West, often influenced what many expected to encounter in the Americas. Gertrude Duby recalled reading and dreaming about May’s heroes when she was growing up in the Swiss mountains. The earliest works that she published once she settled in Mexico still reflect traces of these fantasies and were also strongly influenced by French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle’s Mexique, terre indienne (1936). Given

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that Duby remained in Mexico for the rest of her life, her perceptions of Mexico and of indigenous cultures evolved over the years. When she arrived in Mexico, she was looking for an alternative, for a world better than Europe torn apart by fascism, perhaps for a world where characters like May’s Winnetou could exist. She recalls idealizing the local indigenous populations, whom she called “Indians”: “Tired of corruption and bored with our culture, I wanted to find a better kind of society.”14 Duby later became a photographer, ethnographer of the Lacandón people, and after living with this community for a few years, she realized that there was no such thing as a better society: “[T]here are good and bad people, beautiful and ugly, intelligent and dumb, and, unfortunately, they are very inclined to accept the worst of our civilization.”15 Just like Duby then, Fritz Freudenheim and his family carried their own mental maps with them to their “new homes,” and so did Mistral, Aub, Seghers, and Kisch. Rewald would have done the same, had she been able to escape Europe before the Nazis murdered her and her daughter. The idiosyncrasies of Fritz’s own mental maps may explain the presence of South American nations and the absence of Central and North America (and of Asia, and of Palestine) on the map. The fact that the map includes the port cities of Rio, where the Jamaïque stopped November 26, 1938, and Santos a day later, implies that these transit locations were relevant for the Freudenheims’ itinerary. The map, however, also includes landlocked nations, like Bolivia and Paraguay, confirming that Fritz Freudenheim was familiar with Latin American geography beyond the specific nations that were important for his family’s itinerary from Europe to the Americas. The family arrived in Montevideo on November 30, 1938, and the street where the Freudenheims settled is drawn with details like those that appear on his rendering of Levetzowstrasse or Solingstrasse. Location and date provide a sense of ending and closure to the map, which implies that this map has the characteristics of a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Freudenheim’s map has caught the attention of scholars interested in emigration during the Holocaust and those working on cartography in Latin America. For Joachim Schlör, the map “is a striking and moving example of a migration process—­remembered or ‘stored,’ one might say, in the form of an image, a map, which contains, for those who can

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‘read’ it, the story not just of this German-­Jewish family’s emigration from Nazi Germany to the New World but also, in a nucleus, the larger history of the global experience of persecution and exile in the twentieth century.”16 The author underlines the legibility of the map, as do Karl Offen and Jordana Pym, who discuss Freudenheim’s map as a “conventional one” since Freudenheim is following a series of cartographic conventions that date back to Ptolemy.17 Offen and Pym point out that this map is readable, “because young Fritz knew what elements make a map work. As this child’s map shows, amateurs make and read maps all the time, but even they must learn, comprehend, and employ certain conventions or visible codes (such as arrows or land boundaries) that make a map intelligible to others who have been similarly socialized.”18 Freudenheim’s map is not only legible, he also manages to do something that in many ways has been absent from Western cartography: his map is as much about space as it is about place. “Western cartographic language,” writes Margaret Pearce, “is dominated by the language of space, rather than place.”19 While the terms place and space are sometimes used interchangeably, they do not have identical meanings. However, determining the differences between them can be tricky, as Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano point out in the introduction to Geographies of the Holocaust.20 The authors’ understanding of space and place derive from the work of geographers Yi-­Fu Tuan and Tim Creswell: space, “refers to containers of human activity,” while place becomes the “center of felt value.”21 Along similar lines, Pearce argues that place is space “shaped by experience.”22 Experience, story, and memory are what shape abstract space into places, and all of these elements are an integral part of Freudenheim’s map. Doreen Massey, also a geographer, understands that places are neither fixed nor permanent; she puts forth that that places, like identities, also “are full of internal conflicts.”23 Depicting these internal conflicts on conventional maps, however, can be a daunting task. While maps are not stories and stories are not maps, the history of escape routes from Europe to the Americas during World War II can be told from the intersections where maps and stories meet. The Freudenheim map tells a story, and the stories that Aub, Mistral, Seghers, Duby, and Kisch tell can also become maps, or even “counter-­maps.” Considering that cartography has been

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used “as an instrument to perpetuate and disseminate the official vision of the word,” counter-­maps can “underscore the dynamics, stories, and experiences that are invisible in other cartographies.”24 Nancy Peluso coined the expression “counter-­maps” to describe those “used to pose alternatives to the languages and images of power and [that] become a medium of empowerment and protest.”25 Counter-­mapping is a political and potentially subversive practice that has the potential to “greatly increase the power of people living in a mapped area to control representations of themselves and their claims to resources.”26 The counter-­map has therefore become an important tool and medium when it comes to denouncing the plight of the displaced in the contemporary period (a number of specific examples are discussed later this chapter). Even Freudenheim’s work could be considered a counter-­ map: Nazism displaced him and his family “from the old home to the new,” and so the young mapmaker used his skills to map and so tell his own highly personal story of displacement. Aub, Rewald, Seghers, Mistral, Duby, and Kisch tell, as this book shows, multiple stories of displacement, their own and that of others, but they have not (at least not to my knowledge) drawn maps. The maps that illustrate their respective flight routes at the beginning of each chapter dedicated to a specific author serve as reflections on lived experiences and geographic realities of the unexpected flight routes.

What Is a Map? Definitions of maps are plentiful. They sometimes contradict one another, and, just like everything else, they change over time and in relation to technological advancements. In that spirit, here is one possible definition: maps are visual expressions (a picture, a drawing, a carving, or a sculpture) that convey a sense of a real or imagined environment. Maps never are neutral documents, even though they may appear to be.27 Instead, and as Ricardo Padrón concludes in a study of maps of imaginary worlds, “There are no maps of real worlds, only maps of not-­so-­imaginary worlds that we take for reality. All maps, moreover, mediate an imaginary relationship with that real territory.”28 It may be easy to disregard the fictional qualities of maps: “A map, unless titled ‘imaginary’ or employing such gross exaggerations that most people rec-

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ognize it as inherently false, tends to carry an invisible nonfiction label, an implied certification that it is factual and trustworthy.29 Yet this still does not mean that a map is just a story or a story is a map, even though they can have common characteristics. Offen and Dym understand a map to be a “graphic representation of space (real or imagined, terrestrial or otherwise) that organizes, presents, and communicates spatial information visually.”30 Moreover, an important element of cartography is that it necessarily involves selection and abstraction: “Mapping provides a uniquely powerful visual means to classify, represent and communicate information about places that are too large and too complex to be seen directly.”31 This also is what comes across in Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science,” a fiction about an empire where “the Art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province.” And when that was not enough, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” Yet perfection proved to be impractical, and so the map eventually was “abandoned to the inclemencies of the sun of and of the winters,” eventually becoming a “relic of the geographical disciplines.”32 As Borges’s story shows, selection and abstraction are not only part of what makes a map functional, but also of what makes a map legible. The selected and abstract information that appears on a map is not just about specific locations in space; it also involves ideas about these locations in relation to others. The Freudenheim map, for example, is as much about specific places (a home in Berlin’s Levetzowstr., a home in Montevideo’s Calle Sotelo) as it is about a route from the old home to the new one, a route that may have felt like an adventure for the young mapmaker. The map also is revealing with regard to Fritz’s resilience: the new Heimat appears to be an appropriate substitute for the old Heimat, and the emotional significance of the old and the new homes is connected to the distance that separates them. Abstractions and selections also involve unavoidable distortions, and those distortions are, perhaps ironically, what have made maps legible in the first place. A map’s legibility, that is, the very idea that a map can

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be read, was an advance that dates back to the Renaissance.33 As Eileen Reeves puts it: “This innovation was an interesting revision of previous mapmaking techniques, and one that insisted on the two-­dimensional plane in which writing lies, rather than on the three-­dimensional one in which images are placed.”34 The consequences of this important step in the legibility of maps included one of the most important distortions of the ways in which worlds are seen and depicted. “The spherical earth had to conform to the page-­like map, and not vice versa. To make all meridians parallel—­which they would be if the Earth were two-­dimensional—­Mercator distorted the size of regions far from the equator.”35 This is how maps became texts, or text-­like, as they entered the two-­dimensional plane. Mercator’s 1569 projection of the world, “a map that all could see but few could read” made it possible for the “the spherical Earth” to become a “two-­dimensional Cartesian plane that at best simulates the look of three-­dimensional reality.”36 A map’s legibility also is a constitutive element of a Western, and, as Reeves writes, patriarchal worldview, considering that cartography tends to be portrayed as a science somewhat “outside of the realm of feminine talents.”37 Since “maps provide the very conditions of possibility for the worlds we inhabit and the subjects we become,” and since cartographic institutions have coded and inscribed the planet, reading maps is a crucial skill when it comes to knowing the world as well as to depicting the world.38 Cartographers express themselves in a “malleable but standardized visual language,” and what makes “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat!” such an effective and legible text is that the twelve-­year-­old amateur cartographer uses that language and, perhaps more importantly, because he alters it.39 Maps enhance our understanding of how the physical world shaped the fates of refugees and migrants, and the texts and ideas that move with them. At the same time, a graphic depiction of the circulation of people and ideas may not account for the complex and evolving meanings (conveyed in memoirs, chronicles, novels, and poems) associated with specific places. Thus, what makes the Freudenheim map so compelling is that the boy, with his interrupted childhood and accelerated coming-­of-­age, accomplishes exactly what, according to Pearce, conventional maps cannot do: to incorporate emotion and experience.

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This does not necessarily mean that one should advocate a (probably) misguided nostalgia for the rudimentary tools or the child’s drawings. Instead, the young cartographer conveys meaning and experience with his idiosyncratic use of scale, specifically, “the relationship between a length on the map and the corresponding distance on the ground.”40 “A map of the whole earth,” write Dym and Ofen, “would not be legible to us if it included details like roads and buildings that make a city plan useful and interesting.”41 Yet Fritz, or Federico, came up with a legible map that includes not only details (red roofs on the houses in Germany, a tree-­lined street) but also the Atlantic Ocean and three continents. It may be easy to see the Freudenheim map as a mere ingenious rendition, and yet his model of migration is not more subjective—­or flawed—­than most others. The Freudenheim map is a distortion and abstraction, as all maps are. It is filled with silences, a trait it shares with all other maps that depict displacement (during the global refugee crisis in the 1930s and 1940s, or today). The Freudenheim map also is highly personal, and yet maps never are neutral documents. In Maya Lin’s words, maps are “inherently political—­how we choose to present the world graphically will inevitably alter our perception of it.”42 Thus, if the experience of place and of moving from one place to another can be shown on a map, then the “exactitude in science” can coexist with the inexactitude of emotion and experience.43 Yet depicting this coexistence is not an easy task. The volume Letzte Zuflucht Mexiko. Gilberto Bosques und das deutschsprachige Exil nach 1939 [Last Refuge Mexico: Gilberto Bosques and the German-­Speaking Exile After 1939] is a testimony to the renowned Mexican diplomat and to the numerous fates his work at the Mexican consulate ended up shaping; the book features a map in the beginning. As expected, this map is not hand-­drawn by a child; it therefore may appear to have fewer silences and to be more accurate—­at least its authors follow most rules of mapmaking. Yet this map’s legibility is limited: lines leading from Europe to Latin America display the transatlantic exile; locations are marked with numbers; and the names of the places are indicated with letters from a to h. Yet a legend is missing. While the map does show that the escape routes to the Americas were more Umwege (detours) than they were Wege (paths) and that the regu-

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larly used routes were from Marseille, via Casablanca, to Veracruz, the map does not reveal much with regard to who was going on these routes or was excluded from them. The map does not show what it took to be among the “fortunate ones” who received a visa thanks to Bosques’s efforts nor what happened to those who were not fortunate enough to get a travel document.44 This map also contains an additional silence: while Spain was a country of transit for many refugees (as was Portugal), its role in relation to the exile routes of German-­speaking refugees was more than an “accident of geography.” Mapping transit entails numerous challenges, as refugees often experience each location as a place in between places for a time in between times. The escape routes from occupied Europe do not quite make sense without the borderscape of the Pyrenees. Moreover, the important role that Bosques eventually would play for individuals like Seghers, Kisch, Aub, and many others began when he was first tasked with ensuring safe passage to Spaniards stranded in France after 1940. While only Aub and Mistral were Spanish, all this book’s protagonists have a relationship with Spain. Neither Kisch nor Seghers crossed the Iberian Peninsula on their way to the Americas, as the threat of refoulement made it impossible for them even to attempt making it to Lisbon through Franco’s Spain. Both had openly supported the Republic and spent time in Spain during the war. Seghers participated in the 1937 Congress for the Defense of Culture, as did Kisch, who remained in Spain between June 1937 and May 1938.45 Even though a few photos show a uniformed Kisch, his purpose in Spain was to write and not participate in combat. His younger brother was a surgeon stationed at a field hospital in Benicàssim (Valencia), and that also was where Kisch spent most of his time. Yet, true to his character, he also traveled to different fronts and produced several chronicles about the war.46 Duby had a brief stint in Barcelona right after she fled from Berlin in 1933, yet little is known of what she did while she was there. Rewald’s relationship with the country, and the war, stands out. She traveled to Spain in 1937, joining her husband, Hans Schaul, who was fighting with the International Brigades. Her aim was to write a book for young audiences based on the lives of the youths she encountered at the Ernst Thälmann Orphanage. Rewald remained in Spain for four months and

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she did finish the book. By the time she made it back to France, however, her novel’s optimistic ending no longer corresponded to the realities of the war. This certainly made it difficult to find a publisher for Vier Spanische Jungen [Four Spanish Boys], one of only two young adult novels about the Spanish Civil War written in German and by a Jewish author.47 Silvia Mistral was one among the thousands of defeated supporters of the Spanish Republic who crossed the Pyrenees in 1939. Max Aub spent part of the Spanish Civil War in France as an attaché of the Republic’s embassy. Once the Republic was defeated, the only aid that France, also at the brink of war, gave to the Spanish refugees was to provide internment camps along the beaches of the Mediterranean. The French authorities erected tent cities that were similar to today’s refugee camps on the beaches at Southern France. Eventually, the camps in Gurs and Le Vernet (where Aub was imprisoned before his deportation to Djelfa), first constructed for Spanish refugees, were repurposed for “enemy aliens, stateless persons, and people ‘under suspicion’ arrested after the outbreak of the war.”48 That meant that German refugees who had settled in France after 1933 (among them Hannah Arendt, Hans Schaul, and László Radványi) were sent to those same camps once Nazi Germany invaded France.49 In the contemporary vocabulary of refugee and asylum law, those who fled from Nazi Germany to France because of “a well-­founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group” suddenly found themselves in French prison camps. Once the armistice was signed on June 22, 1940, “the French betrayed the principle of asylum” and agreed to “surrender upon demand all Germans named by the German Government in France as well as in French territories.”50 These are just some of the silences of the above-­mentioned map of escape routes. A more readily available and certainly more comprehensive source are the maps in the Holocaust Encyclopedia at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In them, a “geography of oppression,” a phrase that Knowles, Cole, and Giordano use, becomes evident. 51 These are maps that show, for example, Jewish emigration from Germany between 1933 and 1940, escape routes from occupied Europe in 1942, or the ill-­fated voyage of the MS St. Louis. All maps make it possible to

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understand where the displaced ended up or the locations of the camps where millions were murdered. To be clear, none of these maps profess to depict displacement during the Holocaust in its entire complexity; no single map could accomplish this. In the online Holocaust Encyclopedia, maps serve as illustrations for specific individual stories, such as “Selma Schwarzwald and Her Bear.” This entry in the encyclopedia tells the story of one of the items in the museum’s permanent collection. Sophie Turner-­Zaretzky (née Selma Schwarzwald) was born in Lvov in 1937 and eventually went into hiding with her mother in Krakow after her father was killed and the rest of her family was deported to the Belzec killing center. While hiding in Krakow, Sophie’s mother gave her five-­year-­old daughter a teddy bear, which is now one of the artifacts in the collection at the USHMM. Sophie eventually named the bear “Refugee,” given that it was “a silent witness to the miracle of Sophie’s rescue, rebirth, and success.” The maps that accompany the entry in the encyclopedia provide geographical references to Sophie’s story; they include maps of the German invasion of Poland, the Lvov Ghetto, the location of the Belzec killing camp, and the Belzec Camp Plan in the winter of 1942. Sophie eventually left for England and later settled in the United States. She was not taken to Belzec, where many members of her family were killed, a traumatic loss that would stay with her for the rest of her life. The maps that are part of the exhibit provide an important reference point for Sophie’s story, and yet they do not tell a story in the ways in which the Freudenheim map does. The maps belonging to the Holocaust Encyclopedia make it possible to indicate specific locations as well as the direction of flight, but they cannot depict the meandering nature of escape, nor the multiple losses that the refugee experience entails. The same can be said about many of the maps that display the routes of the displaced today. Given the enormous complexity and global nature of the current crisis, no single map (even one envisioned by Jorge Luis Borges himself) could accurately represent it. Considering the evolution of mapping technologies since World War II, the opportunities that interactive maps now offer to provide new information and understanding about the current refugee crisis are almost endless. Some center on flows, others on specific conflicts, and others, like the one published in the New York Times in 2015, attempt to illustrate the global dimension of the ref-

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ugee crisis.52 That map, “The Flight of Refugees Around the Globe,” is a great visual tool that shows the impact and breadth of the crisis, and yet even this rather sophisticated rendition has its shortcomings. “The journeys are pictured as straight lines that leap border, bodies of water, and continents in single bounds; their pictoral impact is concentrated in blood colored spots where the refugees land. In its reductiveness, the map relies upon and generates certain fictions: that journeys—­especially journeys made by those moving under duress—­are so direct, or that all journeys are the same, or that the trip itself leaves little trace on its traveler or the land over which such numbers of refugees pass.”53 Echoing the lessons of Borges’s piece, maps will always be reductive, and yet a combination of new technologies and collective or community-­based efforts has made it possible to come up with new ways to map the intricate routes of forced migration. The “Story Maps” produced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) make it possible to tell individual stories from different perspectives.54 Several maps of the US-­Mexico borderlands show the varied ways in which different agents use maps. They range from aggregating data about movement along the border, which makes thwarting clandestine crossings easier for the Border Patrol, to maps that NGOs use to show where water may or may not be available and those that show where and sometimes how migrants have lost their lives.55 Contemporary maps and counter-­ maps show that moving across space, across visible and invisible borders on land and sea, is an embodied experience, and that political changes (opening and closing of borders), climate (a storm at sea, the heat in the desert), geographical barriers, and, perhaps more than anything, decisions made by individuals (ranging from leaders, policy makers, government agents, smugglers, and rescuers) shape the outcome of migration. While more conventional maps—­such as those appearing in the media, for example—­still show borders as mere lines on a map, other mapping and counter-­mapping initiatives prove that borders are complex and multilayered regions. In this sense cartography can become a tool for political activism and resistance: to challenge a “border-­regime.”56 One of these maps is the rendering of the Strait of Gibraltar put together by “Hackitectura,” a collective of architects, artists, and hack-

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ers founded in 1999.57 What makes this map distinctive is that, while respecting scale, it challenges other conventions: “The map ignores the geopolitical and epistemological borders that have been naturalized by the dividing line of the sea; instead, a particular flow is followed across the Mediterranean, between Spain and Morocco, Europe and Africa.”58 Stated differently, the creators of this map mostly use cartographic conventions in order to make it legible, but the map still forces audiences to consider the factors that led to a particular situation, who benefits from it, and its overall human cost. This map of the Strait of Gibraltar, and others discussed by Maribel Casas-­Cortés and Sebastián Cobarrubias, are as much about reading maps as they are about reading them differently. These are maps with a shared goal: “to investigate, intervene and in some cases re-­recreate, borders and territories. They are radical in their questioning of the ‘norms’ of the border regime.”59 Reading maps and counter-­maps becomes an active and sometimes even collective practice, perhaps best seen in the interactive exhibit Hostile Terrain 94, created by the Undocumented Migration Project.60 Largely based on the research of archeologist Jason De León, Hostile Terrain 94 is a pop-­up exhibition about the humanitarian crisis at the border between Mexico and the United States. The exhibit consists of more than 3,200 handwritten toe tags (modeled on those used for cadavers in a morgue) that are then placed on a scaled map of Arizona. Using the information about migrant death that “Humane Borders” provides, each toe tag represents one individual—­yet not only their death, also their lives. The act of filling out the tags turns what cartography had rendered as a red dot on an interactive map into an individual whose loss needs to be mourned. For the installation to take place, volunteers fill out information about the deceased on the toe tags. Writing the names becomes an act of collective remembrance of those who died attempting to cross the border. While it may be an exaggeration, or perhaps wishful thinking, to say that changing maps means changing the world, rethinking the ways in which displacement has been and continues to be mapped can still have significant consequences. These different examples show that cartography can be a defiant and subversive practice, and yet neither sophisticated technologies nor large numbers of participants are necessary to produce maps that challenge

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conventional practices and reveal the interconnected nature of storytelling and mapmaking. Maps that have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, just like the Freudenheim map, have the potential to portray “the emotional connection with, and the remembrance of, those left behind.”61 This becomes evident in the counter-­maps that Central American migrants in transit produced as part of a 2018 research project on cognitive mapping, led by Amalia Campos Delgado. These maps, of course, differ from Freudenheim’s in various ways, yet five of them are similar in that they share a depiction of a hostile landscape. “Mapmaking,” writes Campos Delgado, “is a storytelling device,” and counter-­mapping makes it possible to render visible what more conventional maps leave out. The maps that Campos Delgado studies tell five individual stories, highlighting different aspects of the migrant experience. These range from the sequence of events and its relationship to geography and topography, to the hostility and danger of the entire landscape that migrants cross from Honduras to San Luis Potosí.62 The map drawn by “Rosa” is particularly interesting. Like the creators of the Hackitectura map of the Strait of Gibraltar, she places the southernmost location (Honduras) on the very top of the image, while the Northernmost (San Luis Potosí) is a at the bottom. The hostility of the terrain also is constant: underneath the map, a drawing of a dangerous rain forest reflects the overall danger of the migrant journey.63 Just like Freudenheim’s map, just like all maps, this last one is filled with silences. The shapes appearing on paper do not reflect actual geography, and, like Freudenheim, this mapmaker has also forgone territories that were not relevant for her journey, given that “the blank spaces in transmigrant maps are highly relevant as they underscore how limited their knowledge of the space outside the migrant trail is.”64 The lived experiences of fleeing from fascism in the 1930s and 1940s differ from those of the displaced fleeing across the Global South today, but the significance of emotional geographies of old and new homes still comes across in such different works as the Freudenheim map or those briefly discussed here. Sophie Binder’s map placed at this chapter’s end shows the breadth of the protagonists’ escape routes. The marked locations can be very large cities (Berlin, Marseille, Mexico City) or very small towns (Les Roisiers sur Loire, Venta Prieta), and, as a collection, they reveal the global reach

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of the refugee crisis depicted in this book. Moreover, Binder’s maps illustrating the routes of Mistral, Aub, Seghers, Rewald, Duby, and Kisch serve as geographical references to the many different and varied places that are crucial parts of these refugees’ stories. The need to sometimes forgo scale and the exactitude of geography reflects emotional connection and meaning. And, like all maps, those included in this book are filled with silences (see map 1).

M A P 1.

Chapter Three

Ships of Fools: Silvia Mistral

I n t h e e a rl y m o r n i n g h o ur s of July 17, 1939, somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, the Ipanema, a converted cargo ship carrying about a thousand Spanish refugees from France to Mexico, suffered a collision with an unknown object. The accident and the consequent slowdown of the ship’s pace terrified many of the passengers. While the refugees were among the “fortunate ones” who had been able to secure passage to Mexico, the state of the overcrowded vessel made many wonder whether they would ever arrive in the largely unknown country that awaited them (see map 2). A shipwreck was an all too real and terrifying possibility for the Ipanema’s passengers and for the loved ones they had left behind. For the political enemies of the refugees, however, the rumor that the Ipanema had sunk was not exactly bad news. “For Franco’s Spain,” recalled one of the passengers, “we had suffered a shipwreck. We were at the bottom of the sea. All fascist broadcast stations celebrated our collective demise.”1 Yet the Francoist broadcasters, perhaps motivated by cruelty toward the refugees and the families they had left behind in Spain—­their “pieces of our flesh,” as one of the Ipanema’s passengers put it—­had rushed to tell the end of a story before it happened. 2 The Ipanema did not sink, and so the refugees were “resurrected in Martinique” a few days later.3 The collision had damaged the ship’s propeller, making a stopover necessary. Fortunately, a dry dock was available in Martinique, and the French colonial government gave the Ipanema permission to access the port and repair the damage so that the ship could continue its sojourn to Mexico. The Ipanema’s passengers were not allowed to disembark for the duration of the repair, which meant that their movements were limited to a restricted zone by the harbor. And so, they moved from one threshold to another, from one interstitial condition to another.4 Even though the story that the Ipanema had sunk ended up being 52

M A P 2.

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fake news, the fears of the bereaved refugees, many of whom were traveling on the open sea for the first time in their lives, were undoubtedly real, as were, of course, all kinds of menaces, natural and man-­made, to ships carrying refugees across the Atlantic. Yet the collision and damage to the Ipanema did not result in a disaster at sea. Instead, it led to an unexpected, three-­day layover in the Antilles. Some of the passengers chronicled this stay in highly enthusiastic terms in the Diario de a bordo, a logbook that was collectively written, reproduced, and shared aboard. Producing these logbooks was a common practice during sea journeys in the period, and the resulting records provide a unique window into the interstitial time frame aboard, as the displaced, “condemned to idleness” (in stark contrast to the usually frantic activity before departure) now had time for reflection.5 This respite, however, was more than a mere break, it was an opportunity for the refugees to show that they were a community “with a shared goal: to give the best of themselves in the host country and to work for the eventual reestablishment of the Republic and their definitive return home.”6 Silvia Mistral, who, with this second experience of forced displacement in her life, had started to keep a journal that would later become her 1940 memoir Éxodo. Diario de una refugiada española, also recorded her own impressions of the Martinique layover. It becomes evident that the idea of a shared goal was rather lofty: even the Diario de a bordo did not represent a common ideology among the passengers, and other diarios, in opposition, also circulated.7 A brief stay on an island in the Caribbean may appear to be a mere anecdote in the long history of displacement that resulted from the Nationalists’ victory in the Spanish Civil War. Roughly half a million supporters of the defeated Republic left the country. Most crossed the Pyrenees on foot, only to find themselves in a precarious situation in France, where they would soon be caught in another war.8 About nine thousand Spaniards ended up in concentration camps, where the triangle they were forced to wear on their clothes marked them as “Rotspanier.”9 The French government built these camps for the Spanish refugees, and later repurposed them for all those who became “undesirables” during the Nazi occupation. Considering the longer and more complicated history of the Spanish exodus, a three-­day stay in the West Indies may appear to be rather in-

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consequential.10 With the fears of shipwreck appeased, the excursion to Martinique (or, at least to its harbor) represented a welcome distraction. Yet there is more to this story: like many other displaced individuals, this group reached the Americas with preconceived notions about the world they would encounter, notions that most were unwilling to give up or unlearn. For the refugees fleeing from Spain after the war—­and for many other displaced people—­the sea journey was transformational: it was a passage from an old existence to a new one.11 The material culture produced aboard, including the Diario de a bordo and Mistral’s memoir, shows how the refugees actively engaged in making that passage meaningful. Yet what comes from these works is how deeply ingrained colonial and racialized views were, even among those (like the twice-­displaced, working-­class, and anarchist Mistral) who did not benefit from the overseas enterprises that subdued what we now call the Global South. When Mistral first distinguished the outlines of Martinique on the horizon in the early morning hours of June 24, 1939, neither the young writer nor the others traveling with her knew that the island would soon become an important place of transit, documented in a variety of memoirs and chronicles, thanks to what was known as the “Martinique Plan,” to be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Mistral’s Éxodo anticipates more well-­known works by Anna Seghers, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-­Strauss that address the complicated ways in which Europeans recorded their impressions concerning colonialism, race, and racism once their escape routes took them to Martinique. While Mistral and the authors of the short pieces published in the Diario openly condemn (French) colonialism, their Martinique chronicles also contain racist tropes and stereotypical assumptions about the local black population. The refugees trapped in Martinique (for three days in 1939, for longer periods starting in 1940) for the most part did not recognize that their own Caribbean chronicles were implicated in the perpetuation of certain myths and stereotypes. Michael Rothberg uses the expression “implicated subject” in order to “draw attention to how we are ‘folded into’ (im-­pli-­cated in) events that first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects.”12 Being an implicated subject does not make anyone a victim or a perpetrator; it is not an essence, but a circumstance, “a position

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that we occupy in particular, dynamic, and at times clashing structures and histories of power.”13 Thus, the story about the Ipanema is not one about a disastrous shipwreck—­even though the Francoist government may have wished for that. Instead, it is a story in which the complexity and the paradoxes of the refugee experience in the 1930s and 1940s vividly come across. Just like the refugees from multiple nations who traveled to Martinique a year later, the Ipanema’s passengers produced testimonies that reflect loss, nostalgia, and fear, but also a great deal of hope for a world free from fascism. Kindness and condescension, solidarity and prejudice come together in these documents. The Spanish refugees were at the mercy of the French colonial authorities who had authorized the Ipanema to dock in Fort-­de-­France for the duration of the repair. While many of the antifascist refugees felt compelled to express their rejection of the inequalities and injustices in the French-­ruled Caribbean, they had no choice but to accommodate and even show their appreciation for the French. Despite all this, the tone of the chronicles of the Martinique layover in the Diario is celebratory and cheerful. Certain traits of onboard logbooks like the Diario need to be taken into consideration.14 Like the diaries published aboard other vessels carrying Spanish refugees (specifically the Sinaia and the Méxique), the Ipa­ nema’s Diario appeared regularly, sharing news that ranged from the practical (the weather), the political (mainly the war), and the mundane (children were asked to behave properly on deck). In addition to informing the passengers about what was happening onboard and across the world, the authors of the logbooks aimed to articulate a sense of unity among the Spanish refugees (who may have fought each other among the very different factions that supported the Republic) and to provide them with cultural and political information about Mexico, the country that would receive them and that was still largely unknown to most.15 The information in the Diarios was supplemented with regular lectures on board about Mexico, its history, its geography, its politics, and its people. Many of the essays in the Diarios of the Ipanema, the Sinaia, or the Mexique convey the message that the refugees represent the “true Spain,” and that the fight for Spain’s Republic would continue across the

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ocean and in places of refuge. Displacement, therefore, is no longer the consequence of defeat and expulsion; instead, it becomes a new phase in an enduring, righteous struggle against fascism. Mexico now is another trench in a global theater of war.16 Yet the messages about unity and continuity coexist with more problematic pieces. In many of the articles printed in the different logbooks, which echo conventional colonial themes, Mexico often appears as an empty territory where the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War would materialize in an ongoing and symbolic struggle. In the Ipanema’s Diario de a bordo, the terms describing the encounter between the Spanish and the black locals in Martinique are as passionate and hyperbolic as they are patronizing. In one of the chronicles, the description of the first meeting between the refugees and the locals begins with an enthusiastic and “latino” cheer for freedom. Both groups, now united, would have a chance to “work for a rebirth of love and justice, that could once and for all end the differentiation of races and the tyranny of false selections of imperialism.”17 The more abstract critiques of colonialism appear toned down when one of the chroniclers points out that a highly ranked French officer welcomed the refugees, gently affirming: “Vous etes chez vouz,” or “You are at home.”18 The entries in the Diario de a bordo suggest that while the Spanish avoided directly challenging the colonial power, they also had plenty of words of appreciation for the warm welcome they received from the people of Martinique. While the French granted the refugees “thoughtful words and kind greetings,” the chronicles express far more empathy, even intimacy, with the local black population, who, “understand us better in these moments and they love us more with a tender solidarity of shared misfortunes.” The locals appear portrayed as “grateful and industrious blacks, who from the first moment were willing to offer us the ripest and juiciest fruit of their own heart.”19 Given the display of so much magnanimity and goodwill, the stay on the island becomes one with no unpleasant incidents or conflicts, without a “single sour gesture between guests and hosts.” The first and lasting impressions of Martinique are of “color, liveliness, common sense, mutual understanding, and love.”20 Yet the reality of the Martinique layover was far more complex than a joyful chance encounter. The first consequence of the accident that

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made the Martinique stay necessary was that the Ipanema had to greatly reduce its speed. While the slowdown terrified many of the refugees on board, others took it in stride, and jokingly began calling their trip an “endless journey.”21 Humor, or perhaps gallows humor, was an important coping mechanism for the Mexico-­bound refugees who had lost so much: a war, loved ones, and a home country. It is therefore not surprising that the Diario includes any number of—­often crudely drawn—­ caricatures that tell a story that differs from the more solemn articles that accompany them. The Martinique episode is no exception here. The first two images that depict, or attempt to depict, the people of Martinique display racialized tropes that European cartoonists regularly used in their representations of African colonial subjects (figures 2 and 3).22 The images reveal nothing about Martinique, or about the people of Martinique, but everything about European colonial and racist fantasies that the displaced cartoonists had taken with them. 23 This becomes even more evident in the third image (figure 4). Here, the caption reads, “Duérmete niño, que viene el coco,” which can be roughly translated as, “Sleep, my child, the bogeyman is coming.” The fact that a coconut is about to fall on the figures is also the punchline.

“Con ‘rumba’ a México” [On the way to México]. Ipanema. Diario de a bordo, 15, 28 June, 1939. Reproduced from Los barcos de la libertad: Diarios de viaje. Sinaia, Ipanema y Mexique (Mayo–­Julio de 1939), Presentación de Fernando Serrano Migallón (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2006), 234. FIGU R E 2.

“Despedida. Hasta Luego! Hasta Luego! [Farewell! See you later! See you later!]. Los barcos de la libertad: Diarios de viaje. Sinaia, Ipanema y Mexique (Mayo–­Julio de 1939), Presentación de Fernando Serrano Migallón (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2006), 244

FIGU R E 3.

FIGU R E 4. “En la Martinica. Duérmete niño, que viene el coco . . .” [In Martinique. Sleep, little baby, the bogeyman is coming]. Reproduced from Los barcos de la libertad: Diarios de viaje. Sinaia, Ipanema y Mexique (Mayo–­Julio de 1939), Presentación de Fernando Serrano Migallón (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2006), 224.

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The image does not depict the lived realities of the Antilles, but it reveals a racialized imaginary that the cartoonists considered an adequate representation of what they saw (or wanted to see) in the Caribbean and of what would resonate with and amuse the other travelers. Spanish refugees were, of course, not the only ones reproducing racialized tropes along the long escape routes from Europe to the Americas. Indeed, racially charged images circulated along the geographies of displacement that expanded across the world in the 1930s and 1940s. One of these images is an unsigned mural found at Camp Les Milles, an internment and deportation camp in France. Les Milles was used for “enemy subjects” and “undesirables” between 1940 and 1942, and among them was Seghers’s husband László Radványi. The mural displays a ham-­shaped ship, a royal family of canned sardines, as well as racist caricatures: black figures hiding in a pineapple. This mural, writes Eric Jennings, “likely evoked dual refugee fantasies: the dream of oceanic escape to some tropical haven, together with culinary abundance.”24 The entire heading of the mural reads, “If your plates are not very full, let our drawings calm the appetite.” The fact that the mural includes racist iconography would add a third element, namely the colonial structures and racial hierarchies that many of the persecuted in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II encountered and reproduced along their escape routes. These structures and hierarchies correspond to worldviews and mental maps that were as familiar to the muralists in Les Milles as they were to Spanish refugees crossing an Atlantic Ocean, shaped by the violent histories of colonization and slavery. The colonial realities that locals in Martinique were living in 1939 when the Spanish arrived also call into question the depiction of the Antilles in the Diario de a bordo. Arguably, just a few pages in a logbook chronicling the journey of refugees across the Atlantic could never do justice to life on an island in the Caribbean that had been under colonial rule for centuries and was central to the transatlantic slave economy and trade. Instead, one needs to look for accounts of these lived realities in works of Martinican intellectuals, among them Suzanne Césaire (née Roussi), Aimé Césaire, Paulette Nardal, and the younger Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon. All things considered, Mistral’s chronicle of the Martinique expe-

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rience (not unlike those that appeared in the Diario) is more about an imagined and even exotic place than about the realities that come across in the work of the above-­mentioned authors. Yet it should not be dismissed for that reason; not only what Mistral portrays in Éxodo, but also her biography and her earlier Atlantic crossings (prior to 1939) show how the transformational experience of the sea journey led to thorny negotiations of identities, tolerances, and, at times, very damaging prejudices. Texts produced at sea, from the collectively and somewhat hastily produced Diarios to more sophisticated works of literature, are a window into these negotiations.

Ships of Fools In 1931, when Mistral was barely seventeen years old, she traveled with her Catalan-­and Galician-­born parents from Cuba back to Spain, the country where she had spent part of her childhood. Mistral’s parents were sugar plantation workers, and the Cuban government deported them after the falling price of sugar and the consequences of the 1929 crash turned the presence of large numbers of unemployed workers into a political risk that General Machado did not want to face. The regime therefore took advantage of a law dating back to pre-­I ndependence days that made it easy to force out anyone whose parents were not Cuban born. Thus, even those who had been living and working in Cuba for several generations were subject to the law, making it easy to expel political dissidents, among them Mistral’s family. While the most politicized among the deportees had great hopes for a celebratory return to Spain’s young Republic, they were largely ignored once they arrived in Spain. The 1931 sea journey was arduous for Mistral and her family: they traveled in an ocean liner’s steerage section, together with more than eight hundred other deported workers. Yet not all passengers aboard the ship that sailed from the Americas to Europe, stopping in Havana to pick up the deportees, experienced such hardship during the journey. Like most in the period, this vessel was built to transport freight and people, and the cabins ranged from first to third class. Mistral remembers the dehumanizing looks from the passengers traveling in first class: “It seemed as though we, looked down on from the first-­class bridge, were beings made of different flesh, with the leftovers of Adam’s rib.”25

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Even though this ocean liner (like most) was designed to discourage mobility across the different compartments that clearly demarcated the lines between different social locations, Mistral recalls transgressing the ship’s boundaries. “We were not allowed in first class, but I remember that before we reached Barcelona, I went there to get my hair cut. Someone took me, I don’t know if it was a passenger or a member of the staff, someone took me. The difference was enormous, the washrooms, everything was very luxurious. People were elegantly dressed, but that didn’t really affect me, I just observed everything, I was very perceptive.”26 The journey left a profound mark on Mistral, shaping her political and intellectual development once she settled with her family in Barcelona. 27 There, the largely self-­taught writer who described her life as “exodus after exodus” found employment at a cigarette paper factory. She also almost immediately began writing and publishing journalistic work, particularly film reviews in several publications, among them Las Noticias, Films Selectos, or Film Popular.28 After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she joined the anarcho-­syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), an affiliation that then facilitated numerous publications in Umbral: Semanario de la nueva era [Threshold: Weekly for a New Era]. Mistral was a gifted chronicler and an avid reader, which clearly comes across in her memoir. Éxodo begins with Mistral’s departure from Barcelona once the city fell to the Nationalists in January of 1939. Mistral was in transit in Southern France for six months, under constant threat of refoulement. She eventually was able to embark on the Ipanema on June 11, 1939. Mistral wrote her memoir wherever and whenever it was possible, “on my knees, on a rock, on a nightstand, a chair.” In the early stages of writing, she was not very concerned with the eventual publication of her text: “I was not thinking of publishing, it was a testimony of what I was living.”29 Éxodo shares a number of commonalities with a novel published in 1961 that also tackles the actual journey of a ship: Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools.30 Both texts chronicle a transatlantic journey in the 1930s—­of the Vera (Porter) and the Ipanema (Mistral)—­and both were published in installments before they appeared as books, but these are not the only reasons why it makes sense to discuss them in relation

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to one another.31 In 1971 Mistral published the article “Yo fui pasajera en ‘El barco de los tontos” [“I Was a Passenger on the ‘ship of fools’”] in the Mexican daily Excelsior. The title is a direct reference to Porter’s 1961 novel, where the American author narrates her own journey from Veracruz to Bremerhaven aboard the Vera in 1931.32 Porter did not know that one of the passengers traveling in steerage among the “eight hundred and seventy-­six souls: Spaniards, men, women and children, workers in the sugar fields of Cuba, being deported back to the Canaries and to various parts of Spain (wherever they came from) after the failure of the sugar market,” would be a bright young writer who a few years later took on the pseudonym Silvia Mistral.33 Yet Mistral indeed recalls a brief encounter with Porter: “There was a woman with freckles on her arms who showed interest in learning to what kind of Hispanic-­Cuban product I belonged, and what my father’s political ideas were.”34 Ship of Fools tells the stories of different passengers’ lives, their choices, their flaws, and their relationships with historical and political developments in the Depression-­era United States, Cuba under Machado, post-­revolutionary Mexico, Spain’s young Second Republic, and the waning Weimar Republic. The novel was published fifteen years after the end of World War II, so it can also be read in relation to the Holocaust, even though its plot takes place in 1931. Yet Porter’s novel freezes her characters and their actions in the two-­week period of the transatlantic journey. The passengers aboard the Vera thus collectively represent, “the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity.”35 The author ends her book’s preface defining herself as “a passenger on that ship.”36 Porter’s admission made her contemporaries pick up on the ways in which the “ship of fools” is indeed an allegory: the ship and its passengers become a “mirror reflection of humanity.”37 Yet when New York Times Book Review critic Mark Schorer wrote, in 1962, that the reader who could not “find his name on her passenger list” would be “myopic to the point of blindness,” he failed to mention that the 876 passengers traveling in steerage—­among them Mistral and her family—­are absent in this mirror reflection, given that their names do not appear on the list. 38 In the eyes of the other passengers, the people traveling in the steerage are worthy only of contempt. “It was plain they were by no will or plan of their own, and in the helpless humility of complete enslavement they

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were waiting for whatever would be done to them next. Women nursed their starving infants; men sat fumbling among their wretched possessions, tying them up more firmly, they picked at their feet or scratched in their hair; or they sat suspended in uneasy idleness, simply staring. Pale anxious children, miserable, uncomplaining, sat near their mothers and gazed at them, but asked for nothing.”39 For some of the other passengers, the deported look like “beggars on the dock who now seemed to be coming on board the Vera,” and the rumor that “the strange people were political malcontents and were being deported as dangerous and subversive elements” also circulates aboard the ship.40 Herr Rieber, a German passenger, indeed suggests putting “them all in a big oven and turn on the gas,” making it difficult to not read the text in the context of what was imminent in Europe.41 To be clear: Porter’s characters, often “caught between solipsism and avarice,” and not Porter herself, voice these opinions, yet they still struck a nerve when Mistral eventually read the novel based on a journey that she shared with Porter.42 Forty years after crossing the Atlantic in the same ship as Porter, and a decade after Ship of Fools appeared in print, Mistral “wrote back” to Porter, making a claim for the meaning and validity of her experience in her own voice. Mistral remembers and denounces the situation of the forcibly displaced, affirming that what was just a novel for Porter, was a real and terrible experience for her and the more than eight hundred “souls:” “novel for K. A. Porter, terrible experience for those of us who survived that journey on the ‘The Ship of Evil.’”43 The fact that Mistral and Porter crossed the Atlantic on the same ship is more than a chance encounter, as it illuminates the ways in which European refugees handled the class-­based and racial hierarchies that they encountered along their escape routes. In 1971, Mistral challenged the derogatory terms that once framed her and those traveling with her as nameless and faceless outcasts, unable to tell their own stories. Yet Mistral’s own writing about Martinique reveals similar limitations. Mistral’s texts are not as demeaning as some of the passages in Ship of Fools. She certainly does not advocate genocide, as the fictional Herr Rieber in Porter’s novel does. Yet her memoir reveals how European refugees were often unprepared or unwilling to address the complex histories of the worlds they encountered along their flight routes and how they may

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be implicated in them. When Mistral calls out Porter for writing about the 876 deportees aboard the Vera as having no “will or plan of their own,” and about their “helpless humility of complete enslavement [. . .] waiting for whatever would be done to them next,” she folds Porter into the silencing of a story of displacement that also happened to be Mistral’s own. As implicated subjects, neither Porter nor Mistral are directly responsible for the suffering of others. Yet the terms they choose in their depictions of transatlantic journeys fold them into the ways in which the legacies of different histories of violence are entangled with one another. While Mistral’s account of the Ipanema’s journey conjures up the specter of slavery, her remarks about this history are cursory. Once Mistral sees the ship that would take her and other refugees to the Americas, she points out that “these ships bring to life a modern version of the traffic of human flesh.”44 This description echoes the language in Ship of Fools, as Porter writes about the “complete enslavement” of those traveling in the steerage aboard the Vera, or perhaps Ship of Fools echoes the language in Éxodo, given that it was published two decades earlier. Cargo ships carrying people across the Atlantic evoke the transatlantic slave trade and more specifically, “slavery at sea,” as Sowande’ Mustakeem formulates it in her study of the “social space of ships and the ocean as epicenters in the making and unmaking of transported slaves.”45 Mistral’s comment provides an opportunity to further reflect on the connections between different histories of violent displacement and on how the memory of “slavery at sea” relates to other Atlantic crossings. But Mistral misses this opportunity. Even though the conditions aboard the Ipanema and other vessels carrying refugees could be precarious, the individuals traveling on them had not been enslaved; they were not subject to “a climate of terror in the world of slavery at sea that resulted in mental disorientation, familial and communal separation, malnourishment, lack of sanitation and cleanliness, severe isolation, debilitating diseases, miscarriages, sexual abuse, psychological instability, and bearing witness to physical violence committed against kin and shipmates.”46 Freedom, or at least a version of it, and not bondage awaited the refugees in the Americas. Nevertheless, the history of “slavery at sea” resonates here. The experiences of those fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s reveal the knotted histories of colonialism and slavery at every step of

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the way: at port cities, aboard ships, in ports of arrival, and in the places where the refugees ended up settling. Yet in 1939 Mistral was not ready to articulate connections between different histories of violence. Neither were most other displaced writers, as the next chapter, narrating the journey of the Paul Lemerle, will show. Mistral’s brief comments about the ship’s crew from Indochina also are noteworthy. She barely notes their presence, only mentioning that she had reservations about the Asian crew when she was about to embark.47 The fact that just like Martinique, Indochina was under French control at the time Mistral was writing her memoir attests that the movements of refugees across borders and oceans during World War II took place along the flows of colonial rule and, sometimes, impending decolonization.

Modern Slaves and Protagonists of the Odyssey When Mistral first saw the Ipanema, she called the vessel that would take her from France to Mexico “a real shame.” 48 It made her think of the cargo (potatoes) that the ship would carry if it were not transporting refugees, and of the large rats, “with enormous tails,” that she would indeed later find on board.49 Yet Mistral was an experienced traveler, so she knew how to make the best of an otherwise arduous journey. Right away, she claimed a top bunk in steerage, since she had learned that sleeping at the very bottom would lead to seasickness. For the same reason, she also secured a place on deck that would become “her bed, her dining room, her everything” for the duration of the journey.50 Mistral probably was on deck when the outlines of Martinique appeared on the horizon. Her account of the layover begins with a reference to three white women that had once called the Antillean island their home: Empress Josephine herself, Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (the second wife of Louis XIV of France, who spent eight years of her childhood in Martinique), and Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, a distant relative of Empress Josephine, said to be taken by Barbary pirates in her twenties, enslaved, and sent to Constantinople, where she became Valide Sultan Naksidil—­although that story may be a legend.51 The realities that the Spanish refugees encountered in Martinique greatly differed from the worlds these women, whose families were all

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involved in the slave trade in one way or another, had once inhabited. Mistral’s initial comments about the Ipanema’s approach to Martinique invoke a colonial history that has slavery at its very core, yet her writing also eschews the violence of these histories. While images of beautiful Josephine, sassy Maintenon, or astute and legendary Rivéry came to Mistral’s mind, the “first representation of the New World in the hallways of the Ipanema,” was a local black woman, “tall with long necklaces and earrings” who arrived on a barge, ready to sell fruit to the refugees.”52 The local men, writes Mistral, “barely dressed in white trousers obey her.” No wonder that the local woman captured “the attention of the emigrants” with her “charismatic gait and the rhythm of her necklaces falling on her erect chest.”53 The Martinican reality, one where most of the inhabitants were “black subjects under French control” clashed with the initial expectations Mistral and the other refugees traveling aboard the Ipanema may have had about the Caribbean. Yet the accounts in the Diario and Mistral’s descriptions still are far more about what the European refugees wanted to see than about what they came upon. Like many of the other refugees who would find themselves in transit in Martinique roughly a year later, Mistral highlights the beauty and the vivid colors of the place.54 Even though Mistral was familiar not only with transatlantic travel and the precarious routes of deportation, but also with racial and colonial dynamics in the Caribbean, her account of the Martinique stay still reflects more wonder than familiarity. She only mentions her Caribbean upbringing in passing, pointing out that after Machado’s dictatorship expelled her family, she was now returning, “fleeing from the Iscariots,” to the continent that was once home to her, turning her life into “exodus after exodus.55 These biblical references (to Judas Iscariot, to the Book of Exodus) shape this testimony’s carefully curated voice. Mistral is telling the story of displaced and bereaved individuals who, after leaving behind a country overrun by fascism, are ready to build a better, more tolerant new world in the Americas.56 This, as mentioned earlier, was a common theme in the different Diarios that the Spanish refugees produced on ships like the Ipanema, the Sinaia, or the Mexique. While Éxodo is a far more nuanced representation than the caricatures mentioned earlier (caricatures produced on the same ship where Mistral was recording her

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account of the journey), the author’s portrayal of the population in Martinique is paternalistic and racially charged. The Martinicans appear as indistinguishable from one another as the passengers traveling in the steerage in Porter’s Ship of Fools. The story Mistral tells about Martinique is one where conscientious Europeans stand up for nameless black locals, defending them from the French colonial forces. The writing also reproduces myths about a feminized West Indian world that is subservient to the male French colonizer.57 Mistral, like all refugees traveling on the Ipanema, had undergone terrible hardships. The passengers of the Ipanema were vulnerable, if not traumatized: they had survived a war, they had left loved ones behind, shipwrecks were an all-­too-­real menace, and even the most sanguine refugees knew that adapting to a new country in an unknown part of the world would not be easy. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the displaced refrained from making stereotypical assumptions about others, or even from reproducing racist tropes. Sea journeys along a colonized or imminently decolonizing world were important and potentially transformational for refugees about to begin a new existence, yet they did not necessarily result in a process of self-­ reflection about the power dynamics in a racialized society. Mistral dedicates just a short passage to a meeting with local intellectuals. On June 26, the Ipanema’s second day in Martinique, the prohibition for the Spanish to leave the harbor remained in place. Visitors, however, were allowed on board, and so what looked like a lively exchange became possible. “Several Martinican poets and writers visit the intellectuals on board, they dedicate their books, with kind words and noble sentiment. Indigenous and French students cross the estuary in small canoes and reach the Ipanema, to spend time together, greet the Spanish students, and ask them about Spain. A real camaraderie fills all spaces, and rumors of it already reach the population on the island’s interior.”58 Yet the exchange and the camaraderie were one-­sided: neither the Martinican authors nor their works are mentioned by name. While an encounter with Suzanne and Aimé Césaire or Paulette Nardal, hidden behind the generic “several Martinican poets and writers” would make for a remarkable story, there are no words about such a meeting. Now, getting to know the Césaires would not have been possible for Mistral,

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given that they were in Paris and would not return to Martinique until September of that year. Nardal, who had lived in France since the 1920s, when she began her studies at the Sorbonne, was back in Martinique in the summer of 1939. She may or may have not crossed paths with Mistral and the other refugees. The Antillean reality shown in Nardal’s and in Suzanne Césaire’s and Aimé Césaire’s work is not the one that Mistral and the other refugees may have first imagined, and not the one they wanted to see. In Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] (1939) Aimé Césaire describes the collective suffering, the degradation, and the neglect that years of colonial rule have imposed on his native country. The opening verses of Césaire’s poem convey a sense of a place that bears no relationship to what Mistral describes in her memoir. “At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in this dust of this town sinisterly stranded.”59 In the Diarios and in Éxodo, instead, Martinique looks more like an exotic location where the otherwise content local black population had been waiting for the European refugees to help them resist the French colonizers and awake their consciousness. To be fair, Césaire’s Notebook appeared in the French avant-­garde literary magazine Volonté a few months after the Spanish refugees stopped over in Martinique, and Suzanne Césaire’s essays, among them her well-­known “Le grand camouflage” were printed in the journal Tropiques (which the Césaires founded together with René Ménil) between 1940 and 1945. The Spanish refugees, not unlike other European refugees who would arrive in Martinique shortly afterward, produced texts in which Caribbean identities are stable and easy to classify: Martinican’s are subjugated by the French, yet grateful to the Spanish; they are as exotic as they are eager to learn from them. The women are depicted as lavish and stunning, yet they seem to understand little about their own oppression. A look at Suzanne Césaire’s work tells a very different story. She wrote with erudition and with rage about the region and of what it meant to grow up female in Martinique. Her work is about the “instabilities of the region’s identities,” the “internal anguish” beyond the “extremely

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beautiful Antillean face.”60 For Césaire, Martinican women are “of four races and dozens of bloodlines,” revealing how, “the Caribbean reflects back to Europe an unsettling image of itself.” 61 “When they lean over the malefic mirror of the Caribbean, they see in it an unsettling image of themselves. They don’t dare to recognize themselves in this ambiguous being, the West Indian. They know that the mixed races contain a part of their bloodline, that these people are, like themselves, part of Western civilization.”62 Differently from Mistral’s memoir and the texts in the Diario de a bordo, Césaire’s “The Great Camouflage” both “celebrates Caribbean cultures and demands awareness of their contexts within a post-­slavery diaspora.”63 For evident reasons, Suzanne Césaire, born and raised in Martinique, wrote about her “native land” and her return to it in ways that differ radically from the work of Mistral, who was only in Martinique, and only in a restricted area by the harbor, for just three days. My aim in bringing Césaire’s work up here is not to criticize Mistral but to show that as the European refugees approached and eventually settled in the Americas, they often were blind to debates about race, gender, and power in which local authors of color had been vividly engaged for a while. They looked at Martinique, and in failing to see the “malefic mirror,” they were ignoring their own complicity. The Césaires and Nardal wrote in French, and while Mistral spent time in France, it is unclear how fluent she was. It would be ludicrous and anachronistic to expect her to be familiar with essays about Martinique that were published after she visited the country in 1939 and in a language that was not hers. However, her memoir does seem to imply that the Spanish refugees needed to arrive in Martinique in order to raise a political, anticolonial consciousness when she writes such statements as this about the Martinicans: “There is in them a noble yearning to learn about details: they ignore everything.”64 When Mistral arrived in Martinique, the journal L’Étudiant noir (which Aimé Césaire had founded in Paris) had been circulating for four years, and its articles, whose authors were mainly from the Antilles, “represented a new consciousness among black French speaking students.”65 In 1932, Paulette Nardal published the essay “L’Éveil de la conscience de race chez les étudiants noirs” [“The Awakening of Race Consciousness among Black Students”] in another storied journal, La Revue

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du monde noir. 66 “Race-­consciousness among certain Antilleans had already been awakened,” writes Nardal, “but it was a result of their leaving their small native lands.”67 Mistral and Nardal both wrote prolifically about displacement and uprooting, and yet in Nardal’s earlier text, it becomes clear that the kind of awakening that Mistral describes in Martinique actually preceded the Ipanema’s journey.68 Mistral underscores the joy with which the locals celebrate the refugees’ arrival, alluding to solidarity between the groups. That joy should not be surprising, because Mistral tells us that the Spanish refugees aboard the Ipanema “were the first to treat the black women in Martinique as equals, sharing joy with the whites.”69 She adds that the Spanish refugees “planted a new seed” among the “colored people” of Martinique.70 Yet in the next sentence, Mistral also laments that “those of the colored race” will be used as cannon fodder in the next war.”71 Given that the text was written between 1939 and 1940, Mistral’s reference to “cannon fodder” can have two separate meanings. The reference may be about the Spanish Civil War, where Moroccan soldiers fighting for the Nationalists indeed became cannon fodder. Langston Hughes’s poem “Dear Brother at Home,” about a captured Moroccan soldier, comes to mind.72 Mistral may also be referring to the conscription of soldiers from the French colonies who were deployed in Europe during World War I, mainly in the French Army and eventually in the French occupation of the Rhineland. German reactions to the presence of African soldiers (and the children these had with German women, known as the “Rhineland bastards”) reflect, as Doris Bergen points out, “ways of thinking about people of color that were common among white Europeans—­and Americans—­in the early twentieth century.”73 The implication here is that, in Mistral’s account of the Ipanema’s stay in Martinique—­that is, in a refugee’s memories of displacement—­different histories of violence not only overlap; they are the very core of these stories. This comes across vividly when Mistral addresses the deployment of soldiers from colonized places in wars fought in Europe. When Mistral still was in France, only a few days after crossing the Pyrenees, she briefly visited the concentration camp in Argèles-­Sur-­Mere, where Spanish refugees were guarded by a colonial army—­Senegalese soldiers. The tone of Mistral’s description is both fearful and conde-

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scending: “Tall and black, they look like children who had been given a gun and a uniform and an order to kill.”74 The fact that these men who “look like children” are carrying weapons makes Mistral particularly anxious. She worries about the “impressive machine guns” that the refugees, “the army without weapons,” saw in the hands of the Senegalese soldiers.75 When, a few months later, Mistral found herself in the Caribbean, the same part of the world where she spent her childhood, her portrayal of the Martinican women shares certain aspects with her description of the black soldiers in France. The women do not bear arms, nor are they charged with guarding the refugees, and yet in Éxodo the Martinican women are interchangeable, as well as always smiling, statuesque, and innately sexual. Mistral even suggests that they willingly engage in sexual encounters with the men in concentration camps—­because their bodies were all they had to offer.76 Here Mistral reproduces a very old story, told over and over again in the context of colonialism, a story in which “the woman of color yields to, and indeed comes to love, the sexual violence inflicted upon her.”77 Aimé Césaire and Fanon would later take issue with this narrative, yet without challenging its gendered trappings.78 Mistral’s narration of an incident that took place on the Ipanema’s last day on the island reiterates this very old story. She describes how one of the Spanish refugees is loudly haggling over the price of fruit with a local, “a soft, black woman, with uncombed hair.” When a French gendarme notices this, he scolds the woman for demanding too much for the fruit. He not only harasses her, but also pushes her, so that the entire content of her fruit basket ends up falling on the ground. The Spanish man, who at first disagreed with the woman over the price of the merchandise, now becomes her defender. According to Mistral, his own memories of oppression in Europe make him empathize with her: “All the sorrows his countrymen suffered in the concentration camps went through his mind, and all the miseries became a verb.”79 Mistral does not further elaborate on this connection that, on the one hand, suggests empathy, but on the other hand, gestures to the European’s inability to think beyond his own individual experience. The story ends up being about the Spanish man’s heroic deed, not about the black woman from

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Martinique. While this anecdote is about defending a woman from the colonizer’s harassment, the author’s tone remains paternalistic. “Why is the black woman mistreated? She is a woman like all women, like the English and the French, possibly better than them, more human, simpler, nobler. Her smile is white, her look sincere, her demeanor calm. Why does he teach her to hate?”80 The moral lesson is “painfully significant” for the refugee, as Mónica Jato puts it, as it reminds him “that all the blood spilled during the civil war would have been in vain if now they were not able to recognize the injustice taking place before their eyes.”81 Yet this still begs the question of why the one recognizing and fighting the injustice is the European refugee and not the black woman. While the woman is passive and infantilized, the man who defends the fruit vendor becomes a type of “Quijote, reborn in a Spanish refugee” who ends up paying the “semi-­slave of the French empire” the price of all the fruit ruined in the transaction.82 When the Ipanema departs on June 29, Mistral refers to “the greeting of the modern slave to the protagonist of the Odyssey.”83 The black locals (and perhaps the women more than the men) are analogized to modern slaves, while the Spanish refugees become the protagonists of the Odyssey. Anecdotes like this one without a doubt reflect a Western worldview; however, Mistral’s book should not be dismissed for this reason. Instead, the fact that Éxodo contains knotted stories of violence, displacement, colonialism, and racism, makes it a crucial work in understanding the refugee experience during the global refugee crisis in the late 1930s and 1940s. Roughly two years after the Ipanema was held up in Martinique, an escape route from Marseille to Martinique emerged. Displaced writers (André Breton and Anna Seghers), historians (Eric Jennings and Vicky Caron), and intellectuals and novelists (Adrien Bosc and Jon Juaristi) have written about this route and examining their works in relation to Mistral’s journey further confirms the intricate connections between escape routes from Franco’s Spain, from Vichy France, and from occupied Europe. Even though the Francoist broadcasters may have wished a death at sea upon all those traveling on the Ipanema, their actual story not only had a far better outcome, it also provides a window into a unique and complicated moment of a global refugee crisis.

