Andrea Hammel Bücher

Jakov Lind was born in Vienna in 1927. As an eleven-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity. After a literary apprenticeship in Israel, he made his reputation through works of fiction written in German, although he now lives in Britain and writes in English. Lind’s writings are distinguished by an extraordinary variety of stylistic and linguistic modes, which are used, in both his autobiographical and his fictional narratives, to express the experiences of exile, linguistic dislocation and cultural uncertainty. The articles collected in this volume reassess the strategies which Lind adopted to explore the implications of living and writing ‘after all that occurred under Hitler’. Writing After The Work of Jakov Lind is the first comprehensive study of this creative and controversial writer and will be of interest not only to students and academics working in German and Austrian Studies, but to everyone interested in the Holocaust, the literature of exile and the cultural legacy of central European Jewry.

In 1938 and 1939, some 10,000 children and young people fled to the UK to escape Nazi persecution. Known as the ‘Kindertransport’, this effort has long been hailed as a feel-good wartime success story—but there are uncomfortable truths at the heart of this history. The Kindertransport was a complex visa waiver scheme, and its initiators and organisers did not necessarily act in an altruistic way. The British government required a guarantee to indemnify the government against any expense for the arriving child, and refused to admit child refugees’ parents. The selection criteria in place prioritised those who were likely to make the best contribution to society and the economy, rather than the most urgent cases. And, once they had arrived safely in the United Kingdom, some children and young people were placed in unsuitable homes, and many arrangements irrevocably broke down. Written with striking empathy and insight, Andrea Hammel’s expert analysis casts new light on what really happened during the Kindertransport. Revelatory and impassioned, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of migration and refugees in Britain, and offers thought-provoking lessons for how we might make life easier for children fleeing conflict today.

A popular history telling the stories of a varied group of people who found refuge in Wales from the scourge of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The book is designed to resonate with those who have personal experience of similar situations, those looking to understand the refugee experience, young people investigating Welsh and European history and the stories of their ancestors, as well as the general history reader. The book will include a chapter - a kind of historical postscript - on the experience of contemporary Syrian refugees.

Exile and Everyday Life focusses on the everyday life experience of refugees fleeing National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s as well as the representation of this experience in literature and culture.

This book is the first comparative study of the novels written by five German-speaking women – Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen – who had to flee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added – together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann – an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers’ narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the five writers’ narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women’s writing.