Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico

By Tabea Alexa Linhard

Unexpected Routes chronicles the refugee journeys of six writers whose lives were upended by fascism in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II: Cuban-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral, German-born Spanish writer Max Aub, German writer Anna Seghers, German author Ruth Rewald, Swiss-born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby, and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. While these six writers came from different backgrounds, wrote in different languages, and enjoyed very different levels of recognition in their lifetimes and posthumously, they all made sense of their forced displacement in works that reveal their conflicted relationships with the people and places they encountered in transit as well as in Mexico, the country in which they all eventually found asylum.

The literary output of these six brilliant, prolific, but also flawed individuals reflects the most salient contradictions of what it meant to escape from fascist occupied Europe. In a study that bridges history, literary studies, and refugee studies, Tabea Alexa Linhard draws connections between colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II and the Holocaust to shed light on the histories and literatures of exile and migration, drawing connections to today's refugee crisis and asking larger questions around the notions of belonging, longing, and the lived experience of exile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503635968

Book preview

UNEXPECTED ROUTES

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-Publication 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

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE. Beautiful Friendships

CHAPTER TWO. The Emotional Geographies of Old and New Homes

CHAPTER THREE. Ships of Fools: Silvia Mistral

CHAPTER FOUR. Transit and Chance Encounters

CHAPTER FIVE. No Solid Ground: Max Aub

CHAPTER SIX. A Mexican Sector in Berlin: Anna Seghers

CHAPTER SEVEN. Yearning for Mexico: Ruth Rewald

CHAPTER EIGHT. Magical Zapatistas: Gertrude Duby

CHAPTER NINE. Landscapes of Grief: Egon Erwin Kisch

CHAPTER TEN. Afterlives

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

10. One of Paul Urban’s illustrations for Ruth Rewald’s Janko. Der Junge aus Mexiko.

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

12. How Long Behind Barbed Wire?

13. Gertrude’s Angsttraum, Weihnacht, 1940 [Gertrude’s Nightmare, Christmas 1940].

14. Dora Schaul, Five o’ clock Tea.

15. Dora Schaul, Dessin du Depart.

Maps

1. Unexpected Routes.

2. Silvia Mistral (1931–1939).

3. Max Aub (1939–1942).

4. Anna Seghers (1933–1947).

5. Ruth Rewald (1933–1944).

6. Gertrude Duby (1933–1950).

7. Egon Erwin Kisch (1933–1947).

Acknowledgments

ALMOST A DECADE AGO 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 family’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 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 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.

CHAPTER ONE

Beautiful Friendships

THE FIRST VCR MY FAMILY 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 vanguardism. 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