C h a p t e r F o ur

Transit and Chance Encounters

R o u g h l y t w o y e a r s a f t e r a broken propeller led the Ipanema to an unexpected stopover in Martinique, the Paul Lemerle arrived in Fort-­de-­France. By now, the Nazis had invaded France, and the local government, “more ‘vichyste’ than Vichy,” had turned the island into a place that for the refugees was as exotic as it was inhospitable.1 By the time Free French forces took over in 1944, most refugees had departed the island. The passengers traveling on the Paul Lemerle, a converted cargo ship, included Anna Seghers, as well as several other renowned figures: Claude Lévi Straus, the father of structuralist anthropology, surrealist writer André Breton, revolutionary and writer Victor Serge, artist Wifredo Lam, and avant-­garde photographer Germaine Krull. These individuals, whose places of birth included France, Belgium, Cuba, and Germany, had witnessed revolutions and wars extending from Russia to Spain. By 1941, all had become “undesirables” in France. This label for foreign nationals preceded the Nazi occupation and subsequent division of the country into two zones, as a 1938 decree had made the interment of “undesirable foreigners” in “specialized centers” possible. 2 The earliest “undesirables” were Spanish Republicans, among them Max Aub and Silvia Mistral. Once World War II broke out, the label also extended to Jews and antifascists fleeing from Germany and Austria. A combination of xenophobia and fearmongering ultimately lay behind that category: the displaced became a threat to whatever national identity was imagined to be. Similarities to contemporary perceptions and even outrage about the hazards that refugees could represent to the nations receiving them are hardly a coincidence.3 Personal accounts from the “undesirables” traveling aboard the Paul Lemerle tell a story that differs radically from the one the Vichy regime attempted to convey about them. In Breton’s words, he and his fellow passengers were “fleeing barbaric racial prejudice” and “paying for the 74

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crime of holding noble ideals under the noses of their present masters.”4 Yet the journey across the Atlantic also led to encounters with other (no less barbaric) forms of racial prejudice, even though the displaced did not always recognize them as such. Not unlike the Spanish refugees discussed in the previous chapter, those whose paths led to Martinique in 1941 happened upon profound racial inequalities that they sometimes denounced, sometimes ignored, sometimes accommodated, and sometimes even supported. Once the refugees arrived in Martinique, local colonial officers interrogated them, and they did not do this kindly. Lévi-­ Strauss recalls the hostility of the French officers, offering the following explanation for their actions: “They needed enemies on whom they could vent their feelings of aggressiveness, which had been accumulating for months; they needed someone to blame for the defeat of France, in which they felt they had no share since they had not taken part in the fighting, but for which, in another sense, they felt obscurely guilty (they themselves, in fact, had provided a consummate example and the most extreme instance of the unconcern, illusions and apathy which had overcome part, at least, of France).”5 In Martinique the first destination for the refugees turned out to be yet another prison camp.6 Such a place was probably not what the Paul Lemerle’s passengers had had in mind when they first saw the outlines of the Antillean islands from the ship’s deck. According to Lévi-­Strauss, the longing for a bath was so intense that the customary call “Land! Land!” had been replaced by “A bath, at least a bath tomorrow,” once Martinique became visible on the horizon.7 Yet the bath would have to wait for most passengers. They were to remain confined in a prison camp until their travel documents and the necessary funds to pay for their long journeys to their countries of refuge, or to other places of transit, arrived. Like Mistral only two years earlier, most of the renowned and some of the now largely forgotten individuals who were in transit in Martinique chronicled their stay in documents that evoke an amalgam of beauty and horror, all within a colonial framework. For Seghers, for example, Martinique was a place where at night one could see the “sea shining in all its colors,” even though the family was forced to stay in a “terribly dirty internment camp,” with barely any food and where refugees had to pay for their drinking water.8 Breton

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recalls a place with “tropical enchantments,” where “lovely scents of trees” wafted to the recently arrived, and where he and his family happened upon “a little beach cove” that “sparkled with madrepore coral.” Yet the reality of an internment camp in the tropics was hard to forget: “A step too far outside the poorly marked camp boundary inevitably stirred up an armed soldier whose duty it was to make you retrace your steps without further ado.”9 Martin Ruppel, a German antifascist, calls Martinique a “hell-­hole,” and Germaine Krull ends her account of her interment in the Lazaret camp in Pointe du Boute, a former leprosarium, by stating that her experience there had been “one of the worst nightmares” of her life.”10 German journalist and writer Robert Breuer (Lucien Friedlaender, 1887–­1943) had arrived in Martinique a few months before those traveling aboard the Paul Lemerle did. Yet he left no account behind: Breuer died on the island, unable to secure the travel documents that would have made his departure possible. Breuer’s friend and fellow refugee Kurt Kersten describes Breuer’s death and burial in a brief piece published in Germany a decade later.11 Kersten’s elegiac note ends by expressing the author’s shame for still being among the living, while his friend, whom he calls the “eternal refugee,” perished in Martinique without ever reaching safe haven.

The Martinique Plan Unlike this “eternal refugee,” most of the passengers of the Paul Lemerle were eventually able to leave the Antilles and continue a journey that the “Martinique Plan,” had made possible. Between 1940 and 1941, this escape route allowed a limited number of refugees to flee from Nazi-­ occupied Europe to the Americas and reach Martinique. For just a short while (but longer than the three days the Spanish refugees discussed in the previous chapter spent by the island’s shipyards), these individuals’ lives intersected in Martinique, a place where their hopes, their fears, and their nightmares coincided with the racial and colonial realities and tensions of the Caribbean world. Martinique was a logical point of transit for cargo boats that, like the Ipanema or the Paul Lemerle, were carrying people westbound and cargo eastbound. The island had become a French possession in 1815,

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and in the preceding centuries, French and English settlers had shaped the island’s history by bringing with them the prosperity of sugar plantations and the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. Now, the reasons why the Paul Lemerle and other vessels were taking “cargoes of refugees” from Marseille to Martinique were as multiple as they were paradoxical, as Eric Jennings explains in Last Exit from Vichy France. Vichy’s foreign minister and Pétain supporter Marcel Peyrouton initiated the plan, not because he was necessarily concerned with the well-­ being of the “undesirables” in France, but because, for him, the French territory in the Caribbean looked like a good destination for “foreigners who are overrepresented in the French nation and economy.”12 For Peyrouton, perhaps for Vichy, what mattered was not to assure the safety of the persecuted, both renowned and nameless, but to ensure that France would not be overrun by people they perceived to be unwanted foreigners or infiltrators. The Martinique Plan was convenient: traveling from Marseille to Martinique meant that even though the refugees crossed the Atlantic, they were still in French territory once they reached the Antilles. This explains why those nervous about the presence of “undesirables” on French soil (the Pétainists) and those concerned with the lives and well-­ being of refugees became unlikely partners in implementing this avenue of escape. One of the advantages of this route was that it made traveling to Lisbon, “the great embarkation point” for “freedom in the Americas,” no longer necessary. Avoiding Lisbon was essential for many refugees for whom crossing Francoist Spain was too risky: Spaniards exiled in France, for example, as well as antifascists from across the world who had fought for the Spanish Republic. Martinique was never going to be the final destination for the refugees; it was just a place of transit—­“a place in between places for a time in between times,” as I noted in chapter 2. Most Pétain-­supporting colonial authorities, among them Admiral Georges Robert, the high commissioner of the French Caribbean (the “Pétain of the Caribbean,” according to poet Réné Ménil) were staunch antisemites and extremely suspicious of the refugees, whom they considered to be spies and agitators. Also, neither the United States nor most of the other nations in the Western Hemisphere were particularly welcoming to Jewish refugees

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at this point. And, as the experiences of Seghers and other antifascists prove, an affiliation with the Communist Party often meant that exile in the United States would not be an option. According to the above-­mentioned Ruppel, the officer in charge of interrogating the refugees was a “local Goering.” Even though Ruppel had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean, not much had changed since the last time he had been harassed, still in Europe: “The interrogation to which we were subjected was hardly distinguishable from those conducted by lesser Gestapo officers in the German provinces and in France.”13 The camps on the island were poorly equipped: no light, no toilets, no food, barely any water. Only barbed wire, poisonous insects, and broken glass: the “geographies of the Holocaust,” just displaced in a different hemisphere.14 Most refugees were able to leave Martinique after a relatively brief stay, yet not all reached their destination: as mentioned earlier, Breuer could not secure a visa and died on the island in 1943; Kersten was only able to make it from Martinique to New York after spending five years on the island. The Martinique Plan was short-­lived: more and more suspicions about German spies traveling aboard the different ships led to the end of this route by the late spring of 1941. The Martinique escape route moved along a colonial geography: Vichy’s emigration policy and the administration of the French colonies in the Caribbean explain why Martinique was the port of arrival for the Paul Lemerle. While this ship took refugees from Marseille to Martinique at least twice, its most famous crossing took place between March 24 and April 20, 1941, when the above-­mentioned artists, intellectuals, and writers were among the passengers. Their Martinique experience led to the creation of an archive of transit, one that illuminates, as Jennings puts it, “the Second World War’s intellectual impact, in particular its substantive mark on anticolonial dynamics.”15 Yet this archive also makes it easier to pay attention to well-­known figures, who not only were able to escape from Europe but also sometimes even enjoyed limited privileges in Martinique. Breton, for example, was allowed to leave the internment camp after a few days. The colonial administration deemed it more important to invest in keeping the French writer under

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surveillance using a “motley team” of at least six agents, than in providing drinking water to those confined in camps.16 Hierarchies remained firmly in place along this and other escape routes, as the history of the Emergency Rescue Committee also shows. This relief organization, under the leadership of American journalist Varian Fry, was charged with rescuing endangered intellectuals and artists in occupied France.17 Fry was responsible for many other strategies, some more controversial than others, among them renting the Villa Air-­ Bel, a residence outside Marseille, where many intellectuals and artists found refuge before they were able to leave the country. The villa became a sanctuary for those desperately “waiting  .  .  . and waiting  .  .  . and waiting” for the papers that would allow them to leave occupied Europe behind. Guests included Breton, Serge, Lam (passengers of the Paul Lemerle), as well as Remedios Varo, Consuelo de Saint-­Exúpery, and Max Ernst. The communal life at the Air-­B el produced such interesting collaborative artistic projects as the Jeu de Marseillle, a surrealist version of a deck of cards inspired by the Tarot of Marseille, and Lam’s illustration of Breton’s poem Fata Morgana, a text that the Vichy authorities never allowed to circulate. Yet the villa’s history also raises questions of who was and who was not to be rescued.18 Considering the absolute number of displaced individuals between 1939 and 1945, the number of those who passed through Martinique is infinitesimally small, roughly five thousand individuals. Yet while the story of transit in Martinique may be insignificant in relation to the global numbers of displaced in the period, it did lead to a series of encounters that had remarkable consequences for the histories of art and literature, since “it offered the potential of a privileged perspective on the crosscutting events of war and colonialism.”19 Like some of the Spanish Republicans who were rattled by the presence of Senegalese soldiers guarding them in French concentration camps, the European antifascists in Martinique, among them Breton and Seghers, expressed a sense of discomfort once they realized that black soldiers holding bayonets had been deployed to the prison camps. Some, like Krull, were outright appalled. European refugees fleeing from fascism often and openly denounced colonialism, but they were not

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always ready and willing to accept their own ignorance when it came to historical connections between the violent histories of the Holocaust and of imperialism, and their own complicity in the maintenance of racial hierarchies. By contrast, Martinican intellectuals, among them Suzanne and Aimé Césaire (mentioned in the previous chapter) and Frantz Fanon, were always clear about this. As Timothy Parsons puts it, “While Europeans may have denied any connection between the new imperialism and the Holocaust, many educated Africans and Asians were not fooled.”20 Aimé Césaire, who was in Martinique when the Paul Lemerle arrived and formed strong relationships—­or beautiful friendships—­with Breton and Lam, expresses this clearly and succinctly in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950). The violence of Nazism, argues Césaire, “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the blacks of Africa.”21 Not only did Césaire witness the arrival of the Paul Lemerle in Martinique, the native land where he returned in 1936, but his engagements, or beautiful friendships, with some of the ship’s passengers also show that this specific story of the transit in the Caribbean is at the very core of a number of entangled histories. 22

Transit Transit in Martinique offers a unique opportunity to further understand the complex worldviews that displaced individuals espoused in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II. These worldviews may startle present-­day readers, yet the point here is neither to make judgments based on standards unfamiliar for individuals coming of age in the early twentieth century, nor to merely dismiss the racism that is often present in the refugees’ accounts. Just like individuals on the move today, the forcibly displaced were complex and flawed human beings, who encountered enormous difficulties as they were forced to find safety far away from their homes. And routes to safety never were easy, or, at the risk of sounding redundant, safe. An escape route does not just consist of a place of departure and one of arrival. Instead, these paths are meandering and risky, and often include multiple places of transit—­such as Martinique between 1939 and 1941. While transit, can refer to the “action or fact of passing across

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or through; passage or journey from one place or point to another,” or to “a way for passing, a passage” (OED), the word has a very specific meaning when it comes to the lived experience of refugees. In contemporary discussions about forced displacement, transit evokes “temporariness and onward movement,” and the term is often “conceptualized as a state of in-­between-­ness.” Yet rather than “a brief sojourn on the way to somewhere else,” transit can become “an indefinite and potentially permanent state of precariousness.”23 Perhaps no work is better at conveying the difficulties and agonies of this “potentially permanent state of precariousness” than Seghers’s 1944 novel Transit. She began writing it when she and her family were fleeing from fascism and were forced to stay in multiple locations before eventually making it to Mexico, where the novel was first published. One of its characters, a Venezuela-­bound orchestra conductor, provides what may be the most accurate definition of the term when he states that transit “gives you permission to travel through a country with the stipulation that you don’t plan to stay.”24 In the novel the term appears with infinite variations. There are “transit countries,” “letters of transit,” “transit camps,” “transit applicants” as well as the more abstract “transit worries” or “transit talk.”25 Transit therefore conjures up vulnerability, uncertainty, and precarity, or, in Max Aub’s words, the sense that the world is “turning liquid” underneath one’s feet: “soft, uncertain, and quivering, a world of cotton, a soil of clay, slippery, dirty.”26 Stories about transit consist of contradictory and disparate elements, rendered visual in the refugees’ travel documents covered with multiple stamps, signatures, and even scratches, wrinkles, and forgeries. The all-­too-­real menace of shipwreck, as seen in the previous chapter, also haunts most stories about transit. Seghers’s novel begins with a reference to loss at sea: “They’re saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn’t releasing any information. It may just be a rumor.”27 The book ends with more news about the Montreal’s demise, even though the ship and its fate no longer feel entirely real to the narrator: “But then I overhead something about the Montreal—­the Montreal had gone down! It seemed to me as if that boat had left ages ago, a fairy-­tale ship sailing the seas forever, its voyage and shipwreck timeless.”28 Yet the

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news about shipwreck and the death of all those traveling aboard does not stop the refugees stuck in Marseille from persisting in their attempts to find a berth on the next ship that may or may not make it to shore. The conjectures about a possible shipwreck somewhere in the Atlantic reflect the kind of vulnerability and uncertainty that permeated the refugees’ experiences in their attempts to escape from occupied Europe. The Montreal in Transit may be fictional, yet its journey from Europe to the Caribbean evokes the voyages of the Ipanema and the Paul Lemerle (actually mentioned in the novel), and of more ill-­fated vessels, such as the MS St. Louis or the Struma. 29 The novel’s opening suggests that differentiating between rumor and reality was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for refugees trapped in Marseille, in Casablanca, in Martinique, or in any of the “other places” where refugees were forced to stay for short and long periods of time.30 And it suggests as well that some, like Breuer, never left. In places of transit like Martinique, the refugees were at the mercy of local government officials, diplomats, and bureaucrats, as well as entrepreneurs hoping to make a profit from the agonies of the displaced. There, they endured the very real threat of refoulement (contemporary refugee law is based on the principle of non-­refoulement: the refusal to return refugees to countries where their lives are in danger). In the refugees’ depictions of the specific places they crossed and of the routes between these places, what Simone Gigliotti calls “geographies of transit” materialize.31 Transit was and is so much more than a passage from place to place. This becomes evident in Seghers’s novel and her own biography. Roughly two decades after Seghers returned to Germany, a reader’s inquiry about her time in the Caribbean triggers her memory of the journey.32 In her response to the reader, Seghers describes being on deck aboard the ship that took her and her family from Martinique to the Dominican Republic. There she overheard a conversation between Spanish women and two black sailors from the Caribbean. Seghers refers to the men as “Negermatrosen” in the letter, and in the same text she describes Haiti and the Dominican Republic as “Negerrepubliken” and Aimé Césaire as “Negerdichter.” The usage of the slur Neger became common in German in the seventeenth century, as it was taken from Spanish and

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French sources in relation to the slave trade.33 Until recent decades the term was of common usage, even for Jewish, antifascist intellectuals like Seghers, Kersten, or Egon Erwin Kisch. Thus, while Seghers and others of her generation may not have intended to use a pejorative term, its use has an evident racist and colonial history. Refugees like Seghers or Mistral denounced the colonial realities and racial inequalities they saw along their flight routes, but they often continued using racist expressions or leaving prejudices about people of color unquestioned. While Seghers admits not understanding much of the conversation between the two women and the black sailors she overheard on deck, she identifies with the Spanish women, pointing out that they probably were “as exhausted as I was.” Seghers explains that the conversation—­in Spanish—­between individuals stemming from very different parts of the world made her become aware of the magnitude and the violence of the conquest of the Americas. For Seghers, the fact that Spanish was spoken in the “most faraway point on Earth I have ever reached,” means that the language was not just the one that the women who, just like Seghers, were fleeing fascism happened to be using. The language that up until that point Seghers mainly associated with the Spanish Civil War shifted to connote conquest and violence. Though Spanish was a language that Seghers barely understood, it was about to become an important and intimate part of her life, as she was on her way to her new home in Mexico. As the antifascists departed Europe, they took with them their languages, with all their respective historical, sentimental, and sometimes very problematical baggage. For the traumatized, bereaved, nostalgic, but also hopeful refugees, the sea voyage represented a transformation between an old and a new existence, hope for a future, and even a “new chapter in world literature,” as Seghers would write in 1942 (see chapter 6).34 Yet the new beginnings did not mean that the refugees necessarily unlearned prejudices that were at the core of the European cultures in which they had been raised, as many of their encounters with realities in North Africa and the Americas revealed.

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Chance Encounters Much has been written about the fateful meetings in Martinique in 1941 between the founders of the journal Tropiques (Suzanne and Aimé Césaire and René Ménil) and the passengers who arrived on the Paul Lemerle, particularly Breton, Lévi-­Strauss, and Lam, who was returning to Latin America after spending almost two decades in Europe.35 These encounters were not only between individuals, but also between movements, specifically, between Négritude and surrealism. The term Négritude was first used in Paris in the 1930s in the publication L’Étudiant noir (edited by Césaire, Léon-­Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor), and it denotes “a poetics, a literary, cultural and intellectual movement.”36 Négritude is, like surrealism, a complex and multilayered movement. Just as there are several ways to express and understand what Négritude is, there are also many ways to understand surrealism, as Suzanne Césaire argues in her essay “Malaise d’une civilization.” Much of this becomes evident in Breton’s Martinique: Snake Charmer, the poet’s account of his stay on the island. André Masson, who was also a passenger on the Paul Lemerle, illustrated that book, which has been lauded as “the most beautiful of all books about the island.”37 Breton consistently criticizes colonialism, and he provides numerous examples for the ways in which the French officers infantilize the local black population. He mentions newspapers “for their black readers,” that use baby talk, and a broadcast station, Radio Martinique, that also greatly underestimates its listeners. Even more evident is the racism of the police chief, when he reminds Breton, “Especially avoid the colored elements. They are big children.”38 Yet stereotypes and racism operate on a long continuum. While Breton slams French institutions (which provide him with more privileges than most of his fellow travelers), the realities in Martinique still have a magical and exotic quality for the French poet, who at all times remains in control of a narrative that expands yet never splits the seams of the surrealist movement that he helped to engender. As Marina Magloire argues, Breton “leans heavily on the island as a sensual woman trope of the colonial past and present, going so far as to linger upon [Suzanne] Césaire and her female students and wonder if their beautiful

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flesh is warmed by the wood of cacao trees, coffee plants, or vanilla beans.”39 Breton describes his first encounter with Aimé Césaire (whom Seghers still was labeling a “Negerdichter” in the 1960s) in true surrealist fashion, as a “chance encounter.” The expression evokes a phrase from Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants du Maldoror (1868) that would become foundational for the surrealist movement: “a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Breton’s stay in Martinique and especially his acquaintance with Césaire and the journal Tropiques ended up being remarkable experiences for him, yet his depictions also function along the lines of a self-­fulfilling prophecy, as though he had been expecting the unexpected, which then became part of his larger narrative. In his 1943 essay, “A Great Black Poet,” Breton describes his first excursion to Fort-­de-­France after having been imprisoned in the Lazaret camp (where most of the other refugees had also ended up). He then explains, “It was under these circumstances that, by chance on the occasion of buying a ribbon for my daughter, I happened to leaf through a publication exhibited in a variety store where the ribbon was being offered for sale. Between modest covers was the first issue of a magazine called Tropiques, just off the press in Fort-­de-­ France.”40 Whether this actually happened or is just the story that Breton wanted to tell about how he first found Tropiques and later met Césaire is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is that the French poet provides his encounter with Césaire and with Négritude with a magical quality. The chance encounter with first the journal and later Aimé Césaire also has a gendered dimension: not only is Suzanne Césaire not mentioned, but Ménil’s sister, who was the one who connected Breton with Aimé Césaire, is only slightly more important than the hair ribbon. She is a “go-­between,” but not more than that.41 Breton also feels compelled to comment on Césaire’s blackness: “I can recall my initial response in discovering his pure blackness, something I did not notice at first because of his smile. I saw from the start, and everything confirmed it afterward, that he is a human cauldron heated to the boiling point. In that state, his knowledge, raised to the higher level, combines with his magic powers.”42 Breton greatly admired Césaire, the man and his work, as the rest of his essay attests, and the encounter was an important one

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for both poets. Yet Césaire and not Breton was the one who articulated the intricate connection between the history of colonialism and the histories of World War II and the Holocaust. While the meeting between Aimé Césaire and Breton in Martinique was of “greatest consequence for twentieth-­century literary history insofar as it furthered the synthesis between surrealism and the Caribbean sensibility to which Tropiques was dedicated,” the encounter between these two writers, one European, one Martinican, was not the only one that took place in the 1940s.43 Cuban artist Wifredo Lam was one of the very few non-­Europeans traveling on the Paul Lemerle (with the exception of the ship’s crew). According to Ménil, one of the founders of Tropiques, Lam’s transit in Martinique and his meeting with Césaire’s poetry inspired the Cuban artist to paint what is perhaps his most famous work, The Jungle (1943).44 The Jungle is an iconic painting, a work that, according to Cuban novelist and ethnomusicologist Alejo Carpentier, displays the “magic of tropical vegetation, the unbridled Creation of Forms of our nature—­with all its metamorphoses and symbioses—­in monumental canvases of an expressiveness unique in contemporary painting.”45 These lines are taken from Carpentier’s “Prologue” to his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World. Lam’s painting belongs, according to the Cuban writer, in the history of (Latin) America, a history that also is the “chronicle of the marvelous in the real.” Carpentier turns the painting into the quintessential Latin American product: The Jungle is not just one of the Caribbean’s “most emblematic works of art,” it is among Latin America’s most emblematic works of art.46 Yet he does not consider that The Jungle also embodies Lam’s particular experience of transit in Martinique, a place he reached because he had become an “undesirable” in occupied Europe as well as in the West Indies, as a consequence of France’s colonial presence. Lam had left Cuba for Spain in the early twenties to pursue his artistic training. He remained in Spain until 1938 and then left for France. There he met Picasso, who became his friend and mentor, which partially explains why Lam is often and somewhat troublingly called the “Cuban Picasso.”47 The moniker is problematic not only because Picasso is known for having been rather ungenerous when it came to taking on disciples, but also because what made it possible for the Málaga-­ born Pablo Ruiz to become “Picasso” was his turn to primitivism. This

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“deeply romanticized view of African culture (conflating many cultures into one)” allowed modernists to consider “Africa the embodiment of humankind in a precivilized state, preferring to mystify rather than to examine its presumed idol-­worship and violent rituals.”48 If Lam is the “Cuban Picasso,” this artist of African, Asian, and Caribbean heritage becomes part of another self-­fulfilling prophecy. He embodies the ultimate expression of a desire for an authenticity and exoticism that needs to be understood in the context of a colonial imagination responsible for shaping artistic production in Europe in the early twentieth century. Lam, in this sense, becomes a more authentic version of what Picasso had been producing all along. Yet Lam and his work are so much more than that: he “comes from an interstitial position”; he is “never entirely a product of the metropolitan avant-­garde, and never fully at home in the tropical milieu.”49 Shortly after the Nazi occupation of France, Lam, now an “undesirable,” had to find refuge, and so he ended up at the Villa Air-­B el. After a relatively brief stay in Martinique, Lam and his spouse, Helena Holzer, left for Havana, where he completed what would become his most famous painting in 1943. Lam also happens to be one of the few refugees who appears in a photograph that documents the Martinique Plan. Krull, who had managed to smuggle a camera into the camp, took the photo, captioning it “le peintre cubain Fernando Lam accompagné d’une femme non identifiée.”50 The unidentified woman is Holzer, a German-­ born scientist who had met Lam in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and encountered him again in Paris in 1939. Holzer and Lam left Marseille together and got married in Cuba in 1944; they later divorced in 1951. Holzer eventually published a memoir (as Helena Benitez), a text that complicates the notion of Lam as the “Cuban Picasso” even further.51 Yet Krull’s photo of Lam and Holzer also tells another story: a shirtless and gaunt Lam is standing up, while Holzer is sitting down next to a bouquet of flowers in a repurposed water container. Krull’s clandestinely taken photo becomes another version of what transit and chance encounters in Martinique produced: works (like The Jungle, like this photo) that depict the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the perplexing (figure 5). Lam’s painting displays a Latin American reality that, rather than

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Germaine Krull, “Le peintre cubain Fernando Lam accompagné d’une femme non identifiée” [the Cuban Painter Fernando Lam accompanied by a non-identified woman]. Courtesy of Estate of Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen. FIGU R E 5.

merely being “marvelous,” emerges from the “geographies of transit” and from the overlapping violent histories that came together during the encounters in Martinique in 1941. The history of The Jungle therefore anticipates the argument that Lam’s lifelong friend Aimé Césaire would put forth in his Discourse on Colonialism.52 Now, while the beauty and horror of Martinique as well as the “knotted intersections of histories” become evident on Lam’s canvas, other images created by refugees in transit camps or in transit across the Atlantic tell a different, yet related story—­a story about the persistence of a racist imagination. 53 Chapter 3 has already addressed the mural at Les Milles and the caricatures de-

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picting the encounters between the Spanish refugees and the Antillean population published in the Diario de abordo of the Ipanema. Considered in relation to one another, Lam’s painting, the mural at Les Milles, the earlier caricatures, and even the photo of Lam and Holzer illustrate complicated and knotted stories of displacement, colonialism, identity, geography, and, without a doubt, racism and racial hierarchies. The Spanish refugees aboard the Ipanema and the refugees from multiple nations that traveled on the Paul Lemerle produced testimonies that reflect loss, nostalgia, and fear, but also a great deal of hope for a life and world free from fascism. However, the encounters in Martinique show that the violence of colonialism traveled with the displaced. Some of these works—­Breton’s Snake Charmer, Levi-­Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Seghers’s Transit, and of course The Jungle—­are renowned. Yet other lesser-­known, but not less-­poignant works also document the multiple meanings that transit and chance encounters in Martinique produced. These include Germaine Krull’s report “Camp de Concentration a la Martinique” and Kersten’s account of Robert Breuer’s death and burial on the island, “Robert Breuer’s Tod und Begräbniss.”54 Not long after leaving Martinique, Krull was named the head of photographic services for the Free French forces in Brazzaville. 55 Given that Krull ended up in the same place that the fictional Rick Blaine and Louis Renault plan to reach at the end of Casablanca, it is hard to think of her life without the trappings of heroic adventure. Krull certainly broke boundaries, yet the reality she lived (a Modernist photographer who documented the world she saw as a European refugee in the Caribbean and Central Africa) is more compelling than any idealized fantasy of her life and times could ever be. Krull was one among only a few European women who were war photographers in the period and possibly the only one working in Central Africa during World War II. She collaborated on the film L’amitié noir, a documentary project that also involved director François Villiers and Jean Cocteau, who authored the screenplay.56 Krull was, in many ways, exceptional: she was a successful avant-­garde photographer who had lived in a variety of places and had managed to have a successful career (Man Ray labeled her one of the greatest photographers of their time—­together with himself, of course), even in a period when audiences may have been less receptive to the work of a

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queer, multilingual artist.57And, before even getting to Central Africa, she survived the ordeal of being forced to take on a risky escape route. Yet Krull’s Atlantic crossings did not lead to a critical engagement with colonial and racial hierarchies. Krull’s stills that were eventually used in L’amitié noir include photographs of women that “conform to the colonialist stereotypes of her other European colleagues.”58 In other words, these are photographs that come from a racial imaginary that Krull, Mistral, and many others left unquestioned. Mistral’s descriptions of black women, discussed in the previous chapter, and the photos that Krull took in Africa “shared the European fascination with black semi-­ nude bodies and differing standards of beauty.”59 Mistral’s and Krull’s depictions of black women in the Caribbean and in Africa reveal that these women did not unlearn the racial stereotypes that their male counterparts also had no intention of giving up. Krull had already led a nomad’s existence even before the rise of Nazism displaced her across the Atlantic. The Dutch citizen was born in Germany, and spent time in Bosnia, France, Slovenia, and Bavaria, where her family eventually settled. Krull studied photography and even opened her own portrait studio in 1919. Not only photography but also political activism shaped her early life: after being expelled from Russia in 1922, she moved to Paris. Krull’s itinerant background, her political activism, and her—­for her times—­transgressive sexuality placed her among the undesirables in 1941. She was able to secure one of the last visas to Brazil, but this meant that a stay in a concentration camp in Martinique awaited her. While Krull entitled her report “Concentration Camp in Martinique,” the chronicle begins by documenting the situation the undesirables faced in Marseille. All were driven by one goal, one aspiration: to leave Europe behind. No obstacle was too big, no journey too long, even if that meant, according to Krull, arriving in the Americas via Hong Kong. The situation in Marseille entailed dealing with the limited periods of validity of numerous exit and entrance visas, and with Spanish border politics that were completely unpredictable. Navigating these obstacles took as much courage as it took capital. Money was “the sole means to obtain anything in France.”60 Krull confirms that those who were able to embark on the Paul Lemerle (or other vessels along the

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short-­lived Martinique route) had either their own or also someone else’s funds to cover the cost of their journey. Once Krull’s text moves from describing the situation in Marseille to what she experienced aboard the Paul Lemerle, it is again clear that many of her fellow travelers belonged to an elite—­an elite, nevertheless, to which only those who had experienced forced displacement would yearn to belong. This made the humiliations they would endure when they arrived in Martinique even worse. In her report Krull points out that, almost without exception, all the passengers on the Paul Lemerle were learned and cultured. Many once held important social positions: they were doctors, lawyers, and philosophy professors. She also mentions the more renowned figures: Breton, Serge, Lam (whom she identifies as Fernandez Lam), and “German writers” (she does not mention Seghers by name). In this way she establishes a contrast between the lives of the refugees before they stepped on the ship’s deck and their situation aboard, where the officers treated them as though they were “scum of humanity.”61 And so the humiliations pile up: the refugees not only had to pay premium prices for their berths on the ship, they were also forced to purchase their food, “sold at the price of gold.” Upon arrival in Martinique, the refugees were subjected to interrogations. Like Ruppel, Krull notes that Gestapo officers and the French colonials are one and the same. The interrogations were followed with “the pleasure” of being interned in Lazaret, the old leprosarium turned prison camp. Once Krull addresses the stay in the concentration camp, her testimony becomes more and more racially charged. She is so astonished by the fact that black soldiers are guarding European refugees at the internment camps that she even connects the color of their skin with the blackness of the night. “Passing by a portal guarded by black soldiers, their bayonets armed, I find myself in an entirely black yard. I have the impression of falling into the void. In the middle of the jungle, or in prison, there is no difference. People scream. Shadows hide in the blackness, children calling for their parents, women crying . . .”62 As Krull becomes more familiar with the topography of the camp, her language remains racially charged, as she identifies the blackness of the soldiers with the darkness of the night. “For every compound, a black guard. Four wooden barracks, where two are administration buildings and the

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others ancient rooms of the Lazaret, still a few more scattered small barracks. At night it all looks like a black village lost in the bush.”63 The fact that that black troops were in charge of guarding Europeans probably was shocking for many of the refugees, yet Krull is the one who articulates her prejudices clearly and candidly: “Not only are we under the control of Vichy and the boot of the Gestapo, but besides, we whites are now being guarded by Negroes.”64 As Jennings rightfully observes, “Krull’s racial hierarchies added to her sense of humiliation rather than leading her to reflect on the nature of Nazi or Vichy racism.”65 Yet Krull’s report is more than a straightforward account of what happened. The text also provides a window to the fears and emotions of this multilingual, transnational artist: the camp in Martinique becomes a nightmarish location not only because of its precarious conditions but also because it evokes colonial and racialized anxieties: a “heart of darkness,” in the Caribbean. Krull readily admits that she will always remember the lurid landscape of the prison camp. “That night, where the wailing of children, the crying of women, the profanities in all languages mixed with the tragic silence of the tropics will stay with me as one of the worst nightmares of my life.”66 It was a nightmare, however, that Krull was fortunate enough to leave behind, even though the memories may have haunted her for the rest of her life. Breuer, who arrived in Martinique months before Krull, did not have such luck. When Seghers reached Martinique in 1941, among those greeting her where two of her friends and fellow antifascist writers on the run: Kersten and Breuer. Seghers briefly mentions that the men had been stuck on the island for six months and that Kersten did not look well at all, even though Breuer would be the one to die on the island.67 Seghers points out that one reason that may explain why the men had still not received an entry visa from the United States was that their lives were no longer considered to be in danger now that they were in the Western Hemisphere. The two men not only witnessed the Paul Lemerle’s arrival in Martinique, they also saw Seghers and other refugees depart, while they waited and waited and waited for the papers that would allow them to leave the island and continue along their route to safety. Kersten was

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only able to secure a visa for New York by the end of the war. Breuer never left Martinique: he died of malaria and, as Kersten writes, of starvation and desperation in 1943. By then Seghers was living in Mexico, and Krull was busy working in Brazzaville. A very sick and emaciated Kersten eventually made it to New York in 1946, and there he continued exchanging letters with Seghers. He eventually became the editor of the German-­Jewish exile publication Aufbau. The short piece he wrote about his friend’s death and burial in Martinique shows that, not unlike Krull, he would remain haunted by what happened in Martinique for the rest of his life. His prose in the brief essay “Robert Breuer’s Death and Burial” is as elegiac as it is feverish, since Kersten was very sick himself when he witnessed his friend’s final days. Even though the text was not published until 1953, Kersten wrote it years earlier. It is part of a longer and unpolished account of his stay in Martinique, “Tod auf der Insel” [Death on the Island]. Kersten describes Breuer’s agony, his ashen face, his weak arms looking like thin sticks, his eyes that lost the shine they once had. Breuer moves in and out consciousness. He appears to be seeing the parks and restaurants he once frequented in Berlin, even though they are now filled with ghosts and dead trees. At times he is lucid and resigned to his fate: his imminent death far away from home. In other moments he appears to be lost in nebulous memories of his and Kersten’s escape route. After Breuer’s death, Kersten’s horror becomes even more apparent. Breuer’s body has become a ghoulish version of what it once was: his face is as pale as wax, his naked feet look menacing, and his unkempt, white hair give him the appearance of a ghost. The smell of death and Breuer’s no longer recognizable features contrast with the spectacular but also uncanny beauty of the landscape. “We slowly descended the hill through the palm trees. The springs resonated as though bells were ringing. Hummingbirds were fluttering around the hibiscus plants, and the flame trees scorched in the fire of their red blooms. A soft breeze caressed the heights, and in the distance the sea was glistening like molten lead.”68 Kersten’s description of the cemetery where Breuer is laid to rest is even more ominous: “A rotten, putrid smell rose from the humid, black ground. On the edges of the terrain wild tropical plants grew profusely,

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with frightening salaciousness.”69 The text ends with Kersten confessing he is ashamed to still be alive, now that his friend has died quietly and alone in a place that is distant, beautiful, and terrifying, and where the locals have shown the dying refugee kindness and respect. The ill and sometimes also delirious Kersten mourns his friend’s death; he expresses his shame for surviving, but also remarks that being a refugee did not turn Breuer into a hero. Kersten writes that his friend “may not even have been a good person,” and yet his death feels as though he has been “expelled from life,” revealing immeasurable suffering in a faraway place of transit.70

Ships without Harbor Unlike some of her fellow travelers aboard the Paul Lemerle, Seghers did not write a chronicle about her stay in Martinique. However, in her personal correspondence, she mentions the island and the stunning beauty of a place where her exhausted children were able to swim in the ocean and maybe forget the hardships of displacement for a few hours. Yet the stay in the Antilles was no vacation: in her letters Seghers’s tone is anxious about whether the family will be able to continue their journey, anxious whether the necessary funds will arrive on time.71 It is in Seghers’ fiction (specifically in Transit) where the ordeals and dangers of the refugee experience appear more vividly, even though the entire novel takes place in France. Transit, as mentioned earlier, appeared in 1944. Seghers’s friend Lisa Tetzner, a German-­born children’s book author exiled in Switzerland since 1933, completed the fourth installment of her Die Kinder aus Nr. 67 series in that same year. The series chronicles the lives of children living in a working-­class neighborhood in Berlin in from the 1930s to the outbreak of World War II. The fourth book, Das Schiff ohne Hafen [The Ship without Harbor] centers on a Jewish girl, Mirjam, and her aunt Mathilda. Both are fleeing from Europe to Argentina aboard a ship very similar to the Paul Lemerle, the Garibaldi.72 As the book’s title reveals, this story does not end well. Most passengers drown when a seaquake causes severe damage to the ship. Even before the tragedy occurs, the refugees on board are not allowed to disembark at different ports in Brazil and Argentina: some because they are sick, the majority because

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they are missing documents or a stamp in their transit papers, or because the papers they had procured while still in Europe turn out to be false. At least, that is what the local authorities claim. No wonder that young Mirjam eventually has a nightmare of a mountain of stamped papers (of transit documents, even though Tetzner does not use that term) that have become alive. Countless scornful and ghoulish faces appear among the papers, and as the child tears them apart, they just multiply.73 While Das Schiff ohne Hafen and Transit are written for different audiences, they do share a number of traits. Both texts detail the hardship and the hurdles refugees face in their attempts to leave Europe, including labyrinthine bureaucracies as well as the very real threat of shipwreck. Transit, however, takes place in Marseille, while Tetzner’s book is about life and death on a ship daring to cross the Atlantic. Yet among all the heartache and despair, there also are moments of joy: once the ship crosses the Equator, a line-­crossing ceremony, or “Neptune’s baptism” takes place aboard the Garibaldi. To the delight of the young passengers, King Neptune appears to wish the travelers safe passage.74 The celebration represents a respite from the trauma of forced displacement, a moment of optimism when a new and better life in the Americas looked like a certain possibility. While in Tetzner’s book this ceremony is congruent with the novel’s plot (a particularly cruel child is taught a lesson in humility), she did not invent the ritual, as it dates back more than four centuries. Line-­crossing ceremonies were held in many of the ships that took refugees from Europe to the Americas, just like the fictional Garibaldi, or the real Paul Lemerle, as Turkish-­born screenwriter Jacques Rémy, also a passenger on the Paul Lemerle, has documented. In his account “Sur un cargo” [“On a Cargo Ship”] Rémy recalls the ceremony, even though he states that the passengers organize this “grand fête” to celebrate the passing of the Tropic, not the Equator. Yet the ceremony shares the same elements: a joyful baptism accompanied by songs and performances in a variety of languages: French, German, Spanish, even Viennese dialect. The ceremony, this baptism, is about forgetting the indignities of forced displacement and about hope: “Then there is hope: America. The end of hard times, the beginning of a new

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life. Perhaps new difficulties. In any case, peace.”75 However, explains Rémy, not all the passengers want to partake in the joy. Sometimes the loss is omnipresent or too much to bear. Even forgetting about it for a few moments does not appear to be an option: the Spanish women on board, whose husbands were forced to remain in Marseille, refuse to sing until they are reunited with their loved ones. Rémy’s account is one of the many about the journey of the Paul Lemerle. What makes it stand out is that it recently appeared in a publication put together by French film director Oliver Assayas (Rémy’s son), a book that also includes the photographs of Germaine Krull, a close friend of Rémy. The images include the already mentioned portrait of Lam and Holzer as well as photos that document the line-­crossing ceremony: Neptune “baptizes” passengers, many of them youngsters, by dipping them in a pool on deck. One of the children in the photo is Seghers’s daughter, Ruth Radványi (figure 6).76 Krull’s photo does more than freezing a moment of joy and anticipation in time, it shows how refugees of all backgrounds and ages carried their worldviews with them across the ocean. And most of them were not readily willing to let those go, neither in their first place of transit in the Western hemisphere nor in the places where many ended up settling. While safe, or relatively safe on land, the testimonies that the refugees produced about their routes and their destinations always take us back to moments of transit that never end, to ships without harbor that will always haunt the seas.

FIGU R E 6. Germaine Krull, “The children cross the line, Neptune festival on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle.” Courtesy of Olivier and Michka Assayas.

Chapter Five

No Solid Ground: Max Aub

R o u g h l y a y e a r a f t e r M a x Aub arrived in Mexico in October of 1942, Casablanca opened on Mexican screens. He may have seen the film in one of the theaters in the city center—­cinema was, after all, an important part of Aub’s creative output. Between 1938 and 1939 he collaborated with André Malraux when his novel L’espoir (1937) became the film Espoir: Sierra de Teruel (1938–­1939). In fact, his association with the film eventually led to some, but not all, of the political troubles Aub faced after he fled Spain at the end of the civil war. His relationship with cinema continued once he found refuge in Mexico. In 1944 Aub was named secretary of the National Commission of Cinematography; he also taught at the Academy of Cinematography at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). An active collaborator in the Mexican film industry in the 1940s, Aub held a variety of positions in the world of cinema, but more out of economic necessity than anything else.1 Yet a knack for cinema still permeated his writing (and vice versa), perhaps most visibly shown in his posthumously published book on filmmaker and fellow Spanish refugee Luis Buñuel (map 3). 2 Aub may have seen Casablanca, but he also may have skipped it. As someone who had been a refugee himself in France not long before, chances are he preferred to stick to his own versions of what it meant to be in transit, cornered, in constant danger of arrest or worse, and needing to trust the individuals who were in the business of procuring the authentic and forged papers that were necessary for leaving occupied Europe. The actual Casablanca hardly was a fond memory for Aub. He was released from the prison camp in Djelfa in July 1942, but his situation in North Africa continued to be vulnerable. After crossing from Algeria to Morocco, he was detained in the border city of Oujda, which meant that he missed his planned departure for the United States on the Guinea. 98

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Aub had no choice but to hide in Casablanca, given that breaking the long list of rules that now governed the lives of refugees and former political prisoners meant an immediate return to the camp at the prisoner’s own cost.3 Like Seghers, Aub endured the cruelty and arbitrary nature of what it meant to be in transit, and both authors wrote about their experiences. Seghers penned Transit (1944) on her way from Marseille to Mexico, Aub wrote the play El rapto de Europa o Siempre se puede hacer algo [The Rape of Europe; or, Something Can Always Be Done] (1946) a few years later.4 In Aub’s play, a character named Bertha Gross is modeled after Seghers.5 Before Gross is able to secure the fragile promise of life and liberty in the form of the necessary travel documents, she describes her precarious situation in the following terms: “There’s no longer solid ground for me. Everything feels soft, unreliable, quivering. A world made of cotton, a soil made of mud, slippery, dirty. And an immense fatigue because we lost the hope to win. Where can I go? There’s no longer a world for us.”6 Bertha’s vision of a world turning liquid underneath her feet reveals the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety that refugees were enduring in the period. Both Aub and Seghers belonged to a larger community of writers whose work in the 1940s bears the marks of persecution and flight. At the same time, a yearning for roots, for that solid ground that Bertha Gross can no longer feel underneath her feet, persistently haunts fictional and autobiographical accounts of the refugees’ escape routes. These routes, then, take us back to the opening credits of Casablanca, the film that Howard Koch and Julius and Phillip Epstein adapted from Murray Burnett’s and Joan Alison’s play Everybody Comes to Rick’s—­a film that Aub may or may not have seen but that actually shares a number of traits with Aub’s El rapto de Europa.7 Both works take place in francophone cities where refugees are attempting to flee to the Americas. In both stories a refugee is involved in an extra-­marital affair, and none of the choices for the members of the love triangle (composed of the refugee, the spouse, and the lover) seem to be feasible. In both works the married refugee ends up leaving the city with the legitimate spouse, while the jilted lover chooses to stay behind and commits to fight fascism. A fourth character, a strong ally, pledges to do the same. The film

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and the play end with the paramour and the ally starting what will likely become a beautiful friendship. Yet this also is where the similarities end. Aub may have skipped the film because he may not have needed a Hollywood version of events that he experienced firsthand as a refugee in Europe and a prisoner of war in North Africa between 1939 and 1942. By the time he wrote El rapto de Europa, he had already authored four books of poetry, two plays, many short stories, and several novellas. He had also embarked on one of the most complex novelistic projects on the Spanish Civil War, The Magical Labyrinth, “a literary tapestry of the war consisting of five novels, one film script, and some forty short stories.”8 Only two years before completing El rapto de Europa, Aub became the first Spanish author to write about the Holocaust when he published San Juan, a play about a group of Jewish refugees trapped on a cargo ship in a port somewhere in Asia Minor.9 By the play’s end, the San Juan suffers a shipwreck, and everybody on board perishes. The fate of the San Juan evokes the shipwreck of the Struma and the ill-­fated voyage of the MS St. Louis.10 Aub first imagined the plot of the tragedy while he was being transported to a prison camp in Algeria in 1941. He completed the text in Mexico, years before awareness of the atrocities of the Holocaust became common in literary texts from across the world. This of course does not mean that Aub was predicting the future. In 1964 he admitted that knowing more about the Nazi genocide would not have altered his play.11 Beyond anticipating what was to come, Aub’s works depict the contradictory ways in which European refugees and prisoners of war engage with colonialism and racism, a theme that of course also comes across in Curtiz’s 1942 film. Rather than merely being, to quote the famous song, “still the same old story / a fight for love and glory,” Casablanca is as revealing about colonialism in North Africa as it is about race relations in Hollywood in the 1940s. Like most films in the period, Casablanca accommodates and perpetuates colonial commonplaces, ranging from faux “Arabian Nights” backdrops to a depiction of the local population as largely silent and invisible. With regard to race relations on the other side of the Atlantic, the role of Sam (Arthur “Dooley” Wilson), the African American pianist who sings “As Time Goes By,” conjures up the ways in which

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race, and specifically blackness, operated in the industry.12 Thus, one could easily argue that a film studded with stars, Hollywood convention, and “Burbank Orientalism” would portray the realities of what refugees’ endured less effectively than a play penned by an author who experienced firsthand the situation that Casablanca’s “psychologically incredible” characters endure.13 Rafael Santos, the Spanish protagonist of El rapto de Europa appears to be a more realistic antifascist fighter than Casablanca’s Victor Laszlo, the “noble resistance fighter” whose depiction David Denby considers to be “nonsense,” as “no underground leader would show up in a tropical white suit in a night club with his gorgeous wife on his arm.”14 Dissimilarities between the respective depictions of gender roles in Aub’s play and in the film are also worth noting. A woman, Margarita, based on the real-­life Margaret Palmer, is the play’s true heroine.15 Palmer was an American expatriate who resided in Spain from the 1920s until the end of the civil war. She found herself in Marseille in 1940 and, together with US journalist Jay Allen, Palmer helped refugees in Marseille. Among these refugees was a young Max Aub, who ended up dedicating this play to her. Palmer also continued supporting Aub when he was trying to make it out of Morocco after his liberation from Djelfa.16 Allen was to replace Varian Fry, then the leader of the American Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille, but Fry’s relationship with Allen and Palmer was contentious. 17 While Fry was extremely dismissive of Palmer and her role in assisting the refugees, Aub’s play (and the biographical work conducted by Naharro-­Calderón for his edition of El rapto de Europa) show that Palmer’s role was more important than what Fry might have wanted to admit.18 In Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio, based on Fry’s time heading the Emergency Rescue Committee, both Allen and Palmer appear as rather despicable characters. Sure enough, the true story of all these figures lies buried between all the biographic, hagiographic, and disparaging versions of their lives and times. Be that as it may, Aub’s Margarita also is a more genuine counterpart to Casablanca’s heroic but cynical Rick Blaine, to Victor Laszlo, and to Ilsa Lund, who straddles the roles of the “damsel in distress” and the “repose of the warrior.” In Aub’s play, Margarita and Adelita (Rafael’s

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lover, the somewhat reluctant heroine who decides to stay in Marseille and begin a “beautiful friendship” with Margarita by the play’s end) are strong female figures committed to the antifascist struggle.19 Beyond the generic differences (Casablanca, while based on a play, is a film; El rapto de Europa, while possibly meant to be a film, always was “just” a play), another evident difference between both texts is the symbolic and even ideological weight of Casablanca’s exotic location–­ –­or rather its exotic façade, re-­created almost in its entirety in a studio in California.20 Marseille, the setting of El rapto de Europa (and original location of Burnett’s play), is not only less glamorous than the imagined Casablanca, it does not share the Moroccan city’s geopolitical significance. A predecessor for Casablanca’s location was Algiers, a 1938 Hollywood remake of the French Pepé le Moko that “establishes North Africa as an exotic locale for danger and romance.”21 Brian T. Edwards argues that Casablanca’s setting needs to be considered in relation to the development of the theater of war in the North Africa after Operation Torch in 1942. The world that US soldiers encountered on the ground in North Africa was, according to Edwards, irremediably mixed with what Hollywood portrayed, given that “cinema and Casablanca are more thoroughly wrapped up in US global supremacy than is usually acknowledged.”22 Spain and the Spanish Civil War appear only tangentially in Casablanca, in the form of the sultry singer and guitarist (Corinna Mura) who performs in Spanish, Peter Lorre’s mischievous character Ugarte, and of course Rick’s stint fighting for the Republic, coincidentally censored in the dubbed version that was distributed in Spain. 23 Yet rather than bringing up the relevance of the Spanish Civil War to the history of World War II (not only in relation to refugees) Rick’s support of the Republican cause, mentioned in the same breath as his collaboration against Mussolini in Ethiopia, allows for the construction of a narrative in which the United States was already fighting in a war against fascism before the attack on Pearl Harbor. 24 The references to Ethiopia and Spain also conjure the matter of race, since “the Spanish conflict came so close on the heels of the Italo-­ Ethiopian war further highlighted the question of race for African Americans.”25 For African American volunteers, like the nurse Salaria

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Kea, supporting the Republican cause in Spain represented a chance to fight in “the battlefield on which Italian fascism could still be defeated.”26 This matter, eschewed in the film, proves that in Casablanca there is no room for antifascist heroes who are neither white, nor male. If Casablanca’s message is that Rick, representing the United States, has all along been committed to fight fascism, this politically convenient implication (once the US entered the war) outshines the importance of the Spanish conflict in twentieth-­century history and memory. El rapto de Europa puts forth a very different version. The fact that the Spanish Civil War has far more significance in El rapto de Europa than in Casablanca may have a straightforward explanation: Aub, after all was a Spanish writer who was forced to leave his home because of his connection with the defeated Republic. Yet Aub’s relationship with citizenship and nationality is a complicated one. The Paris-­born son of a German father and a French mother (both of Jewish ancestry) only became a Spanish citizen in 1921, after having lived in Spain for eight years. Aub was a transnational writer against his will, with no choice but to live on the hyphen between an inadequate prefix (post-­, trans-­, multi-­, inter-­) and whatever follows it. He wrote El rapto de Europa after having spent his early childhood in France, grown up in Spain, been a refugee in France and a prisoner of war in Algeria, and recently settled in Mexico. El rapto de Europa becomes a cautionary tale, in which Franco’s victory in Spain and the spread of fascism across the continent are part of the same madness that has overrun the continent. In Spain, where the war has already run its course, it is too late. The mythological reference to the Rape of Europa in the play alludes to the spread of fascism and to “the crucial role of Spain as a European country that had already been ‘raped,’ and that deserved being rescued as much as all the others about to fall did.”27 In the play an old anarchist and carpenter named Bozzi makes the only direct allusion to the play’s title: “And now the world seems to be running backwards. We thought that the big day of freedom was near, and I have seen the birth of fascism. What kind of rapture of madness is jolting Europe?”28 A similar sense of despair comes across in Aub’s earlier play, San Juan. A group of young men attempt to escape from a cargo vessel trapped in a port in Asia Minor to join the International Brigades and

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support the Republicans in Spain. Yet their endeavor is hopeless: “The Spanish Guerra Civil appears here not just as a ‘civil war,’ but as a great European conflict closely bound up with events in Europe and World War II. The attempt to counter the fascist threat to Europe by the action of the International Brigades is presciently portrayed in this play, written in 1942, as futile.”29 Thus, in El rapto de Europa the centrality of the Nationalists’ victory in the Spanish Civil War (made possible with the help of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) undermines a version of history in which the United States was all along committed to fight in the antifascist struggle. El rapto de Europa may be a more accurate and nuanced rendition of refugees’ struggles in 1941 than Casablanca, yet the play remains largely unknown. The fact that it was performed in English with the title Margaret on November 12, 1945, in The Playbox of the Pasadena Playhouse before it was ever staged in the Spanish-­speaking world did not help the play to secure large international audiences.30 While Aub’s play is more realistic and more progressive (at least with regard to gender roles) than Casablanca, his oeuvre is not free from hidden and not-­so-­hidden biases, especially in its representation of race and otherness in a colonial context. In Aub’s Diario de Djelfa, a collection of poems he wrote while he was a prisoner of war in Algeria, the thorny relationship of European refugees and prisoners of war with colonialism and racism becomes evident in his depictions of prison camps in North Africa (camps that get only a brief and enigmatic reference in Casablanca).31 While Mistral was intimidated by Senegalese guards who “look like children who had been given a gun and a uniform and an order to kill” in a camp in France, and Krull was shocked that “whites are now being guarded by Negroes,” Aub depicts the Algerian guards (the “moros,” as he labels them) as simultaneously inscrutable, vociferous, and unaware of the precarity they share with the Spanish war prisoners.32

From Nowhere Aub’s work not only incorporates the major transformations of literature in his lifetime, it also narrates the major migratory movements of the twentieth century and even, avant la lettre, of the present era. Aub straddled diverse literary movements, experimented with all existing genres

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and forms—­were he alive today, he probably would have a podcast—­ and his many depictions of displacement make him extremely relevant in the twenty-­fi rst century, even considering that global escape routes have shifted directions.33 Aub published El rapto de Europa in 1945, yet two of his earlier works, the tragedy San Juan (1943) and the poems collected in Diario de Djelfa (1944), reveal the centrality of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War when considering World War II’s escape routes. Tensions between routes and roots shaped the life and work of Max Aub.34 Critics have often argued that literature became a home for this “multicultural Spaniard.”35 Yet a metaphorical home can hardly shelter refugees from the enduring forms of violence that bring about displacement and often persist for its duration. Thus, merely stating that Aub’s roots can be found in his writing and not in a concrete, physical place would undermine compelling reasons to read Aub—­namely, that his works engage with the plights of individuals trapped at the crossroads of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and European colonialism in North Africa. Aub himself may have considered a home crafted from words printed on paper to be quite unsatisfactory.36 He famously stated in his journals that “being from nowhere” did damage him.37 While Aub yearned for roots, his unexpected routes reveal the artificial nature of fixed origins, static identities, and unchanging places. Aub for sure was a cosmopolitan writer, “in the deepest sense of the word; [. . .] he was both rooted locally and at home in the world.”38 Yet this was not exactly a cause for celebration for him, as “he did not feel completely accepted in Mexico, where he was looked upon as a Spaniard; but even in Spain he had always been the odd man out, always a bit suspicious, and sometimes subtly ignored.”39 Similar to other exiled writers, Aub struggled to remain relevant in a literary world ill-­equipped to handle his writing: he wrote, in “the wrong language” (Spanish), and with “the wrong approach, or the wrong purpose.’40 The young Aub, who in the 1920s was committed to modernist and experimental prose, probably did not anticipate his future as much marked by intellectual brilliance as it was by utter irrelevance. He was, like the other writers discussed here, and like most writers everywhere, a product of his times who followed certain trends and renovated them.

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Considering how influential José Ortega y Gasset’s notion of “dehumanized art” (that is, the absence of human forms in non-­representational art) was in the early twentieth century, it is hardly surprising that he began producing just that. Indeed, one of Aub’s earliest publications in 1927 was in the prestigious Revista de Occidente, established by Ortega himself.41 The form and content of Aub’s writing evolved with the political landscape in the 1930s, as he turned toward a more politically engaged literature, hoping to reach far less selective audiences. Aub joined the Spanish Socialist Party in 1929 and was active, like so many other Spanish artists, intellectuals, and writers, in the Alliance of Anti-­Fascist Intellectuals. During the war he served as a cultural attaché for the Embassy of the Spanish Republic in Paris, where he oversaw the installation of Picasso’s Guernica at the Republic’s Pavilion in 1937, and, as mentioned earlier, he collaborated with André Malraux in the filming of L’espoir. Aub left Spain for good in 1939, settling first, as would so many other refugees, in a neighboring country: France. In this case, the neighboring country also happened to be his place of birth. Yet Aub was not welcome in France: the writer was under constant scrutiny and threat of refoulement. On March 8, 1940, a letter from the Francoist Spanish embassy in Paris sent to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that Aub was a former German citizen, nationalized during the civil war (Aub had become a Spanish citizen twelve years before the outbreak of the war), and that the lifelong Socialist was a dangerous Communist.42 In April of the same year, Aub was arrested and later transferred to the Roland Garros prison camp. He was released in November, and two months later Mexican Consul Gilberto Bosques, provided Aub with the necessary documents that would allow him to settle in Mexico.43 Yet even the consul’s help could not prevent further trouble with Vichy’s authorities.44 Another arrest in October 1941 led to the deportation to the euphemistically named “Centre Séjour Surveillé de Djelfa” in Algeria, where Aub would be imprisoned for five months and nineteen days, an experience he documents in Diario de Djelfa. Fortunately, the Mexican consul continued to advocate on Aub’s behalf, and the writer was liberated on May 17, 1942. In Morocco Aub was to embark on a ship that would take him to the United States; John Dos Passos had

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signed an affidavit that made entry into the United States possible. Yet Aub was arrested once again in the border city of Oujda (Morocco) and so missed the ship’s departure. This meant that, as mentioned earlier, he was forced remain in hiding in Casablanca, where he could not go night clubs, enjoy champaign cocktails, or don tropical white suits. Aub was finally able to leave for Mexico three months later. Even though Aub was a remarkably prolific writer, he remains a marginal figure in the European canon–­– ­a result of historical developments, literary practice, and processes of inclusion and exclusion in specific national literatures.45 To paraphrase Simon Gikandi, Aub had to learn to “live outside,” and also to write outside the nations (Spain, France, Germany) that rejected him and the nation (Mexico) that adopted him.46 Aub wrote about this learning process extensively, always inhabiting, in Edward Said’s words, the “intellectual’s provisional home,” specifically, “the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions. But only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then go forth to try anyway.”47 Aub spent his life “trying anyway.” Displacement profoundly marked Aub’s life and work, determining, according to Michael Ugarte “his success (or lack of it) as an artist.”48 Aub often wrote about his failure to reach larger audiences as a writer, about his isolation, the low sales figures of his books, and the lack of support and interest for staging his plays, among them El rapto de Europa, in Mexico.49 Moreover, it is from his location, “outside history” that Aub’s works reveal the ways in which uneven and violent relationships with territories beyond Europe’s borders shape the history of the continent throughout the twentieth century.50 All of this becomes particularly evident when Aub writes about his experience as a prisoner of war in Algeria. The history of Vichy’s prison camps in the Maghreb is, as Sara Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum have shown, “at once a European and a North African story—­a story of the encounter between imperialism and fascism, colony and continent.”51 Aub’s testimonial poetry in Diario de Djelfa and a later short story, “Cementerio de Djelfa” [“Djelfa Cemetery”] (1965), are as much about this history as they are about the connection

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between “the liberation of Europe from fascism” and “the reluctance of liberated Europe to let go of its own forms of extreme violence.”52 Written in epistolary form, the short story “Cementerio de Djelfa” tells the story of Pardiñas, a former prisoner of war in the same camp where Aub was imprisoned. After his liberation at the end of the war, Pardiñas decides to stay in Algeria. Roughly a decade later another war breaks out: the Algerian War of Independence, which leads Pardiñas to witness how a French commander forces his soldiers to empty out the mass graves that held the remains of Spaniards imprisoned in Djelfa during World War II. The French need a place to bury the bodies of about a hundred massacred Algerian men, but since the mass graves from a previous war are already there, digging new ones is not necessary.53 Thus, the men who end up in the prison camps in the Maghreb in the 1940s and those who were fighting for independence in the 1960s not only share a grave, they also share a history of silence and forgetting. Pardiñas speculates that by the time the bodies of the Algerian fighters are placed in the mass graves once used for dead camp prisoners, “something must have remained from our men.”54 “Cementerio de Djelfa,” then, is about the inherent connection between the memory of World War II and the Algerian struggle for independence embodied in the remains of Spanish and Algerian men, left behind in unmarked graves near a forgotten prison camp.55 The bones of men who lost their lives in different wars and that end up in the same grave become a powerful symbol for what Michael Rothberg discusses in terms of a “multidirectional memory.” Rothberg offers a model of collective memory, which, in lieu of being “a zero-­sum game,” becomes “an open-­ended field of articulation and struggle.”56 While Rothberg does not write about the Spanish Civil War, a conflict with strong ties to colonialism and to World War II, there still is ample room for this conflict’s memory in this “open-­ended field of articulation and struggle.” Aub’s work in general, and the above-­mentioned texts in particular, provide evidence for the ways in which the memories of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and European colonialism in North Africa are deeply intertwined, or knotted.57 While Aub wrote some of the poems included in Diario de Djelfa when he was imprisoned in the Le Vernet d’Ariège camp in France, the

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majority of the texts in this collection are a testimony of life behind barbed wire in Algeria.58 Aub had to write his poems clandestinely, on small notecards in tiny handwriting, as any form of record-­keeping was against the rules of the camp, a prohibition that contributed to how much remains unknown about the Holocaust in North Africa.59 And yet breaking the rules was what Aub needed to do to survive. He explains in his own introduction to the collection that the poems kept him alive in the camp: “I owe them my life because as I gave birth to them, I gained the strength I needed to resist the following day: everything told in them is what really happened.”60 Yet, although the events depicted in these poems actually happened, Aub also acknowledges an irrevocable loss when transferring the lived experience in the prison camps into the written word: “This poetry, tied to memory, becomes blurry, pale, and attains a ghostly quality, emulating each reader’s ghosts, because if a dimension is already lost when the lived moves to the painted, what it will not miss when it moves to the written!”61 As much as the poems (and, to an extent, “Cementerio de Djelfa”) reveal the entangled ways in which the memories of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and colonialism and decolonization intersect, these texts also show that no matter how knotted memories might be, certain aspects of the past (experiences, losses, silences) are doomed to become as faint as the few remainders of the concentration camps in the Maghreb. The Djelfa labor camp was first created in March 1941, under the authority of César Cabouche, and was “destined to receive French undesirables.”62 Eventually Spanish prisoners of war, former members of the International Brigades, and stateless Jews would end up in the camp. Djelfa belonged to a network of camps initially set up so that prisoners would work on the Trans-­Sahara railroad between Dakar, Algeria, and Morocco, symbolically rebuilding a crumbling French empire, an undoubtedly coherent gesture for Marshal Pétain’s regime.63 Yet this colonial gesture is inextricably linked to direct Nazi intervention: while the Vichy government managed the railroad project, and “Nazi German experts provided technical assistance,” a cheap labor force was made readily available: “undesirable” Europeans in the prison camps in the Maghreb.64 Between 1940 and 1944 approximately thirty camps were functioning under French control in the Maghreb, and Aub’s poems are among

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the few testimonies of their existence. The poems in Diario de Djelfa indeed challenge a colonial administration, responsible for charging Algerian soldiers with guarding the European prisoners in Djelfa. However, Aub’s depictions of the Algerian soldiers also accommodate and reproduce colonial motifs, revealing the author’s ambivalent sentiments toward the guards and, more generally speaking, an uneven encounter between the subjects displaced by World War II and those who were under colonial rule before the war broke out. Aub is not as blunt as Krull was when she faced the black guards in Martinique, and yet Aub and Krull seem to share an emotional reaction that does not hide their biases. This ambivalence first comes across in Aub’s description of the Algerian space, a landscape framed by barbed wire. The constant allusions to barbed wire bring to mind “Trains to Auschwitz,” the title of a chapter from Reviel Netz’s Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. 65 The Djelfa poems reveal that in the Maghreb, as in Poland, Germany, and France (to mention only a few sites where other concentration camps were located), barbed wire was used as “an instrument for the deployment of violence on a massive scale.”66 Barbed wire constantly limits Aub’s vision of the Algerian landscape. The poem “Ya lo dice el refrán” [“As the Saying Goes”] begins with the verses “Against hunger, barbed wire, / night and day.”67 The sound of the word alambrada (barbed wire) echoes hambre (hunger). As pervasive as hunger, barbed wire is wherever the poet turns his gaze:” “They cut black lines, in their soft grays, the barbed wire leading to the Levant.”68 Just as the Algerian landscape is delimited by actual barbed wire, the Spanish landscape that Aub simultaneously misses and rejects is contained by an invisible, but perhaps even more pervasive and damaging barbed wire. Both landscapes therefore become interchangeable “With identical poverty / identical nudity, / African bleakness / just like in Teruel / scraped plains / like in the fields of Daimiel, / Spaniards in Castille / and moors in the Maghreb.”69 For Aub, the Algerian space is as Spanish as the Spanish landscape is Berber.70 The question that comes across now is, on which side of the barbed wire do we find the local population in Algeria (usually called moros). The term moro appears frequently in the poems, and while Aub uses it to refer to the Algerian guards, it commonly labels “any Arab or

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Muslim, and it has highly negative connotations.”71 While these negative connotations continue to shape depictions of African migrants in contemporary Spain, in the 1930s and 1940s the term was widely used to name the members of the Army of Africa, a conscript army of sixty to seventy thousand Moroccan mercenaries who fought with the Nationalist army during the Spanish civil war.72 In Republican propaganda the Moroccan soldiers became a bloodthirsty and violently masculine menace: the so-­called moros que trajo Franco were said to be on the hunt for Spanish women in order to rape and murder them—­a very different sort of “rape of Europa.”73 Aub’s poems challenge the subjugation of the Algerian guards in Djelfa, yet his writing and the use of specific tropes still operate within a colonial context. In “Dice el moro en cuclillas” [“Says the Kneeling Moor”] Aub highlights the affinities between the prisoners and the guards with another play on words, now based on the similarly sounding words alambrada and the Alhambra, the Nasrid palace outside Granada, which becomes a metonymy for Al Andalus (the name used for Islamic Spain).74 “Says the kneeling moor, Ay, my Alhambra / And the vanquished Christian / My barbed wire.”75 The verses indicate that the Algerian soldiers experience a sense of loss and regret that mirrors the prisoners’ loss of liberty. The implication here is, as Ugarte also points out, that the Algerians also are prisoners in their colonial relationship with France.76 Along similar lines, Cathérine Belbachir argues that the prisoners and the Algerian soldiers share the same space, the space of the vanquished.77 The unmarked graves that prisoners of war and Algerian fallen fighters share in “Cementerio de Djelfa” also come to mind here. The reality in Djelfa, where Algerian soldiers controlled by the French are guarding European prisoners of war, is the result of a racial hierarchy that solidified during World War II, but had been in the making since the “scramble for Africa” in the nineteenth century. The Algerian guards are never singled out, but always represented as one single, flattened, collective character, not unlike the black women in Martinique discussed in the third chapter. Aub alludes to a complete lack of understanding and communication between the prisoners and the Algerian soldiers: “He yells in in his argot / his arms raised / or he is quiet for long moments / without saying anything.78 In “Toda una historia,” [“An Entire His-

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tory”], the author describes shouting and perpetually angry guards: “The Moors talk screaming / that’s how they are / they always seem angry.”79 Unlike El rapto de Europa, a text that depicts gender roles in a more nuanced manner, the sole poem in the collection that mentions an Algerian woman leaves not only gendered but also colonial hierarchies unchallenged. “Mora” begins with a description of the seductive presence of a woman dressed in white. She may be a mirage, brought about by “el sol, la sed,” (the sun, the thirst). The poem is filled with untranslatable diminutives (morilla, cernidilla, zapatilla) that evoke the playful tone of popular poetry. Constant allusions to the color white denote gendered and racial hierarchies. The woman’s heavy-­handedly symbolic white attire—­“white beauty / white grace / white folds and pleats / white veil”—­contrasts with her dark and mysterious eyes.”80 The figure is the seductive, veiled fantasy of the Orientalized and colonized woman, whose body is always available and willing for the male European colonizer: “A glimpsed dark eye / that sees without being seen / looks and offers.”81 The figure belongs to a gendered dynamics of colonialism that “from the outset [are] fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise.”82 The mora imprisons the men with her beauty, as the prisoners who see her also end up being even more entrapped by her than they were already at the camp.83 While some of the poems do express solidarity with the Algerian guards, who are simultaneously exoticized and victimized, certain racial stereotypes and colonial tropes persist in the text—­as they do in a brief scene in Aub’s tragedy San Juan. In addition to the multidirectional linkages between the Spanish Civil War and World War II that are evident in San Juan, the depiction of race and otherness in the play also makes it relevant for this discussion. The fate of the Jewish people is central to the play, yet San Juan also speaks to the conflictive ways in which racial, religious, and cultural identities are part of the most virulent histories of violence in the twentieth century.84 At the end of the second act, the San Juan remains anchored at the port in Asia Minor, and it is at that moment when a character, solely identified as “Negro” appears mysteriously on board; he is listed as one of the “Others” in the play’s beginning. The other “Others” are, like the black man, nameless characters: a policeman and more refugees, young

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and old. The black man encounters Sara, one of the elderly refugees, and initiates an enigmatic conversation with her. He first asks her: “¿Usted es de boldo?” (You are from aboard?).85 The implication here is that the man is speaking with a specific and exotic inflection, possibly form the Caribbean, possibly from nowhere in particular. Consistently speaking with his inflection (which also echoes the ways in which theatrical conventions of the period marked the speech of characters who did not use standard Spanish), the man continues interrogating Sara. He inquires whether she belongs to the group of travelers, and if she is Jewish. Then, the dialogue becomes increasingly uncanny. The stage directions indicate that the man exclaims: “He peldido,” (I’ve lost), using an l in lieu of an r in what should be perdido. When Sara asks him what he lost, he responds as follows: “A bet. They told me that you were like everybody else. Because, if they are like everybody else, why did they not allow them to leave the ship, no?86 Sara then asks the man what he thought they were he responds, hesitantly and ashamed “Neglos . . .”87 The brief scene addresses the connections between the different histories of violence in the twentieth century. It also implies that there is an entangled relationship between different forms of oppression (racism, antisemitism), and it evokes the complex ways in which discourses on blackness operated in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. The presence of the nameless black men aboard the San Juan conjures up the Black Atlantic, signaling the “overlapping traumatic legacies of Atlantic slavery and the Nazi genocide of European Jews.”88 Aub’s play, written before the end of World War II, invites us to question how these overlapping traumatic legacies relate to one another and how they will be remembered. It therefore is far more productive to read Aub not as a writer from a particular nation (Germany, France, Spain, Mexico) where his roots could be located (or not), but as a writer whose routes span all these nations and their borders in relation to displacements brought about by the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and European colonialism in North Africa. Aub’s work reveals the ways in which the thorny and knotted memories of war and displacement remain relevant in the twenty-­fi rst century and within a global reconsideration of World War II. The sentiments that Bertha Gross expresses in the early 1940s surely resonate when considering the plight of refugees who today cross the

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seas in rickety vessels, at the mercy of human traffickers. But in recent years the numbers of those displaced by violence and war have exceeded those of World War II. The precarious situations that European refugees endured during World War II are not equivalent to the struggles that refugees from “failed states,” (to cite Gikandi again) endure today. However, depictions of refugeedom, statelessness, and of the tensions between roots and routes from the 1940s are not entirely unrelated to current situations, in which colonial and racial epistemologies from previous centuries endure. Aub may or may not have seen Casablanca, but considering the works that Aub produced around the same time the film was released leads to a more nuanced understanding of what fleeing from Europe on a route along a colonized part of the world entailed. Seghers’s Transit should also be added here, not only because her literary thriller is about refugees in Marseille, who like Ilse, Rick, and Victor (from Casablanca), like Rafael, Margarita, Adelita, and Bertha (from El rapto de Europa) need to make difficult decisions that affect the safety and survival of others, but also because Seghers herself may have sent her script to Warner Brothers. According to Christian Petzold, director of the 2018 film version of Transit (which certainly is in dialogue with Casablanca), the ending of Seghers’s novel, when “the hero doesn’t go off with the heroine,” was an inspiration for Casablanca.89 Yet the chronology of the novel and the film makes this unlikely, given that Casablanca was released in 1942 and Transit, including its first English translation, is from 1944. Rather than borrowing from one another, these different works, with all their partialities and impartialities, offer a glimpse of the complicated lived realities of refugees in a world that, as Bertha Gross states, has suddenly become soft, uncertain, and quivering, a world of cotton, a soil of clay, slippery, dirty. Yet the world has always had these exact characteristics—­even though that may not have been evident for European writers until World War II forced them on their own routes. Indeed, the colonial and racial epistemologies, questioned in Aub’s writing, contributed to the illusion in Europe that the world is a steady and clean place.

Ch a p t er six

A Mexican Sector in Berlin: Anna Seghers

T h e y e a r s A n n a S e g h e r s s p e n t in Mexico were taxing for her and her family. In 1942 Seghers learned that her mother had been deported to a concentration camp in Eastern Europe; the exact date of her death is unknown. Not long after Seghers found out about her mother’s fate, she was severely injured when a car ran her over on a major thoroughfare in Mexico City. Seghers suffered a serious brain injury, and she endured acutely painful headaches for the rest of her life. Yet despite the hardship of those years, she learned to love Mexico, a place that she considered to be ideal for artists and that she deeply missed once she was back in Germany (map 4).1 Even though Seghers and her husband, László Radványi, became Mexican citizens in 1946, remaining in Latin America was never the writer’s preferred option. She felt that rebuilding her home country and bearing witness to those efforts were her responsibility. And so, in 1947, Seghers left Mexico for the nation that would eventually become the German Democratic Republic. Her husband followed five years later. The couple had originally imagined an ongoing commute between Europe and the Americas. Yet this ended up being impossible, as new administrative hurdles resulting from Cold War hostilities brought Seghers back to the anxious world of Transit. 2 During World War II, she had become painfully aware of the uncertainty of what was in store for her and her loved ones, as they negotiated border crossings and the arbitrary rulings that defined the experiences of refugees in the period. This led to a persistent fear and anxiety when dealing with consulates and other entities that issue personal and travel documents.3 Her injuries from the traffic accident also made it difficult for her to travel, as crossing the Atlantic in an airplane was out of the question for her. Even though she eventually returned to Latin America (to Brazil in 1961 and in 1963), she did so by ship, as she had done when she escaped from Europe. 116

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And so Seghers was all alone in Berlin in the late 1940s. Her husband was still in Mexico, and her now grown-­up children, Ruth and Pierre, were studying in Paris. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of her letters highlight the coldness of daily life in Berlin. She wrote to George Lukács that she felt as though she were living in an ice age, not only because she was no longer in a tropical climate, but also because a biting chill seemed to be wherever she turned: in relation to work, to friendships, and to all things political and human.4 Yet Seghers remained fiercely committed to reimagining and rebuilding her country. She chronicled this experience in numerous letters to her friends in Mexico. Among them were Cuban designer Clara Porset, the only friend with whom she corresponded in Spanish, and art collector Kurt Stavenhagen. The latter received a letter in which Seghers describes the destroyed Berlin, newly divided into four occupation zones. “As you know, it is divided into four sectors, yet what this means is difficult to imagine at home.”5 Back in those years, the divisions between the different sectors were not as strict as one may have thought. This, of course, was 1947, not 1948–­1949, when the Berlin Blockade took place, or 1961, the year the construction of the Berlin Wall began. In her 1947 letter Seghers appreciates the fact that among the ruins of the city it was possible to find newspapers, plays, cinema, uniforms, and even characters that otherwise could only be encountered in faraway places. Then the author playfully laments that, despite this multiplicity, Berlin lacks a Mexican sector.6 With this comment, Seghers expresses nostalgia for the place where she spent six years, a place that was not in ruins, a place where she did not need to face the reality of postwar reconstruction. Yet her comment has an additional significance: Seghers’s words also draw attention to Mexico’s role in World War II and to the intricate connections between the two countries.

A New Chapter of World Literature While Mexicans were not mobilized during the war, the country joined the Allied Forces in 1942, after a German submarine sank a Mexican oil tanker. As the 201 Fighter Squadron, known as the “Aztec Eagles,” was contributing to the war effort far away in the Pacific, Mexico City saw the rise of an important antifascist movement, becoming “a site

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of tremendous dialogue and exchange between diverse artistic and intellectual communities.”7 Stated differently, and in Seghers’s words, a “new chapter of world literature” began in Mexico during World War II.8 This phrase appears in an autobiographical essay written shortly after the author arrived in Mexico City. The text was published, together with an essay by Spanish writer and fellow exile Constancia de la Mora, in a booklet that aimed to bring in political and monetary support for the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC). This organization, founded by veterans of the Lincoln Battalion, the US soldiers who had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, had helped to make the writer’s transit to and exile in Mexico a reality.9 The full title of the booklet is Anna Seghers and Constancia De La Mora Tell the Story of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee. It remains unclear whether Seghers originally wrote this text in German and then had it translated into English, or whether she herself wrote part of the text in English. Alexander Stephan encountered a longer version of the essay in Seghers’s lengthy FBI file (why the FBI kept a file on Seghers is explained later in this chapter). While it appears that Seghers wrote the initial version in German, the last four pages were handwritten in English.10 Stephan does not indicate, however, whether anyone had been charged with translating this text from German into English.11 This “new chapter,” despite its short-­lived and eccentric nature, represents an unheeded and yet crucial moment in the history of a global awareness of the atrocities that the Nazis were committing in Europe. The chapter is also a short-­lived one, often even missed by literary scholars. Yet it is exceptionally relevant when considering the complex ways in which past and present, and the familiar and the unfamiliar come together in the works that visual artists and writers produced in the period. These are pieces that not only display the “interconnected geography of Nazi violence” but also reveal the multiple losses that result from displacement.12 Arendt’s discussion of loss in “We Refugees” comes to mind here. “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of

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feelings. We lost our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.”13 Seghers, the members of her family, and all other refugees endured the “rupture of our private lives,” as the displaced in the current global crisis also do. The loss of language, “the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expressions of feelings,” becomes particularly relevant for writers like Seghers and thus for the “new chapter of world literature.” Even though Seghers, as well as the some of the other exiles, had some knowledge of Spanish (often because they had spent time in Spain during the civil war) writing in a language other than German was not something they even considered. Instead, they established German-­language journals, such as Freies Deutschland/Alemania Libre, and organizations like the Heinrich Heine Klub. Yet the “new chapter of world literature” is about more than efforts to find a remedy for at least one of the forms of loss that resulted from forced displacement. When Seghers writes (in English) about “a new chapter of world literature,” she reveals her own scholarly and political background: she studied art history, philology, and sinology in Heidelberg and Cologne. “World literature” can be a reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who used the term “Weltliteratur” in the nineteenth century to describe the networks of literary texts from faraway places that became available in translation for European writers in the early nineteenth century. The expression also brings up the Communist Manifesto (not an unlikely gesture for Seghers, who had become a member of Germany’s Communist Party in 1928), as Marx and Engels echo Goethe when they address the worldwide circulation of texts. Yet Seghers refers not only to world literature, or to a world-­literary system, but to a new chapter of world literature. In other words, what she qualifies as “a new chapter of world literature,” cannot be simply equivalent to world literature, or to “Weltliteratur,” in the sense that Goethe, and later Marx and Engels, use the term. The rise of fascism in Europe, the outbreak of World War II, and the multiple displacements of individuals, texts, and ideas had transformed what world literature once may have been.

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The new chapter of world literature that Seghers discusses shares a number of elements with the ways in which world literature has been conceptualized since the nineteenth century, as she refers to a literature that evolves as it travels and has translation at its very core, echoing Damrosch’s dictum that “World Literature is writing that gains in translation.”14 Moreover, Seghers is writing about literary works produced within and with the aid of several networks, including networks that were also committed to ensuring that writers like Seghers found a place of safety. Moreover, it is a world literature that emerges in a specific moment of crisis and that articulates a radical optimism, making it not entirely compatible with more contemporary meanings associated with “world literature” or “World Literature.”15 Indeed, most of the works discussed in this section and elsewhere in this book would belong to the “new chapter”; however, these are not texts commonly discussed in anthologies of world literature or university courses that include the label “world literature.”16 Seghers is neither evoking a “disciplinary construct,” nor is she addressing “the sum of all forms of literary expression.”17 Instead, her new chapter of world literature is about what literature could still do, and needed to do, for all those who had been uprooted. The refugees faced the need to adapt to unfamiliar languages and, at the same time, they also hoped to remain relevant in the struggle against Nazism, a force that had not only expelled them from their homes, but that had also turned German into a language associated with oppression, violence, and death. The above-­ mentioned publications (Freies Deutschland/Alemania Libre) and the publisher El Libro Libre provided a venue for authors writing in German in Mexico whose goal was to show the world that German was not exclusively the language of Nazism. Yet the publications did not exist in a vacuum: they came to life on very fertile ground. Even before the war broke out (and before Mexico entered the war in 1942 in support of the Allies), the refugee community was committed to challenging the Nazi propaganda that had been distributed in Mexico via the German embassy.18 What ultimately made the German-­speaking refugees (bereaved, traumatized, even lost in translation) so prolific was the support and the work of Mexican artists, intellectuals, and writers.

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The new chapter of world literature, then, is about more than what displaced writers produced; it is about multiple translations among works in different forms and in different languages. A remarkable example of this type of cultural production is Deportación a la muerte [Deportation to Death], a linoleum print by Mexican artist Leopoldo Méndez. The print straddles a specific aesthetic tradition (Mexican post-­revolutionary culture) and an event (the Holocaust) that, at first glance, seems to be completely disconnected from that tradition. Méndez’s work first appeared in El libro negro del terror nazi: Testimonio de escritores y artistas de 16 naciones [The Black Book of Nazi Terror: Testimony of Writers and Artists from 16 Nations] (1943), adjacent to an essay by Leon Weiss entitled “El exterminio de los judios” [The Extermination of the Jews].19 The book, published in 1943 by El Libro Libre, is a unique collection that chronicles and documents Nazi atrocities in Europe. 20 The book’s origins and its impact are addressed later in this chapter; for now, the focus is on Méndez’s print (figure 7).

FIGU R E 7. Leopoldo Méndez, “Deportación a la muerte” [Deportation to Death]. Courtesy of Pablo Méndez Hernández and Adrián Méndez Barrera; Digital Image © Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, New York.

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A group of emaciated, anguished subjects are huddling in a freight train, illuminated by the light that a hostile soldier is shining on them. The train leads to a horizon where a smoke column evokes burnt corpses and imminent death: the prisoners in the train evidently are Jews being taken to an extermination camp. The image is an early depiction (some claim the earliest, or at least the earliest outside Europe) of the Holocaust. 21 The print takes the information that Weiss’s essay provides in an unexpected direction: the image is striking not only for its content but also for its form. The linoleum print, a medium favored by Méndez, evokes the work of nineteenth-­century Mexican printmaker Guadalupe Posada and “ultimately can be said to date back to 1539, when the first extra-­European print shop in the Americas was founded in Mexico City.”22 Comparing Méndez’s image to photographs of the deportation of Europe’s Jews reveals that the print also is more of an abstraction than a form of documentation. “Thematically, it is political and denunciatory,” writes Ryan Long. “It highlights repression, injustice, suffering, and the need to call attention to these and other problems.”23 The attire of the figures in the print is more rustic than the clothes that most European Jews wore as they were forced into the trains that would take them to the camps. The men’s long beards, the women’s headscarves, and the robes that all the prisoners wear suggest that these figures belong to a remote and rural world, a world obliterated more in the “Holocaust by bullets” than in extermination camps that required transportation by railroad. Their clothes also distinguish them from the soldiers, whose uniforms and helmets make them recognizable as Nazis. Moreover, the train’s vertical wooden panels do not seem to have been a feature of European freight or cattle trains, yet these panels were common in trains in Mexico in the early twentieth century. 24 This does not mean that Méndez’s image is a misrepresentation. Instead, Méndez’s work denounces the violence of the Nazi genocide by bringing it to a different context: Deportación a la muerte also is a translation. Méndez was a prominent Mexican artist and printmaker, and co-­ founder (with Pablo O’Higgins and Luis Arenal) of the “Liga de Escritores de Artistas Revolucionarios” that would eventually become the “Taller de Gráfica Popular” (TGP), the People’s Print Workshop. 25 This artists’ collective was inspired by Posada’s work and dedicated to the

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creation of revolutionary art, “printed on cheap paper and distributed in large quantities in order that their social and political message could reach the widest audience.”26 From its inception and for the duration of World War II, the TGP was deeply committed to the antifascist cause, a cause that in Mexico and for artists like Méndez or Alfredo Zalce operated in the context of a new understanding of the Mexican Revolution, in which the multiple conflicts leading to it were reinterpreted in terms of a larger leftist and antifascist struggle. 27 Artists associated with the TGP ensured that this understanding of the revolution was visible in the works they produced. 28 The train depicted in Deportación a la muerte not only denounces the Nazi genocide, it also evokes and at the same time distorts one of the most prominent symbols of the Mexican Revolution. Trains (some of which had the above-­mentioned vertical wood panels) carried troops across the Mexican landscape, with the fighters often traveling on the coaches’ roofs. Trains therefore feature prominently in different forms of cultural production emerging from the 1910 Revolution, including novels, popular ballads, photographs, and, of course, prints.29 As Simone Gigliotti has shown, trains have a radically different meaning in the context of the Holocaust: “The conditions in trains inflicted one of the most intense bodily assaults for Jewish victims under the Nazi regime that survivors have commonly described as a ‘cattle car’ experience.”30 In survivor testimonies, often written many years after Méndez created his print, both the train journey (disastrous and harrowing in and of itself) and the camp are omnipresent: “In this itinerary, the camp emerges not only as a destination of the train, but also as a perpetually present departure platform where traumatic life experiences find origin, meaning, and are subjected to innumerable comparisons.”31 With Deportación a la muerte, Méndez transforms an image that in Mexico has a very specific meaning, thereby bringing events that were taking place across the Atlantic into a local context.32 In addition to the train, another visual reference further complicates the image and its potential interpretations: the Jewish prisoners in the image “recall the centuries-­old iconography of the Nativity: kneeling figures, cradled infant, an uncannily illuminating light, issuing here, ironically, from the lantern of the Nazi death squad member.”33 The sig-

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nificance of the print exceeds the context of where it was produced and distributed (Mexico), as well as the context that it depicts (deportation of Jews to death camps). The print contains elements that are unfamiliar, unexpected, even foreign, evoking an act of translation that resists “cultural equivalence and substitutability,” as Emily Apter puts it. 34 Deportación a la muerte, in its multiple dimensions, is all about what has been lost and can never be recovered. The importance that visual culture had for the German-­speaking refugees in Mexico further proves why it matters to think about works like Méndez’s as translations (and not, for example, adaptations). For the refugees whose knowledge of Spanish was sometimes quite good (Gertrude Duby comes to mind) and sometimes at the beginner’s level, images became an appropriate and necessary medium.35 It is no coincidence that Seghers herself, as well as her friend and fellow refugee, Bodo Uhse, wrote extensively about the Mexican muralist movement.36 Needless to say, the Communist affiliations of artists like Diego Rivera of course made their work particularly attractive for the exile community; the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940 (whom Rivera and Frida Kahlo welcomed to Mexico in 1937) may have complicated this relationship, but ultimately did not affect the admiration that Seghers and others held for muralist art. Most authors had to rely on translations if they wanted their work to remain relevant in the countries where they were settling for an undetermined amount of time. Translations enabled the production of works that include Deportación a la muerte, El libro del negro del terror nazi, as well as the texts that Seghers wrote between 1941 and 1947. Working with these texts and their significance within the antifascist movement (what Seghers calls a “new chapter of world literature”) means to never forget that translations ultimately made them possible. Deportación a la muerte, the collection in which the print appeared, and even the antifascist cause as a whole are transnational endeavors that have translation at their very core. Méndez’s print is a work of visual art, not a literary text, yet it serves as a starting point for addressing the multiple meanings contained in the new chapter of world literature that came to life in Mexico in the 1940s. While since the 1930s some Mexicans had confidently supported the

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Nazis, and others were committed antifascists, more generally speaking, the nation’s relationship with World War II may have looked more like what Pierre Radványi, Anna Seghers’ adolescent son, encountered in 1941. Radványi remembers feeling trapped in Mexico, a place that for him was “so foreign, so different, so distant from Europe.”37 Yet he also calls Mexico a fantastic place, surely in both senses of the word. For him, Mexico was an exceptional place, but at the same time, it did not feel entirely real. The war that was tearing Europe apart looked illusory in Mexico, as Radványi recalls: “The people over there did not know anything about the war in Europe. Some said that the Kaiser was doing the fighting. Hitler and the Kaiser: that was more or less the same. News arrived via short-­wave radio or in newspapers, but they were very, very distorted.”38 Even for Radványi (whose parents had personally endured the consequences of Nazi politics and Vichy complicity), the fact that the news about the war only reached Mexico in a distorted manner may undermine the earlier claim about a global awareness of Nazi atrocities beginning in Mexico. Yet works like Méndez’s print, the collection El libro negro del terror nazi, and Seghers’s own exilic writing suggest otherwise.

Telling the Story As mentioned earlier, Seghers refers to the “new chapter in world literature” in a booklet published in 1944 in support of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), originally established to provide humanitarian relief for refugees of the Spanish Civil War and, eventually, for those who were displaced by fascism and trapped in Europe. Together with other European refugees, Gertrude Duby collaborated with this organization during a brief stint in New York. Like other US groups that were in one way or another involved with supporting the Spanish Republic, the JAFRC quickly became a target of governmental inquiry during the Cold War.39 Seghers herself was placed under FBI surveillance as early as 1940, once Mexican trade union leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, who facilitated the exile of German intellectuals in Mexico, attempted to secure a visa for her.40 In the booklet de la Mora and Seghers “tell the story” of the JAFRC, using rather different approaches. De la Mora provides a more general

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overview on the committee’s role in supporting the Spanish refugees, stressing the connection between the outcome of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She writes about the more than half a million Spaniards “who were thrown out of their fatherland by the German and Italian invaders—­the core of that army of criminals which later turned all of Europe into a pile of ruins.” De la Mora explains how the aid from the committee had provided relief to the refugees in Mexico in the areas of education and health. Moreover, both texts deliver ample evidence for the support the refugees received from the JAFRC, from the Mexican government, and from the Mexican people. Seghers’s words of appreciation are as fervent as de la Mora’s, yet the story of flight, exile, and adaptation she tells is her own. Seghers, her husband, and her children received help from the JAFRC in order to cover the costs of their passage to Mexico.41 The practice of exposing a specific political problem or situation that affects entire communities by telling an individual’s story is a common one for Seghers, whose literature addresses topics ranging from the devastating effects of fascism on individuals and communities in Germany, to the fates of disenfranchised women in Mexico.42 Seghers’s text begins, as is typical of her writing, in medias res: “It was in a café on the Rue de la Paix in Paris, crowded with German officers, that I first received word that a visa was awaiting me at the Mexican Consulate in Marseilles.” The author then proceeds to narrate her flight across the Atlantic, a journey as complex and labyrinthine as those depicted in her 1944 novel Transit. It is worthwhile noting here that when the nameless narrator of Transit happens upon an unpublished manuscript a fellow German writer left behind, the writing moves the narrator so intensely that he feels he is discovering anew his own mother tongue. “And as I read line after line, I also felt that this was my own language, my mother tongue, and it flowed into me like milk into a baby. It didn’t rasp and grate like the language that came from the throats of the Nazis, their murderous commands and objectionable insistence of obedience, their disgusting boasts.—­T his was serious, calm, and still.”43 The character’s reaction shows that a complicated relationship with languages (“native” and acquired) is an important part of being “in transit,” of being between languages, between identities, between nationalities, be-

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tween citizenships, even between life and death. The experience of being in transit, as stated in chapter 4, comes across as an interstitial space and a period that begins before the refugees’ first border crossing and that endures far beyond the moment when they step on the soil of the country that provides refuge. The new chapter of world literature Seghers describes in many ways emerges from the archive of transit that came into being once writers were forced away from their homes. The travel documents that Seghers was able to obtain with the help of Gilberto Bosques and the financial support from the JAFRC hardly guaranteed an uncomplicated journey. Instead, writes Seghers in her essay, “It took us longer to get here than it did Columbus.” As explained in chapter 4, Martinique was Seghers’s first destination in the Americas. From there the family traveled first to Santo Domingo, then to New York, where, as recent studies reveal, Seghers wished to settle. Yet the US authorities refused to grant the family an entry visa, alleging the poor health of Seghers’s daughter Ruth as a reason. As Stephan’s examination of Seghers’s extremely large FBI file shows, the author was blacklisted in the United States even before she made the journey across the Atlantic.44 Ruth, just like her brother Pierre, was in good health, even though the arduous journey had taken a toll on the children. Not only Ruth and Pierre, but also Seghers herself would carry invisible wounds with her, aware that the challenges of adaptation in a new home were ahead: “It is not easy for people in their mature years to sink new roots every few months,” she writes in the JAFRC booklet. Yet Seghers also expresses emotion and gratitude when she writes of “Mexico, the air we breathe, the people we meet, the country-­side we gaze upon, above all the comradeship of the American people, exemplified in the work of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee.” These experiences, writes Seghers, “have crept into our writing.” She then adds the following, including the phrase discussed above: “Maybe as a result of all this my friends will succeed in beginning a new chapter of world literature.” The booklet’s brief text, however, contains remarkable inconsistencies, as the subjects of the sentences constantly change: it is here where the marks of translation and self-­translation become evident. Seghers tells the story of her family in the first part of the text. However, the we

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in a statement like “Mexico, the air we breathe, the people we meet,” can stand for Seghers’s family as well as for all refugees who were able to make it out of occupied Europe with the help of the JAFRC. Then Seghers shifts from her family’s story, or from all refugees’ stories, to the specific situation in which she found herself as a writer, as she refers to the “things” that “have crept into our writing.” Here Seghers includes herself in a community of displaced authors whose work would be inexorably marked by the multiple ruptures of displacement and exile. Yet the end of the paragraph is puzzling: “Maybe as a result of this my friends will succeed in beginning a new chapter of world literature” (my emphasis). The fact that Seghers here changes the subject from “we” to “my friends,” is surprising, especially considering that in the following paragraph she will make a reference to the already-­mentioned publications of the German exile community in Mexico. Seghers did have a leading role in these publications that, as she writes in her essay in the booklet, “are serving not only to rally the German exiles and other German residents of the continent to the cause of freedom but are also enlisted in the war against a fascist ideology now raising its head even over here.” The fact that Seghers refers to the spread of fascism “even over here” implies that she is writing about Mexico, the place where the German exile community founded the above-­mentioned publications. Her reference to “my friends” who, Seghers hopes, will “succeed in beginning a new chapter of world literature,” is therefore ambiguous. It is not entirely clear whether she is referring to the community of German writers and intellectuals in exile, to her Mexican friends, or to exiles from Spain’s defeated Republic, such as Max Aub or Constancia de la Mora.45 Seghers’s use of the possessive pronoun shifts from “our writing” to “my friends,” then back to “our newspapers,” and, in the last paragraph of the text, to “our day.” This inconsistency suggests that not just the German refugees, not just the Spanish refugees, their Mexican hosts, or even those active in organizations like the JAFRC would succeed in beginning a new chapter of world literature on their own. Instead, such a chapter can only be the product of a common effort, the effort of a new, multilingual community of intellectuals: those in exile and those offering their support. Yet to become a reality, this new chapter of world literature needed translators.

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An interesting but easily overlooked example of a translator’s presence can be found in Seghers’s description of her children’s experience of displacement and exile: “I do not believe that concentration camps, hair-­breadth escapes, crowded quarters on cattle boats are the proper classrooms for children.” The expression “hair-­breadth escapes” sounds somewhat awkward in English (“escaping by a hair’s breadth” may be more appropriate); in German “haarbreit,” or “um Haaresbreite” are common phrases. Moments like this interrupt what Lawrence Venuti has called the “illusion of transparency” and show that the work of translation and the translator’s traces should be taken seriously and as constitutive aspects of these texts.46 A text like Seghers’s essay—­indeed, most works produced in transit and in exile—­bear within them an encounter with languages other than the ones in which they are written. These encounters, rarely acknowledged by authors, make the texts belonging to world literature’s newest chapter in Mexico remarkable, and, in a sense, quite unruly. Going over the different translations of Seghers’s texts into both Spanish and English is not an attempt to pass judgment on whatever their strengths and shortcomings may be. Following Venuti, the point is not to critique the “fluency” (or lack thereof) in the different translations, but to read them against one another in order to address the losses that writers in exile face when, to use Seghers’s own words, they need to “sink new roots every few months.” Writers, suggests Seghers, “are like trees. They take sustenance from the soil around them.” The contradictions in Seghers’s essay may make the text more nuanced than necessary for achieving its original goal (to garner support for the JAFRC). However, they do reflect the complex ways in which transit across borders, across oceans, and across languages altered writers’ lives and the work they produced, transforming their roots into routes. And yet, while many of Seghers’s contemporaries may claim otherwise, the changes that crossing borders and languages imply are not mere losses, even though this notion certainly comes across in a short essay that another German-­born writer, Lion Feuchtwanger, published in Freies Deutschland. From his new home in California, he penned the essay “The Working Problems of the Writer in Exile,” for the Writers’ Congress, held in October 1943 in Los Angeles. Feuchtwanger

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ends his essay on an optimistic note, as he affirms that exile turned out to be a productive and rewarding experience once the war had ended, “when the tide has passed.”47 Feuchtwanger’s more sanguine assessment of the experience of exile in the writer’s life and work evokes the often-­ quoted statement from medieval theologian Hugo of St. Victor, which appears, perhaps most prominently, in the work of other exiled writers, Erich Auerbach and Edward Said: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land.”48 Seghers’s “new chapter of world literature,” and its relationship with Feuchtwanger’s 1944 essay conjure up rich and complex debates on the centrality of translation in the discipline of comparative literature. Emily Apter underlines this centrality in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature: “Brought back from its distinguished past as the medium that permitted the Renaissance to invent itself through a recuperation of ancient learning and culture, translation became the pedagogical pivot of a curriculum established by Europeans in exile from Nazi Germany. This revaluation contributed to redressing the historic undervaluation of the translator’s craft in the nineteenth century, during which the names of translators were frequently left off the books they translated.”49 Even though Feuchtwanger wrote his essay at the height of the period when exile and translations led to new ways to study, critique, classify, and teach literature, he considers translation more in terms of a setback: translation can ultimately only provide a flawed substitute for what has been lost. Feuchtwanger was wary of translations, yet it is also true that he and his fellow refugees were engaged in a local and global “war against a fascist ideology now raising its head even over here” that could only be fought with translations. And, as the ensuing sections show, imperfect and flawed translations (as all are) end up being a fundamental part of the lived realities of displacement.

A Pfannkuchen is not a Tortilla is not a Pancake. The work of translators, who ultimately made the new chapter in world literature possible, has only rarely been acknowledged. El libro negro del terror nazi, the book where Méndez’s earlier mentioned image appears, consists almost in its entirety of translations, yet the identities

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of the translators are nowhere mentioned.50 This situation was hardly unique in the period, and it endures today. Indeed, most of Seghers’s critics fail to mention that her renowned short story “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen,” or “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip” (discussed in the introduction) appeared as “La excursión de las muchachas muertas” in Mexico before it was published in German by Aurora, an exile press created in New York by a German writer, Wieland Herzfelde. The short story was published in Spanish translation in Cuadernos Americanos in 1944, a journal founded by the intellectual Jesus Silva Herzog in 1941, in solidarity with the global antifascist struggle.51 The translation, possibly undertaken by Angela Selke and Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, was part of a section of the journal that also featured poems by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano and Alfonso Reyes (the latter two were among the founders of the publication) and an essay on Argentine painting by art historian Romualdo Brughetti.52 While the short story engages with the German traumatic past, it does so from a Mexican present; translation is at its very core, shaping the form and content of the text. Moreover, another translation, and quite a curious one, preceded the text’s 1946 publication in New York. Stephan explains that Seghers’s FBI file (consisting mainly of intercepted correspondence) included the short story’s earliest English translation.53 The fact that agents of the US government felt compelled to translate a literary text like “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip” shows the political expediency and necessity of translations in the period, making it all the more striking that the translators themselves were routinely ignored. Disregarding the importance of translation means missing part of the story in “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” a tale that is all about what gets lost in an attempt to translate experiences and displaced memories. The well-­known short story poignantly shows the varied forms of damage and destruction that Nazism caused in a generation of young girls, who would become, to call upon commonly used categories, perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Like the essay mentioned earlier, this story also begins in medias res, when the narrator (named Netty, Seghers’s given name) responds with the following words to the owner of a pulquería who inquired about her origins: “No, from much farther away. From Europe.”54 The response makes the reader assume that the man had just asked her if she were

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coming from a less remote location. The first words in the story already highlight Netty’s sense of estrangement: she feels as though she were coming from the moon: “as if I’d said, ‘From the moon.’”55 The text continues with a description of the man: “He stepped back from the table and, leaning motionless against the house, looked at me as if he were searching for some trace of my weird origin.”56 Not only do the narrator’s origins appear to be bizarre in the Mexican man’s eyes (that is at least how it feels for her), but her presence in the countryside is also just as strange: “It suddenly seemed just as weird to me as it did to him that I should come from Europe and end up here in Mexico.”57 In the original German version, Seghers uses the adjective “fantastisch,” a term that Margot Bettauer Dembo translated with “weird” in her 2021version. The 1944 Spanish translation, instead, features the adjective “fantástico,” emphasizing the magical quality of the Mexican landscape more than its strangeness.58 The landscape is also “as barren and wild as a lunar mountain range,” which further reflects the narrator’s alienation.59 This story is not the only one in which Seghers describes Mexico as a strange and distant place.60 In fact, even her son’s aforementioned memories reflect similar sentiments. When Seghers uses the adjective “fantastisch,” several notions of the strange, bizarre, unfamiliar, or uncanny coalesce. Netty feels out of place, as the original German text states: “aus Europa nach Mexiko verschlagen.” Yet the terms used in the Spanish translation, “que desde Europa hubiera venido a parar a México” and the English version, “I should come all the way from Europe and end up here in Mexico,” have slightly different connotations. The word verschlagen in many ways is a precise, unique, and untranslatable term or, as Feuchtwanger puts it, “the word, the happy phrase which is completely molded to our thought and feeling.”61 The incommensurability between “nach Mexiko verschlagen,” “hubiera venido a parar a México,” or “end up here in Mexico” lies at the core of the new chapter of world literature. In this context, the translation conducted by anonymous translators for Seghers’ FBI file should also be considered, as it expresses the sentence in the following manner: “It suddenly seemed equally fantastic to me as it did to him that I should have blundered into Mexico from Europe.”62 The expressions “venir a parar,” “end up in,” or “blundered into” do not quite reflect the nuances of “nach Mexiko verschlagen.” The

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point here is not to lament, but instead to highlight this type of incommensurability, as it is fundamentally important in order to understand the literary production of Seghers and of other refugees whose works appeared in translation and in exile presses. In the different versions of the story the phrases connote, not without irony, that the narrator’s presence in Mexico is the consequence of chance, as though nobody had been responsible for Netty’s displacement. When Seghers writes “dass ich aus Europa nach Mexiko verschlagen war,” she is using a passive construction that, in contrast to “I should come all the way from Europe and end up here in Mexico” (my emphasis) or “hubiera venido a parar a México,” does not require a subject. “Nach Mexiko verschlagen” implies that the narrator has neither agency nor control over her own route or her fate. Moreover, the prefix ver has a variety of conflicting meanings in German; and when it comes to verschlagen, the prefix conveys that something has gone awry (in a similar sense in which verlaufen means to get lost, or versprechen, to misspeak). Since schlagen can be translated as to beat or to strike, the prefix here conveys that “nach Mexico verschlagen” not only means that the character finds herself unexpectedly in Mexico and that nobody appears to be accountable, but it also contains a certain force, even a violence that “venir a parar,” “end up,” and “blundered” do not convey. Even though the narrator uses a passive construction, the short story reveals that the Nazis and all those who supported them were responsible for the violence and suffering described in the text. Finding herself in an unexpected and bizarre moonscape, Netty wanders off and ends up in an uncanny location that begins to transform in front of her eyes. As she hears the creaking of a seesaw, she suddenly finds herself in the greener, lusher landscape of her childhood in the German city of Mainz. She appears to have changed into her younger self. Even though the contrast between the lunar landscape in Mexico and the voluptuous green of Netty’s German childhood is maintained throughout the text, the story is by no means a nostalgic yearning for a home that no longer exists. The woman who now returns to a class trip that took place in 1914 knows exactly, and narrates in its most gruesome detail, what happens to the members of her cohort of German

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girls between 1914 and 1943. The story’s title comes to mind: whether they ended up becoming fascists or resisters, perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, by 1943 every single one of the girls, except for Netty, is dead. Yet the dead girls’ lives seem to be wonderfully and fantastically restored during the excursion. Netty’s hometown is neither bombed nor destroyed, even though the narrator is tragically aware that her schoolmates and hometown are gone. She knows this as she tries to find her childhood home. She walks along the well-­known streets and sees her mother waiting for her. Though deceased in the narrator’s reality, here her beloved mother is alive and well, and Netty wishes to embrace her. Yet as she runs up the stairs, she notices that something is not quite right. The stairs begin to vanish in a haze, and she can no longer find her mother. Suddenly, as she did in the beginning of her “return” to Germany and to 1914, Netty once again hears a sound that is as uncanny as the creaking of the seesaw in the beginning of the text: “There was already the clatter of dishes in preparation for the evening meal. Behind all the doors I heard the familiar rhythm of hands slapping dough. I was put off by the way they baked pancakes: instead of rolling out the elastic dough, they pounded it flat between their hands.”63 What Netty hears is the sound of hands preparing not German “Pfannkuchen” (the word Seghers uses in the German version) but Mexican tortillas. While the story is already riddled with complexity, a look at its multiple translations adds another dimension. In the 1944 Spanish version, the translators use the term tortillas in the quoted paragraph, even though neither Mexico nor tortillas had any significance for Netty when she was a schoolgirl in Mainz, years before she had to flee from Europe.64 The English translation, which uses “pancakes,” may come closer to the original (even though a German Pfannkuchen is also not the same as a pancake). The reference to tortillas in the Spanish translation, a term not mentioned in the German text, ends up revealing more than Seghers perhaps intended. As insignificant as this detail may appear to be, it is only after Netty becomes aware of the sound that the women make as they shape the cornmeal into tortillas that the landscape around her once again becomes blurry. The sound of tortillas, not pancakes, has taken her back to the lunar landscapes of her exile. The clapping sound

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associated with the tortillas takes Netty back to her aged and melancholy present-­day self in Mexico. When she thinks of Pfannkuchen, and not of tortillas, the narrator can (still) not find the precise words that correspond to her new reality. Yet using “tortillas” in the Spanish translation effaces the experience of loss, the transformations that came with displacement and exile. A Pfannkuchen is not a tortilla, and neither one is a pancake. By the story’s end, Netty remembers the assignment that her young teacher had given her on the day of the excursion: to dutifully write an account of the outing. The fact that the narrator remembers this assignment also reveals that what Netty has just experienced is neither a dream nor a hallucination. Instead, her “essay” on the excursion is a clear and painful articulation of exile and loss. As Julia Hell writes, Seghers’s story, “which so masterfully blends the present of the author in her Mexican exile with the memories from her German past works toward one specific moment when Netty, the girl, returns home from the excursion longing to be taken into her mother’s arms.”65 Hell asserts that the re-­encounter with the mother is impossible, signaling a rupture between Netty’s past in Germany and her present in Mexico. Yet rather than blending past and present (or Mexico and Germany, or Spanish and German), the story is about the losses that are part and parcel of any attempt to translate a German experience in Mexico and a Mexican experience in Germany. The story’s form (this includes its multiple, imperfect, complex, and, in a sense, impossible, translations) reflects its content. The same can also be said for many of the essays and images collected in El libro negro del terror nazi, among them Seghers’s own contribution, “Ein Mensch wird Nazi” or “Como se hace un Nazi,” [A Man Becomes a Nazi], a text first published in Freies Deutschland and, in its Spanish version, in El libro negro del terror nazi.

A Man Becomes a Nazi El libro negro is routinely mentioned in most studies of the German intellectual exile community in Mexico City, yet none of the studies provides clues on who the translators, essential to making this book a reality, may have been.66 The book was the brainchild of the community of German exiles and two Mexican intellectual leaders, Vicente Lombardo

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Toledano and Antonio Castro Leal, who are the only Mexican contributors to the volume, with the exception, of course, of the visual artists’ works, as indispensable for the book’s completion as the work of the unnamed translators. The book’s publication was sponsored by Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho, Peruvian president Dr. Manuel Prado, and Eduardo Benes, the exiled Czech president. The only texts originally written in Spanish were authored by the already mentioned Lombardo Toledano and Castro Leal, and by three Spanish intellectuals in exile, Juan Rejano, Antonio Mije, and Antonio Velao. Both Castro Leal and Lombardo Toledano emphasize the book’s importance in the Mexican and the larger Spanish-­speaking world, yet neither one gives credit to the translators. With its 55 texts, 164 photographs and roughly 50 reproductions of prints and drawings (mainly from Mexican artists), the book’s message is as evident and transparent as is its transnational context.67 The moral of Seghers’s own contribution to the text, “Cómo se hace un nazi” is equally evident. The text’s translation, however, raises a number of new questions. As in the earlier discussed text for the JAFRC, Seghers engages here with the rise of fascism in Germany through the story of an individual, Fritz Müller. A sketch by the graphic artist Alfredo Zalce illustrates the text. The same image appeared on a 1939 poster announcing a lecture in Mexico City supported by the Liga Pro-­Cultura Alemana about the place of women in Nazi society.68 The image shows a woman and an infant lying on a bed. The infant is asleep, a blanket covers mother and child, and the former stares warily at a group of boy soldiers carrying guns. The gas masks that cover the soldiers’ faces make them look even more menacing. The image tells a story that illustrates yet also transcends Seghers’s text: a story of a mother who looks at the grim future that seems to await her newborn child, a future from which she cannot protect her. The woman’s hands, in the center of the image, are disproportionately large, suggesting the impossible wish to shelter the infant (figure 8). Merfish points out that the images in the book are not a series of mere illustrations: “The essays and major images contained in it are not organized according to a hierarchy of dependence but appear instead as analogous statements.”69 While the book documents atrocities taking place in Europe, Sara Blair notes that the juxtaposition of texts and illus-

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FIGU R E 8. Alfredo Zalce, “A poster advertising a meeting in Mexico City supported by the Liga Pro-­cultura Alemana on the subject of the place of women in Nazi society, 1939,” © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

trations adds another dimension to the book: “It aims to generate new forms of identification, new modes of photographic meaning, and new states of identification across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.”70 Yet the new states of identification to which Blair refers are also marked by, to use Apter’s terms, “non-­translation, mistranslation, incomparability, und untranslatability.” The juxtaposition of images and texts is not the only signal that the book may be more complex and multilayered than one may at first imagine. The fact that the entire book consists of translations (except for the few texts written in Spanish) also shows that translations were not only a cultural but also a political necessity. If the essays in El libro negro del terror nazi were to reach the world, they had to do so in translation. Seghers’s story begins with Müller’s death sentence: the Red Army is about to execute him after he has been found guilty of, among other

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acts of violence, murdering two boys in front of their mother. Seghers then proceeds to tell the story of how Müller becomes a Nazi, from his birth in 1916 to the moment of his death. Müller’s mother was a seamstress, and his father was a World War I veteran who was never able to find steady employment after the war. The Weimar years are not good ones for the Müller family, and it is in school, and with the influence of a teacher and his peers that Müller, not born a Nazi, becomes a Nazi. His rancor provides fertile soil for the National Socialist indoctrination he receives in school and the streets; and he eventually joins the Sturmabteilung (Storm Division). His increasingly violent behavior leads to an initial and futile protest from the mother “Su madre se quejó,” or “Seine Mutter klagte” in the German version, which expresses more intensity than the term that the anonymous Spanish translator chose: she did not just complain, she lamented.71 And it is from here that Müller’s violence spirals out of control, mirroring the routinization of violence and brutality in Nazi Germany. Once Hitler seizes power, Müller’s mother’s only (mentioned) sentiment is that she thinks her younger son had probably made the right choice. The Spanish text, however, contains a paragraph that does not appear in the German version and that was perhaps added later: it is not only his background, the specific social circumstances when he comes of age, or his propensity for violence that make Fritz Müller a Nazi; a desire for absolute certainty and order, as well as intolerance for nuance or ambiguity also pave the path to fascism. “He wanted order for order’s sake. In his actual life, when every minute brought a new command, there was no room for unrestrained deviations, scuffles, or pogroms. Subconsciously he was happy he had no ambiguous tasks, that he was not made responsible for his actions.”72 According to Josefina Sandoval, only a strong sense of German history could make this tale comprehensible in Latin America, yet this added paragraph suggests that the process Seghers narrates in the text could take place anywhere.73 Seghers herself, or perhaps the anonymous translator responsible for the Spanish version published in El libro negro, may have added these sentences, thereby turning a chronicle of events taking place in the years leading up to the the Nazi rise to power in Germany into a global cautionary tale. Eventually Müller commits several brutal acts of murder in a small

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town. After the Soviet takeover, Müller is arrested and tried in a military court, while a local lieutentant wonders how it was possible that a human mother had given birth to someone like him. And somehow it was: Müller’s very human mother, still living in Düsseldorf, is waiting to hear from her sons, even her youngest, born in 1916. The end of the story conjures up Zalce’s illustration. Yet the image not only tells a story that differs from Seghers’s text, it also precedes it, as it was used on a poster announcing an antifascist lecture held in October of 1938 at the Bellas Artes Palace in Mexico City by psychiatrist and feminist leader Dr. Matilde Rodríguez Cabo.74 Zalce’s work is more than an illustration of Seghers’s text; the relationship between words and images here is dynamic, as it is elsewhere in the collection. In 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Zalce created a drawing about motherhood in times of war. Four years later, Seghers, who may or may not have had access to Zalce’s image, published a story that explains the rise of fascim. In both cases it becomes clear that the private, domestic, and intimate sphere is crucial if one wants to convey how the rise of Nazism was possible and what its consequences would be. Unfortunately, the text’s translator, who may have authored the paragraph mentioned earlier that was absent from the German version, remains anonymous, even though the merit of the work done on pages 55–­63 in El libro negro del terror nazi belongs as much to the translator as to Seghers and Zalce. These individuals, as well as the intellectual and political leaders that made the publication of the book in Mexico a reality, collaborated in what was world literature’s newest chapter in 1942.

Coming Home The Mexican sector in Berlin that Seghers longed for once she was back in Germany represents more than an escapist fantasy. One could even suggest that Seghers attempted to recreate this sector in her own home: her personal library includes not only large numbers of books acquired in Mexico, but also holds copies, some of them signed, of works by Zalce and Méndez, the collection Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana, published by the TGP, prints by Guadalupe Posada, and numerous works on

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Diego Rivera, who is also the subject of two of her essays, “Die gemalte Zeit” (1947) and “Diego Rivera” (1949), to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. In this context, it is important to turn again to the letter Seghers wrote to Stavenhagen in 1947: “As you know, [Berlin] is divided into four sectors, yet what this means is difficult to imagine at home.” Seghers’s casual use of home, or “daheim” in German, may simply mean that she is referring to the place that has become home for Stavenhagen and his family. Yet, not unlike her remark about Berlin’s lacking a Mexican sector, there may be more to this comment. Mexico became a home not only for Seghers and her family but also for her writing. While she wrote only in German (apart from her letters to Clara Porset), the traces of other languages and cultures are visible during her exile years. Her letters from those years further illustrate that “home” became a complicated place for Seghers. The new chapter of world literature is about the unexpected routes and encounters as much as it is about friendships kept alive in letters and about more ephemeral texts, such as the earlier discussed JAFRC pamphlet or even the shorter and largely forgotten pieces that appeared in exile publications like Freies Deutschland. It is also about everything that is lost in translation. In a sense, the “new” chapter of world literature quickly became an “old” one because most refugees left Mexico after the war, and the different German-­language publishing projects in which they were involved soon disappeared. Yet overlooking this new chapter and the crucial role of translators indeed means missing an important part of the story of escape and refuge in Mexico during World War II. Today, the name Anna Seghers is familiar to most scholars of Mexican literature, yet not thanks to a new chapter of world literature that began in the 1940s, but because a number of prominent Mexican writers received the prestigious “Anna Seghers-­Preis.” The Anna Seghers Foundation has been awarding the prize to up-­and-­coming authors in German-­speaking countries and in Latin America since 1995. The list of Mexican awardees includes Fernanda Melchor (2019), Yuri Herrera (2016), Guadalupe Nettel (2009), Cristina Rivera-­ Garza (2005) and Carmen Boullosa (1997). These authors, as well as the others who re-

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ceived the prize (every year it is equally split between a writer from Germany and a writer from Latin America) were chosen because they use their art, as Seghers did, in order to promote a more humane and equitable society, a world centered on tolerance and goodwill.75 The roots of this award are in the routes of Seghers and her fellow refugees and in this “new chapter of world literature” that not everybody remembers.

Ch apter Seven

Yearning for Mexico: Ruth Rewald

I n J u n e 2 016 , B e rl i n ’ s A k a d e m i e der Künste (Academy for the Arts) sponsored the exhibit Children in Exile. The exhibit showcased photographs, letters, and manuscripts from the institution’s archive, documenting the lives of children displaced during World War II. The exhibit included testimonies from many children, among them Pierre and Ruth Radványi, (the children of Anna Seghers and László Radványi), Stefan Rafael Benjamin (whose father was Walter Benjamin), and Nadine Stern (the daughter of screenwriter Kurt Stern, exiled in Mexico). The 1934 cover of Ruth Rewald’s young adult novel Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko also was on display, with the following explanation: “For the children’s books author Ruth Rewald and her young daughter Anja, born 1937, it was too late. The German occupiers deported them to Auschwitz in 1942 and murdered them. Ruth Rewald, too, was moved by a yearning for Mexico; in France she had published a children’s book about a boy from Mexico.”1 While the other children who survived as refugees evidently did not share Anja’s fate, the reference to the child and her mother fits well in the exhibit. Rewald’s novel not only is about exile and statelessness, its settings also include the same kind of uncanny landscapes that would appear roughly a decade after Rewald wrote her book in the works of European writers who, as Seghers put it, ended up in Mexico (map 5). Born in 1906, Rewald fled to France in 1933. By then she had already published two books, Rudi und sein Radio [Rudi and His Radio] (1931) and Müllerstraße-­Jungens von heute [Müller Street—­Today’s Boys] (1932) for young audiences. Her sole novel with a female protagonist Achtung Renate [Careful, Renate] never made it to print. The other two books were published by the Stuttgart-­based publisher D. Gundert and may have appeared just in time, as in 1933 the editor informed Rewald that they would no longer be able to support her work.2 Rewald settled 143

M A P 5.

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in Paris, and her husband Hans Schaul, now barred from practicing law in Germany, soon followed. Life in exile was not easy for Rewald, yet she managed to support herself by writing commercial copy and with occasional teaching gigs.3 She also completed two more novels, the above-­ mentioned Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko (1934) and Tsao und Jing Ling—­Kinderleben in China [Tsao and Jing Ling—­C hildren’s Lives in China] (1937).4 As the book titles indicate, her protagonists usually were boys, sometimes living in faraway places. Had she lived to see her daughter Anja grow up, she might have produced many other books with female protagonists, but that never happened: Anja did not live to see her eighth birthday. When Anja was born in May of 1937, her father already was fighting with the International Brigades in Spain. Rewald joined him there for four months in order to do the research for Vier Spanische Jungen [Four Spanish Boys], a novel based on events that Schaul had witnessed fighting in Spain. By the time Rewald got back to Paris, the tides of the war in Spain had turned. In October 1938 the International Brigades departed from Spain, and a month later the Republicans suffered a brutal defeat in the Ebro region. Barcelona fell in January of 1939, and on April 1 of that year the Nationalists claimed victory. Rewald’s manuscript, completed by then, no longer corresponded to the realities of war, and she never saw it published in her lifetime.5 Once the Nazis invaded France, Rewald and Anja fled Paris, going first to Saint Nazaire and then finding refuge in Les Roisiers-­sur-­Loire. But even the kindness of the locals could not help a Jewish woman in occupied France. Rewald was arrested in July of 1942. By then Schaul, now a veteran of the International Brigades, was a prisoner of war in a camp in Djelfa, Algeria, an experience he shared with Max Aub. There he received his wife’s last letter before she disappeared, a cyphered message telling him that she was about to be deported to the east.6 In the letter Rewald still assures her husband that he will hear from her, and that her only worry is being separated from her daughter. At this point, Anja seemed to be safe, as a neighbor promised to take care of her until the child’s teacher, Mme. Renaud, would become her legal guardian. Yet that never happened, and Anja was deported and killed two years later, without ever having the chance to know what her mother’s “yearning for

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Mexico” meant. Today, in a French village by the Loire, an elementary school is named in Anja’s memory.7 There are no reminders of Rewald’s life and work in Mexico. Traces, however, can be found in Germany and in France: her literary estate, including her correspondence with Hans Schaul, is stored at the Bundesarchiv in Germany. In Paris, at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Anja Schaul’s name appears on the “Wall of Names,” and a photo of a very young Anja reminds us that the child was deported on February 10, 1944, when she was seven years old. It is hard to resist the temptation of magical thinking with regard to the Mexican setting of Rewald’s Der Junge aus Mexico, given that the protagonist’s origin and the depiction of Mexico as a place that simultaneously is exotic, remote, and familiar seems to predict later representations of the country. Yet Rewald was no clairvoyant. Depictions of Mexico in Rewald’s novel and in the later writings of Seghers (discussed further in this chapter’s next section), Gertrude Duby, (see chapter 8) and Egon Erwin Kisch (see chapter 9) are so similar because they tend to portray a place more imagined than real. Mexico becomes a site of hope for a better world or for a world with better people. Yet Rewald never made it to Mexico and, unlike the other writers discussed in this book, she wrote for young readers (i.e., genre fiction). Even though this made her an outsider, her Der Junge aus Mexiko is a cultural expression of a specific moment in time and a reflection on the condition of statelessness. The novel is built on the shared notion that Mexico could become a site of hope, a chance to build a better world, now that Europe is burning. Rewald’s “route” to Mexico only ever existed in an imaginary world. Like those who found refuge in Mexico around the same time that she had to go into hiding in France, she built that imaginary world with tropes about the country and with an understanding of indigenous cultures that bears little or no relation to the lived realities across the Atlantic. Rewald settled in Paris at a time when many of the other prominent exiles were also there. Among them was Seghers, who was part of a jury that awarded Rewald an honorary mention in a literary contest sponsored by an exile organization. While Rewald had the support of another renowned author of children’s books, Lisa Tetzner (mentioned in chapter 4 in relation to her own series, Die Kinder aus Nr. 67), Rewald’s

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name was not on any list that would make escape from occupied Europe possible for her. It is unclear how much Seghers knew of Rewald and her work, but a look at Seghers’s sentiments about Mexico in some of her most intimate writings about the country shows how much Mexico meant for her. A “beautiful friendship” between Rewald and Seghers could have been, but never was. Nevertheless, in the women’s written work (Rewald’s 1934 novel, Seghers’s correspondence, essays, and fictions about Mexico) a shared yearning materializes.

A Faint Glistening of Beauty The letters Seghers wrote during her years as a refugee and when, back in Germany, she longed for a “Mexican sector” in Berlin reveal the many hardships, contradictions, and moments of joy she experienced when she was living in Mexico. They also depict a yearning that echoes the book that Rewald penned almost a decade earlier. Seghers wrote most of her letters in German and in French. A few, mainly sent to publishers in the United States, are in English, and, to my knowledge, the only person with whom she corresponded in Spanish was Cuban designer Clara Porset (1895–­1981). Seghers also exchanged letters with Pablo Neruda, and with Jorge Amado and Zélia Gattai, but wrote them in French. It is important to note, however, that Seghers eventually switched to French in her later letters to Porset, as the Mexican years became increasingly distant, and only the correspondence with her “dear Clarita” kept Seghers’s connection with Mexico as spirited as she may have wanted it to be. It is not only language that makes her letters to Porset stand out among her correspondence. Their intimacy bears witness to the “beautiful friendship” between these two creators and fellow refugees (Porset had been forced to leave Cuba in 1935) and to their predilection for Mexican visual arts, ranging from the folk art that Porset knew so well to the work of the muralists that Seghers admired, among them Porset’s husband Xavier Guerrero. Seghers’s letters to Porset make it clear that the writer saw postwar Berlin, with its ruins and ghosts, from a perspective marked by her yearning for Mexico. Seghers, as mentioned earlier, returned from Mexico with quite a bit of baggage—­literally speaking. She brought numerous books and prints with her, a collection that we can still admire today at

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the Anna Seghers Museum in Berlin’s Adlershof neighborhood.8 One of the most personal objects in the small museum’s collection is a wood-­ carved tryptic of Saint Christopher, who was to protect her during her sojourns. Seghers received the figure after the traffic accident in Mexico City in 1943 that almost killed her. The patron saint of travelers would accompany her on many journeys for the rest of her life. While this may look like a bizarre gesture for a German-­born Jewish writer affiliated with the Communist party, it was entirely in character for a refugee who took emotions and sensibilities connected to the country that gave her refuge back home with her. Porset probably was among the few who really understood what Seghers’s yearning for a “Mexican sector” in Berlin meant. Seghers’s letters to Porset are personal and candid, and regularly signed with “Ana” (a Hispanicized version of her name) or with “Tschibi,” the nickname that Seghers’s own children used for their mother. The correspondence with Porset, with her “Clarita bonita, Clarita querida,” as Seghers addressed her friend, are teeming with images equally harrowing and beautiful. In a frequently cited letter from June 1947, Seghers writes about being enthralled by Berlin’s ruins—­ruins that remind her of a Van Gogh painting. “I do not tell anyone that I love those ghostly streets, first because the Russians were so successful, and second, because they give me a profoundly perverse or unreal or surreal impression, these stairs that go to the heavens like Jacob’s ladder, these facades completely empty, or burnt, where the ghosts remain as the only inhabitants.”9 Seghers admits to Porset that she may be a mad ghost herself, a ghost living in the country of the cold-­hearted.10 No wonder that she was longing for the warmth, passion, and love of friends like Porset and Guerrero. “It is possible that my letter may seem to be rather crazy, and fantastic, and sad,” admits Seghers in one of the letters, but she assures her friend that life in Berlin is not really sad, only utterly unreal: “It would not surprise me if you were to come down one of the ruined stairways, or if Xavier were painting in a corner.”11 Seghers may be channeling André Breton’s vision of Mexico here, not only because the principal theorist of surrealism was supposed to have stated in 1938 that Mexico is “the most surrealist country in the world,” but also, as shown in chapter 4,

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because Breton and Seghers’s shared the journey aboard the Paul Lemerle in 1941. In her letters to Porset, Seghers describes Berlin’s rubble rendered beautiful in the winter snow, and she also asks about common Mexican friends. In a letter dated January 1, 1948, Seghers comments on the celebration in Mexico of a mutual friend’s thirtieth birthday, an event she laments missing. And while the friend’s name is not mentioned, she must have been close to Seghers and Porset: Seghers calls her a “sister.” Seghers also writes that while she could not be there for the celebration, she does not feel envious of those who could, because the colorful and poignant memories of her friends in Mexico give her so much comfort. Sometimes, Seghers’s Mexican memories also had a physical counterpart. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Seghers carried an entire library home with her, and she, of course, also had her Saint Christopher to protect her. Yet not every comforting memory came with a corresponding physical item. Mexican film star Dolores del Río had entranced Seghers, yet she did not bring a photograph to Berlin of the woman she calls a “symbol of eternal beauty” in the above-­mentioned letter. While Seghers does not mention del Río by name, several hints in the letter make it clear that she is writing about the film star. A brief essay that Seghers crafted while still in Mexico (but did not publish until years later in Germany) reveals that the “symbol of eternal beauty” indeed had to be Dolores del Río. Seghers’s essay “Dolores del Río,” begins with the suspicion that readers in Mexico would second-­ guess her subject: why would the German author choose to write about Dolores del Río, out of all Mexican women?12 After all, so much has already been written about the actress, when there are others, like the Corregidora, like the “soldaderas,” or maybe one of Mexico’s many anonymous women, who could be a more appropriate subject for an antifascist intellectual.13 Seghers responds to her imagined critics stating that she chose to write about Dolores del Río because she desired to do so, and because she wanted to take “a faint glistening of her beauty” with her to her desolate and destroyed city in Germany. That faint glistening provides solace for Seghers and for “all those others, who were still expecting to find something other

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than confusion and dust behind the city’s rubble.” For Seghers, Dolores del Río is neither an icon, nor a diva, but rather an artist who, “has used her beauty and her talent in order to express something that her people love.” And that is something that, she argues, “cannot be said about many artists, in all cultures.” What makes Dolores del Río different is that as an artist she had found “the form that corresponds to its content,” which is something, writes Seghers, that can be said “only about a few paintings, few plays, little music, few books. Only a work of art, where its form pays justice to its content.” Seghers adds that Dolores del Río’s performances appeal to intellectuals and to “the young, illiterate girls, who never learned to read and write.” 14 She explains to her German audiences that the actress has portrayed the many lives of Mexican women, referring specifically to the films María Candelaria (1944) and Las abandonadas (1945). Renown director Emilio “el Indio” Fernández was responsible for both films. Seghers admits that she was not yet prepared to make these women and their lives the subject of her own writing—­because it takes great courage to write about what one profoundly loves. The essay on Dolores del Río reveals more than a penchant for the “golden age of Mexican cinema,” which refers to a highly productive and prolific years (from the late 1930s to the 1950s) for the national film industry. Seghers would eventually write about Mexican women, indeed, her 1951 novella Crisanta is about a character based on “the young, illiterate girls, who never learned to read and write” willing to spend their little money on a movie ticket to see Dolores del Rio on the big screen. Yet there were other women in Mexico that Seghers loved and one of them was Clara Porset. Seghers evidently missed Porset and yearned for her friend to visit her in East Berlin, that much is clear (even thought that never happened). And yet, when Seghers first wrote about Mexico and its arts and culture for her East German readers, she chose Diego Rivera and muralism, not her Mexican sisters—­except for Dolores del Río, of course. I point this out not as a snide comment against Seghers, it is not my intention to suggest that she had merely internalized patriarchy, but rather to draw attention to the highly personal exchanges between Porset and Seghers. The letters provide a richer and more nuanced

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understanding of how Seghers learned to see Mexico than some of her published essays and stories. Learned to see, because Seghers’s yearning for Mexico changed over time. While she initially suggested she was not planning to write about Mexico, she would do so after a few years. Yet it also is true that her earlier depictions of Mexico (differently from those she wrote from a spatial and temporal distance, Crisanta and The Real Blue), appear always in relation to Germany and to the continent in flames she had left behind.

Lunar Landscapes By the time Seghers, having barely survived a traffic accident and mourning her mother’s death, wrote about lunar landscapes in “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” Rewald had been put to death at Auschwitz. The young Jewish author from Berlin, committed to writing books about camaraderie and social justice for young readers could be another one of the “dead girls” in Seghers’s story. The landscapes that Netty, the autobiographically inspired narrator, encounters in Mexico uncannily remind us of those Rewald imagined about a decade earlier. As noted in the preceding chapter, the beginning of the story mentions a local man for whom Netty’s origins must feel as strange and distant as though she had just told him that she was coming from the moon.15 In the same breath, she talks about the bleak moonscapes she encountered in Mexico. Historian Leo Spitzer, whose family found refuge in Bolivia rather than in Mexico, remembers that shortly before his Austrian family would depart for South America, Bolivia merely was “a place on a map of South America.”16 Here the moon again appears: “‘We would have gone to the moon,’” the refugee Andres Simon recalled. “‘Bolivia was a closer possibility, but the moon we saw every night. It was more real to us.’ ‘I knew about Bolivia what you know about the North Pole.’ Renata Schwarz said to me. ‘Maybe you know more about the North Pole.’”17 The fact that the moon and the North Pole are not only distant but also uninhabitable environments is important, as the Latin American landscape often becomes a void to be filled with the desires, fears, and fantasies of those who see it. Writers like Seghers and Rewald, who experienced firsthand the racial policies of National Socialism (in Rewald’s case, “experience” would be

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a euphemism), present multilayered pictures of what they perceived in or imagined about Mexico, including the racial structures and hierarchies they encountered. The displaced writers inscribed rural and urban (but mainly rural) landscapes with pre-­existing and often idealized characterizations of indigenous peoples that sometimes contradict and sometimes echo local understandings of race, class, and gender. Moreover, in Edward Said’s terms, the “loneliness of exile” helps to explain how the landscapes the authors encountered in Mexico (or, in Rewald’s case, dreamed up about Mexico) became a sort of tabula rasa for these displaced authors. “How,” writes Said, “does one surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?”18 The answer to Said’s question, at least based on what the mentioned texts suggest, is that while one may surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into such traps, it is quite difficult to do so. This is not to say that the displaced authors merely resort to the “encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions”—­they do not. Yet while they often wrote about the consequences of colonialism and racism, their work still contains blind spots when it comes to the ways in which different histories of violence intersect. The uprooted writers resort to formulaic, sometimes trite, and certainly racialized images and narrations that fit and sometimes do not fit local discourse on such concepts as “mestizaje” (the mixing of races) or “indigenismo,” or even “raza.” Most works address the need to incorporate the indigenous populations in a modern Mexican nation (echoing, to an extent, local debates on “indigenismo” and “mestizaje”). However, the authors’ own condition as refugees who left behind a continent overrun by fascism led to an ambiguous relationship with how a modern nation was supposed to look. While the texts reveal disenchantment and weariness, the refugees persistently looked for enchantment in an indigenous and authentic world they hoped to find in the Americas. Rewald was already doing this when she wrote Der Junge aus Mexiko, shortly after having fled from Nazi Germany. In a way, the lunar landscapes of the Americas serve as a reflection about and an antidote to the loneliness of exile. “Exile,” according to Said, “unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They gen-

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erally do not have armies or states, although they often are in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.”19 Seghers, Rewald, and others looked for such a sense of restoration among the people of Mexico, specifically, those they considered to be the most vulnerable: the young, the indigenous, the women, or all of the above. The term landscape conventionally invokes the visual: the viewer remains outside the landscape: she looks at it but does not reside in the space that her gaze frames. Yet the writers’ relationships with what they saw in Mexico are messier and more dynamic: persecuted and uprooted, they projected their hopes and fears on a space where their pre-­existing notions of the (lunar) landscape and people coincide with more nuanced recollections and descriptions. Having escaped a continent where fascist regimes attempted to annihilate those deemed racially or socially inferior, or “undesirable,” the displaced writers proceeded carefully in chronicles of their encounters with what for them were new “contact zones.”20 Yet in the stories they tell about local and indigenous characters, specific colonial figures, such as the “noble savage warrior,” that were popular in cultural products that precede World War II resurface. Moreover, the exiled authors also tend to idealize certain aspects of Mexico, regardless of whether they lived in the country (as Seghers and many others did) or only yearned for it, as Rewald did. The works of Mexican muralists (among them Rivera and Porset’s husband, Xavier Guerrero) enchanted many of the writers. When it comes to depictions of indigenous characters in the work of antifascist refugees from the German-­speaking realm, the “Indianer,” or “Indios,” portrayed in their works tend be inscrutable characters who inhabit a rural Mexico confined to a remote past. “Indianer” stands for more than a German translation for “Indians.” When the Germanophone writers use this term, they also raise a specific cultural imaginary that involves fictions about indigenous lives in the United States. These subjects are indigenous, they are peasants, they are exploited, they are wise in ways that Europeans cannot seem to fathom, and they are deeply rooted in tradition. All of them are strangers in the city—­not unlike the refugees.

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The exiled writers were not all that concerned about mestizaje, either in its racial (José Vasconcelos) or cultural formulations (Manuel Gamio), looking instead for subjects that fit the landscapes, lunar and otherwise, they depict in their texts. The term mestizaje has a long and complicated history in Mexico, and the German-­speaking refugees were not always attuned to it. At times, they used it uncritically, referring “to real life processes of racial and cultural mixing, rather than to a construct in political and aesthetic imaginaries of collective identity.”21 José Vasconcelos (1882–­1959) was the founder of Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education and main promoter of the muralist movement that Seghers so much admired. He also was “the best-­known exponent of the mythohistory of mestizaje,” and his notion of the “Raza Cósmica,” the “Cosmic Race,” needs to be considered in relation to the history of the term mestizaje, as does the work of Manuel Gamio.22 The latter was a student of Franz Boas and considered to be the father of Mexican anthropology. Both Vasconcelos and Gamio wrote prolifically, if not ferociously, about Mexican culture and civilization, and both promoted their views in the Harris lectures at the University of Chicago in 1926, which were then published in the volume Aspects of Mexican Civilization (1926). 23 Vasconcelos’s contribution is “The Latin American Basis of Mexican Civilization”; Gamio’s is “The Indian Basis of Mexican Civilization,” revealing that both writers are engaged with what Mexico is, where it originates, and where it is heading, yet they differ quite radically in their understanding of these topics. According to Vasconcelos, racial mixing will eventually lead to the emergence of a new, superior type of people; the less desirable (i.e., indigenous) elements eventually will vanish, allowing the “Cosmic Race” to emerge. 24 Gamio also was concerned with forging a new nation, as the title of his most well-­known work, Forjando Patria [Forging a Nation] (1916) shows.25 In his view, however, the indigenous elements are not to disappear, but instead represent the very essence of a nation that is in a process of becoming. While these brief comments do not reflect the full complexity of both authors’ works, the complicated racial history of mestizaje is not, for the most part, a central issue for Germanophone authors writing about Mexico. One exception would be Gertrude Duby, who in 1948 published the brief essay ¿Hay razas inferiores? [Do Inferior Races Exist?].

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This text owes more to Gamio than to Vasconcelos, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the latter is responsible for Timón, a publication that became a platform for the pro-­Nazi and antisemitic thought that Vasconcelos eventually embraced. The German-­ speaking exile community in Mexico unanimously admired the muralist movement. The dubious ideological alliances of Vasconcelos, the movement’s main promoter were, for the most part, simply not talked about, as becomes evident in Seghers’s essay on muralism, “Die gemalte Zeit: Mexikanische Fresken” [“Painted Time: Mexican Frescoes”]. 26 In this text (discussed further in the next chapter), a description of Diego Rivera’s rendering of agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata mirrors the identification of an iconic revolutionary leader with the equally iconic Indios and peasants that circulated in mainstream, post-­revolutionary, and nationalist discourse. Seghers not only considered muralism to be the country’s distinctive art form, but was also was mesmerized by the intense connections she saw between the muralists’ works and the Mexican people. Yet Seghers’s very positive assessment of muralism also was shaped by her European (perhaps Eurocentric?) perspective.27 Along similar lines, as Friedhelm Schmidt-­Welle argues in an essay on B. Traven (the German-­born author who wrote most prolifically about Mexico in the early twentieth century), a paternalistic vision of Mexico’s indigenous communities hardly was an exclusive factor in the writings of European refugees. Such a vision also prevails in the work of indigenista authors and the work of the most famous muralists, among them Seghers’s greatly admired Diego Rivera. 28 Thus, when indigenous subjects appear in the refugees’ writings, they are part of intricate constructions in which pre-­existing notions of the Mexican landscape and its people coexist with reflections about the places that the displaced were forced to leave behind. These are depictions of a revolutionary and artistic ideal, painted on a landscape that while not completely empty, still was empty enough so that it could provide the displaced with the necessary room to be filled with what they expected and hoped to find in the New World. Breton’s notion of Mexico as the “the surrealist place par excellence” comes to mind again.29 For Breton, the country became “a kind of Rorschach image

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in which the European surrealists revealed more about themselves than about the object of their fascination.”30 A few years before Breton first visited Mexico, another French writer, Antonin Artaud, also spent time in Mexico and the works that he and Breton produced about the country reflect more a turn inward than a look outward, or, as Melanie Nicholson puts it, “The image of Mexico recorded in these texts is almost invariably that of a palimpsest, in which the writing visible just below the surface reveals an image not of the exotic other, but of the self.”31 Rewald’s and Seghers’s yearning for Mexico may share similarities with what the French surrealists produced; however, Artaud’s and Breton’s journeys were voluntary trips from which they returned home without having endured traumatic and permanent losses. Seghers’s perspective on Mexico may include certain surreal elements, yet what becomes more salient is that, for her, Mexico also functions as a counterpart to a decayed Europe.32 Mauricio Tenorio-­ Trillo’s notion of the “Brown Atlantis” surfaces in Seghers’s and in Rewald’s writing, as though it were a lost paradise.33 In I Speak of the City Tenorio-­Trillo argues that “the idea of ‘Mexico’ belongs to a series of well-­known tropes produced and consumed domestically and internationally.” With “Brown Atlantis,” he refers to “the creation of the idea of Mexico, by foreigners and Mexicans alike between circa 1870 and 1940.” The search for the “Brown Atlantis,” is a “modern metaphor of atemporal race, endless community and redemptory violence.” 34 It is worth noting here that the majority of texts that Tenorio-­Trillo studies appeared, as did Rewald’s text, before 1940. Yet in the writings of European refugees in Mexico, the traces of the Brown Atlantis remain apparent. These traces become particularly visible when the works narrate a search or a quest for an authenticity that was to be found not in the city but in rural landscapes and communities that were perceived to be untouched, pure, different, and, in a way, an answer to everything that was wrong with the world the refugees had been forced to leave behind. Race is an integral part of the Brown Atlantis, since its racial mark—­ its brownness—­is what allows it to become “a new Atlantis of radical political and aesthetic hopes against encroaching modernity.”35 Race, of course, lies at the core of the contradictions of the Brown Atlantis, and artistic, political, and intellectual elites, in Mexico and abroad, are the

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ones defining and naming appropriate levels of racial difference. Yet the displaced writers often did not pick up on the contradictions that artists like Rivera embody. Rivera, writes Tenorio-­Trillo, “used the opposition to the city and its un-­Mexican intellectuals to make himself—­a man who lived in Paris and Mexico City—­the real Mexican artist.”36 For Seghers, Rivera certainly was the “real Mexican artist” and a practitioner of an art form that was specifically Mexican.37 Yet in “Die gemalte Zeit” Seghers considers the murals that so impress her in relation to what she left behind in Europe. In Mexico it is possible, writes Seghers, to observe how a certain political process in which “ein Volk” (a people) becomes “ein Staat” (a state). For Seghers, Mexico is a place where everything still is in a state of becoming.38 Arguably, one could point out that a main contradiction in Seghers’s essay is the fact that Bismarck was only able to unify what would become the German Reich sixty-­one years after Mexico became an independent state. Seghers represents muralism as an art form that functions as more than an alternative to an “old world,” implying that, in Mexico, the relationship between artist and subject, and even between form and content, is real and instinctual—­something that has long been absent from the “old world.” Seghers writes about the Mexican people, asserting that, despite large rates of illiteracy, their “deep artistic gifts, [. . .] understanding of shapes and colors, [. . .] unbroken instinct to express this life in ways that are not mere thoughts frozen into letters, [. . .] understanding of human nature [. . .] become almost painfully evident when one is back in the ‘old world,’ where it seems that all of that has been extinguished in specific individuals or exchanged with the alphabet.”39 Seghers sees a relationship between the artist and his representations that is of an essentially different nature than the creations in the “old world.” Her description, however, does not account for the fact that artists like Rivera were not just born as quintessentially Mexican artists. The artists themselves and their creations on canvas or the walls of a public building resulted from a process that included, as Tenorio-­Trillo reminds us, spending a significant amount of time in that same “old world,” or at least in the less authentic Mexico City. In addition to the “Brown Atlantis,” another factor shaped the longings for Mexico that comes across in texts written in German before, during, and after World War II: “Indianthusiasm,” that is “a yearning

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for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a supposed Indian essence.40 The exiled writers’ depictions of Mexico’s indigenous communities often end up being romantic visions of the landscape and of a benevolent native other, visions that frequently bear little or no relationship to Mexico and/or Mexicans and are instead transposed from beliefs and tropes about the “Indians” of a dreamed up Wild West. Hartmut Lutz coined the term “Indianthusiasm” to elucidate the ways in which a passion for all things Indian (or, rather, all things perceived to be Indian) coexists with Germany’s complicated racial history in the twentieth century. While these earlier images stem from narratives about the United States, they also shape perceptions of Mexico and of the Americas as a whole; interestingly, they tend to be the creations of authors, pulp and otherwise, who never set foot in Mexico.41 The most prominent of these authors is Karl May (1842–­1912), who was born outside Dresden and to this day remains one of Germany’s best-­selling writers. May’s most famous novels narrate the adventures of Winnetou, a noble Apache prince, and Old Shatterhand, in Spitzer’s vocabulary, “a fascinating mélange of Teutonic knight and pulp-­novel cowboy hero” as well as May’s fictive alter-­ego.42 It is worth noting that May wrote these novels as though they were travel narratives (hence the alter ego). May not only created fictions about the Wild West or about what he and his readers expected the Wild West to be, he published several additional pulp novels set in South America [Das Vermächtnis des Inka (1892); In den Kordilleren (1894); Am Rio de la Plata (1894)]. He also published the five colportage novels that form the “Waldröschen” series, released between 1884 and 1888 under the pseudonym Capitain Ramon Diaz de la Escosura.43 The novels take place in Mexico, and their plots are loosely based on events evolving during Maximilian’s reign in Mexico. As Egon Erwin Kisch notes in “Karl May, Mexiko, and the Nazis,” an essay published in Freies Deutschland in 1942, the novels were written in the aftermath of the war of 1870–­1871, which led to negative depiction of the French intervention in Mexico and enthusiastic support for Benito Juárez. What made this narrative pass the requirements of literature acceptable to the Nazis was a depiction of Mexico as a country that had severed all ties with the Anglophone world. Only a racially marked, pure and “good Indio,” who would submit to Nazi and

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fascist supervision, was thinkable. As Kisch puts it, “They support the good Indio, but only under fascist, Nazi guidance.”44 Given how large Karl May’s readership was (and is), it is no surprise that for most readers in Europe, the Americas became an imaginary geography, a landscape expanding North, and South, East, and West.45 Spitzer remembers that much of what the refugees expected to find in Bolivia came from Karl May’s novels set in South America. Yet the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand also shaped the refugees’ expectations of the new world. The preconceptions of indigenous peoples were thus “influenced by this captivating author,” who, as Spitzer reminds us, was Hitler’s favorite novelist, a fact that the writers who invoke May’s novels when describing their expectations about and perceptions of Mexico may or may not have known.46 As Spitzer remembers, May’s work influenced the expectations of fugitives on their way to South America, and even though Rewald (like May) never made it to the Americas, May’s heroes and May’s imaginary worlds also haunt her 1934 novel about statelessness.

A Boy from Mexico Der Junge aus Mexiko takes place, for the most part, in a small, unnamed German town. Janko, the boy from Mexico, appears one day as a new student in the fourth grade of the local public school. He has come from Mexico via the United States, where he was born. Janko’s mother took him to Mexico when he was a young child. When she died shortly afterward, he was left in the care of her relatives in Mexico. All he knows about his father is a shared last name, Dubirof. Janko is stateless, as he has neither US nor Mexican citizenship when he arrives in Germany. The widow of the former principal of the school has been named Janko’s temporary guardian. Even though some of the German characters reject Janko because of his mysterious origin and his exotic appearance (or, to state it differently, because of the ways in which the character is racialized), the steadfast and noble child quickly wins over the other boys and his progressive-­minded teacher, Larsen. In this sense, the book echoes certain elements of the Mexican post-­revolutionary state and of Spain’s Second Republic. These elements are, specifically, the primacy of a secular education and robust state support of literacy campaigns.47

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It is not possible, however, for Janko to stay in Germany: both Mexico and the United States want to claim the boy, as he has become a symbol for what both nations purport to rightfully own in a struggle that has nothing do with the boy’s well-­being and everything to do with international competition over natural resources. Facing this predicament in addition to an unfortunate incident at school, Janko flees back to Mexico, enters the country clandestinely, and eventually becomes a rural teacher. Janko’s fate is revealed in the book’s last chapter in the form of a letter that a now adult Janko writes to his mentor and role model, the teacher Larsen. The fact that Rewald tells a story of statelessness for young adult audiences set in a distant and exotic setting is already remarked upon in a review (from 1935) that highlights the “longing for faraway countries, for stories about Indians, bonfires, and exotic nights in the jungles.”48 A common element in Rewald’s writing are the important and often idealized educators, who become the children’s and adolescents’ strongest allies, especially those who support the young people’s autonomy and creativity.49 With Janko, Rewald exposes her readers to the problems of exile and statelessness; his resourcefulness and grit also conjure Hugo de St. Victor’s statement, quoted in chapter 6, regarding the exiled man: “He is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land.”50 Rewald depicts exile as a difficult yet ultimately positive and productive experience for her young audiences.51 What distinguishes Rewald’s text from countless other accounts of exile (and not just from that period) is that Janko not only is a child, his Mexican identity marks him as a racialized but at the time attractive and admirable other—­picture a younger, more progressive, and Mexican Winnetou. Judging the book by its original cover (or, more concretely, by the illustration on the cover) already provides ample evidence for the kind of character Janko was imagined to be. Paul Urban, a young graphic artist from Munich who was forced to flee Germany after 1933, created the cover art for the 1934 novel, which was also used for the 2007 edition.52 The barefooted “boy from Mexico” wears white cotton clothes, a kerchief, and a charro hat—­attire that makes Janko a conspicuous product of the Brown Atlantis. In the novel, by contrast, Janko is never described as wearing a hat. And not his bare feet, but exotic-­looking

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sandals surprise his German classmates early in the novel. The inspiration for Urban’s cover art may possibly come from Rivera’s portrait of Zapata, possibly from the work of German-­born artist Winold Reiss, which includes a portrait of “Zapatista Soldiers” (1920) (figure 9).53

The original cover of Ruth Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko, designed by Paul Urban.

FIGU R E 9.

Some of the factors that may explain the esthetic of Urban’s illustrations are the limited images of Mexico that circulated in Europe between the wars, as these primarily reached the other side of the Atlantic in the form of chronicles of the Revolution or travel narratives that tend to center on rural rather than urban Mexico. Indeed, only one among many travel accounts that circulated in the United States and Europe (by one Olive Percival) dealt specifically with Mexico City. 54 Thus, it is likely

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that the books from and about Mexico that Rewald and Urban may have consulted contain a series of tropes that included “the encounter with colonial buildings; bullfights, cargadores, naked children, women peddlers; and all, of course, refusing to admit Mexico City.”55 Especially in widely published travel accounts from the early twentieth century, the image of Mexico as exotic and (mostly) indigenous comes across in “fixed narrative tropes” of a premodern, exotic, slightly dangerous, preternatural word.56 By 1934, B. Traven had published The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1927), The Bridge in the Jungle (1929), The Carreta (1931), Government (1931), and March to the Montería (1933). Given the popularity of his novels in Germany, it is likely that his accounts may have shaped the vision of Mexico that comes across in Der Junge aus Mexiko, supported by Urban’s illustrations. Janko’s classmates’ perception of the boy from Mexico fits remarkably well in Traven’s Mexico, where the country and, specifically, its 1910 Revolution, represent an alternative to truncated hopes for social change in Europe.57 Rewald describes the boy as wearing “a white shirt, black velvet pants, and strange, light-­yellow sandals.”58 Urban’s illustrations portray Janko dressed in the same simple cotton clothing (reminiscent of the white cotton clothes that in Mexico were associated with indigenous subjects) he wears in the cover image. A few of the illustrations in the book, however, include more urban images: a (still barefoot) boy selling a newspaper and a few scenes taking place in the small German town (22). Two additional illustrations merit further analysis. The first one accompanies Janko’s narration of what happened to him after he escaped the hacienda of his relatives in the Mexican countryside. He gets lost and is forced to spend the night outdoors. Even though Rewald writes that the boy falls asleep under a tree, the illustration shows the boy, again with his charro hat, sleeping underneath the probably more expected cactus. The scenes of his nightmares (giant snakes, enormous insects, and other monsters) appear sketched around the cactus (figure 10). In the morning three individuals surround a puzzled Janko; they are, according to the text, “three Indians, carrying clay pots on their heads” (81). Urban’s sketch includes two indigenous-­looking men as well as a third one wearing the garb of a revolutionary soldier and carrying a weapon, a figure certainly comparable to depictions of soldiers common

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FIGU R E 10. One of Paul Urban’s illustrations for Ruth Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko, 78.

in muralist art. The book’s last image accompanies the letter that Janko writes to his teacher, Herr Larsen, six years after the former left Germany. After arriving in Jalisco (in quite a roundabout fashion), Janko decides to become a teacher of indigenous children, emphasizing again the importance of education and literacy as a force for social change: “And I remembered the old Indios at the Hacienda, who after working twelve-­hour days still went to night school. This country needed teachers” (119). The image that illustrates the letter again includes preexisting tropes: a grown Janko, still wearing the same white cotton clothes and the hat, rests his back against the school building. The cactus is no longer guarding his sleep but is still pictured right next to him, and through the window of the rural school we see gleeful youngsters. These are

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supposed to be indigenous children, and Janko lives among them, as he proudly states: “I live only among the Indians, the best people I know” (119) (figure 11). The last lines in Rewald’s novel hardly represent the first time that the term Indianer appears in the text. Rewald’s use of “Indianer” is ambiguous and only sometimes coincides with what other authors write about indigenous cultures in Mexico. Janko is described as “strange,” “adventurous,” stemming from a world of mysteries and unknown experiences, “exotic,” or “extraordinary”; the other children and most of the teachers refer to him as “Indianer” throughout the text. Yet in his own accounts of his life before his arrival in Germany, Janko differentiates between “Mexikaner” and “Indianer,” indicating that the latter have not (yet) been integrated into the modern Mexican state. Moreover, while Janko consistently differentiates himself from the indigenous, subaltern populations he aims to integrate into the state via literacy and education, the other boys regularly call him “Indianer.”

Paul Urban’s illustration for the final page of Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko, 119.

FIGU R E 11.

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Janko is not only identified as a Mexican and as an “Indianer”; the identity of the stateless boy also is racially ambiguous, even malleable. While for the children and for some of the teachers he is an “Indianer,” once he is back in Mexico, he becomes the educated and unambiguously white teacher who will provide the indigenous, rural population with the path to integration in a modern state. Yet this hardly is the sole role he performs. Earlier in the novel, the other boys immediately connect Janko with depictions of imagined Indians coming from films with Douglas Fairbanks (14). For the boys, Janko’s origins blend with exotic depictions familiar to the children via adventure novels or the silver screen. Yet the youngsters cannot decide whether Janko looks more like the quintessential Indian or like the quintessential cowboy, as one particularly contradictory statement suggests. It is important to point out here that the boys use “Indianer” to refer to those they perceive to be Native American from the United States—­that is, to dreamed-­up characters springing to life on the pages of May’s novels or on Hollywood’s screens. One boy therefore wonders “whether the redskins still scalp the whites? I must ask the Indian. He looks like a cowboy” (14). Eventually the boy who will become Janko’s closest friend and confidant attempts to explain his origins, creating a curious hodgepodge of historical glimpses across North, Central, and South America. The boy even includes a racially charged comment about African Americans, who, unlike the proud Indians, “allowed” themselves to be enslaved: This one must tell us how the Indians really are like. I don’t believe that they still wear colorful feathers or that they live in tents. That’s for sure very different now. They used to have large realms, ruled by sun kings. They lived in giant palaces. I’ve read about that in a book about Ferdinand Cortez, who conquered Mexico for the Spanish. They had their own calendar, and they knew more about the stars in the sky than the whites knew back then. But they were unable to defend themselves from the whites. I think that the Indians are very proud. Unlike the Blacks, they refused to become slaves. 59

At this point Rewald does not provide more historical or geographical accuracy. Yet an earlier reference to Karl May suggests that, while she relies on his characters as familiar figures for her readership, the implica-

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tion is that Janko’s world is not Winnetou’s. When Janko tells how three “Indios” found him after he escaped from his family’s hacienda, the other boys ask him what language the men were speaking, to which he replies, “Indianisch” (Indian, or, perhaps more accurately “Indianese”), and he even mentions having learned that language, before eventually forgetting it again, reducing the diversity of indigenous languages to just one, nonexistent language. Janko’s story sparks the boys’ curiosity, who inquire again whether the Indians still scalp the whites, to which Janko replies nonchalantly that “things at home are not like in a Karl May novel. First, that happened a hundred years ago, when the Indians were being chased, and second, that was in North America. At home in Mexico, whites and Indians weren’t enemies. The Indians are as Mexican as the whites. We just call the whites Mexicans to differentiate them, but that’s not very clear. And once they have learned to read and write, then there will no longer be a difference. The Indians even are officers and ministers.”60 The direct reference to May underscores what has been evident throughout the text. Depictions of the noble savage that May popularized in the late nineteenth century circulate in the novel, acquiring both positive and negative connotations. Rewald’s choice to show the struggles of a stateless youth by telling the story of a Mexican boy, ambiguously identified as “Indianer” and as “Cowboy,” is rather understandable: he is figure that, for the generation that includes her, Spitzer, and many other German-­ speaking refugees, was as familiar and appealing as a boy-­wizard or a feisty girl with a penchant for overthrowing oppressive totalitarian regimes with a bow and arrow are for contemporary audiences. Even though Janko states that the world he comes from is not (or, perhaps, is no longer) comparable to Karl May’s, the enduring appeal of the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand explains why Rewald turned to a boy a from Mexico to make the experience of exile and statelessness attractive for her young audiences. When Janko becomes an “Indianer,” in the other boys’ eyes, he is as alluring as May’s Apache prince, as he shares his sense of honor, steadfastness, grit, honesty, and courage. Also note that, according to the boy, the events in May’s novels actually took place—­albeit a hundred years ago. The fact that Janko’s bonhomie and courage make him comparable to Winnetou and Old Shatterhand suggests that Rewald, to write what

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ultimately is an optimistic and socially conscious novel (as most of her novels are), takes advantage of narrative tropes that were already familiar to and popular with Europe’s youth. Janko becomes a role model not only for the other German boys, but also for all children who had to endure displacement and exile, as Rewald tells a story about tolerance, camaraderie, and grit. She also constructs Janko with a series of traits that would be recognizable for audiences in Europe between the wars: the traits associated with the “Indianer” of the Americas—­in other words, an “enthusiasm for things Indian” that predated and outlasted Karl May’s fictions by over a hundred years—­[and] has particularly flourished in German lands.61 In Der Junge aus Mexiko Rewald wrote an antifascist novel, narrating the experience of statelessness for young audiences, but in the process she fell back on “Indianthusiastic” tropes. Rewald’s text, however, hardly is the only one in which such contradictions are manifest. Hartmut Lutz, who has studied the connections between “Indianthusiasm” and antisemitism, goes a step further by arguing that the “the romantic infatuation with North American Indians and annihilatory antisemitism really are flipsides of the same coin.”62 As Kisch points out in his above-­ mentioned 1942 essay, Hitler himself was an admirer of May’s Winnetou, whom he saw as an excellent military tactician and role model for German youth. Indeed, May’s books were used to “propagate Nazi ideals like Führerkult (cult of the Führer/leadership), Rassenlehre (race theory), and Wehrertüchtigung (fostering of military fitness).”63 Rewald’s construction of Janko takes advantage of preexisting notions of certain fantasies and expectations about the Americas. Janko, on the one hand, is stateless, but on the other hand, he hails from the United States and from Mexico; his Mexicanness is not only exotic; it also makes it possible to displace the story a bit from May’s imagined Western universe, without displacing it too much. The relationship that writers like Rewald, Duby, or Kisch had with the imaginary worlds of Indianthusiasm is complex: they neither fully endorse its models nor condemn them. In the novel, the struggle over Janko Dubirof is not over the minor’s well-­being, but a struggle between Mexico and the United States over natural resources. Der Junge aus Mexiko, however ends in an uplifting

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manner: even though the boy cannot stay in Germany with his friends and those who supported him, he finds his way back to Mexico, back to a place and a profession where his work is appreciated and meaningful. Moreover, Janko is a racially ambiguous character who, at the end, fits the narrative of Mexican indigenista ideology in the 1930s. He is sufficiently noble and not too savage; he is an idealized representation, a figure projecting hope and steadfastness for young readers who were growing up in a hopeless world as fascism overran Europe. Rewald’s own daughter, Anja, however, never got to grow up, making her presence in the Children in Exile exhibit sponsored by the Akademie der Künste ghostly and uncanny. Rewald wrote her book to help children understand what statelessness means, and yet her daughter’s fate prevented her from ever articulating her own understanding of that notion, or even from wondering what her mother’s yearning for Mexico could mean. Pierre and Ruth, Seghers’s and Radványi’s children, are featured in the exhibit, and so their stories were shared with German schoolchildren in 2016, many of whom were refugees or children of refugees themselves. The many absences and presences in that exhibit move beyond the hopeful and nostalgic ways in which writers yearned for Mexico, before, during, and after World War II.

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Magical Zapatistas: Gertrude Duby

I t i s t e m p t i n g t o s p e c ul a t e what a “beautiful friendship” between Rewald and Seghers would have been like, had Rewald been able to escape from Europe. Could they ever have become as close as Seghers and Porset were? Would the shared experiences of being female Jewish writers as well as mothers forced to flee with their children brought them close? Given that the answers to these questions must remain unknown, it may make more sense to just stick to the ways in which the affinities between the women come alive in their written work. There were, of course, other women who wrote about Mexico and produced works in which pre-­existing tropes about Mexico alternate with a more nuanced understanding of the country, its history, and its people. One of these women was Gertrude Duby (map 6). Even though Duby and Seghers moved in the same circles in Mexico City (Duby arrived in 1940, Seghers in 1941), their respective relationships with the country would eventually be very different. By the time Seghers returned to Berlin in 1947, where she would yearn for a “Mexican sector,” Duby had already settled in the Southern state of Chiapas. Seghers is known, first and foremost, for her novels and short stories, while Duby never wrote fiction. She published essays and journalistic articles, and she later became a photographer and an activist. In her New York Times obituary, she is described as a “sociologist and photographer who spent five decades documenting the Mayan cultures of southern Mexico.” She was also a “journalist, anthropologist, and explorer.” Note that Duby was an autodidact: she never studied sociology or anthropology, but the fact that she was a European woman who ended up writing about marginalized and indigenous populations somehow turned her work into ethnography.1 Her life was as closely interlinked with San Cristóbal de las Casas, her adopted home, as Seghers’s was with East Berlin. 169

It is unclear whether Duby crossed by land or by sea, traveling from New York to Veracruz via Havana, but a land crossing was more likely in 1940.

M A P 6.

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Seghers’s and Duby’s worlds intersected for a few years in Mexico City, and even though the works they produced about these years were very different, they do share common themes, among them a fascination with the eyes of Emiliano Zapata (1879–­1919), the historic leader of the Mexican Revolution. The fixation on the revolutionary’s eyes prefigures the way in which, almost half a decade later, Sandra Cisneros would write a story titled “Eyes of Zapata,” included in her collection Woman Hollering Creek. 2 As its title indicates, the agrarian leader’s eyes are a significant element in the story: “Your eyes. Ay! Your eyes,” writes Cisneros. “Eyes with teeth. Terrible as obsidian. The days to come in those eyes, el porvenir, the days gone by.”3 Yet despite numerous references to these dark and beguiling eyes, the short story is not about Emiliano Zapata, but about Inés Alfaro, the mother of one of the general’s sons. In this way Cisneros creates an alternative, feminist version of Za­pata’s history and of Mexico’s history, on both sides of the border. “Eyes of Zapata,” argues Barbara Brinson Curiel, “provides readers with an alternative Mexican national narrative which challenges and rewrites the Chicano nationalist origin story.”4 Seghers and Duby wrote about Zapata and about his eyes years earlier, and so both authors, in a sense, rewrote origin stories. In this case, the story is about what Mexico, its history, and its people meant for displaced writers like Seghers or Duby. In Mexico, and also beyond its borders, Emiliano Zapata has always had a “mythical twin”—­namely, “the way in which memories of him have developed within Mexico’s political cultures since his death.”5 The mythification of Zapata is a heterogeneous phenomenon; Zapata often becomes a “shorthand for his movement, simplifying its meaning, both for its members and for outsiders, by giving it a single human face.”6 In other words, Zapata’s “mythical twin” has always had a range of meanings for various constituencies in Mexico, despite the ongoing efforts of different governments to control the values attached to the historical and iconic figure.7 The multiple and often contradictory meanings of Emiliano Zapata continue to evolve, particularly in relation to indigeneity.8 In Duby’s and Seghers’s texts about Zapata, the general’s eyes are as enthralling as in Cisneros’s piece, and they also represent “el porvenir” [the future] and the days gone by; what is to come and what already

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happened. However, the origin story in these earlier texts is of a different nature: Zapata’s eyes stand for the ways in which these antifascist writers make meaning of the worlds they expected to find and what they actually encountered in Mexico in the early 1940s. Their hopes for and fears about the future—­Mexico’s and the world’s—­can be found in their writing about Zapata. As discussed in the preceding chapter, Seghers wrote several essays about her time in Mexico. These include her piece on Dolores del Río as well as two essays about the Mexican muralist movement, “Diego Rivera” and “Die gemalte Zeit: Mexikanische Fresken.”9 In the latter, written in German and for German audiences, Seghers argues that Mexican muralism has the potential to make the representation and subsequent integration of disenfranchised peasants and indigenous populations in the Mexican state, modernity, and mainstream culture a reality. She also writes about Zapata—­specifically, about the ways in which Rivera portrays him, which then, for Seghers, become an example of the above-­mentioned processes of integration. Seghers describes Rivera’s rendering of Zapata in the well-­known mural at the Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca, where the general is shown dressed in white cotton clothes, standing next to an equally white stallion, a horse that Zapata never owned.10 Seghers portrays a very specific identification process between a peasant who is contemplating Rivera’s painting and Zapata himself. “You see a peasant in white cotton clothes, just like him, who looks at it and smiles. He holds on tightly to his horse, a horse as white as he is, with wide open eyes, that shine more than his own. It is worth looking at the painting a little longer; it also is worth remaining silent, as it is not necessary to explain anything to one’s wife, and only smile instead.”11 The peasant’s wife appears in a complicated subordinate position. On the one hand, the man does not need to explain anything; a smile suffices to reveal a connection, equally intimate and intellectual, between him and the woman. On the other hand, the notion that an explanation for the woman would even be necessary reinforces the idea that she remains excluded from the kind of recognition taking place between the peasant and Zapata. Thus, Seghers’s vision of the muralist movement put forth in this brief essay leaves the gendered baggage of Rivera’s work, and even of Mexican muralism, unquestioned.12

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In her essay Seghers states that Zapata also exchanged letters with Lenin—­which probably did not happen. Instead, what may have led Seghers to suggest that such a correspondence existed was an article that Duby published in Freies Deutschland in 1942, “Bauerngeneral Zapata und das neue Russland” [“Peasant General Zapata and the new Russia”].13 Since Seghers was on the publication’s editorial board, she was familiar with Duby’s piece and with the content of a missive from Zapata that opens Duby’s text. In the letter, Zapata states that the liberation of the worker would not be not possible without the liberation of the peasant.14 Yet Zapata wrote that letter not to Lenin, but to a fellow Zapatista, Jenaro Amezcua, in February of 1941.15 What may have made Seghers write about a correspondence between Zapata and Lenin were the connections between the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution detailed in the letter, connections that were important for Duby’s understanding of the Mexican Revolution and its leaders in Mexico.16 She would later address these in her encounters with the Zapatista veterans she interviewed in the states of Morelos and Guerrero between 1942 and 1943. Alternatively, Seghers may have been aware that Zapata and Lenin never did exchange correspondence, yet she might have seen that establishing a link between the two leaders would be an effective way for Seghers to show how relevant Mexican muralist art could be for her readers in the soon-­to-­be-­formed Democratic Republic of Germany. Seghers’s comment on the correspondence between Lenin and Zapata was neither casual nor opportunistic; indeed, it was a rather coherent gesture. Seghers hardly was the sole foreign writer who praised the ways in which muralism mirrored or was expected to mirror the realities of Mexican life and history.17 The Mexican Revolution, the muralist movement, and Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency (1934–­1940) are factors that, for European audiences, contributed to a shared utopian imagining of Mexico as a counterpart to a falling or already fallen Europe.18 The intense identification narrated in Seghers’s “Die gemalte Zeit” corresponds to the constructions of indigenous cultures and of Emilio Zapata that not only were popular beyond Mexico’s borders, but that also circulated widely in mainstream post-­revolutionary discourse in Mexico—­and that continue to do so decades later.19 The contradictions of muralism—­namely,

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its dual nature as revolutionary and as official art, famously espoused by Octavio Paz’s classic 1950 essay El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], are of no real concern to Seghers here. 20 In Rivera’s painting (as discussed in Seghers’s essay), the general’s attire matches what was considered “typical” for the indigenous populations in Mexico in a period when the idealized and romantic view of the pre-­Hispanic world that came across in Mexican post-­revolutionary, nationalist culture clashed with the harsh realities of indigenous lives. 21 In the 1920s and ‘30s, Zapata became a “an Indian, at least from the perspective of urban Mexico, wearing white to reflect his purity and, in particular, the purity of his relationship with the campesinos and Indians of Mexico.”22 Depictions of indigenous cultures provided the post-­ revolutionary Mexican state its cultural and national specificity, while the “actual” indigenous people arriving in the cities were marginalized and living in poverty. 23 Within mainstream post-­revolutionary culture, indigenous subjects become synonymous with peasants; meanwhile the actual and still disenfranchised indigenous people in urban Mexico remained invisible. Yet this does not seem to be what Seghers and Duby were observing. In Duby’s 1943 essay Emiliano Zapata becomes “the slender, swarthy peasant general with eyes black as coal.”24 Three years later, Duby published an article, simultaneously in Spanish and German, based on the interviews she conducted with women who fought with the Zapatistas during the Revolution.25 The article represents a very small segment of a larger body of work, as most of the chronicles of the author’s conversations with the women she interviewed remain unpublished.26 The Spanish version of the 1945 article, entitled “Zapata no ha muerto,” [“Zapata Has not Died”] includes photos that Duby herself took with a recently acquired camera. These images were her first venture into photography—­ another skill that the gifted and resourceful Duby learned by doing.

Duby’s Origin Story Duby was an outlier. Born to a protestant family in a small town in the Swiss Alps, Gertrude Loertscher (she became Gertrude Duby when she married her first husband, Kurt Duby, in 1925) has a story that differs in

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many ways from those of Jewish refugees like Aub, Rewald, Seghers, or Kisch. While crossing borders was never easy in this period, the Swiss embassy made Duby’s journey to the Americas (via Genoa) less meandering and dangerous than the crossings of many others. Considering that for her flight from Europe Duby could count on at least some consular support makes the term refugee a misnomer for her experience of displacement. By definition, refugees cannot turn to their own diplomatic representatives; they require help from grassroots organizations (like the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee, an organization that Duby also supported during a short stint in the United States) or representatives from nations that may provide asylum. Note, however, that Swiss neutrality did not prevent Duby from being imprisoned in France. Politically active since she settled in Germany in the 1920s, Duby was arrested in Paris in 1939, first incarcerated in the “Petite Roquette” prison, and eventually taken to the internment camp of Rieucros. She shared the camp experience with other “undesirable” women, among them Spanish refugees; Roma women; Czech writer Lenka Reinerová, who was close to both Seghers and Kisch, and who would also settle Mexico; actress Steffi Spira, another refugee in Mexico; and German resistance fighter Dora Schaul (née Davidson), who would eventually marry the widowed Hans Schaul. 27 Dora Schaul was responsible for some, if not all, of the sketches of women incarcerated at Rieucros that today can be found in the Gertrude Duby archive at the Asociación Cultural Casa Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas. However, not all drawings are signed, and so it is possible that Duby herself may have drawn some of the sketches, making them her most intimate autobiographical storytelling.28 Sketching was a common activity for the incarcerated women and not just in Rieucros.29 Lili Andrieux’s sketches of the Gurs concentration, where Hannah Arendt was confined, may be technically more sophisticated than those available today at the Na Bolom archive, but they all reflect the same world and the same raw emotions.30 The sketches tell a story about confinement that is intimate and harrowing: nowhere else does Duby look as vulnerable and as lonely. The sketches depict quotidian scenes in the camp against the backdrop of what is usually a somber landscape. In

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one of them, a woman, who may or may not be Duby, is seen behind a barbed-­wire fence, holding a blue handkerchief that matches her shirt. The fact that this image is captioned, in English, “How Long Behind Barbed Wire” makes is possible that this was a later drawing, based on one with the same figure, yet in different colors and captioned “Frohe Ostern” [Happy Easter] (figure 12).

“How Long Behind Barbed Wire?” Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente 24.16. Dibujos del campo de concentración. 1940.

FIGU R E 12.

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The atmosphere is even more bleak in the only drawing done in pencil: here a woman looks tormented in her bed; she is alone, and the caption reads: “Gertrude’s Angsttraum, Weihnacht, 1940” [Gertrude’s Nightmare, Christmas 1940]. Unlike most of the other sketches, this one is unsigned, so it is possible that Duby may have been responsible for it (figure 13).

FIGU R E 13. “Gertrude’s Angsttraum, Weihnacht, 1940” [Gertrude’s Nightmare, Christmas 1940], Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente 24.16. Dibujos del campo de concentración 1940.

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Other renderings of the incarcerated women, like one captioned “Five o’ clock Tea,” are Schaul’s work. Here Duby may be the woman who is isolated and ill on her bed, and not enjoying the reprieve that the company of others can offer. Some of her biographers suggest that that Duby kept to herself during the months she was at the camp—­at least most of the time.31 Yet the fact that these drawings made it to Mexico (in Duby’s luggage, perhaps?) suggest the possibility of a (beautiful) friendship between the two women (figure 14).

Dora Schaul, “Five o’ clock Tea,” Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente 24.16. Dibujos del campo de concentración. 1940.

FIGU R E 14.

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No wonder then that the mood of the images changes in the one that depicts Duby’s liberation, captioned in French: “Dessin du Depart.” The landscape is sunny and colorful, and a relieved looking woman, probably Duby, is now carrying a suitcase (figure 15).32 What that last image does not show is that the Swiss consulate probably was responsible for Duby’s liberation in March of 1940. She departed for the Americas, via Genoa, and made it to New York, where she collaborated with the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee. It was during the

Dora Schaul, “Dessin du Depart,” Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente 24.16. Dibujos del campo de concentración. 1940.

FIGU R E 15.

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transatlantic journey that Duby had a chance to read Jacques Sous­telle’s Mexique, terre indienne [Mexico, Indian Land] a book that ended up shaping what she did and did not expect to encounter in Mexico, and one that may have helped to give Duby the bona fides to be considered an anthropologist.33 Zapata, for example, is described in Soustelle’s text as: “The Indian of Anenecuilco, the only revolutionary leader in Mexico who has understood the peasant situation.”34 Yet Soustelle was not the sole influence on Duby: her enthusiasm for Karl May’s books also shaped her early perception of or, at least, her wishful thinking about Mexico.35 Once in Mexico, Duby needed to secure a source of income and quickly found employment as a social worker at the Ministry of Labor. In the beginning, her responsibilities included working for a government commission dedicated to the social welfare of women in the textile and tobacco industries. Eventually her responsibilities changed, and she joined state-­funded commissions that were investigating education and health care in rural Mexico.36 And so Duby came to spend ten months traveling, mainly in Morelos and Guerrero, researching the life stories of women who followed and fought with Zapata. Most of Duby’s biographers agree that her interest in Zapatista women emerged from several different sources, including her reading of Soustelle’s Mexique, terre indienne and Gildardo Magaña’s Emiliano Zapata y el agrarismo en México, as well as her frequent weekend trips to Morelos.37 Her understanding of Zapata operates in relation to the specific significance that the general attained in the 1940s in a Mexico that recognized him as a national hero, and also in relation to the visions of Zapata that came across in the work of foreign authors, including Frank Tannenbaum, Carleton Beals, and Soustelle himself.38 Duby’s curiosity about Zapatista women led to the already-­mentioned published and unpublished texts, in addition to a series of remarkable photographs that Duby took with the second-­hand Afga Standard camera that she taught herself to use.39 What also makes Duby stand out from most of the other German-­ speaking exiles in Mexico was that she did not return to Europe after the end of the war. Her legacy in contemporary Mexico, particularly her work with the Lacandón Maya, is as visible as it is tangible.40 In fact, comparing Duby’s legacy in Mexico to those of other authors will only

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lead to uneven results: there are books (especially those that were published by El Libro Libre, among them El libro negro del terror nazi and Kisch’s Entdeckungen in Mexiko), and there are photographs of, for example, Seghers on the rooftop of her house on the Avenida Industria, or of Kisch in the landscapes he described in his chronicles, or surrounded by the children of his fellow exiles. There is, of course, an archive of exile literature that continued to grow, even after some of the authors returned to Europe. Yet when it comes to visibility and local impact, the above-­mentioned items pale in comparison to Duby’s legacy in Chiapas, as it includes her writing, her photographs, her activism, as well as the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom, the “House of the Jaguar,” the home that she and her husband, anthropologist Frans Blom, purchased in 1950. Today Na Bolom is a community center, a museum, an archive, a library, a restaurant, and a museum. Na Bolom is a both a landmark and lieux de mémoire along the “Ruta Maya” in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as “an immense repository of information and knowledge which has been collected over the course of more than 40 years of interactions with various indigenous groups.”41 Indeed, visiting San Cristóbal de las Casas without hearing about Na Bolom and Duby is next to impossible. Duby also was an eccentric and passionate environmental activist and advocate for indigenous communities, yet it also is true that she and her husband had a romantic vision of the Lacandón people: “The Bloms created a new image of the Lacandón Maya as the ‘jungle’s spiritual children and guardians.’”42 Both Duby and her husband “sometimes exaggerated the Lacandones reputation as Mexico’s last unadulterated indigenous culture”—­displaying an evident tension between a romantic vision and a desire for modernization.43 Duby’s early writing in Mexico (specifically, the pieces about Zapatista women she wrote about Mexican women before 1945) reveal an intense desire to find a world that was better than the one she left behind, a world free from corruption. In these same texts Duby also underscores the need for modernization and education reform in Southern Mexico. The above-­mentioned published pieces from 1945 center on a specific woman, Buenaventura García—­referred to in the text as “Ventura”—­ whose eyes were those of Zapata: “Ventura looked at me with the eyes

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that resembled the famous eyes of the leader of the South, Miliano, as they sometimes tenderly called him.”44 Duby’s idealization of rural Mexico appears reflected in her enchantment with the physical features (black eyes, dark skin) of Zapata and also of the women she interviewed.45 The texts emphasize Zapata’s persistent presence as well as the grit and resourcefulness of Ventura. Duby narrates an adventurous tale that epitomizes the devotion to Zapata. In the local lore, the revolutionary general has not died: the sound of his horse’s hooves can be heard as Zapata rides along the villages of Morelos.46 Duby’s notes and her published articles from the period reveal a longing for the eyes of Zapata and for what they could mean to those fleeing from a burning continent. There also appears to be a certain nostalgia for a world that never existed, a world that did not differ all that much from the one the Karl May dreamed up in the nineteenth century pulp novels that a young Gertrude Loertscher (decades before becoming Gertrude Duby) once devoured. She recalls, for example, reading and dreaming about Winnetou and Old Shatterhand when she was growing up in the Swiss Alps: “We played, pretending to be Indians near a river, inspired by our reading of the then famous writer Karl May, who had fantastic stories about North American Indians, even though the author did not even know the outskirts of Berlin.”47 Duby arrived in Mexico having read far more than Karl May, of course, and yet a certain idealization that she shared with Rewald and many others still lingered for decades.

Magical Zapatistas In the articles Duby wrote not long after her arrival in Mexico, figures comparable to Rewald’s Janko appear: steadfast, courageous, and also feisty Zapatistas. In Duby’s narratives about the women, a tension emerges between an idealized and racialized indigeneity and a need for modernization and reform through education. Even in Duby’s most unpolished texts, while romantic notions of a noble savage, coming from an “Indianthusiastic” imaginary, inform her writing, she remains committed to denouncing the harsh conditions in which the women lived. Originally composed in German, the texts Duby wrote about the Zapatista women in 1942 and 1943 are sprinkled with expressions in

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Spanish, and Duby herself occasionally provides English translations. The reports that Duby completed before dedicating her work exclusively to the Lacandón Maya should be considered separate from her later ethnographic writings, yet certain notions of race, and especially indigeneity, run across her entire work. Her chronicles say more about the story that Duby, a feminist and antifascist activist, wanted to tell about these women than about their realities. As Gabriela Cano points out, “Gertrude Duby imagined Mexico as a land of social revolution, rural traditions and ancient cultures, an idealized vision shared by many other foreigners who visited Mexico, intrigued by the country’s possibilities of social emancipation, which appeared to be canceled in the Old World.”48 Emiliano Zapata, in a sense, becomes a bridge between the old world and the new, between what Duby and Seghers wanted to see and what they encountered. The women Duby describes draw their strength from a larger-­than-­life and certainly mythical Emiliano Zapata, the same Zapata, as Duby confesses in a report dated June 22, 1942, whom she not only admired, but loved.49 In that text she details a visit to Anenecuilco (Zapata’s place of birth) and describes Zapata’s ubiquitous and undeniable presence wherever she travels in the state of Morelos. Young or old, everybody seems to own a photograph of the revolutionary leader. The fact that weather and humidity have worn many of these images matters little. The blurriness of the photographs in a way only strengthens the cult of Zapata: because “for every peasant, Zapata looks exactly as the ideal that he imagines.”50 As Seghers’s remarks about Zapata’s portrait in her essay on Diego Rivera show, the peasants’ identification with Zapata captures the attention and imagination of the refugee writers—­except that in Duby’s texts a mediation via Rivera (or an artist like Rivera) is not even necessary. Instead, a blurry photo suffices. In the same document, Duby repeatedly emphasizes Zapata’s stunning eyes. She even suggests that young girls, who were actually kidnapped and forced to join the revolutionaries, joined the troops out of their own devotion to Zapata.51 In the above-­mentioned text, Duby narrates how she and her fellow travelers reach Zapata’s place of birth. There, they encounter a man named Policarpio Castro, who was married to one of Zapata’s nieces and who claims to have fought with him in the Revolution. Duby’s impres-

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sions of people and landscape alternate between concern about precarious conditions in Morelos and her admiration for Zapata. She appears to be in awe of everything about Zapata, including his physical appearance. She describes his “wonderful head,” mentions that he is “simply handsome” with his “amazing, large dark eyes”—­eyes so captivating that it is not surprising that he has four legitimate children from four different women.52 Zapata, adds Duby, recognizes all his descendants. Given that Duby had fought for women’s rights in Europe before she was forced to flee, her infatuation with Zapata may be a bit of a surprise. Yet her fascination with the revolutionary leader is consistent with the ways in which she idealized certain aspects of rural Mexico and Mexican folklore, at least in her early years in the country. Cano points out that Duby’s enchantment with Zapata is entangled with his racialized features: the black eyes and the dark skin not only make the general attractive, they also pigeonhole him in his role as the quintessential and eternal revolutionary.53 Perhaps, more than loving Zapata, Duby loved how the subjects she interviewed were devoted to Zapata. Yet the memories of the world she and others escaped were also always with her, and Duby’s chronicles show that that she consistently tried to make the individuals she interviewed in Mexico talk about fascist-­occupied Europe. In the above-­mentioned report from 1942 Duby describes how, on the way back from Anenecuilco to Cuatla, she engages in a dialogue with another local man, Juan, a friend of her guide. When Juan asks her about Europe, Russia seems to be the most familiar place for the peasant, which brings up again a possible solidarity and ideological affinity between the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Yet at that point the conversation shifts back to more local topics: the cost of rent, the upcoming harvest, conflicts over land and water, rivalries, and so forth. Before Duby bids her guide farewell, the subject of the war comes up again. She then proceeds to explain that Juan not only despises the “gringos” above all, but he also looks down on the English, while certainly favoring the Russians.54 Yet since Duby does not reproduce Juan’s direct speech, but instead summarizes the dialogue in her own words, it is difficult to differentiate between Duby’s own political preferences and her interlocutor’s ideas about the war. By contrast, when Duby writes about the Zapatista veterans Rosa Bobadilla, Ventura García,

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and Amelio Robles, she does reproduce what she presents as their own actual words, yet their voices still come to us in Duby’s renditions.

Rosa Bobadilla The text that documents Duby’s first encounter with Rosa Bobadilla, one of the Zapatista women, is dated June 4, 1942. 55 Duby admits that initially it was difficult for her to start a conversation with Bobadilla in the latter’s humble home. Eventually she and her interviewee move to the patio, where they look at photographs: Bobadilla appears in uniform, wearing the same kind of charro hat that Zapata also wore and the attire of women fighting in the revolution: “Cartridge Belt over her chest, revolver in her belt, a gun in her hand.”56 The same weapon is still in Bobadilla’s home, leaning against a wall. Bobadilla slowly opens up to Duby about her experience fighting in the revolution. Between 1911 and 1920 she led a troop of fifteen hundred men who respected and obeyed her. She explains to Duby that, as a woman, she needed to be more courageous than the men—­a rather common experience for women in combat. When Duby inquires whether the people still love Zapata, Bobadilla’s eyes shine, and she responds, “We have always loved our leader, we love him like a saint, he has given us the land.”57 Bobadilla provides Duby with a coherent story of women’s heroism, courage, and a local devotion to Zapata that also has religious connotations.58 The fact that Bobadilla learned to read and write while she was fighting in the revolution only adds to the heroic, even uplifting narrative. Yet in the same text, Duby also expresses her doubts about Bobadilla’s understanding of it all: “This woman, who is bright, knows how to read and write, with years of battle behind her, who knew everybody, officially the president of an organization, is nevertheless underdeveloped and does not know anything.”59 And while, according to Duby, Bobadilla affirms that she supports a democracy, her interviewer doubts that she knows what that means.60 Duby ends her first interview with Bobadilla by asking her what she thinks of Hitler. The Mexican woman responds: “‘What can I think of him, he is so far away, I don’t know him.’ She politely listened to my brief explanations about the Nazis but did not seem engaged. She simply does not understand.”61 Bobadilla partially satisfies Duby’s curiosity, providing her with the elements of a story the

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former wants to tell, and the latter wants to hear. Yet Duby admits that she found the coronel lacking the kind of political sophistication she expected to find. In another account, dated roughly a month after the first visit (July 9, 1942), Bobadilla’s reality disappoints Duby even more.62 Like the earlier text, this one begins in medias res, and Duby’s observations about daily life alternate with her account of the impressions of Bobadilla. Even though Duby would eventually receive much attention for her photography, the fact that Bobadilla refuses to pose for her interviewer the way Duby expects her to do (holding her weapon) is significant. In this sense, the coronel challenges the story Duby hoped to find and to tell. Bobadilla then proceeds to explain that in 1942 she is fighting a different kind of battle: “That was in those times, I was a guerrera then, but not today, today you mustn’t take such pictures, today it’s this other work.”63 The photos Duby perhaps hoped to take (probably comparable to known photos of soldaderas holding their weapons defiantly that have become iconic images) haunt Duby’s photographs and texts of the Zapatistas.64 Stated differently, in these accounts of Duby’s interviews with the Zapatistas, the expected and the unexpected meet. The “other work” to which Bobadilla refers “is a commission by the government to increase production among the woman farmers.” She then proceeds to explain her vision of the war to her Swiss-­born interviewer. Note that, in contrast to the above-­described exchange with “Juan,” here Duby lets her subject speak: “You see señorita, I have to tell you that over there where they are fighting for democracy, they also have guns in their arms and not the plough, the earth is left fallow, and we have to plant corn and sugar for them. We have to and that’s how we can help to beat the tyranny. I also want you to tell the American mothers, wives, and sisters, that this fight is necessary and that we stand on their side and will do everything for our freedom.”65 Rosa Bobadilla does more than provide Duby with an account of Zapatista heroism, as the text is also about her involvement in a struggle against inequality. Yet Duby still doubts whether Bobadilla understands what democracy means. She ends the brief text commenting on the photo of Rosa Bobadilla she actually took, in which she is not holding her gun: “She shows a severe face, although she has beautiful white teeth when smiling.”66 Yet it is in Duby’s reflection about her encounter with

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the veteran that her uncertainties again become apparent. In a separate text, also dated July of 1942, Duby expresses her misgivings after her second visit to Bobadilla’s home. Bobadilla was to take Duby to visit an indigenous community, but then changed her mind about that: “She was friendly as always, but more hesitant and suddenly she doesn’t want to take me along anymore. She says the Indios are very mistrusting and could be saying that I was a German after all.”67 In Duby’s own use of “Indios” some of the ambiguities of the term resonate. While Bobadilla self-­ identifies as “India” (“I am an India myself”), in the same text the term also defines the community that Boadilla is sheltering from Duby as “Indios.” Just like the photo of the Zapatista that Duby wanted to take and for which Bobadilla refused to pose, the “Indios” she refers to are unreachable. The veteran Zapatista remains a gatekeeper for a world that Duby cannot enter. While Duby understands Bobadilla’s caution and distance, she also expresses her frustration with the lack of modernization and progress in Mexico: “Work is linked with the greatest difficulties and as much as I love this country, as much I could often become desperate. Somehow it cancers everywhere and it requires unending work in order to really break through with real progress.”68 Duby’s writing about her encounter with Bobadilla suggests an overwhelming distance between the two women and their experience—­a distance that is far more palpable in the unpublished texts than in those that were published in the period. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that out of all the texts that she gathered in Morelos and Guerrero, the only ones that appeared in print in the 1940s were those centering on Ventura García. In both the German and the Spanish versions, García becomes a truly magical Zapatista, who fights against all odds, and whose devotion to Zapata explains (almost) everything about her.

Ventura García Dina Querido, another veteran of the revolution and a rural schoolteacher (like Rewald’s fictional Janko), was the first one to tell Duby about Ventura García, a woman who during the Revolution had served as a messenger.69 Ventura García’s life story is the main feature in “Frauen um Zapata” (Freies Deutschland, 1945), and “Zapata no ha

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muerto” (Hemisferio, la revista de América, 1945). She is also briefly mentioned in “Mujeres en armas,” a more polished piece that, while from 1945, is now available online.70 As she does in the other texts focusing on the Zapatistas, Duby attempts to relate World War II to that other war that the people from the state of Morelos were fighting against the landowners.71 Duby again writes about Zapata’s eyes and also mentions that he is not dead for the people of Morelos but very much alive in the popular imaginaries, as he was “too important to ever die.”72 Yet the article is not only about Duby’s idealization of (or even infatuation with) the general from Morelos; it also is a chronicle of the life of a character who is endowed with certain magical qualities. The article begins in medias res, when another woman, Chabela, asks García to tell Gertrudita (as the women called Duby) the “story of the poisoning.” The anecdote that García relates is an account of what happened to her after she was taken prisoner during the revolution. With her eyes full of life, even at the age of eighty-­six, she begins by telling Duby that fighting was in her blood and that her ancestors fought with Morelos and Juárez. This genealogy provides additional coherence to García’s story.73 García proceeds to explain that she was a messenger for the Zapatistas and that, once captured by her enemies, she was able to withstand torture and to continually outsmart her captors, including those trying to kill her with a poisoned cake. García relies on more than her own wit and grit; she also affirms that a divine power was what kept her alive and mostly out of prison. García, however, was eventually arrested. When her prison sentence was reduced from twelve years to eight months, Duby inquires whether this was thanks to a lawyer the Zapatistas sent for her. García replies that it was a miracle of God: “Faith had rescued me. The Blessed Mother and the Holy Child.”74 In addition to her more conventional religious faith, the spectral apparitions of her husband and son, who died in combat, end up convincing García to not give up. Released after her first arrest, García continued to work for Zapata, crossing the Mexican revolutionary landscape as a messenger and smuggler. Even Zapata’s death did not stop her: “I thought for a moment that all hope was lost, that we had been orphaned, but I soon saw that that was not right, that the General wanted us to continue fighting. I’ve already

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told you that Zapata is not dead, because even though he is dead for the entire world, he is forever emblazoned in our hearts.”75 Duby ends this essay stating that Zapata is very much alive for the communities she just visited: “For all of them, many are very poor, Zapata lives and nothing and nobody could persuade them to abandon the leader’s flag, with the motto: TIERRA Y LIBERTAD.”76 Ventura García’s story is as much about the devotion to Zapata as it is about women’s steadfastness and empowerment. However, an unpublished chronicle of a later visit to García, dated August 13, 1942, tells a slightly different story.77 While in the earlier piece García’s religiosity is mentioned, but not highlighted, in this short report it attains much more significance. The woman’s faith immediately becomes apparent from her reference to an “asunto” (affair) she needed to take care of, which opens the text. Her “asunto” was that in Mexico City she desired to “to say good-­bye to the Virgin” (in Duby’s characteristic mélange of languages, “um sich despedir de la virgen,” appears in the German version of the text). Duby also finds García reading scripture, or “historia sagrada,” translated as “sacred history.” García’s home is cluttered, not with furniture, but with bags, trunks, boxes, and packets, as well as “saint pictures all over and three holy corners. And in the main corner, a picture of the Madonna done by García’s son, now deceased. A signed photo of Zapata, burning candles, and fresh flowers can also not be missed on this shrine.”78 Unlike the published piece that ends with a note about Zapata’s undying presence, this short account is a perhaps a more realistic depiction of an eighty-­six-­year-­old woman’s life in Morelos—­more the story that actually was, rather than the story Duby hoped to find.

Amelio Robles When it comes to Amelio Robles’s life story, Duby’s narratives attain a different level of complexity. Born female, Robles eventually began wearing men’s clothes and joined the Zapatistas in 1912, identifying as male for the rest of his life.79 Duby’s unwillingness to accept Robles as a man is worth noting. Even though Duby ultimately addresses the veteran Zapatista, who has the military rank of colonel (coronel), as Amelio instead of Amelia, she ultimately refuses to accept his gender as male. In both “Frauen um Zapata” and “Zapata no ha muerto,” Duby briefly

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mentions Robles, whom at this point she still calls Amelia. She first hears of him in the town of Tuxtla (Guerrero). Here Duby constantly calls him Amelia but does point out that he wears men’s clothing. “There we chatted one night about the most famous coronel Amelia Robles, who led 200 men, an example of bravery and tenacity for all of those who had lost their courage. Today Amelia works in men’s clothes in a small ranch in Xochipala, and she is ready to reach again for her weapons, should a just cause make it necessary.”80 Duby is rather intrigued by Robles, and so she is eventually able to locate and interview him. Interestingly, Robles’s pseudonym here is said to be “La Güera,” a term that not only underlines femininity, but also would classify Robles as light-­skinned. Duby’s translation of “la Guera” as “die Hübsche,” “the pretty one,” certainly conveys a sense of the term, but also eschews the racial connotations of the expression. Be that as it may, what is more important is that Duby never stops seeing Amelio Robles as a woman: She [Rosa Bobadilla] says that that there have been many messengers, but only a few active fighters. One of them is still alive, she was known as “La Guera” (or Quera, Rosa and her grandson could not agree on the spelling of this pseudonym that means “the pretty one”). This woman is much younger, known to be very brave, but she loved drinking and some time ago she shot a man during a “pleito,” a brawl, and now is in prison in Mexico City. Her name was Amelia, her last name is unknown.81

In the earlier mentioned, more polished “Mujeres en armas,” Duby narrates in further detail the story of the coronel. She only calls him Amalio once, right at the very end of the text, referring to him as “Amalia, who now should be for me, and for everyone, the Coronel Amalio Robles.82 Yet the ensuing description, the preceding comments about Robles’s beauty, and the fact that he is also known as a La Güera call into question Robles’s male identification. “The hair is very short, a little grayish, a tall forehead, a thin nose, clear and vivid yes, and a mouth with a surprising energy. Her voice is strong, but melodic, and not masculine; her skin is delicate and very white, her movements, a bit brusque and very determined.” Duby describes Robles as a warrior who knows how to prepare a meal, and as a perfect hostess who provides her

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guests with warm and comfortable bedding. Moreover, Duby affirms that neither Robles’s attire, nor the fact that he wants to be treated as a man surprise her. Yet she still insists on referring to him as a woman. For Duby, Amelio Robles’s actions and identity are part of a woman’s struggle and not about contesting a specific gender identity. The Coronela Amalia Robles will forgive me for addressing her as a woman. Her courage, intelligence, and industriousness honor the female sex. But in a century when women remain relegated to secondary roles because of their sex, when their capacities are not taken in consideration, living in a small town far away from main roads, I understand that the Coronela Amalia Robles lives, works, and helps her people in men’s clothing and acting as though she were male.83

What seems to matter more in Duby’s encounter with Robles is that he (she, for Duby) is an exemplary woman warrior. The more Duby hears about Robles, the more she is thrilled to meet him in person, and yet (not unlike Rosa Bobadilla, who refuses to pose for the photo that the Swiss exile had hoped to take), Amelio Robles’s story ends up more complicated than the one Duby is willing to tell. Cano recognizes that Duby employs a lens shaped by first-­and second-­wave feminisms in her description of Robles: “His radical change in gender and sexual identity was not simply due to a pragmatic desire to enjoy the social advantages of men, but rather the product of a deeper, more vital desire to radically transform the female identity assigned to him at birth in order to make himself masculine in every aspect of life.”84 According to Cano then, Duby misses a key element in the stories of Amelio Robles and of all the Zapatistas. While Duby does not shy away from depicting the contradictions that mark these women’s lives, she also represents their stories as being far more coherent than their realities were. Or, as Cano puts it, Duby was “seeking an Eden of social revolution and feminist emancipation in indigenous Mexico.”85 In a sense, Duby was looking for her own transatlantic utopia, her “Brown Atlantis,” as Tenorio-­Trillo would put it. In this context, one of Duby’s lesser known but no less interesting texts stands out: a booklet that she wrote in 1946 for Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, or SEP) that was

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published as part of the Biblioteca Enciclopédica Popular series. The roughly eighty-­page text, commissioned by Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, represents an attempt to provide a clear and firm “no” to the question raised in the text’s title: “¿Hay razas inferiores?” [Do Inferior Races Exist?]. Published in the aftermath of World War II, Duby documents her essay with a bibliography that includes the Popul Vuh, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and the writings of anthropologists Franz Boas, her own partner Frans Blom, and German exile Paul Merker, among others. The result is an antiracist manifesto that still is not free from racial baggage; a story about race and racism in the post–­World War II culture that also seeks to elevate the policies of the Mexican state. 86 Mexico, in Duby’s words, has been exemplary in its struggle against racist discrimination. “Mexico, the Latin American country, has provided a great example, and its role as a cultural leader of Castilian-­speaking countries makes this even more important. It is about time that other countries, those countries that believe themselves to be more modern, but where discrimination affects the honor of the entire nation, follow that example.”87 The reference to “countries that believe themselves to be more modern” clearly is an allusion to the racially segregated United States.88 In her conclusion, Duby refers to the “great and generous historic calling” of Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, stating that “the Mexican congress affirms the historic attitude of its fatherland that has always fought against racial discrimination. Mexico’s international politics is based on the equality of all men and all races.”89 Mexico never engaged in the kind of genocidal violence committed by Nazi Germany, nor was Mexico as segregated as the United States in these years. But this is a far cry from stating that Mexico has always fought racial discrimination. This does not, mean, however, that Duby was merely naive, or that the SEP was using her to convey an appropriate and non-­threatening message. Rather (and this also is what comes across in her early writing from Morelos and Guerrero), after having left behind a continent torn apart by fascism, Duby depicts Mexico as a world where one could start anew, a world, in Seghers’s words, where everything is still in a state of becoming, a world where the indigenous communities were simply more noble, or, as Rewald’s Janko states, were

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“the best people in the world,” and where literacy and education would soon end discrimination and inequality. Duby’s writing on Mexico, just like that of Rewald and Seghers, offers a portrait of a specific time and a very specific transatlantic projection onto Mexico. But these texts are revealing about the loneliness of these subjects, wandering around in landscapes that are simultaneously distant from their experiences but also rendered familiar. In this context the eyes of Zapata stand for the ways in which these antifascist writers make meaning of what they encountered, deeply interwoven with what they hoped to encounter, in Mexico in the early 1940s. That is their origin story.

Chapter Nine

Landscapes of Grief: Egon Erwin Kisch

I n 2 018 r a d i o p r o d u c e rIan Chillag created “Everything Is Alive,” a new interview podcast, something that may sound banal at this point, except for the nature of who is being interviewed. The podcast “consists of interviews with inanimate objects (a soda can, a pillow, a tattoo, a newspaper, a satellite, a mirror, etc.).1 The premise for the podcast may at first sound contrived, if not a little silly, but it turns out that these impossible interviews contain surprisingly poignant revelations about what it means to be alive in our present times. However, Chillag’s project may not be so innovative after all: seventy years before “Everything Is Alive” was first aired, Egon Erwin Kisch came up the “pyramid-­interviewer.” This figure is exactly what it sounds like: a journalist talking to a pyramid, to structures that, writes Kisch in “Interview mit den Pyramiden,” [“Interview with the Pyramids”], will always have something to say. Kisch’s pyramid-­interviewer reveals the complicated emotions of a European refugee who talks to ruins to learn more about their past and ends up facing the realities of his own present. The quest for a conversation with pyramids takes the interviewer from Cuicuilco (Mexico City), to Teotihuacán and Tenayuca (state of Mexico), Tula (Hidalgo), Xochicalco (Morelos), Cholula (Puebla), and then back to Mexico City. All the pyramids the journalist meets are female, possibly a result of the grammatical gender in German. Some are feisty, some are chatty, some are reticent, some are conceited, and all provide our interviewer with a glimpse of their histories (map 7). Once he returns to Mexico City, the pyramid-­interviewer remembers seeing images of Mesoamerican pyramids in a book he read as a child. Among these was the temple that once stood in the country’s capital, the Templo Mayor, in a spot that a cathedral now occupies in the city’s main square, the Zócalo. Finding himself in that location, he is surprised when a mysterious voice calls out to him. He follows her calling and ends 194

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up by the ruins of what once was an Aztec temple and now is reduced to the “the wreckage of all ages.”2 Yet obliteration has not silenced what is left of the temple. The voice speaking from the ruins has the last word, as she proceeds to explain why she summoned the interviewer. “I did that because you are European. Right now, in your part of the world, all you have done to us is happening to you. Your buildings, your people are now experiencing something more dreadful than what I have lived, even though your Cortez is only a ridiculous and pathetic caricature of ours. It is time for us to send a writer, to interview your rubble.”3 While “Interview mit den Pyramiden” is about the memory of conquest and colonization that materializes in Mexico’s pyramids, or in what is left of them, the text’s closing paragraph is a reminder of the war in Europe. The voice speaking to the pyramid-­interviewer from an easily overlooked location—­not even on a “Baustelle” (construction site) but near an “Abbaustelle” (demolishing site)—­melds different histories of violence. The crimes that Europeans were inflicting on other Europeans in the 1940s become a distorted reflection of the death and destruction that conquest and colonization caused on the other side of the Atlantic centuries earlier. The idea that the more recent rubble in Europe also is worth an interview, this time conducted by a writer sent from the Americas, foreshadows Seghers’s yearning for a Mexican sector in Berlin (see chapter 6). Moreover, the pyramid’s statement alludes to entangled histories of violence and to the ways in which “colonial violence foreshadows totalitarianism at the same time that totalitarianism casts a shadow backward on the colonial archive,” playfully prefiguring the arguments that Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire would make just a few years later.4 In this sense, “Interview mit dem Pyramiden” sets the stage for “Indiodorf unter dem Davidstern” [“Indio Village under the Star of David”], a text that in a very different and much more intimate sense allows Kisch to bring together the horror of the war raging in Europe and the horrors that European conquest and colonization had left behind in his country of refuge. Both chronicles appeared in Entdeckungen in Mexiko [Discoveries in Mexico], a collection of travel narratives published by the exile press El Libro Libre in Mexico 1945. Similar to what Seghers and Duby wrote in their early years of exile, narratives that in the beginning appear to be rooted in Mexico and in the Mexican landscape un-

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expectedly return to the places from which the refugees, often leaving their loved ones behind, have fled. Together with a third chronicle, “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer” [The Mystery of the Jewish Indians], an essay published in Freies Deutschland, these reportages form a triptych that reveals the long reach of the Holocaust across the Atlantic. The Holocaust was a “place-­making event that created new places—­ ghettos and camps within the European landscape, or reworked more familiar places—­such as rivers or roads—­into genocidal landscapes.”5 Clearly, these ghettos were in Europe, not Latin America, as were all extermination camps and the vast majority of other camps, with the few exceptions of places like the prison camps in the Maghreb, among them Djelfa, discussed in chapter 5. Yet this does not mean that confining all those deemed undesirable or a threat to whatever the nation was imagined to be to an enclosure with fortified and/or weaponized boundaries took place only on European soil. Concentrating, debilitating, and killing people in an enclosed space, often with the help of coiled barbed wire, was a method of war that originated during the Anglo-­ Boer Wars. Mainly women and children were the ones taken to camps, where they would suffer starvation, dehydration, and disease. Concentration camps (a term used for the first time in 1901), internment camps, prisoner camps, extermination camps, and even the refugee camps are not interchangeable, yet their history is entangled. In 1942, when Kisch was living in and writing about Mexico, just north of the border, Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the relocation of men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry, was issued. The genocidal landscapes of the Holocaust are far away from the places Kisch discovers in Mexico, yet considering that “the Holocaust transformed the meaning as well as the materiality of every place and space it touched,” and that it “gave frightening new meanings to mobility,” the sites that appear in Kisch’s Mexican chronicles are vulnerable to similar transformations.6 The implication here is not that every place in the world a refugee may have crossed or reached belongs to the geographies of the Holocaust. Rather, works like Kisch’s Mexican reportages show that the landscapes of grief that emerged from the Holocaust could materialize in a place like Venta Prieta, the small town in Hidalgo that Kisch describes in “Indio Village under the Star of David.” Grief—­the

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manifestation of sorrow resulting from loss or death—­may overwhelm the bereaved at any moment and anywhere. Grief is an emotion that is also connected to the physical world; hence it becomes part of landscapes like the one that Kisch depicts in his piece on Venta Prieta.

A Racing, Roving, and Raging Reporter Like Aub and Seghers, Kisch was an extraordinarily prolific writer. He dabbled in different genres, publishing a novel, Der Mädchenhirt, and several plays early in his career. Eventually he dedicated his writing life exclusively to journalism, committed to telling the facts, but in a manner that was “as inviting and stylized as fiction.”7 He researched his subjects meticulously, if not passionately, hoping to ensure that his readers would derive as much pleasure from his works as they might from reading a piece of fiction.8 Kisch called himself “der Rasende Reporter,” a somewhat “restrictive” alias that dates back to the title of a collection published in 1924.9 The adjective rasende could be translated as “racing,” “raging,” and “raving,” and rasende also seems to echo reisende (traveling), so that Kisch could also become the “roving reporter.”10 While the original cover art of Der Rasende Reporter, a photomontage from Otto Umbehr, embodies speed and modernity, the moniker belies Kisch’s actual writing practice:11 his chronicles resulted from rigorous research and meticulous revisions.12 Swiftness was an illusion, if not a luxury, for a man who, starting in 1910, when he published his first article in the German-­language periodical Bohemia, never stopped traveling and writing. Kisch’s chronicles were heavily but not always visibly edited, and it is entirely possible that many of the improvements were made by his life partner, the Vienna-­ born Gisela Kisch (née Lyner, 1895–­ 1962), who married Kisch in 1938. Lenka Reinerová, a Czech writer who was once Kisch’s neighbor in Prague’s old city, and who also found refuge in Mexico, was certain that Gisela was a creative partner for Kisch.13 Seghers, another close friend of Gisela and Egon, or Gisl and Egonek, as she called them, fondly recalls moments in Paris, in Madrid, and in Mexico City, when Gisela was the one who, late at night, turned to her typwriter, in order to transform her spouses’s handwrittten manuscripts into legible prose: “And at night, after we finally left, she grinds

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down the words that Kisch has written with his crazy handwriting, and the typewriter clatters, as though it were connected to a lever and not to a person of flesh and blood.”14 After Kisch’s death in 1948, Gisela, now lonely in a city where she would always remain a foreigner, became the editor of her late husband’s collected works, a task she shared with German writer Bodo Uhse, another member of the refugee community in Mexico. Egon and Gisela’s partnership may conjure up the heteronormative trope of the “great Man and his long-­suffering wife, who not only inspires him but annotates and types up his work,” yet a detailed biographic investigation of Gisela’s life and work will probably tell a more nuanced and also more interesting story.15 This at least comes across in another one of Seghers’s memories of her friends and fellow exiles. She describes that in their home, “Gisl was what in chemistry they call, I think, a catalyst, a substance that a specific element needs in order to have a reaction.”16 She was a catalyst then, but to this day Gisela remains a cypher. She is routinely mentioned in biographical work on Kisch and even appears as a character in Volker Weidemann’s novels Ostende: Sommer der Freundschaft (2014) and Brennendes Licht: Anna Seghers in Mexiko (2020). While a sense of who Gisela was comes across in these texts, her depiction still is impressionistic: there is her radiant smile, her easy laughter, her hospitality, or a knack for preparing coffee so good and strong, even under precarious circumstances, that Seghers used to call it “Zauberkaffee” (magical coffee). Gisela’s story in many ways is still there to tell, but it would not be farfetched to say that Entdeckungen in Mexiko bears traces that are hers. The narrative voice in Kisch’s pieces is not just that of the “racing, raging, and raving reporter”; it is an amalgam of experiences that include Kisch’s own as journalist and a Jewish refugee, as well as Gisela’s. Kisch’s reportages frequently start out by describing a particular place and its present circumstances (like the ruins of the Templo Mayor in the Zócalo), and then, little by little, interpreting their history and reflecting on their meaning. Stated differently, “places, events, and things apparently insignificant in themselves are decoded as tokens of larger ‘historical’ processes.”17 “Interview mit den Pyramiden,” “Indio Village under the Star of David,” and “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer” are

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no exceptions. Yet what makes these three chronicles more remarkable is that they become expressions of grief resulting from, to again invoke Arendt, multiple losses: home, the familiarity of daily life, occupation, language, and, more than anything, loved ones. Kisch’s chronicles of his sojourns in Mexico are as much about the “the rupture of our private lives” as they are about the colonial legacies that haunt the discoveries in Mexico of a man born to a multilingual Jewish family in what once was Austro-­Hungarian Prague. These losses were the price that Kisch had to pay for his safety. Once he settled in Mexico, leaving the country that offered him asylum was not an option, and so he was limited to domestic travel—­but that did not stop Kisch from pursuing his passion. The current circumstances, however, ended up changing his approach to his writing: with his mobility restricted to Mexico, Kisch now was a chronicler of history, a creative transformation that was not without satisfactions for him.18 What also differentiates the work he produced in Mexico from his earlier pieces is that now he was witnessing the horrors of the Nazi genocide from across the Atlantic. And so he wrote about places very far away from that horror but that, like the above-­mentioned pyramids, have their own horror stories to tell. One of these places is Venta Prieta, the small village that Kisch was lured to visit by stories about an “Indian Jewish” community. “Indio Village under the Star of David” is about his trip to Venta Prieta, but only intially: in this chronicle remoteness and proximity as well as past and present all collapse in a moment of grief that would be beyond words for anyone but perhaps Egon Erwin Kisch. Bereaved and alone, he finds himself in a place where the distance between an impoverished town in the mountains of Hidalgo and Prague’s Jewish quarter has vanished. Like all chapters of Entdeckungen in Mexiko, this one is sprinkled with words and phrases in Spanish, a language Kisch started learning in Spain during the civil war, and he includes a glossary in the beginning of the book.19 Nevertheless, Kisch wrote about Mexico in German, the language that had been common for the Jews of Prague since the nineteenth century and that this multilingual writer had always used, as had other Czech Jewish writers, among them Franz Kafka and Lenka Reinerová. 20

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Much has been written about the choice,­if it even was one,­of Kafka and others to write in German and so produce what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a “minor literature”—­in Yasemin Yildiz’s words, “an intensification and subversion of the German language from within.”21 The complex configurations of language and class, and their respective relationship with Jewishness played out differently for Kafka, Reinerová, and Kisch. Yet in the work of all three, the use of the German language is part of a complex negotiation with their backgrounds, their milieu, as well as old and new menaces. 22 Growing up in a middle-­class Jewish family in the prominent “multilingual site” of Prague, the always gregarious Kisch navigated and negotiated the city’s different neighborhoods.23 He wrote from and about a place that was linguistically and culturally diverse, and that allowed him to play “with modern notions of belonging that embraced change, uncertainty, strangers, and human difference.”24 In this sense, he also “probed the limits of class and national boundaries while imagining a city that he, at least, could call home.”25 The loss of what such a home could mean becomes painfully clear in “Indio Village under the Star of David.” Like all refugees, Kisch did not know how long his stay in Mexico would be. His writing pratice adapted to his present situation, and so he expressed himself in a slightly different version of his deterritorialized German that now also included the traces of his stints in France, Spain, and, of course, Mexico. Yet for him and for the other displaced authors, writing in German was not just a matter of language competency or fluency; it meant that they were involved in a fight for the recovery a language that the Nazi regime had attempted to make its own. Philologist Victor Klemperer has famously challenged the grip Nazis had on the language, as have other displaced writers (Seghers, Rewald, and Kisch among them) who defied Nazism by taking back one of the tools of the regime: the language. 26 Kisch became a frequent contributor to the German-­language monthly Freies Deutschland (published between 1941 and 1946), he co-­founded the Heinrich Heine Klub with Seghers and was behind the creation of the exile press, El Libro Libre (see chapter 6), which published Entdeckungen in Mexiko as well as his biographical text, Martkplatz der Sensationen [Sensations Fair].

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Even though the content of Kisch’s writing shifted from current events to historical chronicles disguised as travel narratives, almost everything he produced in and about Mexico more or less maintained the essence of his style: somewhat ironic, informative, and with the apparent immediacy of a snapshot. He also was writing for audiences in the German-­speaking world, and, according to Seghers, his chronicles were well received in the same Berlin where she was longing for a “Mexican sector.” “The Aztecs would have never imagined that they would get so much publicity in Berlin’s Soviet sector. Seriously, I think it is superb that the people here, who have lived such isolated and limited lives, who have iced up, get to learn about a different world.”27 Seghers may have come up with these lines to comfort her beloved friend, who was very ill by the time she wrote them and would die shortly afterward. She also may have written the letter influenced by her own nostalgia for Mexico (see chapter 6). Yet chances are that German readers, isolated and cold not only in a physical sense, may have found something more than escapism in Kisch’s book, given that it also exposes readers to a survivor’s grief. Interestingly enough, Wenceslao Roces’s Spanish translation of Kisch’s book, Descubrimientos en México, was published in Mexico in the same year as the German version. The book received praise for being “the deepest and most loving book written by a foreigner about Mexico in more than a century.” Kisch himself was pleased with the translation and reception of his book, considering that, “only rarely a travel narrative is published in the same country it is about.”28 As several critics have pointed out, Kisch’s use of the preposition in in his book’s title allows for a perspective on Mexico perhaps more nuanced than others that foreign writers produced, given that the book is about the discoveries Kisch makes in Mexico; it is not about his discovery of Mexico. 29 In Kisch’s book Mexico is, for the most part, not the remote and exotic location that comes across in travel narratives or adventure stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Instead, he engages with the country’s colonial and postcolonial history, its political economy, and labor conditions in the 1940s. Entdeckungen in Mexiko covers the breadth of the country’s geography (from the Yucatán peninsula to Michoacán, from Teotihuacán to Morelos, from Durango and Coahuila to Querétaro, Oaxaca, Chiapas,

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and the Yucatán Peninsula) and the length of the nation’s history, from pre-­Colombian times to the author’s historical present in the 1940s. The cast of characters ranges from locals (Cuáuhtemoc, Hernán Cortés, Benito Juárez, Lázaro Cárdenas, the film star Cantinflas, whom Kisch calls a “a Mexican Chaplin”) to Europeans (Alexander von Humboldt, the ill-­fated Emperor Maximilian and his spouse, Empress Carlotta, the two Karls, Marx and May), and numerous lesser-­known, anonymous figures: the tlachiqueros and the chicleros, tortilleras and mariachis. He narrates these ordinary lives with a mix of gravity and levity, familiarity and wonder, perhaps best exemplified in an anecdote he recalls in the chapter that opens Entdeckungen in Mexiko, “Geschichten mit dem Mais” [“Stories with Maize”]. Local crops, like maize, cactus, cotton, or agave, frequently become motifs in Kisch’s chronicles, as these allow for broader reflections on history and culture.30 “Stories with Maize,” then, is a historical account and a reflection about labor conditions and the movement of products and people across borders, all of it conveyed in Kisch’s distinctive voice. He writes about tortillas and tortilleras, reminding his readers that in Spain, where he was first exposed to Spanish, neither corn nor flour tortillas are regularly consumed, and that the word “tortillera,” nowadays understood to be derogatory, refers to lesbians. The text begins with the memories of an unnamed Spanish refugee, who, upon arriving at the port of Veracruz, is flabbergasted when he reads a headline about the “Streik der Tortilleras” (Strike of the Tortilleras). He is left wondering about this strange land where “women like that go on strike. Are they demanding shorter work days, higher wages, a collective contract?”31 Given Kisch’s fondness for linguistic games and his particular sense of humor, there is a chance that the account is apocryphal. What it ultimately reveals (in addition, of course, to a depiction of sexuality and gender that corresponds to Kisch’s worldview and his times), is a knack for both the delights and the frustrations of living and writing between languages. Even though Kisch threw himself into writing about Mexico with the same enthusiasm with which he once jumped off a ship at the Melbourne harbor (see chapter 1), and while, like Mistral, Duby, or Seghers, he produced works disparaging colonialism and its consequences, his Mex-

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ican chronicles inevitably contain blind spots with regard to racialized constructions. It is, in Rothberg’s terms in reference to Hannah Arendt, a “blindness about race and colonialism that might be typical for the Europeans of the era in which she wrote, but no less crippling for their typicality.”32 Kisch was, like all the protagonists of this book, a product of his times. The positive reviews his book received are proof of a writing process that, belying Kisch’s alias, is anything but rushed, as he produced a book that even contemporary experts in Mexican history and culture would find valuable. Yet it also is true that, while pieces like the story of the pyramid-­interviewer do not shy away from denouncing the violent history of conquest and colonization, they are still more about past destruction than about present inequalities in Mexico.33 The voice speaking to the pyramid-­interviewer is a ghostly memory; contemporary injustices, discriminations, or legacies of racism and colonialism are not as evident in Entdeckungen in Mexiko as is the country’s past, with the exception, perhaps, of labor conditions.34 In “Die Vanille-­I ndianer,” for example, the author states that the Totonac of Veracruz have a past, but no history, becoming implicated in what scholars of postcolonialism would challenge decades later, putting forth the notion that “history’s waiting room,” is an imaginary one, and that equating the beginning of history with the beginning of history in the West is an inherent colonial gesture.35 In the picture that Kisch paints of his country of refuge, specific racial hierarchies also appear unquestioned. His Mexican chronicles share attributes with those of other writers, who expressed a fascination with indigenous lives, entangled with an exoticizing, if not “Indianthusiastic” perspective. This means either relegating indigenous communities to a remote past, equating the struggles of indigenous communities with the working classes of Europe, or making assumptions about a certain racial purity as a trait of indigeneity. 36 As discussed in chapter 7, in the work of the German-­speaking refugees, the term Indianer conjures up a specific cultural imaginary that involves fictions about Native American life in the United States, specifically, the “Wild West.” The “Indianer” appearing in these texts are peasants; they are exploited, they are often wise in ways that Europeans cannot fathom, and they are deeply rooted in tradition. To be fair, Kisch is more careful with his nomenclature, and he is well aware of problem-

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atic depictions of Mexican history in German-­language sources, ranging from Alexander von Humboldt all the way to the Nazi ideologues.37 And yet, every once in a while, Kisch’s narrative voice falls back on stereotypes and myths about indigeneity in Mexico. Unlike the other authors, who tend to use the word Indianer interchangeably for indigenous communities and for mestizos, Kisch prefers Indios throughout Entdeckungen in Mexiko, perhaps acknowledging the fact that Mexico was nothing like what Karl May had dreamed up. The famous German pulp author appears frequently in the text, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and usually in an ironic tone. For example, Kisch refers to himself and to other Europeans as “Bleichgesichter” (Pale Faces), the term that in the Winnetou novels is reserved for hostile Europeans, except for Old Shatterhand, May’s alter ego. Yet Kisch, who devoured May’s novels as a young reader, and even met the author when he visited Prague in 1808, does show some appreciation for May’s work. It turns out that not everything in May’s world is a fantasy: Kisch cannot hold back the irony when he states that not only Goethe, but also May and even his horse had all read Alexander von Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur [Views of Nature] (1808). Here he refers to a moment in May’s novel Old Surehand, when the hero’s horse manages to stay hydrated in the desert by feasting on a type of cactus. Humboldt had been the first one to introduce European readers to such survival skills.38 Yet Kisch also repeatedly reminds his readers that the Nazi ideologues made May’s imaginary worlds fit their preferred racial categorizations (see chapter 7). While the bulk of Kisch’s Mexican chronicles are as informative as they are witty, and as complex as they are readable, none are as riddled with contradictions as those involving Jewish and indigenous topics.

The Mystery of the Jewish Indians The mayhem in Europe mentioned at the end of “Interview with the Pyramids,” appears in a more personal, if not intimate, context in “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer” and, of course, “Indio Village under the Star of David.” Writing about specifically Jewish topics was not a new venture for the fiercely secular Kisch. Many of his reportages appeared in the 1934 collection Geschichten aus Sieben Ghettos [Tales from Seven Ghettos], a book first published with a cover designed by

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Paul Urban, the same artist responsible for the illustrations of Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko. While some of the pieces in this particular volume date back to the 1920s, the collection’s publication date needs to be understood in relation to the rise of antisemitism in Nazi Germany.39 These tales take place in a variety of locations in a Jewish geography that expands from Bohemia to New York’s Lower East Side, and topics range from the story of Sabbathai Zevi to a re-­invention of the myth of the Golem. About a decade after the volume’s first publication, Tales from Seven Ghettos reached Anglophone audiences with a translation by Edith Bone.40 “Indio Village under the Star of David,” was included in the collection, but not “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer,” a text that is also absent from Entdeckungen in Mexiko. The reason for this may be that “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer” is a more complex and, perhaps, less emotionally satisfying work, given that readers are left with more questions than answers. Kisch never solves the riddle of the Jewish Indians, not for his readers, and also in relation to his own story. The first element that stands out is the very expression “Indianer,” one that Kisch avoids in “Indio Village under the Star of David,” where he consistently uses “Indios,” with one exception: a reference to a cabaret song from the 1920s. In said piece, Kisch briefly mentions the Viennese cabaret artist Heinrich Eisenbach, as he remembers a performance in which the artist caricaturized a figure both Jewish and Indian: “An old music-­hall tune came into my mind, that had been a hit in the days of harmless jargon-­fun. The Viennese music-­hall comedian Eisenbach pranced about on the stage with a Red Indian feather head-­dress on his head, Apache war paint all over him, but with Jewish side-­curls and a prayer-­shawl, such as Jews wear in the synagogue.”41 Kisch reproduces Eisenbach’s song: “Mein Vater war ein klaaner / Jüdischer Indianer, / Meine Mutter, tief in Texas drin, / War eine koschere Gänslerin” (“My father was a small Jewish Indian, / my mother, deep in Texas, was a kosher gooseherd).42 The narrator dismisses the lyrics as “harmless jargon-­fun,” yet the reference reveals a racialized imaginary that Kisch—­and others—­took with them across the Atlantic. German-­speaking refugees in the 1940s like Kisch hardly were the only ones fascinated by the figure of the “Jewish Indians” in Mexico. In the United States, knowledge about mysterious crypto-­Jewish commu-

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nities in Mexico dates back to a newspaper article describing the Jews of Venta Prieta as “descendants of Marranos,” illustrated with “photos of men with skullcaps riding on burros.”43 News about this community rapidly spread, leading to a long-­lasting imaginary about the Jews of Venta Prieta, built on a fascination with both similarity and difference. This fascination cannot be detached from specific stereotypes about indigenous cultures and about Mexico that come across in the writings of visitors who journey to Venta Prieta, hoping to find either a comforting origin story or an equally satisfying and unambiguous story about an outright imposture. As anthropologists Ronald Loewe and Helene Hoffmann put it, “What these separate, historically disparate accounts best illustrate is the resiliency of U.S. stereotypes of Mexico in the face of change, dialectical images of simplicity and dignity mixed with poverty and squalor.”44 Moreover, a “seemingly irrepressible tendency to see primitiveness and poverty at every juncture,” symbolizing “the ability to survive in the face of adversity” informs depictions of encounters with this Jewish community in rural Mexico.45 In most US venues, discussions of the “Jewish Indians” tend to go back to the work of Hungarian-­born ethnographer Raphael Patai, who first visited Venta Prieta in 1948, seven years after Kisch did. Patai briefly mentions Kisch’s work in an article that appeared in Menorah Journal (the same venue where Arendt published “We Refugees”) in 1950. Patai was rather skeptical, and he eventually argued that the Jewish community in Mexico City that Kisch describes in “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer,” was not Jewish at all, but that it had formed “as a result of a schism in the Iglesia de Dios (Church of God), an evangelical Protestant sect that observed the Sabbath on Saturday and celebrated certain Jewish holidays.”46 The problem that Patai, as well as other scholars, journalists, and travelers face when trying to find a clear answer to the mystery of the Jewish Indians is a lack of written records. Yet that same lack also contributes to the fascination with stories like Venta Prieta’s. In Dalia Kandiyoti’s words, “Stories that stage the quest for largely undocumented pasts that may have been survived residually or in a ghostly fashion speak to our fascination with extinction and survival.”47 However, Kisch’s work still stands out among others, as he leaves the place of worship (it is never entirely clear whether it is a synagogue or not) de-

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scribed in “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer” with very little certainty about anything. The chronicle begins with a chance encounter: Kisch notices a star of David on the collar of a taxi driver in Mexico City, and so he immediately makes inquiries about a community apparently as Jewish as it is indigenous. He therefore sets out to find the “Indian citizens of Jewish faith.” Upon learning that indeed a community gathers in a synagogue in the Calle Caruso, in a section of the city described in the text as a shantytown, Kisch decides to visit the place with a friend, a “historian of religion specializing in comparative rites research” evidently interested in the “Church of the Jews.” The travel partner also happens to be rather unconvinced about the Judaism of the members of the community gathering in the Calle Caruso. Once the men reach the neighborhood, they are unable to find the place where the members of the “Jewish Indian” community gather and worship, and so they proceed to ask an old woman selling food by the side of road. When she gives no answer, they inquire again, this time with the assumption that the woman may be as old as the times when there were no churches, but temples for the gods. Kisch’s use of irony here is evident: an inquiry about a “Jewish Teocalli” also yields no response.48 The question is farcical, and yet it raises a long history of lore about the origins and shared fates of indigenous populations of the Americas and Jews. The history begins with José de Acosta questioning in the late sixteenth century whether the Indians descended from the Jews in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias.49 Even though Acosta denied this connection, it survived for centuries, reappearing in works that include Menassah Ben Israel’s Esperança de Israel (The Hope of Israel), from 1650, and others from well into the nineteenth century, when Lord Kingsborough, whom Kisch mentions, claimed that the Mesoamerican communities descended from the lost tribes of Israel.50 The notion could be an attractive one for Kisch, as it was for Jews who settled in the Western Hemisphere before the Czech writer found himself in Mexico: “If Indians and Jews shared a tie of ancient kinship, or if the Jews of antiquity had been the first to colonize America, American Jews could revel in the idea that they belonged to the New World in a cosmically significant way, unprecedented in the Jews’ centuries-­long

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entanglement with European civilizations.”51 The coincidence (the taxi driver with the star of David) that led to the encounter could be a game changer for Kisch: if the community indeed were Jewish Indians, if they were living proof that Jews had resided in the Americas all along, Kisch and many others were no longer exiles in Mexico, as their journey to the New World would now be “a kind of homecoming.”52 Yet Kisch’s narrator rapidly dismisses the lost tribe theory, as comforting as it may have been.53 What finally leads Kisch and his companion to the actual place of worship is, once again, chance: a child playing in a puddle, described as “an angel, an angel the color of bronze,” tells the men that they were actually standing in front of the home where, in an adjacent patio, the synagogue could be found. There, a community that, to Kisch, looks more indigenous than Jewish greets the men. This depiction, despite Kisch’s evident knowledge of Mexican history, still contains traces of an “Indianthusiastic” imaginary. Kisch stresses that this group should be identified as primarily Indio. He describes a man as being of the “Indian Type” and, still somewhat playfully, warns a hypothetical typesetter to make sure that the word Judío should not be confused with Indio. “Typesetter, don’t you turn the “n” into a “u,” the Indian into a Jew, because that would express the opposite of what I want to say about the man.”54 Kisch’s note to the typesetter is meaningful both in a concrete and an abstract sense. First, it speaks to both the material conditions that made producing Freies Deutschland possible: the local typesetters and printers, for the most part, did not know German, which made avoiding typographical mistakes difficult; once completed, the galley proofs had to be taken from one point to another in Mexico City, usually in streetcars.55 Second, the slippage between Indian and Jewish is not unique to Kisch’s work. It appears in variations between the folio and the quarto of Othello, suggesting “an overlapping of the categories of Moorishness or blackness, Jewishness, and Indianness (all, not coincidentally, victims of Catholic Spain.)”56 The slippage actually precedes Shakespeare, as it was common in documents of the Spanish colonial period, revealing and “actual confusion in European minds between Indians and Jews.” Kisch then invokes this history, only to undermine it. In a tone that differs from many of the pieces in Entdeckungen in Mexiko, where Kisch writes about the diversity of Mexico’s indigenous cultures,

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here he insists that the members of this community are interchangeable with all other “Indios” attending religious services in a church and not a synagogue. “The community consisted of eighty Indios, who looked exactly like millions of other Indios. Their sombreros were resting on their knees, as millions of other Indio men do in church, and the women, like millions of Indio women in church do, covered their face with an embroidered shawl, and the children frolicked and crawled everywhere, as millions of Indio children do in church.”57 The narrator holds that this community is neither a lost tribe, nor does its formation date back to the time of the conquest. Unlike others who wrote about the mystery of the Jewish Indians, Kisch does not second-­guess the community’s syncretic practice, but he still insists on the group’s racial homogeneity. Yet he also contradicts his own assertion. He describes a member of the congregation as “Indio by race and Jewish by religion,” but then mentions that the man’s ancestry is Iberian, given that Luis de Carvajal, the Elder was one of his ancestors.58 Kisch ends the text with an explanation provided by the community’s spiritual leader, who may or may not have been a rabbi, provides. He says that this community honors Luis de Carvajal, the Younger (not Luis de Carvajal the Elder) as their forbear. But even that account should not be taken at face value. Luis de Carvajal, “el Mozo,” or “the Younger,” described by Kisch elsewhere as one of the “most tenacious, daring, and peculiar of Jewish martyrs,” arrived in New Spain in the late sixteenth century, following the call of his uncle, Carvajal, the Elder, who had been named governor of the province of Nuevo León.59 In the colonies, the younger Carvajal and other members of his family practiced Judaism in secret, which eventually made them fall victim to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. 60 Carvajal was burnt at the stake, together with his mother and sister, on December 8, 1596. Yet it was not only his martyrdom that turned him into a well-­known figure: he also left behind several important manuscripts that document both his religiosity and his experiences as a prisoner in the Inquisition’s dungeons. Carvajal’s writing “bears witness not only to the torture and executions of his family members but also to the secret and syncretic customs, beliefs, and rhetoric of crypto-­Jewish life.”61 It hardly is surprising that, as far as ancestors are concerned, Carvajal is a highly desired candidate, and Kisch describes him as a man

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who “was not afraid of anything when it came to practicing, studying, spreading, and disseminating his forbears’ faith, not of the dungeons and tortures of the Inquisition, or even his own death at the stake.”62 Yet contradictions abound in Kisch’s text: being descendants of the Iberian Luis de Carvajal would make the members of the community mestizos, challenging the insistence that the faithful in Venta Prieta are, as Kisch consistently calls them, Indios. In a more whimsical and less rigorous tone than in many of his other pieces, where he discusses Mexico’s history of conquest and colonization in greater detail, here Kisch simply seems to accept the community for who they are, inconsistencies and all. This becomes clear when he muses on the community’s spirituality, once the religious services are over. The faithful have gathered in the patio of the synagogue, or makeshift synagogue, and are drinking water from a faucet. They drink the water, writes Kisch, because they are thirsty, and yet this same very mundane gesture attains a more sacred meaning, as they “knew that it was plain tap water, but it still seemed that they had gathered around a blessed well, and, whether they were conscious of this or not, they liked to drink the water flowing in their house of worship (426). In the end, what renders the community Jewish in Kisch’s eyes is neither ancestry, nor genealogy, but a matter of faith and a relationship with a community and a place: “No, the Indios we met today had nothing to do with one of Israel’s lost tribes nor with the conquerors; they were families, in the capital and in the provinces, who professed Judaism”(426). Unlike other authors who have written about the “Jewish Indians,” Kisch is not concerned with the question of whether the community’s religious practice can be Jewish, or Jewish enough, or not Jewish at all. At the same time, he cannot seem to stop himself from playfully suggesting why the “lost tribe” theory may have been so persuasive for some: there are, after all, certain similarities between biblical and Mesoamerican landscapes. This becomes evident when Kisch comments on what the community witnesses during the religious service. The man that Kisch earlier described as Indian by race, Jewish by faith, and Spanish by name (Carvajal) is in charge, and he begins telling the story of Exodus (hardly a coincidence: Kisch was, after all, experiencing a form of exodus). The narrative includes a description of Egypt, a country with “pyramids with

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idol worshipping and human sacrifices and deserts and serpents and locusts.” Such a place would be more than familiar to his audience, who were listening attentively, “as though he was telling his listeners about their own land and their own history, because there is no country like Mexico, where they have so much of all that” (423). Yet, as with “Interview mit den Pyramiden,” a reminder of the violence of war and genocide taking place in Europe removes the levity from the text. References to human sacrifice, deserts, snakes, and locusts do not faze the community, but the sermon becomes uncanny when the man who calls himself Carvajal speaks of the war in Europe and Germany’s responsibility in it. “But everything changed when his words corresponded to today’s Germany. With their eyes wide open and their blue-­black, straight hair standing on end, they did not seem to believe that ungraspable fable about a land, dominated by bloodlust and cruelty” (424). Germany has become a “that dreadful, mythical land,” and it turns out that the stereotypes about violence and bloodthirst often projected on distant geographies are not just far-­fetched tales, but the European reality that Kisch, but not all of his loved ones, had been able to escape (424). The emotions associated with Kisch’s escape and survival in a faraway place become even more evident once he makes it to Venta Prieta.

In Venta Prieta The actual history of Venta Prieta’s Jewish community is hard to come by, as it has a “largely undocumented past” that only survived “residually or in a ghostly fashion” and that ultimately speaks to “our fascination with extinction and survival.”63 It is a history riddled with contradictions and filled with holes. One of the few pieces that appear to hold it all together is the Tellez family, which has maintained a leading role in Venta Prieta well into the twenty-­fi rst century. The family is also charged with keeping the community’s secrets.64 Both Kisch and Patai narrate different versions of an origin story that involves members of the Tellez family. Patai describes meeting an elderly woman, Señora Trinidad Jiron de Tellez, the oldest member of the Jewish community. She tells Patai about her grandfather, Ramon Jiron, who for a while was the only crypto-­Jew in an unnamed town in

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Michoacán, otherwise inhabited by Christians. Upon finding out about his hidden faith, Jiron’s neighbors first tortured him and eventually sew him into a bull’s skin, to then throw him into boiling water “where he died a miserable and painful death.”65 The family fled Michoacán and settled in Hidalgo, where Trinidad Jiron eventually married a member of the Tellez family. After hearing Trinidad’s story, Patai seeks out her sister Gertrudis, and she offers a very different account. In her version, Ramon Jiron was a Catholic from Zamora (Michoacán), and what made him a rebel was not an actual or alleged crypto-­Jewish practice, but his resistance to his family’s wishes for him to become a priest. He ran away from home, but was soon apprehended, and Jiron’s father’s punishment was forcing his son to wear a bull’s skin. Ramon eventually left town, settling in Hidalgo. While both versions of the family lore involve the same elements with differing levels of cruelty (displacement from Michoacán to Hildago, Ramon Jiron, and a punishment with a bull skin) only one of them brings up a Jewish origin. In Kisch’s chronicle, an account much closer to the first than to the second version appears. Kisch describes meeting Enrique Tellez, the grandchild of a man who goes by the name of Roman Gison (probably another version of Ramón Jiron), also from Zamora, where forty years earlier a pogrom—­this is the word Kisch uses—­had taken place. “The people seized my grandfather on the mother’s side, Roman Gison was his name. They demanded that he embrace the Christian faith and scoff at his old faith. When he refused, they sewed him into a cow’s hide and made a fire in a ring around it. The cowhide shrunk and pressed my father grandfather to death.”66 The fact that Kisch uses the word pogrom to address this type of punishment establishes a connection with the anti-­Jewish violence that for a man growing up in Eastern Europe was rather familiar. In similar fashion, later in the text he refers to the Cristeros as a “clerico-­fascist” movement, also blending recent European and Mexican histories (204). “Indio Village under the Star of David” operates on multiple temporalities: it is an apparent snapshot of Jewish lives and crypto-­Jewish traditions that were preserved and adapted for centuries, and it also is a reflection on the ways in which the Holocaust transformed the meaning

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of places that, at first glance, appear to be far removed from the actual location of the Nazi genocide. As in “Das Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer,” chance again is an important element in this chronicle. During a trip to Hidalgo, a road sign pointing to Venta Prieta reminds Kisch of the Jewish community he visited in Mexico City’s Calle Caruso. The fortuitous reminder of the town’s name also has an effect on the very playful and humorous tone of the text, at least in its initial moments. What begins as a pursuit of the peculiar—­the mystery of “Jewish Indians” in an enclave in the state of Hidalgo—­ends up leading to a reflection filled with poignancy and pathos, so that this particular chapter of Entdeckungen in Mexiko not only stands out, but is also comparable to Seghers’s “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip.” Both works expose the grief of those mourning the death not only of their loved ones (a mother, friends, two brothers), but also of an entire community. The text shows that grief could overwhelm the “fortunate ones” who had found refuge (among them five of six of this book’s protagonists) in unexpected locations like Hidalgo or Morelos. Upon arrival at Venta Prieta, the narrator inquires, as he had done when he visited the Calle Caruso synagogue in Mexico City, about local Jews. The first response he gets is that he ought to look for a “caballist.” This makes him try to locate someone, “who might have been taken for an interpreter of numbers and portents, an adept of the Cabbala” (200). The “caballist,” however, turns out to be a man riding on a horse, showing not only Kisch’s fondness for linguistic plays (probably a consequence of his multilingualism), but also that the kind of Jewishness he encounters in Venta Prieta is part of a story that the narrator did not expect to find. Eventually Kisch meets Enrique Tellez, the patriarch of the family, who also happens to be the richest man in town, which, as the author reminds his readers, does not exactly mean that Tellez is a wealthy man. He informs Kisch that indeed there are religious services for the town’s Jews every Saturday in the early morning hours, and Kisch decides to attend. When he returns to Venta Prieta the following day, he learns that the community’s rabbi is a Falasha from Ethiopia, simply called “Etíope” by the people of Venta Prieta (205). It is unclear how this man of Ethiopian origin and a Spanish name (Guillermo Peña) made it to Hi-

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dalgo. Kisch also learns that the rabbi is also a baker, who is in charge of preparing the very syncretic “galletas de semana santa” or “waffles of the holy week” (203). Kisch appears to be charmed by all this, even more when he learns that the man in charge of regularly performing the circumcisions for the members of the community goes by the appropriate name “Señor Klipper.” Yet everything changes once Kisch participates in the religious service and in reciting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Not unlike Seghers’s Netty, who is transported from Mexico’s arid landscapes to the lush, green gardens of Germany, here the narrator suddenly is back at the Bärenhaus (Bear House), the home adorned with two stone bears in Prague’s Jewish quarter, where Kisch and his four brothers grew up. Grief now finds Kisch, and so the modest structure where Jewish services are held and the home where he grew up become one and the same place. The implication here is not that the Jews of Hidalgo, after all, are the descendants of the “lost tribe”: as Kisch is articulating a much more complex homecoming, a homecoming that instead of providing comfort makes a full expression of grief possible. He is reminded of his parents, who would have never imagined that “their sons would one day be driven from the Bear House, one to Mexico, to India another, and the two who were unable to escape the Nazi terror, to unknown places of unimaginable horror and to death” (208). Kisch’s parents died in Prague (in 1901 and 1937), years before he made it to Mexico. While they did not witness the horrors of World War II, they lost one of their sons, Wolfgang, to the trenches of First World War. Out of the five siblings, only Friedrich, the youngest brother (who served a surgeon for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War) survived into the 1960s. The remaining brothers were murdered in the Shoah: Arnold in a concentration camp in Lodz (1942), and Paul in Theresienstadt in 1944. In his biographical Marktplatz der Sensationen, Kisch writes that the Bärenhaus once appeared listed in a Prague travel guide as his birthplace, a place worth a visit for the cultured traveler. This fact was omitted in the Nazi version of the same travel guide in 1934, leading Kisch to ponder whether in a future, postwar version of that travel guide, the reference to the Bärenhaus would require two asterisks: one stating that the house

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that was the birthplace of a Jewish writer was worth a visit, and another declaring that it was not.67 Yet before that could ever happen, the Bärenhaus and the place where Kisch recites the prayer of the dead “with a group of Indios, in the shadow of the silver-­lined mountains of Pachuca” become one in an endless landscape of grief (208). And the sorrow is not just about the members of Kisch’s family: “My thoughts ranged further: relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers, victims of Nazi terror, they all could claim to be remembered in the prayer for the dead” (208). At this point, the tone of the text changes completely: instead of a chronicle of an excursion to place with a rare historical confluence, the piece becomes, echoing Seghers, an excursion to the lands of the dead. A procession of millions, men and women who had spent their lives in the striving to provide for their families and bring up their children to be useful members of human society; workers who earned their bread in the sweat of their brow; physicians, prepared day and night to go to the assistance of those who suffered; men who did their best to spread the truth and improve the lot of their fellow-­men; scholars who lived for their advancement of science; artists who strove to bring beauty into their lives; children who dreamed of a wonderful future for themselves . . . all sort of people, jolly and sentimental, good and bad, weak and strong. (208)

This community of all kinds of individuals turns into a procession, not a “Death March” (those were to happen a few years later in Europe), but a march toward death materializing in a place that has become one with the genocidal landscapes of the Holocaust. They come, countless in an interminable procession. Past cold and brutal faces they stagger towards the goal. There it is, a building from which smoke rises. They all know what the building is, and what the smoke is made of that rises from the chimney. It is a death factory; it manufactures corpses. What were the thoughts of this army of victims-­for-­the-­slaughter as they moved towards this goal? There was no more hope, no hope for themselves, for their children, for their memory, scarcely hope even of retaliation, of punishment for this mass murder. They must press through the gates, they must strip, they must go into the chamber where a terrible gas suffocates them, burns them, dissolves them into nothing. Smoke rises from the chimney.

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Interminable is the procession; it moves along as though there has never been a humanity, as though there had never been any meaning to humanity, never the striving to bring more bread, more justice, more truth, more health, more wisdom, more beauty, more love, and more happiness into this world. (209)

The text’s last line, where Kisch states that he is the last one to leave the place of worship that he had reached earlier that day “in such a merry humour,” may not be necessary, as the paragraph describing the horrors of the gas chambers has made clear that now Kisch’s humor is no longer merry, only haunted. Kisch was a prolific, exuberant, and generous man. Gisela used to say that if he were to find only five francs in his pocket, he would consider himself to be able to buy a publishing house or a newspaper, and he would have enough left to invite ten guests to dinner.68 He knew how to charm almost everyone, those who thought like him and those who did not. Even the children of his fellow refugees seemed to be taken by his charisma, as a famous photo taken during the celebration of his sixtieth birthday in Mexico City shows.69 Unlike his two brothers and so many others, he did not die far from the place he was born, and today it is possible to see the site where Kisch’s and, in 1962, Gisela’s ashes were put to rest. He did not die, to paraphrase his friend Anna Seghers, in a remote place where stars would become death lamps, with no one saying the Kaddish for them.70 And we may visit not only Kisch’s grave, but his place of birth: the “Bärenhaus” is still standing on Melantrichova 475. But the country where Kisch died was not the same one where he was born, and neither was his city. And while the physical remainders of Kisch’s presence in Mexico are few, consisting of not much more than the few editions of the Spanish translations of his work, it is in these texts that very different parts of the world are irrevocably connected in a haunting landscape of grief.

Chapter Ten

Afterlives

I n 19 39 , b e f o r e S e g h e r s w o ul d board the Paul Lemerle, make it to Mexico and publish The Seventh Cross, Transit, and “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” she wrote “Reise ins Elfte Reich” [“Journey to the Eleventh Realm”]. The tale reflects the bureaucratic nightmares that she and many others were enduring and would continue to endure until they found, to paraphrase Peter Gatrell, “a place of relative safety.”1 While Seghers could not foresee the future, certain moments in her short story do sound prophetic. When her characters are about to cross a border and have no choice but to stuff their travel documents in their mouths, chew them, gag on them, and eventually swallow them, or when a refugee hastily burns an affidavit with a cigarette, Warsan Shire’s much more recent poem “Home” comes to mind.2 Shire writes about forcibly displaced individuals tearing up your passport in an airport toilet sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.3 Shire’s verses depict displaced people destroying their documents, either willingly or unwillingly, to avoid deportation to places where they would be harmed. She imagines a place “that chases you to the shore” that tells you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through oceans drown save be hungry 218

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beg forget pride your survival is more important.4 In Seghers’s and Shire’s works, no specific home is mentioned, but “home” is seen as a place to be left behind and where the banished cannot return. Seghers’s Eleventh Realm resembles such fantastic locales as the land of Cockaigne or the upside-­down world that a boy and his uncle visit in Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel The 35th of May; or, Conrad’s Ride to the South Seas. The short story ultimately reveals the absurdity and the cruelty of policies governing the lives of the displaced.5 As different as “Reise ins Elfte Reich” and “Home” may be with regard to genre, voice, and context, both are about the terrifying and terrifyingly absurd obstacles that prevent refugees from making it to places “of relative safety.” In this sense, refugee lives can become more akin to afterlives, lived in an uncanny land shared with the ghosts of loved ones, of languages and homes, and of the everyday that was left behind. Seghers’s tale has a collective protagonist: a group of desperate individuals on the run, with no place to go after ten countries have denied them entry, “in spite of all guarantees and guarantors and testimonies and recommendations.”6 The displaced “no longer knew what to do and had fallen into despair.”7 And so they make it to the Eleventh Realm, the place where only those who do not have passports, the truly “passlos” (passportless) will be allowed to enter. The Eleventh Realm appears to be the sole viable solution for this group—­except for those among them who stubbornly want to rely on the few and, for the most part, useless travel documents they still own, which they end up swallowing shortly before reaching the border. Those who insist on showing their documents upon arrival at the Eleventh Realm are swiftly turned away. Once the “passlos” make it to the Eleventh Realm, they discover additional peculiarities: everybody is covered with countless medals. Upon birth, citizens of the Eleventh Realm are given numerous awards for such deeds as bravery or patriotic duty. Once they have shown that they deserve them by committing the necessary acts, the medals are ceremoniously removed. The Eleventh Realm has other strange customs: at age forty, all citizens choose a new profession; if two people were to fall in

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love and desire to be together, that just happens without fanfare, as weddings are left for those who only meet once; schoolchildren are provided with red pens to correct their teachers’ mistakes. Even the land’s bureaucracy is reversed: the most lowly ranked bureaucrat has a large staff and oversees several offices, while the president of the Eleventh Realm merely has a small room and no assistants. It is to that spare room where the recent arrivals in the Eleventh Realm are eventually summoned. They are not wearing any medals on their bodies, which makes them look undesirable: the locals assume that the newcomers must have improperly and illegally disposed of the awards that should be displayed on their chests. This is quickly remedied when the refugees receive all the necessary honors in a pompous ceremony. Newly covered in medals, the members of the group do not feel honored or fulfilled, or that they now belong in the Eleventh Realm, even though they are fully participating in local traditions. Instead, their deficiencies and their difference have just become more noticeable. Despite the all the nonsense in the Eleventh Realm, the characters’ despair, confusion, and alienation mirror the lived experiences of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, in Dwork and van Pelt’s terms, a history “characterized by adjustment and adaptation, and marked by loss and a thread of loneliness. Constructive lives, and lives slightly apart. Never quite at home.”8 Seghers imagined the Eleventh Realm before she fled from fascist-­ occupied Europe. She was no prophet, but she was a keen observer of a reality that, in the years that followed the writing of “Reise ins Elfte Reich,” became just as bizarre as its laws. Several occurrences in Seghers’s life as a refugee indeed may as well have taken place in the Eleventh Realm. Around 1942, US government agents located a series of letters written in code and with invisible ink, sent from one “Anne Sayer” from a Mexico City address (338 Insurgentes) where László Radványi apparently had rented an apartment. The letters appeared to be tied to the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the connections with Seghers seemed to be all too clear. The agents were convinced that the code that would make it possible to decipher the letters could be found in Seghers’s novel The Seventh Cross, and so they searched for it in the German, Spanish,

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and English editions of the text in the homes of refugees and antifascists living in Mexico and the United States. No code was found, and so the mystery of the letters was never solved.9 But at least The Seventh Cross, which Seghers wrote between 1938–­1939, and which, like some of her other renowned texts, appeared in Mexico before being published anywhere else, got a few more readers. Alexander Stephan tells the longer and more complex story of how and why the US government, via the FBI and other agencies (the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, and precursor of the CIA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS, the Office of Censorship, the Department of State, and, of course, and the House of Un-­A merican Activities Committee), kept Seghers and other writers under surveillance.10 Some, like Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, were living in the United States, where a number agencies paid close attention to what they and their family members were doing, what they were writing, and with whom they exchanged correspondence. For those who, like Seghers and Kisch, were living across the border in Mexico, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) was in charge. This subgroup had been founded in 1940, and it conducted surveillance until 1947 all over Latin America. Undercover agents, often pretending to be “legal attachés” or other consular officers, were monitoring antifascist refugees.11 The SIS also outsourced its work to local informants, usually recruited from within the antifascist refugee community. Among them was a Spanish refugee: writer and politician Margarita Nelken (1894–­ 1968). Of German Jewish origin, Nelken had lived in Spain until she was forced to leave in 1939. She was a staunch defender of women’s rights as well as the only woman elected to public office in all three legislatures of Spain’s Second Republic. In 1937, during the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Valencia, Nelken and Seghers where photographed while immersed in conversation; a “beautiful friendship” seemed to be a distinct possibility.12 Roughly four years later, by 1942, Seghers and Nelken met again in Mexico but the relationship between the two women had transformed. According to William K. Ailshie, who was serving as the vice consul and labor attaché of the US embassy, Nelken was to have “branded Anna Seghers and other

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prominent ‘free’ Germans opportunists and weaklings.”13 Other sources suggest that Nelken may have been working for the KGB. One of the few facts about Nelken’s alleged espionage is that she was listed in a report of the SIS, “Special Investigation Section of the FBI,” in relation to what became known as, “The ‘Alto Case’ and the Communist Underground in Mexico,” an investigation about Ramón Mercader, a.k.a. Frank Jacson or Jacques Mornard, the man responsible for killing Trotsky in his Mexico City home in 1940. The above-­mentioned letters written in invisible ink connected to Anna Seghers belong to the same case.14 The story of how and why Nelken ended up involved in the US government surveillance of the refugee community in Mexico is too long and complex to give it the justice it deserves now. It should suffice to say that both women, who, under other circumstances, could have shared a beautiful friendship as intellectual collaborators, ended up in a “spider web” of intrigue and accusations that had little do with who they were or what they wrote.15 Instead, it was a web made of the circumstances that shaped their lives on the run and their afterlives in their new homes. Even though the information that the FBI collected about Seghers was massive (her file alone was more than a thousand pages long), it did not yield information about any great conspiracies or subversive activities in which she and her friends and collaborators may have involved themselves. Rather, it reveals details about the daily life of a writer trying to make a living and support her family far away from home. The surveillance activity began in 1940, when the government of the United States got wind that Mexican trade union leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano was making efforts to get a series of intellectuals involved with the Communist Party out of occupied Europe. Different government agencies were charged with surveilling these writers, their movement, their contacts, and their correspondence. The goal of all this surveillance was to “prevent subversive activities,” on US soil and across the border, in Mexico.16 Seghers and many of her friends, among them Kisch, appeared to be dangerous in the eyes of the US government because they hailed from an enemy nation (even though that same enemy nation had declared them their foes and had forced them to flee) and because of their relationship with Communism. And so, they became “Communazis,” “a term useful

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for those who were convinced that Nazis and Communists belonged to the same empire of evil and that they differed only in insignificant details” (xv). Yet there also is a more frivolous reason that ultimately explains all this surveillance. As Stephan argues, inflating the risk that a few writers represented gave some of the relatively new agencies something to do. “The scattered handful of refugee writers in the United States and Mexico, whose presence was almost undetectable to the public, came under fire from the FBI not because they were Germans, and more or less left-­wing to boot, but because the Bureau, after its successful campaigns against gangsters like Machine-­Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, was expanding rapidly and needed new enemies” (19). The existence of the “Communazis” and all their potentially dangerous plots and conspiracies turns out to be, more than anything else, a fiction. A fiction, however, with real life consequences, for Seghers and also for many others. While Seghers, Duby, or Kisch made it to New York between 1940 and 1941, and even though a “cold” war could not really start until the World War II hostilities ceased, the ideological and political struggles that would shape the remainder of the twentieth century were already influencing their experience of flight and asylum. The fact that many of the displaced had been in prison camps in France before they were able to escape from occupied Europe also did not make them any more vulnerable in the eyes of the authorities in the US; instead, it made their involvement in subversive activities seem more likely. Seghers and her family reached Ellis Island on June 16, 1941. They departed ten days later, and in Mexico the surveillance continued (229). Agents intercepted, read, and translated Seghers’s correspondence. One informant, who, under the pretense of discussing a publishing contract, was allowed into her home, described her demeanor as “extremely nervous and suspicious” (258). As mentioned in the beginning, this particular situation led to such strange occurrences as the above-­mentioned letters about the “Alto case.” However, the unsolved mystery of these letters reveals more about what the US government agents wanted to find (or were tasked with finding) than about any subversive activities in which the refugees in Mexico were or were not involved. More than global conspirators, the refugees in Mexico were vulnerable and often

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traumatized individuals, who wrote ferociously against forgetting, hopelessness, and irrelevance, and who were trying to keep connections with loved ones and colleagues spread across the world alive, or were simply trying to stay alive: “One report of a house search in Mexico City expresses disappointment that instead of secret ink, agents found only stomach drops, a remedy that Europeans in Mexico liked to keep on hand” (257). The fact that Seghers had been deemed suspicious and dangerous before her arrival in New York also made it virtually impossible for her and her family to receive asylum in the United States. Yet Seghers’s political affiliations were not listed as the official reason for why the family could not stay in the United States. Instead, the medical authorities on Ellis Island diagnosed Seghers’s daughter Ruth, with an apparent “disease of the central nervous system.” Seghers herself describes this experience in a letter to F. C. Weiskopf written while she was trapped on Ellis Island, in June of 1941. When an agent questioned her, Ruth blinked at him, and Seghers explains that her daughter did so because she was tired, as near-­sighted as her mother, and because the man had been staring at her: “Then the man writes on a piece of paper (without a medical examination and without saying . . . a word to the child): The child is suffering from ‘disease of the central nervous system.’”17 Ruth’s alleged disease and, worse, the fact that the family was accused of hiding the child’s ailment, were listed as the official reasons for the family’s exclusion from admission to the United States. The fact that, on the day Seghers arrived on Ellis Island, she and the Boston-­based publisher Little, Brown & Company settled the contract for an English-­ language edition of The Seventh Cross did not help to get the family out of the detention center.18 The publisher was in no situation to help Seghers and her family, who had to rely on others to lend them clothes and other supplies. When Seghers returned to Europe in 1947, she was able to transit through the United States without any problems, but her written work had arrived there and even in Germany before she would. She had finished The Seventh Cross by 1939, but the book’s history cannot be detached from Mexico, the author’s country of refuge. The novel was first published in German by the exile press El Libro Libre, just as Kisch’s

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Entdeckungen in Mexiko was, and artist Leopoldo Méndez designed the book’s dust cover.19 Similar to Méndez’s engraving Deportación a la muerte (discussed in chapter 6), the image on the first edition of Das siebte Kreuz brings together the brutality of what was taking place in Europe (the clearly visible swastika, the soldiers) and religious symbolism (the prominent cross fashioned out of a tree trunk in the center of Méndez’s composition), rendered in a style that evokes the work of nineteenth-­century Mexican printmaker Posada. Seghers’s dedication acknowledges the many collaborations that made this publication possible: “This book is dedicated to Germany’s antifascists, living and dead. Its publication in Mexico came about through the friendship and joint efforts of German and Mexican authors, artists, and printers.”20 Like his close friend Anna Seghers, Kisch, who was no newcomer to absurd, if not cruel, immigration and border policies when he arrived in the United States, also had to endure the dire conditions at Ellis Island, as did his spouse Gisela. Yet eventually both were allowed to leave what he called a “Gefängnisinsel” (prison island) under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty, and to spend some time in New York before crossing to Mexico by land. He may have had more freedom to move around the territory of the United States than Seghers did, even though his work did not reach US audiences in the same way his friend’s books would. Kisch had hoped that Little, Brown & Company would also pick up Entdeckungen in Mexiko, and yet the publisher disappointed the author. While the book was praised as being written in a winning style, “with spirit and brilliance,” the reason for the rejection was that the collection could not be compared with other more commercially sound depictions of Mexico. Kisch’s writing is described as too nuanced for the average American reader, who would be unfamiliar with certain ideas and figures that only educated Germans would recognize—­regardless of the fact that Kisch actually was Czech. 21 The Seventh Cross is not exactly a commercial text, and yet, while Seghers was under surveillance by the US government, American soldiers fighting to liberate Europe from fascism were carrying with them a special edition of a book written by this “Communazi.” The novel tells the story of seven men who escape the Westhofen concentration camp. The camp’s commander orders that the fugitives should be apprehended

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within seven days and executed on the “seven crosses” fashioned out of trees that surround the camp. “Probably no trees ever cut down in our country were as unique, as strange as the seven plane trees growing at the gable end of Barracks III. Their crowns, for a reason to be revealed at a later time, had previously been cut off and a board had been nailed across each of the tree trunks at shoulder height. From afar, the seven plane trees looked like seven crosses.”22 All but one of the fugitives are apprehended: Georg Geisler, the protagonist, manages to escape, and by the novel’s end, he finds refuge in the Netherlands. Praised as “the best representation of Nazi Germany in a novel,” The Seventh Cross is a story about a successful resistance to fascism: if Geisler can be saved, then it still is possible to save Germany and the world. 23 Given this content, it is not surprising that the novel’s English edition was sponsored by the major publisher Little, Brown & Company, was chosen as Book-­of-­the-­Month, published in an illustrated edition with art work by William Sharp, made into a Hollywood blockbuster directed by Fred Zinneman, with Spencer Tracy in the starring role, and, as mentioned earlier, provided to the army in a special edition. The Seventh Cross is a suspenseful text that may have been good entertainment, but it also educated the soldiers about the country where the armed forces were fighting against the same enemies that Seghers denounces in her book (with whom, in the eyes of the US authorities, she could have been conspiring all along). Publishing this novel and selling the rights for the film version was a game-­changer for Seghers, as it solved some of the financial hardships for a family who had largely been relying on the help of others in order to make it out of occupied Europe and to the Americas. Yet the success of The Seventh Cross did not save Seghers from being labeled a “camouflaged Communist agent,” or from a consequent exclusion from entering the United States. While decades, geography, and circumstance separate it from The Seventh Cross, another story of forced displacement and detention comes to mind here: No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Iranian Kurdish refugee, Behrouz Boochani fled his home in 2013. He never made it to Australia, his intended destination, but instead ended up imprisoned on Manus Island until his liberation in 2019.

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Boochani never stopped writing for the duration of his incarceration, even though that meant typing text messages on a smuggled cell phone. His biography came together in the messages he sent to his friends and translators, Moones Mansoubi and Omid Tofighian, in Sydney. Before Boochani could leave Manus Island, Picador published his book, which went on to win several prestigious Australian literary prices: the Victorian Prize for Literature and the National Biography award. Meanwhile, Boochani remained trapped in the offshore prison, courtesy of Australian border policies, in spite of becoming, in Richard Flanagan’s words, a “great Australian writer.” Boochani was freed in late 2019 and now resides in New Zealand. The “great Australian writer” has vowed to never set foot in the country responsible for his incarceration. Boochani, typing away in Manus Prison on a smuggled phone reminds me of Max Aub writing his poems in Djelfa on smuggled paper, making one wonder what Aub could have done had he had access to more sophisticated technology. Yet Aub used what he had, composing his poems on the preciously few available sheets, writing with minuscule letters, and still managing to come up with a collection that, once again, was first published in Mexico. In Spain an edition of the collection finally appeared in 2015, decades after the author’s death in 1971. Just two years before, in 1969, Aub managed to travel back to Spain, for the first time in thirty years. The goal of his trip was to gather the materials he still needed to finish his book on Luis Buñuel. He traveled with his Mexican passport and with a visa that allowed him to remain in the country where he grew up for exactly three months, from August to November. Aub documents this return that was not one (“I have come, I have not returned,” he would write) in his memoir La gallina ciega [The Blind Man’s Bluff ] that was published—­no surprises here—­for the first time in Mexico. The first Spanish edition appeared more than two decades after the original publication, once Franco had died and the Spanish transition to democracy was more or less complete.24 In his memoir, a melancholy Aub recounts how the country he received permission to visit bears little relationship to the one he was forced to leave, acknowledging wearily that this story of a refugee’s return to a home that no longer is one would hardly find any readers. He knows that the book he is writing will not be sold in Spain, still in Franco’s grip in the late 1960s.

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Even when the day comes when his work can once again circulate freely “nobody will know what I am talking about.”25 Yet this did not mean either that Aub would have a devoted following in Mexico, his home since 1940. In Mexico, writes Aub, “I’m nobody, or they act as if I were, which amounts to the same thing.”26 The stories of Seghers, Boochani, and Aub emerge from radically different contexts, yet they still speak to the divergent ways in which the refugees themselves and their written works, or their bodies and their writings, can and cannot cross borders; stated differently, their stories are about the afterlives of refugees and of their written work. The fates of Kurt Kersten and Robert Breuer also come to mind here. When Kersten died in 1962, his New York Times obituary describes him as a “staff member of Aufbau, a German-­language weekly, and author of several German and Russian histories.” Not surprisingly—­also considering that this is an obituary from 1962—­the circumstances of why he was trapped in Martinique for five years are glossed over. All readers are told is that Kersten “was taken to Martinique, where he lived until 1946, the year he succeeded in coming to the United States.”27 The history of the Martinique Plan shows that Kersten and Breuer were not simply “taken,” to Martinique. Indeed, the verb taken covers up the entangled histories of French colonialism and Nazi occupation, as well as the actual theaters of war in the Atlantic and the intricacies of US migration policy in the period that shaped Kersten’s and, particularly, Breuer’s fate. It is worth noting here that Breuer and Kersten were unable to get an emergency visa (“Notvisum”) to the United States, since Martinique was not considered to be a “danger zone.”28 After hearing this repeatedly from the authorities, Kersten recalls that Breuer eventually wondered whether returning to Morocco may be the right idea, as being in a far more dangerous zone may have warranted a US visa: “Breuer brought up, with an earnest demeaner, that we should perhaps return to Morocco in order to reach a ‘danger zone.’”29 Breuer never received any kind of visa, and so departing from Martinique would also mean departing from life. When Kersten describes the moment Breuer’s body was being laid to rest, he mentions a local officer who spoke about a place for which “the eternal refugee” would not require a travel document—­perhaps a place like the Eleventh Realm.

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“From a distance I grasped that the captain was speaking about a long journey that that man in the tomb had undertaken, and about a desired visa and a land you could enter without a visa, a land so much more beautiful than any land on earth.”30 The words about that beautiful place are little comfort for Kersten and none for Breuer, who had done all he could to make it out of the island while still alive and before getting too sick to continue struggling for the right papers. About a year after he arrived in Martinique, he was desperately appealing to anyone who could help him. In a letter dated July 26, 1941, he lists the possible reasons why he would be a good candidate for an immigrant visa. “Where is America’s concern for freedom of spirit,” he wonders, thereby appealing to abstract notions of freedom. This is then followed by a call for humanitarianism, meaning that every life is worth saving: “And its humanity?” But Breuer then contradicts himself, as he adds that, as an intellectual, he had something to offer that others might not: “It indeed is inconceivable that a man like me is treated with such indifference, all because of senseless bureaucracy.” He ends the letter stating the idea that Martinique was not in a “danger zone” is ludicrous: “The notion that I am in a safe place is just an illusion.”31 Breuer also emphasizes that he would not be a burden to the state, as he had his own means to support himself and could also count on the help of other writers and organizations to which they belonged. Yet nothing helped. Breuer, who was not as well as known as Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, or Kersten’s good friend Anna Seghers, did not receive a visa. His life was not endangered enough until it was, and so he died in Martinique. Unlike the journeys of Seghers, Kisch, Aub, and certainly Breuer and Kersten, Gertrude Duby’s journey from Europe to the Americas was less meandering, and she was not as vulnerable as the others were. It was crucial for her that she was Swiss-­born and not Jewish, even though it is still not exactly clear who was pulling the strings to get Duby out of the Rieucros concentration camp and to Genoa, where she was able to embark.32 One of her biographies suggests that it is not known how Duby received the documents that allowed her to travel from Genoa to New York. Moreover, the fact that she was actually able to make it to the ship may have been due to her resourcefulness and even the kindness of strangers.33

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Like Seghers and Kisch, Duby was also detained at Ellis Island, though it is unclear how long she was there. She eventually received permission to stay for a limited time in New York, where she collaborated with Barsky’s Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee, supporting prisoners in French concentration camps like the one she had just left behind. Duby, less famous in 1941 than Seghers, Kisch (or Mann or Feuchtwanger) may not have a file as extensive as the former writers, but she also was not free from surveillance or from suspicion. During the harsh months at Rieucros, she had to endure the mistrust of some of the other imprisoned women, who apparently suspected that she was a spy of either the British or American secret service.34 Once she was living in Mexico, Duby’s choice to settle in Chiapas also looked suspicious to some agents from the United States who felt she had to be involved in some form of espionage. Guenther Reinhardt, a German-­born journalist turned occasional government agent who was active in intelligence operations in Latin America during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, writes extensively about Duby in his biography Crime without Punishment.35 Reinhardt’s depiction of the lives of antifascist refugees must be taken for what it is: the view of an affiliate of the FBI who finds in Mexico exactly what he set out to discover: Soviet intrigue everywhere, courtesy of what he called “The Little Comintern.” Reinhardt describes Duby as “a dumpy unattractive woman who looked like a Greenwich Village caricature of a revolutionist, wild-­haired and weak-­eyed.”36 Yet he warns his readers that she actually was not a caricature, but was instead “an able agent of the Soviet,” working undercover as an archeologist, an occupation that the self-­taught ethnographer, photographer, and activist never had. According to Reinhardt, Duby used this same cover when she traveled to Chiapas for the first time. Reinhardt claims that British Intelligence “showed me that the real purpose to her four-­month trek was to establish secret courier routes to and from Guatemala, another hatching nest for Soviet violence” (89). Reinhardt adds that Duby was responsible for smuggling Guatemalan Communists into Mexico, for opening future pathways for additional dangerous agents to enter the country, and for securing a hideaway in the jungle of Chiapas for members of the “Little Comintern” who “had to be whisked away from Mexico City” (89).

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The fact that the antifascist refugee communities in Mexico were riddled with intrigue, often in relation to or as a consequence of specific decisions made in the Soviet Union, has been well documented. Yet this does not mean that there is any truth to the vast conspiracies that Reinhardt and his employers stubbornly wanted to find in Mexico. A look at Duby’s own writing and her achievements in her early years in Mexico and during her lifetime suggests that accusations like those in Reinhardt’s book did not have a great impact on her. And yet it is still worth noting that women like Duby, just like the earlier mentioned Margarita Nelken, are likely to be caught in webs of suspicion and mistrust. Reinhardt briefly mentions Nelken, describing her as a female companion of Duby in the “Little Comintern.” There was, if she wanted to discuss such womanly matters as the use of a girdle to hide either a note or a knife, Marguerita [sic] Nelken a chilling, shrewish woman who left her native Russia as a young girl, became a German espionage agent in Spain during World War One and subsequently went to work in Germany as an agent of the original Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. In the Spanish Civil War she had been among the leadership of the Russian delegation directing the Loyalists. In Mexico she was hard at work with Comrade Dueby, handling the Little Comintern’s plans. (91)

Nelken’s actual biography has nothing to do with what Reinhardt is portraying here. Her respective relationships with the Spanish Communist Party in Spain and, once she was in exile, the Spanish Communist Party, Mexico Delegation, as well as with the Soviet Union were fraught with conflict, but she was not responsible for such intrigue, nor, as Reinhardt claims, was she involved with the alleged assassination of Tina Modotti (91). It is unclear if Duby and Nelken ever actually met. The thought of them exchanging ideas on how best to use their undergarments to hide weapons or secret messages is a fantasy that Reinhardt, and perhaps others, had about the lives of exiled women. Yet, as Seghers’s, Duby’s and Nelken’s stories prove, the realities of their existences in many ways supersede such fictions. Any reflection about forced displacement would remain incomplete

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without considering those who were unable to leave the places where their lives were endangered, among them Ruth Rewald and her daughter Anja. While Seghers was dealing with the authorities on Ellis Island in 1941, Rewald and Anja were in hiding in France. A year later, while Seghers was safe in Mexico, Rewald was on a journey of no return. The only words that remain about that journey are in a short missive she sent to Schaul, written in an easily decipherable code—­just a fragment that could not reveal the horror that she was enduring. Neither Rewald nor her child survived, and yet the testimonies that Simone Gigliotti analyzes in The Train Journey suggest that they, too, endured the “most intense bodily assaults” before arriving at the camp, not only “the destination of the train, but also [. . .] a perpetually present departure platform where traumatic life experiences find origin, meaning, and are subjected to innumerable comparisons.”37 Rewald never got to tell this last story, and even some of those she did write in her lifetime remained unknown until the late years of the Cold War, when a German researcher located Rewald’s unpublished manuscript Vier Spanische Jungen [Four Spanish Boys] in an archive in Potsdam. Rewald had joined her husband Hans Schaul in Spain 1937 in order to write a book for young audiences about an event the latter had witnessed when he was fighting with the International Brigades. Four boys had escaped Peñarroya (in the province of Cordova) after the Nationalists had captured the town. Knowing that the Nationalists would sooner or later harm them, and also hoping to join their fathers who were fighting with the Republicans, the boys crossed the lines and eventually happened upon the German-­speaking volunteers of the Tschapaiew Battalion, to which Schaul belonged. Rewald delivered: she went to Spain, conducted her research, and produced a book for young readers. Yet she never saw it in print. The manuscript for Vier Spanische Jungen was lost for almost fifty years, and its (to this date) only edition was not published until 1987. Janko. Der Junge aus Mexico, of course, saw its second edition in 2007, more than seven decades after it first appeared with a small publisher (Sebastian Brandt), after Rewald had already left Germany. After living in Paris and hiding in Les Roisiers-­sur-­Loire, Rewald never made it to another place of safety, and it would take decades for her written works to

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have an afterlife. Unlike what happened in Aub’s case, Rewald’s books could have circulated freely in her home country in the postwar years, but it was a very long time until someone actually paid attention to her work and her life. The fact that Rewald’s readers were children and young adults certainly played a role in this, as these are works that usually receive far less critical attention than what is not considered to be “genre fiction.” Along similar lines, it hardly is a coincidence that Silvia Mistral is mainly known for her memoir Éxodo. Her other written work, including children’s books and a travelogue about a journey to Israel, received very little notice. This may be partially due to the fact that, like many other exiled women, she ended up producing more marketable genres that would help her to make a living. Yet these usually are not the books that receive the attention of literary critics or cultural historians. Her Madréporas, however, is an interesting exception. This collection of vignettes about exile and motherhood, illustrated by renown Spanish graphic artist and fellow refugee Ramón Gaya, is an unconventional text, a “pictorial dialogue.”38 In the book’s first section, Mistral writes about pregnancy, specifically, about the joy of motherhood emerging from “pores, as with the madrepore.”39 For Mónica Jato, who wrote the introduction to the 2019 edition of the text (the book’s first one in Spain), the porosity of the madrepore “also refers to the idea of a being that opens up to the world, a relational (and plural) being that is not an essence but responds to its environment or social and material setting.”40 A portmanteau of mater (mother) and porus (pores), the name given to these stony corals puts forth a notion of rootedness that, rather than being irrevocably connected to an immobile or grounded essence, allows for a more dynamic and porous sense of identity and belonging. Mistral ends the book writing about and for her own, Mexican-­born daughter: “You will not be a foreign element here and from now on you will learn to distinguish genuine voices from the false noise of words, what exists as truly enduring and real behind what are just insecurities disguised as passions, loving it and understanding it, being you one more among all, you will have the exact conscience of your country: Mexico.”41 The madrepore with its porous structure may be, at the end, a fitting metaphor for this book’s six protagonists, the works they produced about

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their journeys, their imagined and real lives in Mexico, and everything about their afterlives. About eight decades after this book’s protagonists first found themselves displaced from their homes and on the run, the numbers of those facing such a fate have increased exponentially. They are producing works, though perhaps not on tiny, smuggled pieces of paper, or with typewriters like the one Seghers had in her rooftop terrace in Mexico City, or in small, almost unreadable handwriting like Kisch’s. The technology has changed, but the displaced still are writing everywhere and all the time, as Mistral did, on her knees, on a rock, on a nightstand, a chair.42 And all this takes us back to the early morning fog scene in Casablanca, which may not have been that inaccurate after all: perhaps the haziness does not depict a particular weather phenomenon, but the notion that refugee lives also are afterlives.

Notes

Chapter One 1. Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Murray Burnett, Joan Alison, Arthur Edeson, and Michael Curtiz, Casablanca (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2010). 2. For an in-­depth analysis of the fates of Jewish refugees in Portugal, see Marion Kaplan’s Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 3. Lindsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writings, Rights and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 25. 4. Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories” Standard Edition, vol. 3 (London: The Hogarth Press), 301–­22. 5. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12. 6. The lines stem from “As Time Goes By,” the song that Sam (Dooely Wilson) performs in the film. 7. Björn Nordfjörd, “Rick’s Café International: Casablanca as a Film of the World,” in Critical Insights Film: Casablanca, ed. James Plath (Ispwich, MA: Salem Press, 2016), 174–­88; 177. 8. Nordfjörd, “Rick’s Café International,” 184. 9. Nordfjörd, “Rick’s Café International,” 183. 10. Meredith Hindley, Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II (New York: Public Affairs Group, 2017). 11. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-­C onsciousness (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993); Simon Gikandi, “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial (London: Routledge, 2009); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). 12. See Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern (Berlin: G. B. Fischer, 1962); Simone Weil, L’enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 13. Stonebridge, Placeless People, 25. 14. Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees, xi. 15. Lindsey Stonebridge, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 15. 16. Anna Seghers, Letter to Kurt Kersten, 2 January, 1945, in  Anna Seghers.

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Briefe (1924–­1952),  ed. Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke  (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 156. 17. Ai Weiwei, Chin-­Chin Yap, and Heino Deckert, Human Flow (Amazon Studios, 2018). 18. Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee?” Social Text 139, no. 2 (June 2019): 109–­31; 113, 114. 19. Anna Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” in Selected Stories, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021). 20. . Seghers, “Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 180. 21. Seghers, “Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 180. 22. Warsan Shire, “Home” https:​/​​/​seekersguidance​.org​/​articles​/​social​-issues​/​ home​-warsan​-shire​/​​. 23. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal, 31, no. 1 (1943): 69–­71. 24. Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), vii. 25. Shire, “Home.” 26. Patrick Von zur Mühlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-­Portugal. Die deutsche Emigration und der Exodus aus Europa, 1933–­1945, (Bonn: J. H. W Dietz, 2019).] 27. I have written elsewhere about Benjamin’s death and the significance of Dani Karavan’s Passages.” See Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); “Moving Barbed Wire: Geographies of Border Crossing During World War II,” in Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space, ed. Tabea Linhard and Timothy Parsons (London and New York: Palgrave, 2018). 28. Debórah Dwork and Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–­ 1946 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009): xv. 29. James Hathaway, “The Global Cop-­Out on Refugees,” International Journal of Refugee Law 20, no. 20 (2019): 1–­14. 30. Francie Cate-­A ries, Spanish Culture behind Barbed-­Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–­1945 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004); Scott Soo, The Routes to Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939–­2009 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Dwork and Van Pelt, Flight from the Reich. 31. Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees, 2. 32. Mauricio Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94. 33. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 94. 34. Sebastiaan Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–­1975 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 212–­13. 35. Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez, “Del destierro al transtierro,” in A tiempo y destiempo: Antología de ensayos (Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013). 36. Daniela Gleizer, Unwelcome Exiles: Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–­1945, trans. Susan Thoame (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 37. Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), 222–­

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23; Ariel Dorfman, “A Lesson on Immigration from Pablo Neruda,” New York Times, 21 February 2018. 38. Markus G. Patka, Zu Nahe der Sonne: Deutsche Schrifsteller im Exil in Mexiko (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999). 39. David Bezmogis, “Common Story,” in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen (New York: Adams Press, 2018), 43–­50; 46. 40. Lev Gonklin, “Guests of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa,” in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen (New York: Adams Press, 2018), 75–­80; 76. 41. Gatrell, Modern Refugee; Stonebridge, Refugee Imaginaries, 15. 42. The full name is the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was formed the year before. 43. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 69. 44. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Introduction,” in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen (New York: Adams Press, 2018), 11–­23; 22. 45. Silvia Mistral, Éxodo: Diario de una refugiada española (Zürich: Pepita Graphics, 2013). 46. Anna Seghers, Briefe an Leser (Berlin: Aufbau, 1970), 63. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 47. Max Aub, Diario de Djelfa (Madrid: Visor de poesía, 2015). 48. Christine Fischer-­Defoy, Letzte Zuflucht Mexiko: Gilberto Bosques und das deutschsprachige Exil nach 1939. Eine Ausstellung des Aktiven Museums Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin (Akives Museum Berlin: 2013); Daniela Gleizer, “Gilberto Bosques y el consulado de México en Marsella (1940–­1942),” in La burocracia en tiempos de guerra: Estudios de historia moderna y contemporánea de México 45 (December 2105): 54–­76. 49. Max Aub, Jusep Torres Campalans (La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2002). 50. On August 2, 1945, Aub wrote in his diaries, “How much has being from nowhere, in this closed world, damaged me! Having the name that I have, and with that surname, that may be from one country or another” He also comments on his French inflection: “that French accent that mangles my Castilian” in the same entry. See Max Aub, Diarios, 1939–­1952, ed. Manuel Aznar Soler (Ciudad de México: Conaculta, 2000), 131; The same lines are also quoted in Sebastiaan Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–­1975 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002) 221; José María Naharro-­Calderón, “De ‘Cadalso 34’ a Manuscrito Cuervo: El retorno a las alambradas,” in Historia de Jacobo (Segorbe: Fundación Max Aub, 1999), 183–­255; 188; Ignacio Soldevila, El compromiso de la imaginación: Vida y obra de Max Aub (Segorbe: Fundación Max Aub, 1999), 24. 51. Max Aub, Eugenia Meyer, and José de la Colina, La verdadera historia de la muerte de Francisco Franco. (Segorbe: Fundación Max Aub, 2001). 52. See José Colmeiro, “Introducción,” in Mistral, Éxodo: Diario de una refu-

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giada Española. Edición a cargo de José Colmeiro (Barcelona: Icaria, 2009), 15. Mistral’s other work includes numerous articles and essays, romance novels, children’s books (La bruja vestida de rosas, La cola de la sirena, La cenicienta china); Madréporas, a series of lyrical vignettes about motherhood illustrated by Ramón Gaya, first published in 1944 and reissued in 1967, 1985, and 2020; and a travel account, El nuevo Israel: Un viaje a Kibutzia (1954). 53. León Felipe, “Prólogo,” in Mistral, Éxodo: Diario de una refugiada Española (México: Minverva, 1940), 16. 54. Anna Seghers, Anna Seghers, Constancia de la Mora Tell the Story of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (New York: Joint-­A nti Fascist Refugee Committee, 1944). 55. Seghers made this comment in an interview published in The New Masses in 1943. See Christiane Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie, 1900–­1947 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003), 386. 56. Patka, Zu Nahe der Sonne, 118. 57. Ruth Rewald, Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko (Wuppertal: Arco-­Verlag, 2007). 58. Dirk Krüger, “Nachwort,” in Vier Spanische Jungen (Köln: Pahl Rügenstein Verlag, 1987), 162. 59. Gertrude Duby (née Gertrude Elizabeth Loertscher) appears as Gertrude Düby, Gertrude Duby-­Blom, Gertrude Duby Blom, and Gertrude Blom in different sources. I refer to her as Gertrude Duby throughout the book. 60. Na Bolom, at https:​/​​/​en​.nabolom​.org​/​​. 61. Richard D. Lyons, “Gertrude Blom, 92, Long a Chronicler of Mayan Cultures,” New York Times, 29 December 1993. 62. Egon Erwin Kisch, Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Mexico: El Libro Libre, 1945). 63. Peter Cochrane, “The Big Jump: Egon Erwin Kisch in Australia” (Commonwealth History Project: The National Centre for History Education, 2008). 64. Egon Erwin Kisch, Paradies Amerika (Berlin: Verlag Erich Reiss, 1930). 65. Marcel Reich-­ R anicki, Die Ungeliebten. Sieben Emigranten (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske Pfullingen, 1986), 40. 66. Marcus G. Patka, Der rasende Reporter. Egon Erwin Kisch: Eine Biographie in Bildern (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 205. 67. Kisch was the vice president of the Heinrich Heine Klub and frequently collaborated with the exile publication Freies Deutschland. 68. Lepoldo Méndez, La séptima cruz, Museo Nacional de la Estampa, https:​/​​/​ mexicana​.cultura​.gob​.mx ​/​es​/​repositorio​/​detalle​?​id​=​​_ ​suri:MUNAE:TransObject:5b ce89637a8a02074f8337c1 69. Caroline Kodym, Mexico als Geliebte—­Europas Literarische Conquista. Über einen Sehnsuchtsort in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020), 9. 70. Max Saunders, “Life-­Writing, Cultural Memory, and Literary Studies,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 321–­31; 328. As Dwork and van Pelt remind their readers, Anne Frank also was a refugee. 71. Anna Seghers, Transit, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York

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Review Books Classics, 2013); Rebecca Slodounik, “‘Once Upon a Time in Marseille’: Displacement and the Fairy Tale in Anna Seghers’s Transit,” Humanities 8, no. 173 (2019): 1–­11; Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 72. Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–­18; 8. 73. Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 7. 74. Michael Rothberg, “Comparing Comparisons: From the ‘Historikerstreit’ to the Mbembe Affair,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 September 2020, 7. 75. Helen Graham, “Coming to Terms with the Past: Spain’s Memory Wars,” History Today 54, no. 5 (2004): 29–­30; 29. 76. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 77. Michael Rothberg, “Reflections on a Year of Acrimonious Discourse,” Stanford University Press Blog, https:​/​​/​stanfordpress​.typepad​.com​/ ​blog​/​2022​/​03​/​ reflections​- on​-a​-year​- of​-acrimonious​-discourse​.html​. 78. Dirk Moses, “The German Catechism,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021; Rothberg, “Comparing Comparisons,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 September 2020. 79. Bryan Cheyette “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-­S emitism,” American Historical Review (October 2018): 1234–­45; 1235. 80. Rothberg, “Comparing Comparisons,” 6. 81. Marcel Dalio, Mes anées folles. Récit recueilli par Jean Pierre de Lucovich (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1976), 147; Christopher S. Lang, “Here’s Looking at You . . . and You: The Actor’s Contributions,” Critical Insights Film: Casablanca, ed. James Plath (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016), 147–­59; 154. Chapter 2 1. David Jünger, “Karte von Fritz Freudenheim,” bpb: Bundeszentrale für die politische Bildung, 20 October 2021, https:​/​​/​w ww​.bpb​.de​/​themen​/​zeit​ -kulturgeschichte ​/​geteilte​-geschichte ​/​342332 ​/ ​karte​-von​-fritz​-freudenheim ​/​​. 2. David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 3. Federico (Fritz) Freudenheim, “Von der alten Heimat zur neuen Heimat!” (Private Collection, Irene Freudenheim), cited in Joachim Schlör, “Irgendwo auf der Welt: German-­Jewish Emigration as a Transnational Experience,” in Three-­Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016): 220–­38; 224; Jordana Dym and Karl Offen. Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9. 4. Marion Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 1. 5. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 3, 4 6. Atina Grossman, “Versions of Home: German-­Jewish Refugee Papers Out of the Closet and into the Archives,” New German Critique 90 (Fall 2003): 95–­122; 104. 7. Grossman, “Versions of Home,” 104. 8. Schlör, “Irgendwo auf der Welt,” 226.

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9. Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 10. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 83. 11. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 82. 12. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 93. 13. Egon Erwin Kisch, “Karl May, Mexiko, und die Nazis,” Freies Deutschland (November 1941). 14. Gertude Duby Blom, La familia de Na-­Bolom (Monterrey: Fondo Nacional para Actividades Sociales, 1979), 14. 15. Duby Blom, La familia de Na-­Bolom, 14. 16. Schlör, Irgendwo auf der Welt, 223. 17. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 8–­9. 18. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 8–­9. 19. Margaret Pearce, “Place Codes: Narrative and Dialogical Strategies for Cartography,” Paper read at  24th International Cartographic Conference, Santiago, Chile (November 2009). 20. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 4. 21. Knowles et al., Geographies of the Holocaust, 4. 22. Margaret Pearce, “Framing the Days: Place and Narrative in Cartography,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 35, no. 1 (2008): 17–­32; 2. 23. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 155. 24. Amalia Campos-­Delgado, “Counter-­Mapping Migration: Irregular Migrants’ Stories Through Cognitive Mapping,” Mobilities 13, no. 4 (2018): 488–­504; 489–­90. 25. Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These? Counter-­Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia, Antipode 27, no. 4 (1995): 383–­406; 386. 26. Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These,” 387. 27. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2. 28. Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” in Akerman and Karrow, Maps, 255–­87; 286. 29. Akerman and Karrow, Maps, 4. 30. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 6. 31. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, eds., The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), xix. 32. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” trans. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 325. 33. Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” in Dodge, Kitchin, and Perkins, Map Reader, 332–­39; 332. 34. Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 333. 35. Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 333. 36. Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 333; Knowles et al., Geographies of the Holocaust, 27.

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37. Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 336. 38. John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-­C oded World (London: Routledge, 2003). 39. Katherine Harmon, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 10. 40. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 11. 41. Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America, 11. 42. Maya Lin, Boundaries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 27. 43. Borges, “Exactitude in Science.” 44. Daniela Gleizer, “Gilberto Bosques y el consulado de México en Marsella (1940–­1942): La burocracia en tiempos de guerra,” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México 49 (January–­June 2015): 54–­76. 45. For photos of Seghers and Kisch together in Valencia, see Marcus Patka, Der rasende Reporter. Egon Erwin Kisch: Eine Biographie in Bildern (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 186. 46. Marcus C. Patka, Egon Erwin Kisch. Stationen im Leben eines streitbaren Autors (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1995), 312. 47. Ruth Rewald, Vier Spanische Jungen (Köln: Pahl Rügenstein Verlag, 1987). See also my chapter “A Novel That Never Was: Ruth Rewald’s Vier Spanische Jungen,” in Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice, ed. Cynthia Gabbay (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), 151–­72. 48. Debórah Dwork and Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–­ 1946 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 231. 49. Dwork and van Pelt, Flight from the Reich, 231. 50. Dwork and van Pelt, Flight from the Reich, 231. 51. See Knowles et al., Geographies of the Holocaust. The authors refer specifically to a geography that “includes not only broadly territorial ideas such as Lebensraum, which distinguished Aryan versus non-­A ryan space, but also the specific work of planning and designing Germanified cities, Jewish ghettos, and concentration camps,” 14. 52. Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace, “The Flight of Refugees Around the Globe,” New York Times, 20 June 2014. 53. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto, “Passagen des Exils: Zur Einleitung/ Passages of Exile: An Introduction,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich: Richard Boorberg Velag, 2017), 7–­13, 14 54. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective contains several “Story Maps”; see https:​/​​/​criticalrefugeestudies​.com ​/​story​-maps​. 55. For an example, see the maps provided by the NGO Humane Borders, at https: ​/​​/ ​humaneborders​.org ​/​migrant​-death​-mapping ​/​​. 56. Maribel Casas Cortés and Sebastián Cobarrubias, “Drawing Escape Tunnels Through Borders,” in An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2007), 51–­67. 57. See https:​/​​/ ​hackitectura​.net​. 58. Casas Cortés and Cobarrubias, “Drawing Escape Tunnels,” 61.

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59. Casas Cortés and Cobarrubias, “Drawing Escape Tunnels,” 63. 60. See Hostile Terrain 94, https:​/​​/​w ww​.undocumentedmigrationproject​.org​/​ hostileterrain94. Worldwide exhibits were planned for summer and fall 2020; unfortunately most had to be postponed due to the Covid-­19 pandemic. By 2022, the exhibit had been shown at more than seventy locations worldwide, and additional shows are planned. 61. Campos-­Delgado, “Counter-­Mapping Migration,” 488–­504; 495 62. Campos-­Delgado, “Counter-­Mapping Migration,” 498. 63. Campos-­Delgado, “Counter-­Mapping Migration,” 499. 64. Campos-­Delgado, “Counter-­Mapping Migration,” 499. Chapter 3 1. Emilio Calle and Ada Simón, Los barcos del exilio (Barcelona: RBA, 2006), 235. 2. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 236. 3. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 235. 4. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto define this condition as being in a “Schwellenzustand”; see Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto, “Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich: Richard Boorberg Velag, 2017), 8–­23. 5. Joachim Schlör, “Reflexionen an Bord: Die Schiffsreise als Ort und Zeit im Dazwischen,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Passagen des Exils/ Passages of Exile, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich: Richard Boorberg Velag, 2017), 54–­68; 69. 6. Mónica Jato, El éxodo español de 1939: Una topología cultural del exilio (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2020), 82. 7. Jato, El éxodo español, 116. 8. Soo, Scott, The Routes to Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939–­2009 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 9. Sara J. Brenneis, Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940–­2015 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 10. Alicia Alted, La voz de los vencidos: El exilio republicano de 1939 (Madrid: Aguilar, 2005); Federica Montseny, El éxodo: Pasión y muerte de españoles en el exilio (Barcelona: Galba Editorial Sagitario, 1977). 11. Schlör, “Reflexionen an Bord,” 54–­68; 56, 66. 12. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1. 13. Rothberg, Implicated Subject, 8. 14. Silvia Mistral, Éxodo (Zürich: Pepita Graphics, 2013), 147. The author points out that all contributors and editors were men and “renowned journalists,” many of whom had been active in propaganda during the war. All citations in this chapter are from the 2013 edition. 15. Francisco Caudet, El exilio republicano en México: Las revistas literarias (1939–­1971) (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2010), 42.

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16. Caudet, El exilio republicano, 72. 17. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 227. 18. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 228. 19. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 228. 20. Calle and Simón, Los barcos del exilio, 228. 21. Mistral, Éxodo, 149. 22. Fredrik Strömberg, Charles Johnson, et al., Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012), 47. 23. I am paraphrasing Johnson’s foreword to Black Images. 24. Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 35. 25. Silvia Mistral, “Yo fui pasajera en ‘El barco de los tontos’,” Excelsior, 18 October (1971). 26. Mistral, “Yo fui pasajera.” 27. Mónica Jato, Diario de un retorno a dos voces: Correspondencia entre Cecilia G. De Guilarte y Silvia Mistral (Sevilla: Ediciones Ulises, 2015), 22. 28. Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos, Varias voces, una historia: Mujeres españolas exiliadas en México (Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011), 144–­46. 29. Tuñón Pablos, Varias voces, 54; José Colmeiro, “Introducción: Mujer, exilio, y memoria,” in Éxodo: Diario de una refugiada española, by Silvia Mistral (Barcelona: Icaria, 2009), 24. 30. Mónica Jato uses the expression “la nave de los locos,” or “Narrenschiff,” but does not refer to Mistral’s 1971 article or to Katherine Anne Porter’s novel. Instead, she draws from Michel Foucault’s History of Madness to address how refugees lived through the experience of being trapped on a ship unwelcome at most harbors. See Jato, El éxodo español, 120. 31. Éxodo was first published in the periodical Siempre, before appearing with Minerva in 1940. Ship of Fools originated in Porter’s log of her journey. She sent that in a letter to a friend and eventually turned it into a novel. 32. Porter’s novel, as the author herself insisted, engages with the varied experiences aboard a ship transporting a range of very different (and, for the most part, unkind) passengers. The author traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1920 and returned twice before leaving for Bremerhaven from Veracruz. 33. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools (New York: Little, Brown, 1962), xii; Mistral chose her pseudonym while reading Frédéric Mistral’s 1859 poem Mireio; her family used to call her Silvia. 34. Mistral, “Yo fui pasajera,” n.p. 35. Porter, Ship of Fools, n.p. 36. Porter, Ship of Fools, n.p. 37. Darlene Harbor Unrue, “Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: Failed Novel, Classic Satire, or Private Joke?” in Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: New Interpretations and Transatlantic Contexts, ed. Thomas Austenfeld ( Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2015), 213–­36; 221. 38. Unrue, “Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, 221.

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39. Porter, Ship of Fools, 57–­58. 40. Porter, Ship of Fools, 58. 41. Porter, Ship of Fools, 59. 42. Hilton Als, “Enameled Lady: How Katherine Anne Porter Perfected herself,” New Yorker, 20 April, 2009, 3. 43. Mistral, “Yo fui pasajera.” 44. Mistral, Éxodo, 138. 45. Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 4. 46. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 7. 47. Mistral, Éxodo, 136. 48. Mistral, Éxodo, 136. 49. Mistral, Éxodo, 136. 50. Mistral, Éxodo, 144. 51. The three women also appear mentioned in the Diario, as “three women who were more than queens.” The entry is from Monday, June 26, 1939. In Mistral’s memoir, the entry is dated June 25, 1939, and she provides more detail, as she refers to the “beauty and frivolity of empress Josephine, the sassiness of Maintenon and the shrewdness of Amanda Dubuc de Rivéry, la Sultana Validé” (Éxodo, 153). 52. Mistral, Éxodo, 153. 53. Mistral, Éxodo, 153, 154. 54. Mistral, Éxodo, 153. 55. Mistral, Éxodo, 153, 166. 56. The memoir that Mistral eventually published in Mexico is not her “raw,” or unfiltered, travel journal. Instead, it is a heavily edited text, filled with numerous literary and other intertextual references. See Colmeiro, “Introducción,” 24. 57. Marina Magloire, “Witchcrafts of Color: Suzanne Césaire, Mayotte Capécia, and the Shapeshifiting Doudou in Vichy Martinique,” Meridiens: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, no. 1 (2018): 108. 58. Mistral, Éxodo, 156. 59. Aimé Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, bilingual ed., trans. Clayton Eshleman and Arnold James (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2013), 3. 60. Suzanne Césaire, “Le grand camouflage,” Tropiques 13–­ 14 (September 1945), 267–­73; 269, cited in Kara Rabbitt, “The Geography of Identity in Suzanne Césaire’s ‘Le grand camouflage,’” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 3 (2008): 121–­31; 125. 61. Rabbitt, “Geography of Identity,” 124; Magloire, “Witchcrafts of Color,” 107. 62. Césaire, “Le grand camouflage,” 270, cited in Rabbit, “Geography of Identity,” 126. 63. Césaire, “Le grand camouflage,” 270. 64. Mistral, Éxodo, 157. 65. T. Denean Sharpley-­W hiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2.

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66. Paulette Nardal, L’Éveil de la conscience de race chez les étudiants noirs,” La Revue du monde noir 6 (April 1932): 25–­31, reproduced in Sharpley-­W hiting, Negritude Women, 119–­24. 67. Sharpley-­W hiting, Negritude Women, 119. 68. Sharpley-­W hiting, Negritude Women, 119. 69. Mistral, Éxodo, 158. 70. Mistral, Éxodo, 158. 71. Mistral, Éxodo, 158. 72. Hughes’s poem begins, “We captured a wounded Moor today / He was just as dark as me / I said, Boy, what you been doin’ here / Fightin’ against the free?” The poem addresses the complex and contradictory realities of the racism that Hughes (and also Salaria Key and Eslanda Robeson) describes in Spain: Moroccan soldiers fighting for the Nationalists, and African American and Caribbean volunteers fighting for the Republic. While Hughes and Robeson do not recall racism among the Spanish people (at least those fighting for the Republic), “African American soldiers, who were mistaken for Moroccans fighting for Franco, certainly experienced it.” See Imaobong D.  Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-­ Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 58. 73. Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 35. 74. Mistral, Éxodo, 53. 75. Mistral, Éxodo, 57. 76. Mistral, Éxodo, 158. 77. Marina Magloire, “Witchcrafts of Color, 113. 78. Rabbitt, “Geography of Identity, 121–­31; 121; Suzanne Dracius, “In Search of Suzanne Césaire’s Garden,” Research in African Literatures 41, no. 1 (2010): 154–­65; 158. 79. Mistral, Éxodo, 160. 80. Mistral, Éxodo, 160. 81. Jato, El éxodo español, 119. 82. Mistral, Éxodo, 160. 83. Mistral, Éxodo, 162. Chapter 4 1. Olivier Assayas, “Ma version de l’histoire,” in Un Voyage: Marseille-­R io, 1941, ed. Olivier Assayas and Adrien Bosc, text and photographs, Germaine Krull and Jacques Rémy (Paris: Editions Stock (2019), 51. 2. Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7. Jennings’s book has been an invaluable source for this chapter, as it has led me to some of the archival sources here, among them manuscripts by Kurt Kersten and Germaine Krull. 3. Arie Kruglanski et al., “Are Syrian Refugees a Danger to the West”? The Conversation, 19 June 19 2019; https:​/​​/​theconversation​.com​/​are​-syrian​-refugees​-a​ -danger​-to​-the​-west​-113803; Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, and Katie Simmons, “Eu-

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ropeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2016, https:​/​​/​w ww​.pewresearch​.org​/​global​/​2016​/​07​/​11​/​euro​ peans​-fear​-wave​- of​-refugees​-will​-mean​-more​-terrorism​-fewer​-jobs​/​​. 4. André Breton, Martinique: Snake Charmer, trans. David W. Seaman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 66. 5. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin, 1992), 28. 6. Breton, Martinique, 26. 7. Lévi-­Strauss, Triste Tropiques, 26. 8. Anna Seghers, Letter to Franz Carl Weisskopf, 2 May 1941, in Anna Seghers. Briefe (1924–­1952), ed. Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 369. 9. Breton, Martinique, 68. 10. Martin Ruppel, “Hell-­hole Martinique,” The New Masses, 26 August 1941, 14–­16; Germaine Krull, “Camp de concentration a la Martinique,” unpublished manuscript, Museum Folkwang Essen, Germany. 11. Kurt Kersten, “Robert Breuers Tod und Begräbnis,” Frankfurter Hefte 8 , no 3 (March 1953): 230. 12. Quoted in Jennings, Escape from Vichy, 293. 13. Ruppel, “Hell-­hole Martinique,” 14. 14. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano have conceptualized these geographies as “new spaces of confinement, such as box cars,” that “gave frightening new meanings to mobility.” See Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 11. 15. Jennings, Escape from Vichy, 3. 16. Breton, Martinique, 75 17. Numerous texts, including Fry’s own autobiography, Surrender on Demand (1945), biographies, and even fiction tell the story of how Fry managed to help a list of individuals that include Hannah Arendt, Franz and Alma Werfel, and Marc Chagall, among others. Yet his story is not without controversy: See Sheila Isenberg: A Hero of Our Own: The story of Varian Fry (New York: Random House, 2001); Dara Horn “The Rescuer,” Tablet, 17 January (2015). 18. Rosemary Sullivan, Villa Air-­Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 19. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 72. 20. Timothy Parsons, The Rule of Empires: Those who Built them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 421. 21. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkam (New York: Monthly Review Press), 36. 22. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Volontés 20 (August 1939). The 1947 of edition of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was published with a preface by André Breton and a frontispiece that Lam designed (Paris: Bordas,

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1947). Lydia Cabrera’s Spanish translation, Retorno al país natal, also includes illustrations by Lam (La Habana: Molina, 1943). A bilingual edition of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated and edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, was published in 2013 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2013). 23. Robyn C. Sampson, Sandra M. Gifford, Savitri Taylor, “The Myth of Transit: The Making of Life by Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Indonesia,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 7 (2016): 1135, 1137. 24. Anna Seghers, Transit, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2013), 39. The character is an orchestra conductor who received a visa for Venezuela. It is not clear, however, whether he ever makes it out of Marseille and to Caracas. 25. Seghers, Transit, 40, 50, 52, 94, 80, 94. 26. The description is taken from Max Aub, El rapto de Europa; o, Siempre se puede hacer algo, to be discussed in the next chapter (Ciudad de México: Biblioteca Cátedra del Exilio, 2008), 113. 27. Seghers, Transit, 3. 28. Seghers, Transit, 251. 29. The MS St. Louis departed from Hamburg in 1939 on its way to Cuba, with more than nine hundred Jewish refugees on board. Cuba, the United States, and Canada denied entry to the refugees, and the ship was forced to return to Europe; about two hundred and fifty of those hoping to find safe haven in the Americas eventually died in the Holocaust. While the MS St. Louis was a transatlantic liner, the Struma was a far more modest ship, and in far worse condition than the MS St. Louis. In 1942, it was retrofitted in order to carry more than eight hundred refugees from Romania to Palestine, but the Struma never made it beyond the Black Sea, where it was, in all likelihood, hit by a Soviet torpedo. 30. “Other places” is, of course, a reference to Casablanca. Rick Blaine is correct when he states that not all refugees had to end up in Casablanca; there were “other places” in the Maghreb. 31. Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 24. Gigliotti uses this expression to refer specifically to the ways in which these are recalled in “departures, train journeys, and arrivals at the camp.” 32. Seghers’s letter is from February, 1963. She wrote several works of fiction set in the Caribbean, Die Wiedereinführung der Sklaverei in Guadeloupe (1984), Die Hochzeit von Haiti (1949), Das Licht auf dem Galgen (1961), and Drei Frauen aus Haiti (1980). 33. While there have been numerous debates about the term’s use in children’s literature in Germany, the debate has not moved to the criticism of exile literature. Seghers, Kersten, and Egon Erwin Kisch consistently use the term. See Sally Magrane, “A Fight in Germany over Racist Language,” New Yorker, 31 January 2013, and Dialika Neufeld, “It’s Time to Remove Racism from Children’s Books, Der Spiegel Online, January 2013, https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ why-­racism-­should-­be-­removed-­from-­books-­for- ­children-­a-­879628.html.

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34. Joachim Schlör, “Reflexionen an Bord: Die Schiffsreise als Ort und Zeit im Dazwischen,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Passagen des Exils/ Passages of Exile, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich: Richard Boorberg Velag, 2017), 57, 65. 35. Tropiques circulated between 1941 and 1945. The publication “was a collaborative creative venture that saw Martinique through its subjection to Vichy rule and ended when direct political participation became possible for its founders. Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil were also Tropiques’ primary contributors.” See Katerina Gonzalez Seligman, “Poetic Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2016), 495. Michael Rothberg considers the journal to be a “form of cultural resistance to Vichy rule in Martinique”; see his Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 72. 36. T. Denean Sharpley-­W hiting, Beyond Negritude: Essays on Woman in the City (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 3. 37. Conversation with Euzhan Palcy at the Chicago premier of her Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, Columbia College, April 1966; cited in Franklin Rosemont “Introduction,” in Martinique: Snake Charmer, by André Breton, trans. David W. Seaman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 1. 38. Breton, Martiniquer, 71. 39. Marina Magloire, “Witchcrafts of Color: Suzanne Césaire, Mayotte Capécia, and the Shapeshifiting Doudou in Vichy Martinique,” Meridiens: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, no. 1 (2018), 120. 40. Breton, Martinique, 86. 41. Breton, Martinique, 87. 42. Breton, Martinique, 88. 43. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 72. 44. In an essay from 1978, Ménil writes that Lam “prendre contact avec la foret tropicale d’Absalon et sitôt rentre a Cuba peindra son célebre tableau “La Jungle.” Quelle incidence la poésie de Césaire a pu avoir sur la vision de pientre—­c’est qui méritrait d’etre examinee.” See René Ménil, “Sous l’Amiral Robert: ‘Tropiques’ temoin de la vie culturelle, Cahiers du CERAG 36 (1978), 145–­53; 53. The landscape on Lam’s canvas is therefore not Cuban (even though it is often read in that way), but instead represents “the imaginary jungle of Negritude,” and like Césaire’s poetry, it evokes “both the Antillean reality and a dimly remembered African home.” See Robert Linsely, “Wifredo Lam: Painter of Negritude,” in Race-­Ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routldege, 2002), 289–­307; 294. 45. Alejo Carpentier, “Prologue,” in The Kingdom of This World, trans, Harriet de Onis (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975). 46. Francisco Hernández Adrián, “Paris, Cuba, New York: Wifredo Lam and the Lost Origins of the The Jungle,” Cultural Dynamics 21, no. 3 (2009): 339–­60. 47. Hernández Adrián, “Paris, Cuba, New York, 348. 48. Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism,

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and Anticolonialism,” in Race-­Ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routldege, 2002), 233–­60; 234. 49. Hernández Adrián, “Paris, Cuba, New York,” 350. In this sense, Lam’s experience relates to Aub’s (whose uprootedness is discussed in chapter 5) and to Seghers’s, yearning for a “Mexican sector” in Berlin after spending six years in Mexico (discussed in chapter 6). 50. Assayas and Bosc, Un Voyage: Marseille-­R io, 1941, 55. 51. Helena Benitez, Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam, 1939–­ 1950 (Lausanne: Acatos, 1999). 52. In addition to Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and, more recently, Paul Gilroy, Michael Rothberg, and Timothy Parsons have argued that the violence of colonialism and the violence of the Nazi genocide are intrinsically related. 53. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 78. 54. Kurt Kersten, “Robert Breuers Tod un Begräbnis”; Germaine Krull, unpublished manuscript, Archiv Museum Folkwang, Essen. 55. Kim Sichel, “Germaine Krull and L’amitié noire: World War II and French Colonialist Film.” Colonialist Photography, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (London: Routledge, 2002), 257–­80; 266. 56. Sichel, “Germaine Krull,” 266. 57. Gloria Crespo MacLennan, Imágenes de un exilio. El País, 27 July 2019; https:​/​​/​elpais​.com ​/​cultura ​/​2019​/​07​/​25​/ ​babelia ​/​1564051032 ​_​435588​.html​. 58. MacLennan, Imágenes de un exilio. 59. MacLennan, Imágenes de un exilio, 272. 60. Krull, “Camp de concentration,” 2. 61. Krull, “Camp de concentration,” 2. 62. Krull, “Camp de concentration,” 5. 63. Krull, “Camp de concentration,” 5. 64. Krull, “Camp de concentration,” 5. 65. Jennings, Escape from Vichy, 146. 66. Krull, “Camp de Concentration,”5. 67. Anna Seghers, Letter to Bodo Uhse, June 1, 1941, in Anna Seghers. Briefe, 1924–­1952, 106. 68. Kersten, “Robert Breuer’s Tod und Begräbniss,” 227. 69. Kersten, “Robert Breuer’s Tod und Begräbniss,” 227. 70. Kersten, “Robert Breuer’s Tod und Begräbniss,” 230, 229. 71. Anna Seghers, Letter to F. C. Weisskopf, 2 May, 1941, anna Seghers. Briefe 1924–­1952, 98. 72. Lisa Tetzner, Die Kinder aus Nr. 67. Band 3 und 4 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986) 73. Tetzner, Die Kinder, 251. 74. A different version of this ceremony is common in the navies of different countries; the hazing element that accompanies that version is absent from the novel. 75. Jacques Rémy, “Sur un cargo  .  .  .  ,” in Un Voyage: Marseille-­R io, 1941,

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ed. Olivier Assayas and Adrien Bosc, text and photographs, Germaine Krull and Jacques Rémy (Paris: Editions Stock (2019), 79–­105; 105. 76. The “Fete de Neptune” is also described in detail in Adrien Bosc’s novel Capitaine (Paris: Editions Stock, 2019), 158–­62. Chapter Five 1. Pedro Tejada Tello, “Crímenes ejemplares de Max Aub y el cine,” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 32 (2006). 2. Max Aub, Luis Buñuel (Granada: Cuadernos de Vigía, 2013). 3. José María Naharro-­Calderón, “Max Aub y los ‘Universos Concentracionarios,’” Homenaje a Max Aub, ed. James Valendar and Gabriel Rojo (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2005), 99–­126; 110–­11. 4. Max Aub, El rapto de Europa; o, Siempre se puede hacer algo (Ciudad de México: Biblioteca Cátedra del Exilio, 2008). 5. José María Naharro-­Calderón, “Actualidad de ‘El rapto de Europa,’” in Aub, El rapto de Europa, 11–­45; 21. Seghers’s husband, László Radványi, also became a character in one of Aub’s works. Aub met him at the Roland Garros prison camp in April of 1940; in his novel Campo Francés, he became a “Sociology professor from Heidelberg” (1965, 135; cited in Max Aub, Diarios. 1939–­1952, ed. Manuel Aznar Soler (Ciudad de México: Conaculta, 2000), 26. 6. Aub, El rapto de Europa, 113. 7. A 1938 visit to Marseille, where he witnessed the plight of refugees firsthand, inspired Burnett to write the play. José María Naharro-­Calderón, Elizabeth Scarlett, and Pedro de Tejada Tello have also discussed the similarities between the film’s and the play’s respective plots. 8. Sebastiaan Faber, “The Privilege of Pain: The Exile as Ethical Model in Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, and Edward Said,” Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads 3, no. 1 (2006), 15–­37; 18. 9. Max Aub, San Juan: Tragedia (Segorbe, Castellón: Fundación Caja de Segorbe, 1992); Albrecht Buschman, “Die Kulturen des Max Aub,” Die Horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 48, no. 2 (2003): 5–­12; 11. 10. Susanne Zepp, “Early Writing: Max Aub’s San Juan,” in The Holocaust in Spanish Memory: Historical Perceptions and Cultural Discourse, ed. Alberto Gómez López-­Quiñones and Susanne Zepp (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 169–­82; 172. 11. Max Aub, “Al publicarse San Juan,” Primer Acto 52 (May 1965), 6–­7; reprinted in Aub, San Juan, 255. 12. See Paul Allen Anderson, “The World Heard: Casablanca and the Music of War,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 482–­515; Richard Gooden and Mary McCay, “Say It Again, Sam[bo]: Race and Speech in Huckleberry Finn and Casablanca,” Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1996): 657–­82; William Gooding, “Black Cupids, White Desires: Reading the Recoding of Racial Difference in Casablanca,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African-­A merican Literature and Culture, ed. Maria Diedrich and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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13. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” SubStance 14, no. 2 (1985): 3–­12; 3. 14. David Denby, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s: Casablanca on the Big Screen,” New Yorker, 19 March 2012; https:​/​​/​w ww​.newyorker​.com​/​culture​/​culture​-desk​/​ everybody​- comes​-to​-ricks​- casablanca​- on​-the​-big​-screen​. 15. Elizabeth Scarlett, “El rapto de Europa y Casablanca: dos dramas de la crisis de la conciencia europea y americana,” Actas del Congreso Internacional ‘Max Aub y el Laberinto español,’ ed. Cecilia Alonso (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1996), 745–­51; 748. 16. Naharro-­Calderón, “Max Aub y los ‘Universos Concentracionarios,’” 110. 17. Naharro-­Calderón, “Actualidad de ‘El rapto de Europa,’” 30–­35. 18. Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Skyhorse Pub, 2009) 19. Naharro-­Calderón, “Actualidad de ‘El rapto de Europa,’” 43. 20. Scarlett, El rapto de Europa y Casablanca, 751. 21. Jack Nachbar and Ray Merlock, “Time Going By: A Casablanca Chronology,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 27, no. 4 (2000): 46–­48. 22. Brian T. Edwards, “Following Casablanca: Recasting the Postcolonial City,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 5, no. 1 (2005): 13–­20; 9. 23. Scarlett, El rapto de Europa y Casablanca, 748. The reference to Rick’s involvement with the Loyalists did not make it past the Spanish dubbing of the film: in the Spanish version distributed for the duration of the dictatorship, Rick’s support for the Spanish Republic was translated as fighting against the annexation of Austria. See María Rosa Agost, “Aspectos generales de la traducción para el doblaje,” in ¡Doble o nada! Actas de las I y II Jornadas doblaje y subititulación de la Universidad de Alicante, ed. John D. Sanderson (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes), 2015. 24. Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 287. 25. Isabel Soto, “‘I Knew That Spain Once Belonged to the Moors’: Langston Hughes, Race, and the Spanish Civil War,” Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 130–­46; 133. 26. “Salaria Kea: A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,” A pamphlet issued in 1938 by the Negro Committee to Aid Spain and the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. (From the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, New York City). 27. Scarlett, El rapto de Europa y Casablanca, 747. In addition to the classical reference to Titian’s Rape of Europa, the play’s title could also be, as Naharro-­ Calderón points out, an invocation to Jacques Lipschitz’s 1938 sculpture of the same title. Lipschitz was among the artists whom Varian Fry helped to get out of Europe. 28. Aub, El rapto de Europa, 86. 29. Zepp, “Early Writing: Max Aub’s San Juan,” 177. 30. Naharro-­Calderón explains that US theater director Gilmor Brown had received the play from Aub in person in Mexico; Theodor Apstein, a Hispanist from the University of Texas, had taken care of the translations. Although initial cri-

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tiques were favorable, Brown’s attempts to further distribute the play in the United States were fruitless: literary agents in New York responded that at this point in time (1945), the play was already outdated (Naharro-­Calderón, “Actualidad de ‘El rapto de Europa,’” 41). 31. See Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 8; Max Aub, Diario de Djelfa: Con seis fotografías (Valencia: Ed. de la Guerra & Café Malvarrosa, 1998). 32. Mistral, Éxodo, 53; Krull, “Camp de Concentration,”2 . 33. See Ottmar Ette, “Max Aub: Vertreibung, Migration und ein literarisches Spiel auf Leben und Tod,” AWR Bulletin 42, no. 1 (2004): 9–­14; 11; Albrecht Buschman, “Die Kulturen des Max Aub,” 12; Eric Dickey, “Voices from Beyond the Grave: Remembering the Civil War in the Work of Max Aub,” Hispanic Issues On Line 11 (2012): 157–­77; 166; Michael Ugarte, “Max Aub y la mirada del ‘otro’ africano,” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 30, nos. 1/2 (2005): 513–­24; 522. 34. Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsch, “General Introduction,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, Welsh S. Lawson, and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–­13; 2; Simon Gikandi, “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality, in Rerouting the Postcolonial (London: Routledge, 2009), 22–­39; 29; Elizabeth DeLoughrey Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007). 35. Ugarte, “Max Aub y la mirada del ‘otro’ africano,” 515. 36. Max Aub, La gallina ciega. Diario español, Edición, estudio introductorio y notas de Manuel Aznar Soler (Barcelona: Alba, 1995), 115. 37. On August 2, 1945, Aub wrote in his diaries: “¡Qué daño no me ha hecho, en nuestro mundo cerrado, el no ser de ninguna parte! El llamarme como me llamo con nombre y apellido que lo mismo pueden ser de un país que de otro”). He also comments in the same entry on his French inflection: “ese acento francés que desgarra mi castellano.” See Diarios,1939–­-­1952, 131, 128. The same lines are also quoted in Sebastiaan Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–­1975 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002) 221; C. Naharro-­ Calderón, “De ‘Cadalso 34’ a Manuscrito Cuervo: El retorno a las alambradas,” in Historia de Jacobo (Segorbe: Fundación Max Aub, 1999), 183–­255; 188; Ignacio Soldevila, El compromiso de la imaginación: Vida y obra de Max Aub (Segorbe: Fundación Max Aub, 1999), 24. 38. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 193. 39. Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony, 221. 40. Berman, Modernist Commitments, 187. 41. Buschmann, “Die Kulturen des Max Aub,” 5. 42. See Soldevila, El compromiso de la imaginación, 39; Naharro-­Calderón, “De

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‘Cadalso 34’ a Manuscrito Cuervo,” 187; Benard Sicot, “Max Aub en Djelfa: Lo cierto y lo dudoso,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 55, no. 2 (2007): 398. 43. Bosques even employed Aub: he became the press attaché of the Mexican consulate in Marseille. Naharro-­Calderón suggests that Aub probably worked as a messenger between Bosques and the Emergency Rescue Committee. See his “De ‘Cadalso 34’ a Manuscrito Cuervo,” 206. 44. Soldevila, El compromiso de la imaginación, 40–­41. 45. While many of Aub’s works have been translated into German and French, to this date, only three of Aub’s works are available in English: Jusep Torres Campalans (Doubleday, 1962), Field of Honor (Verso, 2009), and “Jacob’s Story: Manuscript of a Crow,” which appeared in New Directions Prose and Poetry 45 (1982). 46. See Gikandi, “Between Roots and Routes,” 26. Gikandi is not writing about European intellectuals and writers who, like Aub, were displaced in the 1940s, but about African refugees in the twenty-­fi rst century, “caught in the cracks of the failed state.” 47. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 144. 48. Michael Ugarte, “Max Aub’s Magical Labyrinth of Exile,” Hispania 68, no. 4 (1985), 733–­39; 733. 49. Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony, 213; 220. 50. Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony, 223. 51. Aomar Boum and Sara Abrevaya Stein, The Holocaust and North Africa, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 52. Michael Rothberg, “Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 359–­79; 373). 53. Max Aub, Historias de mala muerte (México: Joaquín Moritz, 1965), 83. 54. Aub, Historias de mala muerte, 83. 55. Rothberg, “Remembering Back,” 373. 56. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 21. 57. Rothberg coins the expression noeuds de mémoire, a play on Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, in order to show that these knots of memory, more than the “sites of memory,” make it possible to consider “collective or cultural memory beyond the framework of the imagined community of the nation-­state.” See Michael Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire,” Yale French Studies 118–­119 (2010): 3–­12; 7. 58. Dario de Djelfa is not unique when it comes to Spanish prison and concentration camp testimonies. According to Eric Dickey, “The concentration camps constitute a place of memory where a significant portion of the marginalized memory of post–­Spanish Civil War history belongs.” (Dickey, “Voices from Beyond the Grave, 169). Moreover, Francie Cate-­A rries shows that the “makeshift camps, located primarily along the French border” are an “enduring, archival site”; the border camps are “formative spaces in the fledgling Spanish collective consciousness in exile”; see Francie Cate-­A rries, Spanish Culture Behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Represen-

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tation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–­1945 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 23. 59. Boum and Stein, Holocaust in North Africa, chapter 7. 60. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 21. 61. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 21. 62. Jacob Oliel, Les Camps De Vichy: Maghreb-­sahara, 1939–­1945 (Montréal: Éditions du Lys, 2005), 105; Boum and Stein, Holocaust in North Africa, chapter 7. 63. None of the poems in the collection actually contains references to working on the railroad. Instead, one of the captions of the four photos included in the book suggests that it was Aub’s job to work with hemp: he was making espadrilles. See Sicot, “Max Aub en Djelfa,” 408. 64. Boum and Stein, Holocaust in North Africa, chapter 7. 65. Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). 66. Netz, Barbed Wire, 128. 67. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 47. The original versions of the poems are included in the notes: “Contra el hambre, alambrada, / noche y día.” 68. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 47: “Ya se recortan negras, en grises suaves, las alambradas hacia Levante.” 69. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 75: “En idéntica pobreza, / idéntica desnudez, / desolación africana / igual a la de Teruel, / despellejadas mesetas / a los Campos de Daimiel, / españoles en Castilla / y moros en el Magreb.” 70. Diario de Djelfa, 75. 71. Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 3. 72. Alfred Albet-­Mas, “Three Gods, Two Shores, One Space: Religious Justifications for Tolerance and Confrontation between Spain and Colonial Morocco during the Franco Era,” Geopolitics 11, no. 4 (2006): 580–­600; 592. 73. The phrase “Los moros que trajo Franco” is a verse from a famous Spanish Civil War song, “No Pasarán” and also the title of a 2002 book by Rosa María Madariaga. 74. Catherine Belbachir, “El espacio de los vencidos en Diario de Djelfa de Max Aub,” in Historia, espacio e imaginario, ed. Jacqueline, Covo-­Maurice (Villeneuve-­ d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), 173–­78; 175. The verse could also be a reference to a medieval ballad, “Ay de mi Alhama.” 75. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 75: “Dice el moro en cuclillas / ¡Ay de mi Alhambra! / Y el cristiano rendido / ¡Mi alambrada!” 76. Ugarte, “Max Aub y la mirada del ‘otro’ africano,” 514. 77. Belbachir, “El espacio de los vencidos,” 175. 78. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 43: “Habla a gritos su jerga / con los brazos en aspa / o se está quedo largos / ratos sin decir nada.” 79. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 64: “Los moros hablan chillando, / que es su manera de ser / parecer siempre enfadados.” 80. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 124: “blanco garbo, / blanca gracia / blancos pliegues y repliegues / blanca almalafa.”

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81. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 124: “Ojo oscuro entrevisto / que ve sin ser visto, / mira y ofrece.” 82. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. 83. Aub, Diario de Djelfa, 124. 84. These conflicts are particularly visible in the characterization of Carlos, a young man who eschews his relationship with Jewishness, but who, like all the other characters, dies in the shipwreck. Aub’s own relationship with Jewishness was complicated: while his parents had Jewish origins, the family was agnostic and Aub only became aware of his connection with Jewishness as an adult. Aub visited Israel in 1967. Contrary to what he expected, this journey did not awaken emotional or even sentimental connections with Jewishness. See Aub, Diarios, 387. 85. Aub, San Juan, 152, my emphasis. 86. Aub, San Juan, 152: “Una apuesta. Me dijelon que elan como todos. Yo no lo podia cleel. Polque, si son como todos ¿pol qué no los habían de dejal desembalcal, no?” 87. Aub, San Juan, 152. 88. Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory,” 8. 89. Richart Porton, “Lives in Transit: An Interview with Christian Petzold,” Cineaste (Spring 2019), 17–­21; 20. Chapter 6 1. Christiane Zehl Romero, ed., Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie, 1900–­1947 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003), 386. Seghers makes this statement, as Zehl Romero notes, in an interview with John Stuart, published in New Masses, on February 16, 1943. 2. Christiane Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie, 1947–­1983 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003), 17. 3. Seghers uses the expression “Nervenangst vor Ämtern” in a letter from 1947. See Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie, 1947–­1983, 17. 4. Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie, 1947–­1983, 15. 5. Anna Seghers, Letter to Kurt Stavenhagen, 12 June 1947, in Anna Seghers. Briefe (1924–­1952), ed. Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 219. 6. Like Seghers, Stavenhagen had to leave his native Germany behind. He was a successful entrepreneur and became a prominent art collector. See also Wiebke von Bernstoff, Fluchtorte: Die Mexikanischen Und Karibischen Erzählungen von Anna Seghers (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Pohle, Fritz. “Das Rätsel um das wirkliche Blau,” in Fluchtort Mexiko, ed. Martin Hielscher (Hamburg: Luchterland, 1992), 57–­59; 58. 7. Beth Merfish, “El libro negro”—­Mexico City at the Front of Antifascism,” artUS 26 (2009), 36–­41; 39. 8. Anna Seghers and Constancia de la Mora, Anna Seghers [and] Constancia De La Mora Tell the Story of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (New York: Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee, 1944).

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9. Alexander Stephan, Anna Seghers im Exil (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993), 130. Constancia de la Mora was a Spanish exile and author of the autobiographical text In Place of Splendor: The Autobiography of a Spanish Woman (1939), which appeared in the United States in an English version before it was published in Spanish. See Soledad Fox, A Spanish Woman in Love and War: Constancia de la Mora (Sussex Academic Press, 2007). 10. Stephan, Seghers im Exil, 129. 11. Even though Seghers corresponded with several writers and editors in English, she lacked the necessary fluency to write in English with the same nuance and complexity characteristic of her writing in German. See Anna Seghers. Briefe 1924–­1952, 672. 12. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 112. 13. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal 31, no. 1 (1943): 110. 14. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 288. 15. As Emily Apter succinctly puts it, “World Literature” can be understood as a “disciplinary construct” propagated via anthologies, essays, and studies, “some emphasizing networks and systems oriented around Marx’s hypothetical of a literary International, others emphasizing a Goethean lineage adjusted to an era of global finance capital.” Meanwhile, world literature, in contrast, is “a descriptive catch-­all for the sum of all forms of literary expression in the world’s languages.” See Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 2. The main references are World Literature Today, works by Casanova (1999), Prendergast (2004), and Moretti (2000), as well as role of the Institute for World Literature, spearheaded by David Damrosch 16. There are myriad ways to understand what world literature is. Mariano Siskind calls the concept “a tool meant to classify world literary texts and exclude others, whether it is a discipline and a way of reading (and thus the new paradigm for comparative literature), or whether it is the name of the historical formation of a space of symbolic exchange and circulation that exceeds particular national cultures; world literature entails, to a certain extent, all of these critical and pedagogical operation.” See Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 351. 17. Apter, Against World Literature, 2. 18. Friedrich Katz, “El exilio centroeuropeo: Una mirada autobiográfica,” in México, país refugio: La experiencia de los exilios en el siglo XX, ed. Pablo Yankelevich (Ciudad de México: INAH-­Plaza y Valdés, 2002), 43–­48; 45. 19. Leon Weiss, whose testimony is held by the USC Shoah Foundation, was born in Lodz, spent time in a labor camp in Siberia, and eventually made it to Mexico in 1943. 20. According to Alexander Stephan, El Libro Libre was “perhaps the most important émigré publishing firm in the world” in the period. See Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers, trans. Jan van Heurck (New Haven, CT:

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Yale University Press, 2000). 224). Together with Seghers’s own Das Siebte Kreuz (published with a cover designed by Mexican artist Leopoldo Méndez), El libro negro del terror nazi probably is the most important publication to come from El Libro Libre, and only one of three books that it published in Spanish translations. The others are Paul Merker’s La caída de la república alemana: El camino de Hitler al poder (1944, trans. Manuel Andújar), and André Simone’s La batalla de Rusia (1943, trans. Pedro Quintanilla). 21. See Merfish, “El libro negro,” 37; and Ryan Long, “The People’s Print Shop: Art, Politics, and the Taller de Gráfica Popular,” in Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations, ed. Stuart A. Day (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 84–­106; 85. Sources for the text appearing alongside Méndez’s print include an article from Hitler’s Mein Kampf; an undated article by Varian Fry published in the New Republic; an article from March 13, 1943, that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune; information from the Office of Soviet Information, dated December 19, 1942; information from unknown sources; and eye-witness accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. 22. Sara Blair, “After the Fact: El libro negro, Traumatic Identities, and the War on Fascism,” Journal of Jewish Identities, 5, no. 1 (2012): 112–­25; 115. 23. Long, “The People’s Print Shop,” 86. 24. See, for example, the following images as a contrast: http:​/​​/​w ww​.yadvashem​ .org​/​y v​/​en​/ ​holocaust​/​about​/​09​/​europe​_ ​gallery​.asp​. 25. The above-­mentioned collection, Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana, was also a TGP publication. 26. Alison Cameron, “Buenos Vecinos: African-­A merican Printmaking and the Taller de Gráfica Popular,” Print Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1999): 353–­67; 358. 27. Andrea Acle-­K reysing, “Antifascismo: Un espacio de encuentro entre el exilio y la política nacional. El caso de Vicente Lombardo Toledano en México (1936–­ 1945),” Revista de Indias 86, no. 267 (2016): 573–­609; 576. 28. The Liga Pro-­Cultura Alemana, an anti-­Nazi organization, held a series of lectures at the Bellas Artes Palace in the fall 1938; the TGP oversaw the posters, which were also distributed in different parts Mexico City. See Acle-­K reysing, “Antifascismo.” 29. From the corrido (popular ballad) “La Rielera,” to the iconic image of “La Adelita,” from countless scenes in the “Novels of the Mexican Revolution” to the hundred-­peso bill that marks the Centenary of the Revolution, trains are ubiquitous images in the cultural production emerging from the Revolution. 30. Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 2. 31. Gigliotti, Train Journey, 16. 32. Acle-­K reysing, “Antifascismo,” 575; Blair, “After the Fact,” 120. 33. Blair, “After the Fact,” 120. 34. Apter, Against Comparative Literature, 2. 35. Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie 1900–­1947, 384. 36. Egon Erwin Kisch, whose work is discussed in chapter 9, and Bodo Uhse were close to Seghers, and both wrote about Mexico and Mexican arts. Uhse pub-

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lished two collections of short stories about Mexico, Mexikanische Erzählungen (1957) and Sonntagstraum in der Alameda (1957). See also Friedhelm Schmidt-­Well, Mexico als Metapher. Inszenierung des Fremden in der Literatur und Massemedien (2011); and Renata von Hanffstengel, Mexiko im Werk von Bodo Uhse: Das nie verlassene Exil” (1995). 37. Pierre Radványi, “Einige Errinerungen,” in Argonautenschiff. Jahrbuch der Anna Seghers Gesellschaft, vol. 3 (1994), 188. 38. Radványi, “Einige Errinerungen.”. 39. Today the organization may be more well known in relation to the US Supreme Course case Joint Anti-­Fascist Rescue Committee vs. McGrath. 40. Stephan Anna Seghers im Exil, 10. 41. Stephan, “Communazis,” 255. 42. In The Seventh Cross (1942) the hero, Georg Heisler, is a Communist who escapes from a Nazi concentration camp; the unnamed hero of Transit faces the complications that obtaining a visa in Marseille in order to escape from fascism entails; in her novella Crisanta (1951), Seghers narrates the fate of a young, disenfranchised Mexican woman; the family’s housekeeper in Mexico City may have been a model for the character named Crisanta in the novella. 43. Anna Seghers, Transit, trans. Margot B. Dembo (New York: Random House, 2013), 20. 44. Stephan, Communazis, 55. 45. Seghers had met many of the Spanish exiles when she participated in the Second International Congress of Anti-­Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia in 1937. 46. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–­2. 47. Lion Feuchtwanger, “The Working Problems of the Writer in Exile,” Altogther Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 256–­60; 260. 48. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173–­86; 147; Paul Reitter “Comparative Literature in Exile: Said and Auerbach,” in Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, ed. Alexander Stephan (Oxford: P. Lang, 2006), 21–­30; 22. 49. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 10. 50. The texts in the anthology were originally written in German, Czech, French, English, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian. 51. Pohle, “Das Rätsel um das wirkliche Blau,” 57–­58. 52. Pohle, “Das Rätsel um das wirkliche Blau,” 57–­58. 53. Stephan, Anna Seghers im Exil, 24. 54. Anna Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” in Selected Stories, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021), 283. Since this analysis centers on translations, I’ve included the original German text in the notes: “Nein, von viel weiter her. Aus Europa” (Anna Seghers, Geschichten aus Mexico (Berlin: Aufbau, 1972), 5–­35, 5.

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55. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 156; “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen”: “als ob ich erwiedert hätte: ‘Vom Mond’” (5). 56. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 156; “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen”: “Er trat vom Tisch zurück und fing an, reglos an die Hauswand gelehnt, mich zu betrachten, als suche er Spuren meiner phantastischen Herkunft” (5). 57. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 156; “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen”: “Mir kam es plötzlich genauso phantastisch wie ihm vor, dass ich aus Europa nach Mexiko verschlagen war” (5). 58. The text in Spanish reads, “A mí me pareció de pronto tan fantástico como a él que desde Europa hubiera venido a parar a México”; see Anna Seghers, “La excursión de las muchachas muertas,” Cuadernos Americanos 18, no. 6 (1944): 227–­45; 227. 59. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 156; “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen”: “kahl und wild wie ein Mondgebirge” (5); Seghers, “La excursión”: “peladas y salvajes como montaña lunar” (227). 60. Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers, Eine Biographie, 1900–­1947, 383. 61. Feuchtwanger, “Writer in Exile,” 258. 62. Stephan, Seghers im Exil, 149. 63. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 180: “Man klapperte schon mit den Tellern zum Abendessen. Ich hörte hinter sämtlichen Türen das Klatschen von Händen auf Teig in vertrautem Rhythmus; dass man auf diese Art Pfannkuchen buk, befremdete mich: die zähe Masse, statt sie auszurollen, zwischen den Händen platt zu schlagen” (34). 64. Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” 180; “Excursión,” “Me extrañó que se hicieran así las pastas, batiendo la cruda mesa tenaz entre las manos para hacer tortillas, en vez de extenderla con el rodillo” (255). 65. Julia Hell, “Anna Seghers and the Problem of a National Narrative after Auschwitz,” GDR Bulletin 19, no. 2 (1993): 1–­7; 4. 66. Another interesting fact is absent from the different studies of the collection. During Seghers’s first exile in France, she was already involved in a comparable yet less ambitious publishing project that may have been a precursor of El libro negro del terror nazi. During her exile in France, Seghers intended to edit a book that would pay homage to the German heroes murdered in the earlier years of Nazism. She had secured contributions by Thomas Mann, whose essay “El nazismo envilece a Europa” opens up El libro negro. However, the book Seghers meant to complete never was published. So, it may not be farfetched that El libro negro had a precursor in Seghers’s never-­published Heldenbuch. 67. Blair, “After the Fact,” 112. The book also includes reproductions of works by John Heartfield, Käthe Kollowitz, and William Groper, although they were not produced specifically for this collection. See Merfish, “El libro negro,” 38. 68. See https:​/​​/​w ww​.metmuseum​.org ​/​art​/​collection ​/​search ​/​746756​. 69. Merfish, “El libro negro,” 38. 70. Blair, “After the Fact,” 112. 71. Anna Seghers, “Cómo se hace un nazi,” in El libro negro del terror Nazi en Europa, ed. Antonio Castro Leal (Ciudad de México: El Libro Libre, 1943), 55–­63;

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49; Anna Seghers, “Ein Mensch wird Nazi,” Freies Deutschland (March 1943), 13–­ 15; 14. 72. Seghers, “Cómo se hace un nazi,” 60: “Quería el orden por el orden. En su vida actual, en que cada minuto traía una orden nueva, no cabían desviaciones salvajes, riñas ni pogromos. Allá en la subconciencia se sentía contento de que no tuviera tareas equívocas, de que se la quitara la responsabilidad de sus acciones. 73. Josefina Sandoval, Mexico in Anna Seghers’ Leben und Werk, 1940–­1947 (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2001), 114. 74. See Helga Prignitz-­Poda, El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México, 1937–­1977 (Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992). 75. See Anna Seghers Stiftung, online at https:​/​​/​w ww​.anna​-seghers​.de​/​stiftung​ .php​. Chapter Seven 1. Akademie der Künste, “Kinder im Exil,” https:​/​​/​w ww​.adk​.de​/​d e​/​programm​/​ index​.htm​?​we ​_​objectID ​= ​46989​. 2. Dirk Krüger, “Vergessen und verbrannt,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 18, no. 70 (1988): 111–­19; 111. 3. Robert Cohen provides a semifictional account Rewald’s life in his novel Das Exil der frechen Frauen (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 2000). 4. Rewald’s friend and fellow author Lisa Tetzner, by then living in exile in Switzerland, helped her publish this novel in installments in the Swiss periodical Der öffentliche Dienst, where it appeared between May and July of 1937. The actual book edition was not published until 2002, with a postscript by Deborah Vietor-­Engländer. 5. Dirk Krüger, “Nachwort,” in Vier Spanische Jungen, by Ruth Rewald (Frankfurt: Pahl Rugenstein, 1987), 117. 6. Krüger, “Nachwort,” 173. In her message Rewald wrote that she was going to work on the harvest (Ich fahre zur Erntearbeit), either near Schaul’s place of birth in the Prussian Province of Posen (today Poznan in Poland) or near where the Doctor is; the “Doctor” would be Stalin. With this, Rewald communicates to her husband that she is about to be taken to a camp in the East. 7. Ecole Primaire Anja Schaul, https:​/​​/​w ww​.education​.gouv​.fr​/​annuaire​/​49​ -maine​- et​-loire​/​gennes​-val​-de​-loire​/​etab​/​ecole​-primaire​-anja​-schaul​.html​. 8. See https:​/​​/​w ww​.anna​-seghers​.de​/​museum​.php​. 9. Anna Seghers, Letter to Clara Porset, 22 June 1947, in Anna Seghers. Briefe (1924–­-­1952),  ed. Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke  (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 228. 10. Seghers, Letter to Clara Porset, 229. 11. Seghers, Letter to Clara Porset, 229. 12. Seghers wrote her essay on Dolores del Río shortly after her return to Berlin. It appeared in the German exile publication Demokratische Post and was later reissued in Argonautenschiff. Jahrbuch der Anna-­Seghers-­Gesellschaft Berlin und Mainz, vol. 12 (2003), 255–­59. See Olivia Díaz Pérez, “Dolores del Río un Crisanta.

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Notizen zum Essay Dolores del Río von Anna Seghers,” Argonautenschiff. Jahrbuch der Anna-­Seghers-­Gesellschaft Berlin und Mainz, vol. 12 (2003), 260–­270. 13. Josefa Ortega Domínguez, la Corregidora, is a heroine of Mexico’s struggle for independence. The soldaderas who fought in the Mexican Revolution are discussed further in the next chapter. 14. All citations are from Seghers, “Dolores del Río,” 255. 15. Anna Seghers, “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” in Selected Stories, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021), 156. 16. Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 81. 17. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivi, 82. 18. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 19. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 141. 20. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2010). 21. Ana María Alonso, “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje,’ Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism, Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004), 459–­90; 482. Note that Alonso makes this comment with regard to English-­language scholarship, and not to the writing of antifascist exiles. 22. Alonso, “Conforming Disconformity,” 463. 23. José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926). 24. José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica, misión de la raza iberoamericana: Notas de viajes a la América del Sur (París: Agencia mundial de librería, 1925). 25. José Gamio, Forjando patria (México: Porrúa, 1916). 26. Anna Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit. Mexikanische Fresken” in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1970). 27. Christiane Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie, 1900–­1947 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003), 386; Olivia C. Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos. Das Werk von Anna Seghers zwischen Nationalsozialismus, mexikanischem Exil und Wirklichkeit der DDR (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2016), 239–­40. 28. Friedhelm Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher: Inszenierungen des Fremden in Literatur und Massenmedien (Berlin: Edition Tranvia, 2011), 171; Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 84. 29. Melanie Nicholson, “Surrealism’s ‘Found Object’: The Enigmatic Mexico of Artaud and Breton,” Journal of European Studies 43, no. 1 (2013), 27–­43; 27. 30. Nicholson, “Surrealism’s ‘Found Object,’” 28. 31. Nicholson, “Surrealism’s ‘Found Object,’” 40. Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1936. With the support of the French government, Breton would do so two years later, officially as a cultural attaché of the French embassy—­even though one of his main goals was to meet Leon Trotsky. 32. Zehl Romero, Anna Seghers,1900–­1947, 386; Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 239–­40.

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33. Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 95; 100. 34. Mauricio Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 147. 35. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 161. 36. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 164. 37. Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 240. 38. Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit,” 216; Seghers wrote about this same idea in a letter to Kurt Kersten, dated August 4, 1944; Seghers, Zehl Romero, and Giesecke, Anna Seghers. Briefe, 1924–­1952; 151. 39. Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit,” 215. 40. Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” in Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 168. See also Frank Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany (New York: Berhan Books, 2015). 41. Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 73. 42. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 83. 43. The complete title of the first novel is Das Waldröschen oder: Die Verfolgung rund um die Erde. Großer Enthüllungsroman über die Geheimnisse der menschlichen Gesellschaft von Capitain Ramon Diaz de la Escosura. 44. Egon Erwin, “Karl May, Mexiko, und die Nazis,” Freies Deutschland (November 1941). 45. See Rivka Galchen, “Wild West Germany,” New Yorker, 9 April 2012. 46. Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 83. In War and Genocide, Doris Bergen points out that Hitler indeed enjoyed movies based on Karl May’s stories (51), yet the historian also mentions that the dictator “preferred to read summaries and pamphlets rather than actual writings of people [. . .]. So maybe “favorite author” is not exactly accurate. See War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 51; 49; Klaus Mann, “Hitler’s Literary Mentor,” Kenyon Review 2, no. 3 (1940): 391–­400. 47. The importance that Rewald’s books place on education is relevant in the Mexican and the Spanish context. In postrevolutionary Mexico, “state policy makers and official party builders invested grandiose hopes in the school. It would alter local behavior and power relations, from the public arena of property and office to the intimate areas of gender, age, and sexual relations” (Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–­1940 [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997], 4). The ideological origins of the weight placed on education during the Republican years can be found in the profound influence that German Philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause had on a number of progressive intellectuals in the nineteenth century. Education and education reform were to become one of the priorities of the Republican government, at least in its early years. The Mexican “Misiones Culturales,” set in place by the earlier mentioned José Vasconcelos actually precede the “Misiones

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Pedagógicas” that were initiated shortly after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931. 48. Dirk Krüger, Die deutsch-­jüdische Kinder-­und Jugendbuchautorin Ruth Rewald and die Kinder-­und Jugendliteratur im Exil (Frankfurt: Dipa, 1999), 126. 49. Deborah Vietor-­Engländer, “Die Akte wird lebendig und ergreift Gewalt von dem Menschen,” in Frauen im Exil (Bad Boll: Evangelische Akadamie, 1994), 124–­ 42; 133. 50. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 147. 51. Krüger, Die deutsch-­jüdische Kinder-­und Jugendbuchautorin Ruth Rewald, 179. 52. Urban escaped to the Netherlands after the Nazi rise to power. After briefly settling in the Soviet Union, he disappeared in 1937. Urban also was responsible, among others, for the cover art for Egon Erwin Kisch’s Geschichten aus sieben Ghettos (Tales from Seven Ghettos), published in Amsterdam, and for another children’s book published in exile, Irmgard Keun’s Das Mädchen, mit dem die Kinder nicht verkehren durften. These three illustrations are likely the only surviving works of the artist. 53. See http:​/​​/​winoldreiss​.org​/​works​/​artwork​/​portraits​/ ​Mex59​.htm​. 54. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City. 55. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 152. 56. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 152. 57. Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 171; Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos, 86. 58. Rewald, Der Junge aus Mexiko, 9. (Subsequently cited by page no. in parens in the text.) 59. Rewald, Der Junge aus Mexiko, 14. This last statement is, to an extent, comparable to Silvia Mistral’s comment that slavery may have been a choice (see chapter 3). Rewald here also uses, as most German exiles in the period would, the slur “Neger.” 60. Rewald, Der Junge aus Mexiko, 82. 61. Susanne Zantop, Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 4. 62. Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm,” 167. 63. Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm,”178. Chapter Eight 1. A number of works engage in further detail with Duby’s work as a photographer and as an ethnographer of the Lacandón Maya. Alex Harris’ and Margaret Sartor’s Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness (1984) reproduces many of Duby’s most famous images, including the photos of the Zapatista veterans taken in the 1940s. Brian Gollnicks’s Reinventing the Lacandón Subaltern Representations in the Rainforest of Chiapas (2008) and J. W. Palka’s Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change (2005) include analyses of the significance of Duby’s ethnographic work.

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2. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (New York: Random House), 1991. 3. Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, 101. 4. Barbara Brinson Curiel, “The General’s Pants: A Chicana Feminist (Re)Vision of the Mexican Revolution in Sandra Cisneros’s Eyes of Zapata,” Western American Literature 35, no. 4 (2001): 403–­27; 404. 5. Samuel Brunk, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press), 460. 6. Brunk, Emiliano Zapata, 463. 7. Brunk, Emiliano Zapata, 463. 8. Jean Meyer, “El buen salvaje otra vez,” Letras Libres, March 1999, 70–­72. 9. Anna Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit. Mexikanische Fresken,” in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, ed. Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie, 1970). 10. The image can be seen here: https:​/​​/​w ww​.moma​.org​/​collection​/​works​/​80682​. 11. Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit,” 218. 12. For a critique of sexism and homophobia in muralist art, see Edward McCaughan, “Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in the Art of Mexican Social Movements,” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 1 (2002): 99–­143. 13. Gertrude Duby, “Bauerngeneral Zapata und das neue Russland,” Freies Deutschland (November, 1942), 27. 14. Duby, “Bauerngeneral Zapata, 27. 15. Adolfo Gilly, La revolución interrumpida: México 1910–­1920. Una guerra campesina por la tierra y el poder (Ciudad de México: Ediciones El Caballito, 1971), 106. 16. For an analysis of the connections between these two epochal struggles, particularly in with regard to the role of the arts, see Andrew R. Smolski et al., “Lessons from Exits Foreclosed: An Exilic Interpretation of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, 1910–­1924,” Capital & Class 42, no. 3 (2018). 17. Tenorio-­Trillo, I Speak of the City, 149. 18. Olivia C. Díaz Pérez, Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos. Das Werk von Anna Seghers zwischen Nationalsozialismus, mexikanischem Exil und Wirklichkeit der DDR (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag), 129. 19. Meyer, “El buen salvaje otra vez.” 20. Mary Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 21. Ricardo Pérez Monfort, “Indigenismo, hispanismo, y panamericanismo en la cultura popular mexicana de 1920 a 1940,” in Cultura e identidad nacional, ed. Roberto Blancarte (Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 343–­ 83; 356, 359. 22. Brunk, Emiliano Zapata, 61. 23. Pérez Monfort, “Indigenismo, hispanismo, y panamericanismo,” 356. 24. Duby, “Bauerngeneral Zapata,” 27. 25. Gertrude Duby, “Zapata no ha muerto,” Hemisferio: Revista de América 4, no. 15 (1945); and “Frauen um Zapata,” Freies Deutschland (April 1945). 26. Gabriela Cano, “Gertrude Duby y la historia de las mujeres zapatistas de la Revolución Mexicana,” Estudios Sociológicos 27, no. 83 (2010): 579–­97; 581.

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27. Simone Hantsch, Das Alphatier. Aus dem Leben der Gertrude Duby-­Blom (Berlin: Trafo, 2006), 68. 28. Mechtild Gilzmer, Fraueninternierungslager in Südfrankreich: Rieucros und Brens, 1939–­1944 (Berlin: Orlanda Verlag, 1993); and Camps de femmes: Rieucros et Brens, 1939–­1944 (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2000). 29. Hantsch, Das Alphatier, 67. 30. See Lili Andrieux Collection, United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial, https:​/​​/​collections​.ushmm​.org ​/​search ​/​catalog ​/​irn50040 31. Kyra Núñez, Rostros y rastros de una leyenda: Gertrude Duby Blom (Ciudad de México: Sextil Editores/Editorial Altrament, 2015). Nuñez mentions Serge Klarsfeld and Dora Schaul, among others, and points out that none of the women who wrote memoirs about the Rieucros camp seem to remember Duby. 32. Asociación Cultural Na Bolom Archive, file 24.16, Concentration Camp Drawings, 1940. 33. Hantsch, Das Alphatier 71; Silvia Pappe, Gertrude Duby-­Blom. Königin des Regenwalds: Eine Biographie (Bern & Dortmund, EFeF-­Verlag, 1995), 47 34. Jacques Soustelle, Mexique, terre indienne (Paris: B. Grasset, 1936), 115. 35. Pappe, Königin des Regenwalds, 66. 36. Hantsch, Das Alphatier, 77; Cano, Gertrude Duby, 587. 37. Cano, Gertrude Duby, 587. 38. Cano, Gertrude Duby, 588. 39. Duby’s unpublished notes about the meetings and interviews she conducted are held at the archive of the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom. Grammatical and spelling inconsistencies are reproduced in the citations, as are the occasional mixing of German and Spanish. 40. Mechthild Gilzmer, “De huidas y contradicciones. Tres mujeres en el exilio mexicano: Gertrude Düby, Lenka Reinerová, Steffie Spira,” in México como punto de fuga real o imaginario de la cultura europea en la víspera de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ed. Michael Peters and Giovanni Stefano (München: Meidenbauer Verlag, 2011), 263–­85. 41. Dawn Starin, “The House of the Jaguar: Can It Survive?” Anthropology Today 33, no. 4 (2017): 25. 42. Starin, “House of the Jaguar,” 24. 43. Starin, “House of the Jaguar,” 24. See also Gilzmer, “De huidas y contradicciones,” 280. 44. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 23; Duby, “Zapata no ha muerto,” 43. 45. Cano, “Gertrude Duby,” 588. 46. This image—­a spectral Zapata, riding on his horse in Morelos—­appears in Jacques Soustelle’s Mexique, terre indienne, “Zapata, dit-­on, revient quelquefois la nuit, autour des huttes de Morelos, d’oú las paysans entendent le galop de son cheval qui se perd ensuite dans l’ombre et le silence” (115). 47. Getrude Duby, “Pensamientos y memorias,” Avance/Tabasco, 11 April 1987, 8. 48. Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender,

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Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico,” ed. Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano, and Jocelyn H. Olcott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 50. 49. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT, 9,09. The actual text in German reads: “ich bin richtig ein wenig aufgeregt, denn ich liebe Milliano, ich bewundere ihn nicht nur” (5). 50. Archivo Na Bolom, Expediente ANBT 9,09, 7. 51. Archivo Na Bolom, Expediente ANBT 9,09, 7. 52. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,09, 7. 53. Gabriela Cano, “Gertrude Duby,” 588. 54. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,09, 10. 55. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39. 56. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39, 1. 57. Duby does not translate the last statement from Spanish into the otherwise German text (ANBT 9,39, 2). 58. Zapata, as depicted in Duby’s texts, has certain elements of a secular saint, yet, he does not function as a mediator, as these figures tend to do. As Desirée Martín writes in Borderland Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), a “‘secular saint’ may refer to someone who is venerated for extraordinary actions or contributions to a noble cause, but who is not recognized as a canonical saint by a religion” (3). 59. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39, 3. 60. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39, 4. 61. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39, 4. 62. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,10. This text is also available in English translation. 63. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,10, 1. 64. For an analysis of images of soldaderas, see my book Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). 65. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,10, 6. 66. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,10, 6. 67. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT, 9,11. 68. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT, 9,11, 7. This document is filed separately at the archive in English translation. While I was unable to locate the original German version, Hantsch cites a segment in her biography of Duby: “Die Arbeit ist mit größten Schwierigkeiten verbunden, und so sehr ich dieses Land liebe, so sehr könnte ich auch oft verzweifeln. Irgendwo krebst es fast überall, und es braucht eine unendliche Arbeit, um hier wirklichem Fortschritt die Bahn zu brechen” (Hantsch, Das Alphatier, 77). In the English rendering, Duby translates the German word krebst with “cancers.” While “languish” may be a more appropriate translation, her use of “cancer” may actually represent her view more accurately. 69. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,36 2. 70. María López Armendáriz, “Gertrude Duby y las mujeres zapatistas,” Chiapas Paralelo 7 January 2014, https://www.chiapasparalelo.com/trazos/2014/01/ gertrude-­duby-­y-­las-­mujeres-­zapatistas/.

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71. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 23; “Zapata no ha muerto,” 36. 72. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 23. 73. José María Teclo Morelos led the Mexican war of Independence in the early nineteenth century. Benito Juárez, president of Mexico from 1857 until his death in 1872, got the country through the War of Reform (1858–­60) and the French Invasion (1862–­1867). 74. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 24; “Zapata no ha muerto,” 37. 75. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 24. 76. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 24. 77. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,38. 78. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,38. 79. Gabriela Cano, “Amelio Robles, andar de soldado viejo. Masculinidad (transgénero) en la Revolución Mexicana,” Debate Feminista 38 (2009): 14–­39.  80. Duby, “Frauen um Zapata,” 24. 81. Archivo Na Bolom. Expediente ANBT 9,39. 82. While the correct name was Amelio Robles, Duby uses Amalia/Amalio in this text. 83. Duby, Mujeres en armas, 11. 84. Duby, Mujeres en armas, 37. 85. Cano, “Unconcealable Realities,” 53. 86. Since this is a government-­commissioned text, the favorable depiction of Mexico and its government’s policies should not be taken at face value. 87. Gertrude Duby, ¿Hay razas inferiores? (Ciudad de México: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1946), 66. 88. Duby, ¿Hay razas inferiores?. 89. Duby, ¿Hay razas inferiores?, 82. Chapter Nine 1. Ian Chillag, Everything Is Alive, https:​/​​/​w ww​.everythingisalive​.com ​/​​. 2. Egon Erwin Kisch, Entdeckungen in Mexiko (München: Knaur, 1992), 71. 3. Kisch, Entdeckungen in Mexiko, 71. 4. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 64. 5. Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 2. 6. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 4. 7. Sheila Skaff, “Ambivalence and Cigarettes: Egon Erwin Kisch’s ‘A Ford’s Place in Detroit,’ with a Translation of the Text,” Michigan Historical Review 29, no. 1 (2003): 119–­31. 8. Marcel Reich-­R anicki, Die Ungeliebten. Sieben Emigranten (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske Pfullingen, 1986), 36. 9. Keith Williams, “The Will to Objectivity: Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter,” Modern Language Review 85, no. 1 (1990): 92–­106; 93. 10. I am grateful to Kurt Beals, Caroline Kita, and Erin McGlothlin for their recommendations on translating the expression “der rasende Reporter.”

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11. See https:​/​​/​w ww​.nga​.gov​/​collection ​/​art​- object​-page​.133792​.html​. 12. Reich-­R anicki, Die Ungeliebten, 37. 13. Lenka Reinerová, Es began in der Melantrichgasse. Erinnerungen and Weisskopf, Kisch, Uhse und die Seghers (Berlin: Aufbau, 2006), 77; Gitta Honegger, “Prague Writer Lenka Reinerová: Kafka’s Last Living Heir,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 4 (2005): 659–­77. 14. Anna Seghers, “Gisl,” Freies Deutschland 4 (1945), 6; cited in Marcus G. Patka, Der rasende Reporter. Eine Biographie in Bildern (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 197. 15. Thessaly La Fore, “When Two Artists Meet, and Then Marry,” New York Times, 20 May 2021. 16. Seghers, “Gisl,” 6. 17. Williams, “Will to Objectivity,” 96. 18. Friedhelm Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher. Inszenierungen des Fremden in Literatur und Massenmedien (Berlin: Verlag Walter Frey, 2011), 112. 19. Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 114. 20. Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 32. 21. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 33 22. Chad Bryant, Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 58. See also Walter Sokel, “Kafka was a Jew,” New Literary History 30, no. 4 (1999), 840–­41. 23. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 31. 24. Bryant, Prague, 59. 25. Bryant, Prague, 59. 26. Victor Klemperer, Lti: Notizbuch eines philologen (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1949). 27. Zehl Romero and Giesecke, Anna Seghers. Briefe 1924–­1952, 286; the letter is dated February 26, 1948. 28. See Olivia Díaz Pérez and Luis Carlos Cuevas Dávalos, “Un cronista literario: Descubrimientos en México de Egon Erwin Kisch,” Sincronía: Revista de Filosofía y Letras 64 (2013): 1–­18; 5; Patka, Der rasende Reporter, 237. 29. Schmidt Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 117; Díaz Pérez and Cuevas Dávalos, “Un cronista literario,” 4. 30. Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 117. 31. Kisch, Entdeckungen in Mexiko, 12. 32. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 38. 33. Díaz Pérez and Cuevas Dávalos, “Un cronista literario,” 7; Jennnifer Michaels, “Migrations and Diasporas: German Writers in Mexican Exile. Egon Erwin Kisch’s and Anna Seghers’s Promotion of Cross-­Cultural Understanding,” Studia Theodisca 19 (2012), 19–­37; 24. 34. Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 119. 35. Kisch, Entdeckungen in Mexiko, 270; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Notes to Chapter Nine

269

36. Díaz Pérez and Cuevas Dávalos, “Un cronista literario,” 7. 37. Kisch, “Karl May, Mexiko, und die Nazis,” Freies Deutschland (November 1941). 38. Schmidt-­Welle, Mexiko als Metapher, 115. 39. Jana Bulíčkové, Das Bild des Judentums im Werk von Egon Erwin Kisch, PhD diss. (Prague: Univerzita Karlova V, Pedagogická Fakulta, Katedra Germanistiky, 2009), 38. 40. Egon Erwin Kisch, Tales from Seven Ghettos, trans. Edith Bone (London: Robert Anscombe, 1948). 41. Kisch, Tales from Seven Ghettos, 200. 42. Bone did not include a translation of the song, perhaps because it would conceal the local inflection. 43. Ronald B. Loewe and Helene Hoffman, “Building the New Zion: Unfinished Conversations between the Jews of Venta Prieta, Mexico, and Their Neighbors to the North,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 4 (2002): 1135–­47; 1138. 44. Loewe and Hoffman, “Building the New Zion,” 1140. 45. Loewe and Hoffman, “Building the New Zion,” 1144. 46. Loewe and Hoffman, “Building the New Zion,” 1140. 47. Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 24. 48. Egon Erwin Kisch, Nachlese, (Berlin and Weimar,1973), 422. 49. Walter Mignolo, “Racism As We Sense It Today,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1737–­42; 1737. 50. Rachel Rubinstein, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 201), 10. 51. David S. Koffmann, The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019) 52. Koffmann, Jews’ Indian, 2. 53. Kisch, Nachlese, 426. 54. Kisch, Nachlese, 423. 55. Markus G. Patka, Zu Nahe der Sonne. Deutsche Schriftsteller im Exil in Mexico (Berlin: Aufbau, 1990), 98. 56. Rubinstein, Members of the Tribe, 10. 57. Kisch, Nachlese, 423. 58. Kisch, Nachlese, 423. 59. Markus Patka, Egon Erwin Kisch: Stationen im Leben eines streitbaren Autors (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997), 36. The original citation is from a manuscript in Kisch’s “Die Familie Carbajal. Carbajal der Ältere.” 60. Ronnie Perelis, Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 61. Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return, 22. 62. Kisch, Nachlese, 428. In the rest of this section, Nachlese is cited in parens by page no. 63. Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return, 24.

270

Notes to Chapters Nine a nd Ten

64. Alison Grady, “A Visit to Mexico’s Oldest Jewish Community,” NACLA Report on the Americas (September 2007), https: ​/​​/​nacla​.org ​/​article ​/​visit​-mexico​%​ 27s​- oldest​-jewish​- community​. 65. Rapahel Patai, On Jewish Folklore (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 25. 66. Kisch, Tales from Seven Ghettoes, trans, Edith Bone (London: Robert Anscombe, 1948). In the rest of chapter 9 citations of this work are given in parens in the text. Yet another origin story version appears in Carol Cook’s article, “Plain and Simple Faith,” Haaretz, October 1, 2001. Cook mentions a Maritrini Tellez (possibly referring to Trinidad), apparently a crypto-­Jewish family who fled persecution in Michoacán and then settled outside Pachuca. 67. Kisch, Marktplatz der Sensationen, 15. 68. Reinerová, Es began in der Melantrichgasse, 74. 69. Patka, Der rasende Reporter, 243. 70. Anna Seghers, “Abschied vom Heinrich Heine Klub,” in Über Kunst und Wirklichkeit. Die Tendenz in der reinen Kunst (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970), 205–­8; 206. Chapter Ten 1. Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), vii. 2. Seghers, “Reise ins Elfte Reich,” in Erzählungen: 1933–­1947 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2011), 81–­94; 83. 3. Seghers, “Reise ins Elfte Reich,” 83; Warsan Shire, “Home,” at https:​ /​​ /​ seekersguidance​.org​/​articles​/​social​-issues​/​home​-warsan​-shire​/​​. 4. Shire, “Home.” 5. Erich Kästner, The 35th of May; or, Conrad’s Ride to the South Seas, trans. Cyrus Brooks (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934). 6. Seghers, “Reise ins Elfte Reich,” 81. 7. Seghers, “Reise ins Elfte Reich,” 81. 8. Debórah Dwork and Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–­ 1946 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 380. 9. Alexander Stephan, “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German Emigré Writers, trans. Jan van Heurck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 257. 10. Stephan, “Communazis,” xi. 11. Stephan, “Communazis,” 8. 12. Gerda Taro, “Margarita Nelken and Anna Seghers at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, Valencia,” The International Center for Photography (ICP), https:​/​​/​w ww​.icp​.org​/ ​browse​/​archive​/​objects​/​ margarita​-nelken​-and​-anna​-seghers​-at​-the​-second​-international​- congress​- of​. 13. William K. Ailshie, Second Secretary of Embassy, Embassy of the United States of America, Mexiko, “Brief an Secretary of State v. 24.11 1943,” S 1–­2 [800.00b Nelken, Margarita/15], quoted in Stephan, “Communazis,” 235. 14. Alexander Stephan, Anna Seghers im Exil (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993), 17–­19.

Notes to Chapter Ten

271

15. Nick Fisher uses the spider web metaphor to depict the perceived international communist menace in the earlier part of the twentieth century: “The disparate strands of international radicalism—­anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, labor unions, peace and civil liberties groups, feminists, liberals, aliens and Jews—­intertwined and terminated at one source: the Communist International in Russia”; see his Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), xiv. I use the same term with somewhat different connotations, in order to also address how gender and power defined and limited the agency of women like Nelken. 16. Stephan, “Communazis,” xi. Subsequently cited in the text by page no. in parens. 17. Anna Seghers, Letter to F. C. Weiskopf, June 1941, Anna Seghers. Briefe (1924–­1952),  ed. Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke  (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 109. 18. Kristy Boney, “Expressionism in Pictures: Exploring William Sharp’s Comic Adapation of The Seventh Cross,” in Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History, ed. Helen Fehervary, Christiane Zehl Romero, and Amy Kepple Strawser (Leiden: Brill: 2019), 94–­119; 98. 19. See Arts in Exile, Anna Seghers: Das Siebte Kreuz [The Seventh Cross (1942)], First German Edition, Published in Mexico (1942), at https:​/​​/ ​kuenste​-im​- exil​.de​/​ KIE ​/​Content ​/ ​E N​/​Objects​/​seghers​-siebte​-kreuz​-buchumschlag​- en​.html​?​single​=​1​. 20. Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: New York Review of Books: 2018), n.p. 21. Letter from Little, Brown to Maxim Lieber, New York, 3 April, 1934, in Marcus G. Patka, Der rasende Reporter. Eine Biographie in Bildern, by Marcus G. Patka (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998), 237. 22. Seghers, Seventh Cross, 5. 23. Peter Beicken, “The Seventh Cross and Fred Zinneman’s Cinematic Adapation,” in Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History, 78–­93; 91; Thomas von Steinaecker, “Afterword,” in Seghers, Seventh Cross. 24. Max Aub, La gallina ciega. Diario Español, Edición, estudio introductorio y notas de Manuel Aznar Soler (Barcelona: Alba, 1995). 25. Aub, La gallina ciega, 180. 26. Aub, La gallina ciega, 340. 27. “Dr. Kurt Kersten of Aufbau Is Dead,” New York Times, 22 May 1962. 28. Eric T. Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 171. 29. Kurt Kersten, “Der Tod auf der Insel,” unpublished and undated manuscript, Kurt Kersten Archive, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, 39. 30. Kurt Kersten, “Robert Breuers Tod und Begräbnis,” Frankfurter Hefte: Heft 8 (March 1953), 230. 31. Kersten, “Tod auf der Insel.” 32. Silvia Pappe, Gertrude Duby-­Blom. Königin des Regenwalds: Eine Biographie (Bern & Dortmund, EFeF-­Verlag, 1995), 48. 33. Simone Hantsch, Das Alphatier. Aus dem Leben der Gertrude Duby-­Blom (Berlin: Trafo, 2006), 69.

272

Notes to Chapter Ten

34. Hantsch, Das Alphatier, 69. 35. Guenther Reinhardt, Crime without Punishment: The Secret Soviet Terror Against America (New York: Hermitage House, 1952); See “Guenther Reinhardt, 63, Dies; Was a Writer and Investigator,” New York Times, 8 December 1968. 36. Reinhardt, Crime without Punishment, 89. In this and the next paragraph, cited in the text by page no. in parens. 37. Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 2. 38. Mónica Jato, “Madréporas: Raíces en el exilio,” in Madréporas, by Silvia Mistral (Granada: Cuadernos del Vigía, 2019), 13. 39. Mistral, Madréporas, 33. 40. Jato, “Madréporas: raíces en el exilio,” 18. 41. Mistral, Madréporas, 89. 42. Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos, Varias voces, una historia: Mujeres españolas exiliadas en México (Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011), 54; José Colmeiro, “Introducción: Mujer, exilio, y memoria,” in Éxodo: Diario de una refugiada española, by Silvia Mistral (Barcelona: Icaria, 2009).

Index

Page numbers in italics denote photographs or illustrations, and endnotes are indicated by “n” followed by the endnote number. Academy of Cinematography at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), 98 Achtung Renate (Rewald), 143 Acosta, José de, 208 adaptation (to new home), 14, 26, 68, 121, 127, 128, 220 Africa, 36, 48, 58, 80, 87 Army of Africa, 112 Central Africa, 89, 90 colonialism in, 101 prison camps, 105 Southwest Africa, 3 See also North Africa African Americans, 101, 103, 165, 245n72 See also Blacks Africans, 16, 58, 71, 80 migrants, 112 refugees, 253n46 See also Blacks afterlives, 219, 222, 228, 233, 234 Ai Weiwei, 6, 7, 8 Ailshie, William K., 221 Alfaro, Inés, 170 Algeria, 80, 98, 101, 104, 105, 107–­113 Algeria, French, 21 Algerian War of Independence, 109 Algerians, 105, 109, 111–­113 See also moros Alison, Joan, 100 Allen, Jay, 102

Alliance of Anti-­Fascist Intellectuals, 107 Allied Forces, 2, 118, 121 “‘Alto Case’ and the Communist Underground in Mexico, The,” 222, 223 Amado, Jorge, 147 Amezcua, Jenaro, 173 Amitié noire, L’ (Krull), 89, 90 Andrieux, Lili, 175 Anenecuilco, Mexico, 180, 183, 184 Anna Seghers and Constancia De La Mora Tell the Story of the Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (Seghers and De la Mora), 119 Anna Seghers Foundation, 141 Anna Seghers map, 117 Anna Seghers Museum, 148 Anna Seghers-­Preis, 141 antifascist resistance, 3, 12 antifascists, 8, 18, 77, 104 activists/fighters, 3, 12, 24, 102, 183 Austrian, 25 Communist Party and, 78 European, 23, 79, 83 fleeing Germany and Austria, 74 Germany’s, 76, 225 intellectual, 8, 149 Mexican, 126 refugees, 21–­22, 56, 153, 221, 223, 230–­231 significance of Mexico for, 20 writers, 22, 92, 172, 193, 261n21

273

274

Inde x

Antilles, 54, 60, 69, 70, 76, 77, 94 antisemitism, 77, 114, 155, 167, 206 Apter, Emily, 125, 131, 138, 256n15 Arendt, Hannah, 88, 196, 200, 204, 229, 246n17 escape of, 4, 31, 45 in Gurs concentration camp, 175 “We Refugees,” 8, 10, 14, 119, 207 Argèles-­Sur-­Mere camp, 71 Army of Africa, 112 Artaud, Antonin, 11, 156, 261n31 Asia Minor, 101, 104, 113 Asociación Cultural Na Bolom, 22, 29, 175, 181 Aspects of Mexican Civilization (Vasconcelos and Gamio), 154 Assayas, Oliver, 96 asylum, 10, 22, 37, 45, 175, 224 of antifascist refugees, 223 in Mexico, 15, 21, 200 atrocities, 101, 119, 122, 126, 137 Auerbach, Erich, 131 Aufbau (periodical), 93, 228 Auschwitz concentration camp, 13, 15, 20, 28, 111, 143, 151 “Ausflug der toten Mädchen, Der” (Seghers). See “Dead Girls Class Trip, The” (Seghers) autobiography, 7, 27, 100, 119, 151, 175 de la Mora’s, 256n9 Fry’s, 246n17 Aztec Eagles, 2 Aztecs, 196, 202 Barcelona, Spain, 10, 12, 44, 62, 87, 145 Bärenhaus, 215–­217 Barsky, Edward, 22, 230 See also Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) “Bauerngeneral Zapata und das neue Russland” (Duby), 173 Beals, Carleton, 180 Bear House, 215–­217

beautiful friendships, 80, 101, 103, 178 in Casablanca, 2, 4 meaning of, 20 with Mexico, 13, 31 that never were, 147, 169, 221, 222 Belbachir, Cathérine, 112 belonging, sense of, 4, 11, 17, 91, 201, 208, 233 Belzec killing camp, 46 Ben Israel, Menassah, 208 Benes, Eduardo, 137 Benitez, Helena. See Holzer, Helena Benjamin, Stefan Rafael, 143 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 9 Bergen, Doris, 71, 262n46 Berlin Wall, 118 biases, 105, 111 See also prejudices; stereotypes Binder, Sophie, 49, 50, 51, 53, 99, 117 Black Book of Nazi Terror, The (Castro Leal). See Libro negro del terror nazi, El (Castro Leal) blackness, 85, 91, 102, 114, 209 blacks, 80, 85, 113–­114, 165 of the Caribbean, 82, 83 caricatures of, 60 of Martinique, 55, 57, 68–­70, 72, 73, 84, 111 soldiers, 71, 72, 79, 91, 92 women, 67, 71, 72, 73, 90, 112 See also African Americans; Africans Blair, Sara, 137–­138 Blaushild, Israel Moshe, 32 Blind Man’s Bluff, The (Aub), 227 Blom, Frans, 22, 181, 192 Boas, Franz, 154, 192 Bobadilla, Rosa, 184, 185–­187, 190, 191 Bolivia, 36, 37, 38, 151, 159 Bone, Edith, 206 Boochani, Behrouz, 226–­227, 228 Borges, Jorge Luis, 41, 46, 47 Bosc, Adrien, 73

Inde x

Bosques, Gilberto, 16–­18, 20, 44, 107, 128, 253n43 Boullosa, Carmen, 141 Boum, Aomar, 108 Brazil, 34, 90, 94, 116 Brazzaville, Belgian Congo, 2, 89, 93 Brennendes Licht: Anna Seghers in Mexiko (Weidemann), 199 Breton, André, 55, 75–­76, 85, 86, 91, 149 beautiful friendships of, 80 displacement, 73 in Martinique, 78 Martinique: Snake Charmer, 84, 89 on Paul Lemerle, 15, 74, 79 travels to Mexico, 261n31 vision of Mexico, 148, 155–­156 Breuer, Robert, 76, 94, 228–­229 death of, 78, 82, 89, 92, 93 Brown Atlantis, 156–­157, 160, 191 Brughetti, Romualdo, 132 Buñuel, Luis, 98, 227 bureaucracy, 25, 35, 82, 229 in “Reise ins Elfte Reich” (Seghers), 218, 220 in Transit (Seghers), 28, 95 See also travel documents Burnett, Murray, 100, 250n7 Cabouche, César, 110 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Aimé Césaire), 69 Calders, Pere, 12 Calle Caruso, Mexico City, 208, 214 Camacho, Manuel Ávila, 12, 137 “Camp de Concentration a la Martinique” (Krull), 89 Camp Les Milles, 18, 60, 88, 89 Campalans, Jusep Torres, 17 Campos Delgado, Amalia, 49 Cano, Gabriela, 183, 184, 191 Cárdena, Manuel, 3 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 11, 12, 173, 203 Careful, Renate (Rewald), 143

275

caricatures, 58, 60, 67, 88–­89, 196, 230 Caron, Vicky, 73 Carpentier, Alejo, 86 cartography, 38, 40, 41, 43, 47 conventions, 39, 48 institutions, 42 techniques, 33 See also mapping Carvajal, Luis de, the Elder, 210–­211 Carvajal, Luis de, the Younger, 210–­212 Casablanca, Morocco, 3, 98 Casas-­Cortés, Maribel, 48 Castro, Policarpio, 183 Castro Leal, Antonio, 137 Cate-­A rries, Francie, 253n58, 254n63 Catechism Debate, 32 “Cementerio de Djelfa” (Aub), 108, 109, 110, 112 Central Africa, 89, 90 Central America, 36, 38, 49, 165 Centre Séjour Surveillé de Djelfa, 107 Césaire, Suzanne Roussi, 60, 69, 70, 84, 85 chance encounters, 57, 64, 84–­89, 208 charro hat, 160, 162, 185 Chiapas, Mexico, 22, 23, 28, 29, 169, 202, 230 Duby’s legacy in, 181 chicleros, 203 “Children cross the line, Neptune festival on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, The” (Krull), 96 Children in Exile (exhibit), 143, 168 Chile, 13, 25, 32 Chillag, Ian, 194 Cholula, Mexico, 194 chroniclers, 23, 28, 57, 62, 200 Cisneros, Sandra, 170 Cobarrubias, Sebastián, 48 Cocteau, Jean, 89 Cold War, 116, 126, 223, 230, 232 Cole, Tim, 39, 45 colonial rule, 4, 15, 60, 66, 69, 111

276

Inde x

colonial structures, 4, 16, 60 colonialism, 72, 86, 90, 110, 203 Breton criticizes, 84 consequences of, 4, 152 European, 3, 80, 106, 109, 114 European refugees and, 18, 31, 57, 73, 79, 105 French, 55, 228 gendered dynamics of, 113 legacies of, 204 North Africa, 101 slavery and, 65 violence of, 89, 249n52 colonization, 68, 69, 71, 73, 113, 115, 208 history of, 29, 60, 204, 211 in Mexico, 196 Communazis, 222–­223, 225 Communist Party, 16, 23, 78, 148, 222 in Germany, 18, 120 in Spain, 231 Communists, 107, 222, 226, 230, 258n42 Diego Rivera, 125 Hans Schaul, 21 Nazis and, 223 spider web metaphor, 271n15 “Como se hace un Nazi” (Seghers), 136 “Con ‘rumba’ a México,” 58 concentration camps, 7, 72, 120, 130, 197, 241n51, 258n42 Argèles-­Sur-­Mere, 71 Eastern Europe, 116 France, 23, 79, 230 Lodz, 215 Maghreb, 110, 111 Martinique, 90, 91 Poland, 6 Rieucros, 229 Spaniards in, 54 Spanish, 253n58 Westhofen, 225 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), 62

confinement, 16, 75, 79, 175, 197, 246n14 conquest, 1, 26, 196, 204, 210.211 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 14, 237n42 Cook, Carol, 270n66 Corregidora, la, 261n13 counter-­maps, 39–­40, 47, 48, 49. See also mapping Creswell, Tim, 39 Crime without Punishment (Reinhardt), 230 Crisanta (Seghers), 19, 150, 151, 258n42 Cristeros, 213 Cuba, 13, 63, 74, 86, 87, 247n29 escape from, 19 expulsion from, 15, 61, 147 Cuban Picasso, 16, 86, 87 See also Lam, Wifredo Cuicuilco, Mexico, 194 Curiel, Barbara Brinson, 170 Curtiz, Michael, 3–­4 Dakar, Senegal, 81, 110 Dalio, Marcel, 32 Damrosch, David, 121, 256n15 Das Schiff ohne Hafen (Tetzner), 94–­95 d’Aubigné, Françoise, 66 Davidson, Dora. See Schaul, Dora Davidson De la Mora, Constancia, 119, 126, 127, 129, 256n9 De León, Jason, 48 de Maintenon, Marquise, 66, 67 de Saint-­E xúpery, Consuelo, 79 “Dead Girls Class Trip, The” (Seghers), 7, 19, 27, 132, 151, 214, 218 death camps. See extermination camps “Death on the Island” (Kersten), 93 decolonization, 30, 66, 68, 110 del Río, Dolores, 149–­150, 172 Deleuze, Gilles, 201 democracies, 29, 30

Inde x

Denby, David, 102 Deportación a la muerte (Méndez), 122–­125, 122, 225 deportation, 8, 60, 64, 218, 225 to Auschwitz, 28 to Belzec, 46 to camps, 21, 116, 125 to Canaries, 63 from Cuba, 61 to Djelfa, 45, 107 of Europe’s Jews, 123 from France, 20 Kisch’s, 24 routes of, 67 of Ruth and Anja Rewald, 143, 145, 146 Deportation to Death/Deportation a la muerte (Méndez), 122–­125, 122, 225 deportees, 61, 65 deracination, 5 Descubrimientos en México (Kisch), 202 “Despedida. Hasta Luego! Hasta Luego!” 59 “Dessin du Depart” (Dora Schaul), 179, 179 desterrados, 12, 29 destierro, 11 detention, 16, 17, 32, 98, 224, 226 at Ellis Island, 25, 230 diaries, 27, 29, 56 Diario de a bordo, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 70 Diario de Djelfa (Aub), 16, 21, 27, 105–­ 109, 111, 253n58 Diaz de la Escosura, Ramon, 158 Dickey, Eric, 253n58 dictatorship, 29, 30, 67 See also Francoism “Die gemalte Zeit” (Seghers), 141, 155, 157, 172, 173 “Diego Rivera” (Seghers), 141, 172 Discourse on Colonialism (Aimé Césaire), 31, 80, 88

277

Discoveries in Mexico (Kisch). See Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Kisch) discrimination, 192–­193, 204 See also biases Djelfa, Algeria, 98, 102, 197, 227 Centre Séjour Surveillé de Djelfa, 107 deportation to, 45, 107 imprisonment in, 109 labor camp, 110, 145 See also “Cementerio de Djelfa” (Aub); Diario de Djelfa (Aub) “Djelfa Cemetery” (Aub), 108, 109, 110, 112 “Do Inferior Races Exist?” (Duby), 154, 192 “Dolores del Río” (Seghers), 149 Domínguez, Josefa Ortega, 261n13 Dominican Republic, 82 Dos Passos, John, 107–­108 Duby, Kurt, 174 Dwork, Debórah, 9, 220 Dym, Jordana, 39, 41, 49 East Berlin, 13, 150, 169 East Germany, 30, 150 Eastern Europe, 12, 116, 213 education, 127, 159, 160, 163, 164, 180, 193 Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education, 154, 191, 192 reform, 181 reform through, 182 Rewald’s books place importance on, 262n47 Edwards, Brian T., 103 “Egon Erwin Kisch” map, 195 Eisenbach, Heinrich, 206 El Libro Libre, 25, 122, 181, 224, 256–­257n20 publishes travel narratives, 196 refugees found, 13, 201 venue for German-­language authors, 121

278

Inde x

“Eleventh Realm” (Seghers), 218, 219, 220, 228 Ellis Island, New York, 25, 223, 224, 225, 230, 232 Emergency Rescue Committee, 79, 102, 253n43 emigration, 37, 38, 39, 45, 67, 78 See also immigration; migration Emiliano Zapata y el agrarismo en México (Magaña), 180 emotional geographies, 49 “En la Martinica. Duérmete niño, que viene el coco . . . ,” 59 Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Kisch), 23, 25, 181, 196, 199–­206, 225 exposes grief, 214 on indigenous cultures, 209 Epstein, Julius, 100 Epstein, Phillip, 100 Ernst, Max, 79 escape routes, 27, 43, 60, 76, 93 across the Pyrenees, 8, 9, 44, 45, 54, 71 in Casablanca, 1, 31, 100 of Fritz Freudenheim’s family, 33 geographies and directions of, 5 global, 106 history of, 39 maps of, 40, 44–­45, 49 from Marseille, 73, 77, 78 Martinique, 55, 78, 80 racialized structures and hierarchies along, 13, 79, 83 riskiness of, 4, 90 worlds encountered along, 64 espionage, 77, 78, 222, 230, 231 Espoir: Sierra de Teruel (Malraux), 98, 107 Ethiopia, 103, 214 Étudiant noir, L’ (journal), 70, 84 European refugees. See refugees, European “Everything Is Alive” (Chillag), 194 exile communities, 11, 19, 125, 129, 136, 155

exile routes, 2, 6, 32, 44 See also escape routes exiles, 12, 160, 181, 199, 209 Eduardo Benes, 137 German, 25, 94, 129, 136 German-­speaking, 180 knowledge of Spanish, 120 Kurt Stern, 143 loneliness of, 152 in Paris, 146 Spanish, 11, 17, 77 women, 231, 233 writers, 106, 131, 153, 154, 158 Éxodo/Exodus (Mistral), 17, 55, 61, 73 compared to Ship of Fools (Porter), 62, 65 depiction of Martinique, 69 on Martinique delay, 15, 54 Mistral best known for, 233 on Mistral’s escape route, 27 portrays Martinique population, 67–­68, 72 exoticism, 1, 37, 61, 87, 114, 159 of Algerian guards, 113 in Casablanca, 103 of Martinique, 69, 74, 84 of Mexicanness, 160–­162, 164, 165, 167 of Mexico, 146, 156, 202, 204 expectations, 24, 85, 255n84 of the Americas, 37, 155, 159, 167 of Bobadilla, 186 of Caribbean, 67 of Mexico, 172, 173, 180 of postwar Berlin, 149 of Venta Prieta, 214 of Wild West, 158 works that depict, 87 extermination camps, 123, 197 See also concentration camps “Extermination of the Jews, The” (Weiss), 122 “Exterminio de los judios, El” (Weiss), 122 “Eyes of Zapata” (Cisneros), 170

Inde x

Fanon, Frantz, 60, 72, 80 Fata Morgana (Breton), 79 FBI, 119, 126, 128, 132, 133, 221 “ ‘Alto Case’ and the Communist Underground in Mexico, The,” 222 Little Comintern and, 230 surveillance of refugee writers, 223 Felipe, León, 17, 18 Fernández, Emilio “el Indio,” 150 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 130–­131, 133, 221, 230 First World War, 23, 71, 139, 215 Fisher, Nick, 271n15 “Five o’ clock Tea” (Dora Schaul), 178, 178 flight routes. See escape routes Forjando Patria (Gamio), 154 Fort-­de-­France, Martinique, 15, 56, 74, 85 fortunate ones, 2, 6, 32, 44, 52, 214 Four Spanish Boys (Rewald), 45, 145, 232 Franco, Francisco, 11 Francoism, 9, 29, 30, 56, 77, 107 broadcasters on Ipanema rumor, 52, 73 Frank, Anne, 27 “Frauen um Zapata” (Duby), 187, 189 Free French forces, 74, 89 Freies Deutschland/Alemania Libre (newspaper), 130, 136, 158, 173, 197, 209 exile publications in, 141 Kisch frequent contributor to, 201 refugees found, 13 venue for German-­language authors, 120, 121 French Invasion, 267n73 French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 107 Freudenheim, Fritz, 33–­36, 38–­39 Freudenheim map, 33–­43, 34, 46, 49 Fry, Varian, 79, 102, 246n17, 251n27 Führerkult, 167

279

Gallina ciega, La (Aub), 227 Gamio, Manuel, 154–­155 Gaos, José, 11, 12 García, Buenaventura, 181, 184, 187–­189 Gatrell, Peter, 218 Gattai, Zélia, 147 Gaya, Ramón, 233 GDR. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Gefängnisinsel, 25, 225 “Gemalte Zeit, Die” (Seghers), 141, 155, 157, 172, 173 gender, 27, 70, 152, 189, 203, 262n47 identity, 191 roles, 102, 105, 113 Genoa, Italy, 22, 175, 179, 229 genocide, 101, 123, 200, 212, 216 advocating, 64 denouncing, 124 overlap with slavery, 114 reworks landscapes, 197, 214 survivors of, 15 genre, 17, 27, 28, 198, 219, 233 geography, 9, 10, 44, 50, 89, 159, 226 colonial, 78 emotional, 49 of escape routes, 5 Geographies of the Holocaust, 39, 241n51 Jewish, 206 Latin American, 38 Mexico’s, 56, 202 of Nazi violence, 119 of oppression, 45 refugees’ knowledge of, 37 South American, 36 geopolitics, 8, 48, 103 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 19, 21, 116, 173, 185, 186, 227 German refugees. See refugees, German Germanified cities, 241n51 Germany, Nazi, 39, 110, 131, 226 aids Nationalists’ victory, 105 invades France, 45

280

Inde x

Germany, Nazi (cont.) Rewald flees, 152 rise of antisemitism in, 206 violence of, 139, 192 “Gertrude Duby” map, 170 “Gertrude’s Angsttraum, Weihnacht, 1940”/“Gertrude’s Nightmare, Christmas 1940,” 177, 177 Geschichten aus Sieben Ghettos (Kisch), 205–­206 Gestapo, 78, 91, 92 ghettos, 46, 120, 197, 205, 206, 241n51 Gigliotti, Simone, 82, 124, 232 Gikandi, Simon, 108, 115, 253n46 Giordano, Alberto, 39, 45 Gison, Roman. See Jiron, Ramón Gleizer, Daniela, 12 Glissant, Édouard, 60 global refugee crisis, 4, 7, 33, 43, 73 Global South, 49, 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 120, 205, 256n15 “Grand camouflage, Le” (Suzanne Césaire), 69 grief, 5, 198, 200, 202, 214, 215 landscapes of, 197, 216, 217 Grossman, Atina, 36, 37 Guatemala, 181, 230 Guattari, Félix, 201 Guerrero, Mexico, 173, 180, 187, 190, 192 Guerrero, Xavier, 147, 148, 153 Gurs concentration camp, 45, 175 Hackitectura, 47, 49 Hathaway, James, 9 Havana, Cuba, 13, 15, 18, 61, 87, 170 ¿Hay razas inferiores? (Duby), 154, 192 Heinrich Heine Klub, 19, 120, 201 Hell, Julia, 136 Herrera, Yuri, 141 Herzfelde, Wieland, 132 Herzog, Jesus Silva, 132 Hess, Rudolf, 24

Hidalgo, Mexico, 194, 197, 200, 213, 214, 215 Historikerstreit, 30, 31 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 126, 139, 159, 167, 185, 262n46 Hoffman, Helene, 207 Holocaust, 80, 110, 213–­214 Aub writes about, 101 colonialism and, 86 Deportación a la muerte (Méndez), 123 emigration during, 38 genocidal landscapes of, 197, 216 geographies of, 78 Geographies of the Holocaust, 39, 241n51 Historikerstreit, 30, 31 Holocaust Encyclopedia, 45, 46 Holocaust Memorial Museum, 45 meaning of trains in, 124 Mexican post-­revolutionary culture and, 122 Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg), 30 Ship of Fools (Porter), 63 victims of, 27 See also Shoah Holzer, Helena, 87, 88, 89, 96 “Home” (Shire), 218–­219 Honduras, 49 Hostile Terrain 94 (Undocumented Migration Project), 48, 242n60 House of the Jaguar, 181 “How Long Behind Barbed Wire,” 176, 176 Hughes, Langston, 71, 245n72 Hugo of St. Victor, 131, 160 Human Flow (Ai), 6–­7 Humboldt, Alexander von, 203, 205 identities, 15, 39, 61, 89, 127, 165, 233 Caribbean, 69 collective, 154 cultural, 113 Mexican, 160

Inde x

national, 74 racial, 5 sexual, 191 static, 4, 106 illegal immigrants, 4, 24 illustrations, 46, 137, 160, 206 Lam’s, 79, 247n22 Urban’s, 161, 161, 162, 163, 164 Zalce’s, 140 imaginary worlds, 40, 146, 159, 167, 205 immigration, 11, 36, 225 See also emigration; migration imperialism, 57, 80, 108 implicated subject, 55, 65 imprisonment, 16, 27, 45, 85, 109, 113, 226 of Europe, 1 Petite Roquette prison, 22, 175 Roland Garros prison camp, 107 of women, 230 See also incarceration; prisoners of war incarceration, 8, 21, 22, 24, 175, 178, 227 See also imprisonment “Indian Basis of Mexican Civilization, The” (Gamio), 154 Indianer, 153, 164–­167, 204, 205 Indians (Americas’ Indigenous), 160, 162, 174, 180, 200, 204 idealizing, 38, 152, 182 “Indian Basis of Mexican Civilization, The” (Gamio), 154 Indianthusiasm, 157–­158 Janko (Rewald), 164–­168 Jewish, 197, 205–­211, 214 refugees’ sense of, 37 See also Indianer; indigenous peoples; Indios Indianthusiasm, 157–­158, 167 indigeneity, 170, 182, 183, 204, 205 indigenismo, 152 indigenista, 155, 168 indigenous cultures, 22, 146, 164, 181 depictions of, 174

281

diversity of, 209 idealizing, 38 popular constructions of, 173 stereotypes about, 207 indigenous peoples, 155, 158, 181, 187, 192, 204, 205 characterizations of, 152 Duby writes about, 169 idealized, 38 invisibility of, 174 muralism’s effect on, 172 preconceptions of, 159 share fate of Jews, 208 “Indio Village under the Star of David”/“Indiodorf unter dem Davidstern” (Kisch), 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206 temporalities of, 213 Indios, 150, 163, 166, 209–­210, 216 depictions of, 153 “good Indio,” 158–­159 use of term, 187, 205, 206, 211 Zapata as iconic, 155 See also Indians (Americas’ Indigenous); indigenous peoples integration, 164, 165, 172 International Brigades, 44, 104, 105, 110, 119, 145, 215 Tschapaiew Battalion of, 21, 232 Vichy government confines, 16 internment camps, 16, 22, 60, 91, 197 Martinique, 75–­76, 78 Mediterranean, 45 Rieucros, 23, 175, 229, 230, 265n31 “Interview mit den Pyramiden”/”Interview with the Pyramids” (Kisch), 194, 196, 199, 205, 212 Ipanema, 15, 58, 59, 62, 66, 76, 82 collision, 52 Diario de a bordo, 54, 57, 58, 89 in Martinique, 68, 74 Mistral’s account of, 65, 67, 71, 72 passenger testimonies, 56, 89 shipwreck rumor, 52, 73 Italy, 14, 105

282

Inde x

Jacson, Frank, 222 JAFRC. See Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko (Rewald), 28, 145, 146, 152, 159–­168, 206 book cover (Urban), 143, 161 illustrations (Urban), 163, 164 publication of, 20, 21 Japanese ancestry relocation, 197 Jato, Mónica, 73, 233, 243n30 Jennings, Eric T., 60, 73, 77, 78, 92 Jeu de Marseillle, 79 Jewish Indians, 205–­211, 214 See also “Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer, Das” (Kisch) Jewish refugees. See refugees, Jewish Jewishness, 201, 209, 214, 255n84 Jews, 20, 74, 114, 123, 125, 271n15 of antiquity, 208 crypto, 206, 210, 212, 213, 270n66 “El exterminio de los judios” (Weiss), 122 of Hidalgo, 215 of Prague, 200 stateless, 8, 16, 110 Jiron, Gertrudis, 213 Jiron, Ramón, 212–­213 See also Tellez family Joint Anti-­Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), 119, 126–­130, 137, 141, 175, 179, 230 Duby supports, 22, 23 Josephine, Empress, 66, 67 “Journey to the Eleventh Realm” (Seghers), 218, 219, 220, 228 Juárez, Benito, 158, 188, 203, 267n73 Juaristi, Jon, 73 Jungle, The (Lam), 86, 87, 88, 89 Kaddish, 215, 217 Kafka, Franz, 200, 201 Kahlo, Frida, 125 Kandiyoti, Dalia, 207 Kaplan, Marion, 5 Karavan, Dani, 9

Kästner, Erich, 219 Kea, Salaria, 103–­104 Kersten, Kurt, 6, 26, 76, 78, 83, 228–­229 works of, 89, 92–­94 KGB, 222 killing centers. See extermination camps Kisch, Arnold, 215 Kisch, Gisela Lyner, 25, 198–­199, 217, 225, 238n67 Kisch, Paul, 215 Kisch, Wolfgang, 215 Klemperer, Victor, 201 Knowles, Anne, 39, 45 Koch, Howard, 100 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, 262n47 Laberinto de la soledad, El/Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 174 Lacandón Maya, 22, 38, 180, 183, 230 Duby best known for, 23, 28 romantic vision of, 181 Lam, Wifredo, 74, 80, 84, 89, 91, 96, 248n44 called Cuban Picasso, 16, 86–­87 illustrations of, 79, 247n22 photograph, 88 landscapes of grief, 197, 216, 217 Last Refuge Mexico (Fischer-­Defoy), 43 Latin America, 139, 141, 142, 151, 192, 197 on Freudenheim map, 43 geography, 38 intelligence operations in, 230 The Jungle (Lam), 86, 87 Lam returns to, 84 “The Latin American Basis of Mexican Civilization” (Vasconcelos), 154 Seghers returns to, 116 SIS surveillance in, 221 Lautréamont, Comte de, 85

Inde x

laws, 61, 220 refugee, 5, 45, 82 Lazaret camp, 76, 85, 91, 92 Le Vernet d’Ariège camp, 17, 18, 45, 74, 109 Lebeau, Madeleine, 32 legal status, 7, 8, 14 Lenin, Vladimir, 173 Les Milles prisoners camp, 18, 60, 88, 89 Les Roisiers-­sur-­L oire, France, 20, 145, 232 Letzte Zuflucht Mexiko (Fischer-­ Defoy), 43 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 15, 55, 74, 75, 84, 89 liberation, 23, 107, 173, 225 Aub’s, 102, 109 Boochani’s, 226 Duby’s, 179 Libro Libre, El. See El Libro Libre Libro negro del terror nazi, El (Castro Leal), 122, 126, 131, 136, 181, 257n20, 259n66 translation of, 138, 140 Liga de Escritores de Artistas Revolucionarios, 123 Liga Pro-­Cultura Alemana, 257n28 Lin, Maya, 43 Lincoln Battalion, 119 Lisbon, Portugal, 1, 2, 32, 35, 44, 77 Little Comintern, 230, 231 Loewe, Ronald, 207 logbooks, 54, 56, 57, 60 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 12, 126, 136–­137, 222 Long, Ryan, 123 longing. See yearning Lörtscher, Gertrude Elizbeth, 22 lost tribe of Israel theory, 208–­211, 215 Lukács, George, 118 Lutz, Hartmut, 158, 167 Machado, General, 61, 63, 67 Mädchenhirt, Der (Kisch), 198

283

Madréporas (Mistral), 233 madrepore, 233–­234 Magaña, Gildardo, 180 Maghreb, the, 108, 109, 110, 111, 197, 247n30 Magical Labyrinth (Aub), 101 Magloire, Marina, 84 Malraux, André, 98, 107 “Man Becomes a Nazi, A” (Seghers), 136 Mann, Thomas, 221, 229, 230 Mansoubi, Moones, 227 Manus Island, 226–­227 mapping, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49 technologies, 33, 46, 47, 48 See also cartography; counter-­maps maps Aub, Max (1939–­1942) (Binder), 99 Duby, Gertrude (1933–­1950) (Binder), 170 Freudenheim, 34 Kisch, Egon Erwin (1933–­1947) (Binder), 195 Mistral, Silvia (1931–­1939) (Binder), 53 Rewald, Ruth (1933–­1944) (Binder), 144 Seghers, Anna (1933–­1947) (Binder), 117 “Unexpected Routes” (Binder), 51 mariachis, 203 Marktplatz der Sensationen (Kisch), 215 Marseille, France, 28, 32, 87, 90, 100 American Emergency Rescue Committee in, 102 El rapto de Europa (Aub) setting, 103 escape routes from, 2, 44, 73, 77, 78 Mexican consulate in, 16, 127 refugees in, 82, 91, 96 Seghers flees to, 18 Transit (Seghers) setting, 94, 95, 115 Villa Air-­B el, 79 Martinique Plan, 16, 55, 76–­80, 87, 228

284

Inde x

Martinique: Snake Charmer (Breton), 84, 89 Martkplatz der Sensationen (Kisch), 201 Marx, Karl, 120, 203, 256n15 Massey, Doreen, 39 Masson, André, 84 “Max Aub” (Binder), 99 “Max Aub” map, 99 Maximilian, 158, 203 May, Karl, 158, 165, 166, 182 adventure novels, 37–­38 Duby likes, 180 Hitler likes, 159, 167, 262n46 Kisch likes, 205 Maya, 23, 169, 181 See also Lacandón Maya Melchor, Fernanda, 141 Mémorial de la Shoah, 20, 146 memory wars, 30 Méndez, Leopoldo, 26, 122–­126, 122, 131, 140, 225 Ménil, René, 69, 77, 84, 85, 86, 248n44 “Mensch wird Nazi, Ein” (Seghers), 136 mental maps, 36, 37, 38, 60 Mercader, Ramón, 11, 222 Merfish, Beth, 137 Mesoamerica, 194, 208, 211 See also Central America mestizaje, 152, 154 mestizos, 205, 211 Mexican consulate, 16, 43, 107, 127, 253n43 Mexican Revolution, 11, 22, 162, 170, 174, 183, 187–­188 chronicles of, 161 Russian Revolution affinity, 173, 184 TGP in, 124 trains ubiquitous images in, 257n29 See also Zapata, Emiliano Mexican sector in Berlin, 116, 118, 141 Seghers’s yearning for, 140, 147, 148, 169, 196, 202

Mexican state, 164, 172, 174, 192 Mexican War of Independence, 267n73 Mexico, Indian Land (Soustelle), 37, 180 Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, 192 Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education, 154, 191, 192 Mexikaner, 164 Méxique (ship), 56, 58, 59, 67 Mexique, terre indienne (Soustelle), 37, 180 Michoacán, Mexico, 202, 213, 270n66 migration, 33, 36, 38, 43, 47, 228 See also emigration; immigration Mije, Antonio, 137 Misiones Culturales, 262–­263n47 Modotti, Tina, 231 Morelos, José María Teclo, 267n73 Morelos, Mexico, 182, 184, 188, 189, 192 Duby in, 180, 183, 187 in Entdeckungen in Mexiko, 202 Kisch in, 194 refugees in, 214 Seghers in, 173 Mornard, Jacques, 222 Morocco, 48, 98, 102, 107, 108, 110, 228 French, 2, 3 moros, 105, 111, 112, 113 MS St. Louis, 45, 82, 101, 247n29 “Mujeres en armas” (Duby), 188, 190 Müller Street—­Today’s Boys/ Müllerstraße-­Jungens von heute (Rewald), 143 Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg), 30 muralism, 60, 150, 153, 157 effect on indigenous peoples, 172 relevance to GDR readers, 173 revolutionary soldiers commonly depicted in, 162–­163 Seghers admires, 125, 147, 155 Vasconcelos promotes, 154

Inde x

Mustakeem, Sowande’, 65 “Mystery of the Jewish Indians, The” (Kisch). See “Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer, Das” (Kisch) myths, 183, 205, 206, 212 about other places and people, 26 about the past, 29 Caribbean chronicles perpetuate, 55 of feminized West Indian world, 68 mythohistory of mestizaje, 154 Rape of Europa, 104 Seghers’s use of, 28 of Zapata, 170 See also stereotypes Na Bolom, 22, 29, 175, 181 Nardal, Paulette, 60, 68, 69, 70, 71 National Commission of Cinematography, 98 Nationalists, 16, 54, 155, 170, 245n72 Barcelona falls to, 62, 145 capture Peñarroya, 232 clash with indigenous lives, 174 current, 14 exile vs., 152 Moroccan soldiers fight for, 71, 112 Nazis aid, 105 Native Americans. See Indians (Americas’ Indigenous) Nazi genocide, 101, 114, 123, 124, 200 in “Indio Village under the Star of David” (Kisch), 213–­214 violence of, 249n52 Nazi occupation, 27, 44, 54, 74, 228 Aub escapes, 98 Casablanca depicts, 3–­4 Communists leave, 222 deportation and, 143 escape from, 82, 129, 147, 223 escape routes from, 45, 73, 76 of France, 14, 23, 32, 54, 79, 87, 145 intellectuals and writers flee, 12 Martinique Plan and, 16, 228 Seghers escapes, 226

285

travel documents needed to escape, 8 undesirables and, 86, 87 Nazism, 9, 24, 90, 132 crimes of, 30 Freudenheim family displaced by, 33, 40 German the language of, 19, 121, 201 rise of, 140 violence of, 80 Négritude, 84, 85 Nelken, Margarita, 221–­222, 231 Neruda, Pablo, 12–­13, 147 Nettel, Guadalupe, 141 Netz, Reviel, 111 new chapter in world literature, 83, 118–­126, 128–­131, 133, 140–­142 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 14 Nguyen, Vinh, 7 Nicholson, Melanie, 156 No Friend but the Mountains (Boochani), 226 noble savage, 153, 166, 182 noeuds de mémoire, 253n57 North Africa, 2, 16, 24, 83 Aub in, 98, 110 Casablanca’s setting, 4, 31–­32, 103 colonialism in, 101, 106, 109, 114 prison camps in, 105, 108 North America, 36, 38, 165, 166, 167, 182 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Aimé Césaire), 69 Núñez, Kyra, 265n31 Offen, Karl, 39, 41, 49 “On a Cargo Ship” (Rémy), 95 oppression, 45, 69, 72, 114, 121, 166 Orringer, Julie, 102 Ortega y Gasset, José, 107 Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo, 132 Ostende: Sommer der Freundschaft (Weidemann), 199 Oujda, Algeria, 17 Oujda, Morocco, 17, 98, 108

286

Inde x

Padrón, Ricardo, 40 “Painted Time” (Seghers), 141, 155, 157, 172, 173 Palacio de Cortés, 172 Palmer, Margaret, 102 papers, travel. See travel documents Paradis Amerika (Kisch), 24 Parsons, Timothy, 80 passlos, 219 passports. See travel documents Patai, Raphael, 207, 212, 213 Paul Lemerle, 66, 74–­80, 89–­92, 94–­96 André Breton on, 15 arrives in Martinique, 84 Breton and Seghers on, 149 “Children cross the line, Neptune festival on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, The” (Krull), 96 Krull chronicles journey aboard, 26 Lam on, 86 Seghers’s embarks on, 18 takes Martinique Plan route, 16 in Transit (Seghers), 82 Paz, Octavio, 174 Pearce, Margaret, 39, 42 “Peasant General Zapata and the New Russia” (Duby), 173 “Peintre cubain Fernando Lam accompagné d’une femme non identifiée, Le” (Krull), 88 Peluso, Nancy, 40 Peña, Guillermo, 214 Peñarroya, Spain, 232 Pétain, Marshal, 77, 110 Petite Roquette prison, 22, 175 Petzold, Christian, 115 Peyrouton, Marcel, 77 Picasso, Pablo, 86, 87, 107 places of transit, 3, 75, 77, 80, 94, 97 Martinique, 55, 82 Poland, 6, 46, 111 policies, 219 border, 225, 227 emigration, 78 immigration, 11

Mexican, 192 migration, 228 migratory, 12 racial, 151 refugee, 10 Porset, Clara, 19, 118, 141, 147–­150, 169 Porter, Katherine Anne, 11, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 243n32 ports, 52, 101, 104, 113, 203 Antwerp, Belgium, 35 of arrival, 66 Brazil and Argentina, 94 Martinique, 78 Rio, 38 Portugal, 5, 35, 44 Posada, Guadalupe, 123, 140, 225 posters, 32, 137, 138, 140, 257n28 post-­revolutionary Mexico, 63, 122, 155, 159, 173, 174, 262n47 See also Mexican Revolution Prado, Manuel, 137 Prague, 22, 198, 205 Kisch’s birthplace, 13, 23, 24, 200, 201, 215 prejudices, 56, 61, 74, 75, 83, 92 See also biases prison camps, 29, 75, 79, 91, 92, 98, 197 France, 14, 16, 45, 223 French Algeria, 21, 101 Maghreb, 109, 110, 197 North Africa, 105 Roland Garros, 107 Vichy’s, 108 prisoners of war, 21, 109, 110, 145 Aub as, 16, 101, 104, 105, 108 in “Cementerio de Djelfa” (Aub), 112 propaganda, 112, 121, 242n14 pyramid-­interviewer, 194, 196, 204 Pyrenees, 8, 9, 44, 45, 54, 71 Querido, Dina, 187

Inde x

rabbis, 210, 214, 215 racial hierarchies, 16, 80, 89, 112 along escape routes, 13, 60, 64, 79, 83 in Casablanca, 4 Kisch’s, 204 Krull’s, 90, 92 in “Mora” (Aub), 113 racism, 58, 84, 89, 152 along escape routes, 55, 60 displaced reproduce, 68, 83 European refugees engage with, 64, 70, 79, 91, 101, 105 in Éxodo (Mistral), 73 legacies of, 204 Mexico struggles against, 192 persistence of, 88 in post-­World War II culture, 192 in refugees’ accounts, 80 in San Juan (Aub), 114 in Spain’s civil war, 245n72 of Vichy government, 92 Radványi, László, 20, 21, 143, 168, 220 becomes Mexican citizen, 116 in Camp Les Milles, 60 character in Aub’s works, 250n5 in Le Vernet prisoners camp, 18 sent to concentration camp, 45 Radványi, Pierre, 18, 118, 126, 128, 143, 168 Radványi, Ruth, 18, 96, 118, 128, 143, 168 Rapto de Europa, El/Rape of Europe, The (Aub), 100–­106, 108, 113, 115 Rasende Reporter, Der (Umbehr), 198 Rassenlehre, 167 “Rätsel der Jüdischen Indianer, Das” (Kisch), 197, 199, 205, 206, 207, 208, 214 raza, 152, 154, 192 Real Blue, The (Seghers), 151 refoulement, 44, 62, 82, 107 refugee camps, 45, 197 refugee communities, 29, 121, 199, 221, 222, 231

287

refugee crisis, 14, 43, 46, 50 of 1930s and 1940s, 4, 14, 73 current, 7, 33, 46 refugee law, 5, 45, 82 refugees, antifascist, 21–­22, 56, 153, 221, 223, 230–­231 refugees, European, 67, 69, 73, 115, 194 in Caribbean, 89 in Casablanca, 3, 4 collaborate with JAFRC, 126 colonialism and, 18, 31, 57, 73, 79, 105 in Martinique, 16, 31 in Mexico, 155, 156 racism and, 64, 70, 79, 91, 101, 105 refugees, German, 45, 129 refugees, German-­speaking, 28, 121, 125, 154, 166, 204, 206 communities in Mexico, 29 exile routes of, 44 return to Europe, 13 refugees, Jewish, 8, 36, 77, 101, 175, 199, 247n29 in Portugal, 5 refugees, modern, 14 refugees, Spanish, 75, 76, 129, 203 Éxodo (Mistral), 15, 27, 67, 72, 73 fame of, 12 flee after Spanish Civil War, 8 in French internment camps, 45 go to Chile, 13 on Ipanema, 52, 56, 66, 71, 89 JAFRC aids, 127 Luis Buñuel, 98 Margarita Nelken, 221 in Martinique, 69, 70 remain in Mexico, 30 as trans-­placed, 11 as undesirables, 23, 54, 60, 74, 175 See also Spanish exiles Reich, German, 157 Reichstag, 24 Reinerová, Lenka, 23, 175, 198, 200, 201 Reinhardt, Guenther, 230, 231

288

Inde x

“Reise ins Elfte Reich” (Seghers), 218, 219, 220 Reiss, Winold, 161 Rejano, Juan, 137 Rémy, Jacques, 95–­96 reportage, 28, 197, 199, 205 Republic, Spanish, 44, 56, 103, 245n72 Aub serves embassy of, 107 in Casablanca, 103–­104, 251n23 defeat of, 8, 54, 129 José Gaos’s government position in, 12 propaganda of, 112 refugees from, 11, 77 Silvia Mistral supports, 45 US groups support, 126 See also Second Republic Republicans (Spanish), 12, 103, 145, 232, 262n47 army, 16 confined in Djelfa, 16 in French concentration camps, 79 memoir of, 15 propaganda, 112 in San Juan (Aub), 104–­105 Schaul fought with, 21 as undesirables, 74 Revista de Occidente (journal), 107 Revolution, Mexican. See Mexican Revolution Rewald, Anja, 143 Reyes, Alfonso, 132 Rieucros internment camp, 23, 175, 229, 230, 265n31 Rivera, Diego, 125, 153, 161 Seghers’s works on, 140–­141, 150, 155, 157, 172, 174, 183 Rivera-­Garza, Cristina, 141 Rivéry, Aimée du Buc de, 66, 67 “Robert Breuer’s Tod und Begräbniss”/“Robert Breuer’s Death and Burial” (Kersten), 89, 93–­94 Robles, Amelio, 185, 189–­191 Roces, Wenceslao, 202 Rodríguez Cabo, Matilde, 140

Roland Garros prison camp, 107, 250n5 Roma women, 23, 175 rootedness, 4, 5, 106, 153, 196, 204, 233 See also uprootedness Rothberg, Michael, 2, 30, 55, 109, 204, 253n57 Rudi and His Radio/Rudi und sein Radio (Rewald), 143 Russian Revolution, 173, 184 Ruta Maya, 181 “Ruth Rewald” map, 144 Said, Edward, 108, 131, 152 Sales, Joan, 12 San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 4, 13, 22, 23, 169, 175, 181 San Juan (Aub), 101, 104, 106, 113, 114 Schaul, Anja, 20, 143, 145, 146, 168, 232 Schaul, Dora Davidson, 23, 75, 175, 178, 179 Schaul, Hans, 45, 145, 146, 232 fights with International Brigades, 21, 44 marries Dora Davidson Schaul, 23, 175 Schlör, Joachim, 36, 38 Schmidt-­Welle, Friedhelm, 155 Schorer, Mark, 63 Schwarzwald, Selma, 46 screen memories, 2–­3 Second Republic, 63, 159, 221 See also Republic, Spanish Sediqi, Ismatholla, 6–­7 Sediqi, Sakhi Ahmad, 6 Sensations Fair (Kisch), 201 Serge, Victor, 16, 74, 79, 91 Seventh Cross, The (Seghers), 25, 218, 220–221, 224–­226, 258n42 Sharp, William, 226 Ship of Fools (Porter), 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 243n31, 243n32 Ship without Harbor, The (Tetzner), 94–­95

Inde x

Shire, Warsan, 8, 218–­219 Shoah, 20, 31, 146, 215 See also Holocaust Siebte Kreuz, Das (Seghers), 25, 218, 221, 224–­226, 258n42 “Silvia Mistral” map, 53 Simon, Andres, 151 Sinaia, 56, 58, 59, 67 Siskind, Mariano, 256n16 slavery, 60, 67, 70, 114 at sea, 65 socialism, 22, 107, 139, 151, 271n15 soldaderas, 149, 186 solidarity, 56, 57, 71, 113, 132, 184 Soustelle, Jacques, 37, 180 South America, 25, 36, 43, 151, 165 in adventure literature, 37, 158, 159 on Freudenheim map, 36, 38 Southern Mexico, 23, 169, 181 Southwest Africa, 3 Soviets, 21, 140, 202, 230, 231, 247n29, 263n52 Central Asia, 24 Spandau prison, 24 Spanish Civil War, 54, 57, 73, 102, 119, 215 aftermath of, 2, 5, 8, 9, 31, 60, 80 Army of Africa, 112 Aub during, 98, 107 Aub’s works on, 106 in Casablanca, 2, 103–­104 causes displacements, 114 Duby during, 231 El rapto de Europa (Aub), 103, 104, 105 Kisch during, 24, 200 Lam meets Holzer during, 87 Magical Labyrinth, The (Aub), 101 memories of in North Africa, 109–­110 Mistral during, 62 Moroccan soldiers fighting in, 71, 245n72 refugees of, 5, 11–­12, 80, 126–­127 in San Juan (Aub), 113

289

Schaul during, 21 Seghers during, 120 Spanish language associated with, 83 Vier Spanische Jungen/Four Spanish Boys (Rewald), 45, 145, 232 See also International Brigades; Republic, Spanish Spanish exiles, 11, 17 Spanish refugees. See refugees, Spanish Spanish Republic. See Republic, Spanish Spanish Socialist Party, 107 Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 221–­222 spies, 77, 78, 222, 231 Spira, Steffi, 175 Spitzer, Leo, 36–­37, 151, 158–­159, 166 St. Louis, MS, 45, 82, 101, 247n29 statelessness, 45, 115 Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko (Rewald), 20, 143, 146, 159–­160, 165–­168 of Jews, 8, 16, 110 Rewald’s work on, 28 Stavenhagen, Kurt, 118, 141, 255n6 Stein, Sara Abrevaya, 108 Stephan, Alexander, 119, 128, 132, 221, 223, 256n20 stereotypes, 37, 68, 212 about indigenous cultures, 207 about Martinique black population, 55 about Mexico and Mexicans, 26 Breton’s, 84 Kisch’s, 205 racial, 90, 113 See also myths Stern, Kurt, 143 Stern, Nadine, 143 Stonebridge, Lindsey, 14 Strait of Gibraltar, 47, 48, 49 Struma, 82, 101, 247n29 Sturmabteilung, 139 subversive activities, 40, 48, 64, 222, 223

290

Inde x

“Sur un cargo” (Rémy), 95 Surrealism, 15, 74, 84, 85, 86, 148 French, 156 Jeu de Marseillle, 79 Mexico and, 155 See also Breton, André surveillance, 79, 126, 221–­223, 225, 230 Switzerland, 18, 94, 186, 260n4 aids Duby, 22, 23, 175, 179 Duby’s homeland, 13, 37, 174, 182, 229 Tales from Seven Ghettos (Kisch), 205–­206 Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), 123–­ 124, 140 Tannenbaum, Frank, 180 Tellez, Enrique, 213, 214 Tellez, Trinidad Jiron de, 212–­213 Tellez family, 212–­213 Templo Mayor, 194, 199 Tenayuca, Mexico, 194 Tenorio-­Trillo, Mauricio, 156, 157, 191 Teotihuacán, Mexico, 194, 202 testimonies, 62, 67, 110, 111, 143, 219, 232 Aub’s, 108 to Bosques, 43 concentration camps, 253n58 of Ipanema’s passengers, 56, 89 Krull’s, 91 refugees,’ 97 Seghers’s fiction as, 28 survivor, 124 Tetzner, Lisa, 94, 95, 146, 260n4 TGP (Taller de Gráfica Popular), 123–­ 124, 140 Timón (periodical), 155 tlachiqueros, 203 “Tod auf der Insel” (Kersten), 93 Tofighian, Omid, 227 tortilleras, 203 totalitarianism, 31, 166, 196

Train Journey, The (Gigliotti), 232 trains, 2, 34, 35, 86, 247n31 to Auschwitz, 111 meaning in Holocaust, 124 Mexico Revolution imagery, 257n29 take Jews to camps, 123 Train Journey, The (Gigliotti), 232 Transit (Seghers), 19, 81, 89, 100, 116, 127, 218 bureaucracy in, 28, 95, 258n42 Paul Lemerle in, 82 set in Marseille, 94, 95, 115 translators, 14, 133, 135, 227 crucial role of, 141 of El libro negro del terror nazi, 136–­137, 139, 140 illusion of transparency, 130 for new world literature, 129, 131 not identified, 132 transmigration, 36 transterrados, 12, 13, 29, 30 transtierro, 11 travel documents, 92, 98, 228, 229 Bertha Gross awaits, 100 Breuer unable to secure, 76 Freudenheim map and, 44 to leave occupied Europe, 8 passports, 218, 219, 227 of refugees, 14 Seghers’s, 116, 128 stories about transit in, 81 transit papers, 95 waiting at Villa Air-­B el for, 79 waiting in prison camp for, 75 See also bureaucracy; visas travel narratives, 29, 158, 161, 196, 202 Traven, B., 155, 162 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-­Strauss), 89 Tropiques (journal), 69, 84, 85, 86, 89, 248n35 Trotsky, Leon, 11, 125, 220, 222 Tsao und Jing Ling—Kinderleben in China/Tsao and Jing Ling—Children’s Lives in China (Rewald), 145

Inde x

Tschapaiew Battalion, 21, 232 See also International Brigades Tula, Mexico, 194 Turner-­Zaretzky, Sophie, 46 Tuxtla, Mexico, 190 Ugarte, Michael, 108, 112 Uhse, Bodo, 19, 125, 199 Umwege, 43 UNAM (Academy of Cinematography at Mexico’s National Autonomous University), 98 undesirables, 18, 77, 90, 153 imprisoned, 16, 110, 197 Nazi occupation and, 14, 86, 87 Spanish refugees as, 23, 54, 60, 74, 175 unfortunate ones, 2, 32 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 237n42 uprootedness, 11, 12, 71, 121, 152, 153 See also rootedness Urban, Paul, 160–­162, 206, 263n52 Rewald’s Janko illustrations, 161, 163, 164 US government, 9, 132, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225 van Pelt, Robert Jan, 9, 220 Varo, Remedios, 79 Vasconcelos, José, 154–­155 Misiones Culturales, 262n47 Velao, Antonio, 137 Venta Prieta, Mexico, 49, 197–­198, 200, 207, 211, 212–­214 Venuti, Lawrence, 130 Vichy government, 16, 74, 77, 78, 79, 107, 110 complicity, 126 prison camps, 108 racism, 92 Vier Spanische Jungen (Rewald), 45, 145 , 232 Vietnam wars, 7

291

Villa Air-­B el, 79, 87 Villiers, François, 89 visas, 20, 35, 44, 78, 116, 126 Aub’s, 227 Chile, 25, 32 exit and entrance, 2, 4, 9, 90, 128 immigrant, 229 Mexico, 18, 25, 127 safe-­conduit, 6 in Transit (Seghers), 247n24, 258n42 United States, 32, 92, 128, 228 See also travel documents visual art, 119, 125, 137, 147 “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat!” (Freudenheim), 33, 34, 42 See also Freudenheim map Wall of Names, 20, 146 War of Reform, 267n73 “We Refugees” (Arendt), 8, 119, 207 Wege, 43 Wehrertüchtigung, 167 Weimar Republic, 23, 63, 139 Weiskopf, F. C., 224 Weiss, Leon, 122, 123, 256n19 Weltliteratur, 120 West Germany, 30 Western Hemisphere, 15, 77, 92, 97, 208 Westhofen concentration camp, 225 Wild West, 37, 158, 204 Wilson, Arthur “Dooley,” 101 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros), 170 “Working Problems of the Writer in Exile, The” (Feuchtwanger), 130 world literature, 256n15, 256n16 new chapter in, 83, 118–­126, 128–­ 131, 133, 140–­142 World War I, 23, 71, 139, 215 worldviews, 13, 42, 60, 73, 80, 96, 203 Xochicalco, Mexico, 194

292

Inde x

yearning, 17, 26, 49, 75, 136, 150 to belong, 91 for the eyes of Zapata, 182 for faraway countries, 160 for friends, 148 for a home, 134 to learn details, 70 for Mexican sector, 140, 147, 148, 169, 196, 202 for Mexico, 143–­147, 151, 153, 156, 157, 168 for roots, 4, 100, 106 Yi-­Fu Tuan, 39 Yildiz, Yasemin, 201 Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, 202, 203

Zalce, Alfredo, 124, 137, 138, 138, 140 Zamora, Mexico, 213 Zapata, Emiliano, 155, 161, 172–­174, 180–­185, 187–­189, 193 mythification of, 170 as secular saint, 266n58 “Zapata no ha muerto”/“Zapata Has not Died” (Duby), 174, 187–­188, 189–­190 Zapatistas, 161, 173, 174, 188, 189, 191 magical, 182–­187 women, 180, 181 See also Mexican Revolution