Forced into Transit: Global Perspectives on Refugees Fleeing Nazi Persecution
Wednesday, April 9 at 2pm PT/ 5pm ET
The talk introduces transit as a concept to analyze spatial and temporal experiences of Jewish or political refugees from Nazi persecution, starting first in 1933 in Germany and later on in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and all over Europe. It focuses on the in-between situation of marginalization before and after flight, spaces of transit like ports or camps as well as the temporalities of transit and the undetermined length of the phase between flight and ‘arrival.’ Therefore, the talk challenges caesuras like 1945 and common refugee geographies in the Northwestern hemisphere. Instead, it highlights the agency of refugees, alternative destinations especially in the global South, and interactions in all phases of transit with social or natural environments refugees experienced, including gender and age-related aspects. This includes especially encounters with other refugees and people in widely varying colonial or postcolonial constellations. The talk also discusses the aspect of sources that cover - or might uncover - these in-between situations of refugees in transit.
Swen Steinberg is assistant professor (term adjunct) at the Department of History and the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and is an affiliated researcher at the German Historical Institute in Washington with its Pacific Office at the University of California in Berkeley. Since 2018, he has served as the co-supervisor of the international standing working groups ‘In Global Transit’, ‘Migrant Knowledge’ and 'In Search of the Migrant Child.' Since 2023, he has been a member of the international standing working group ‘National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850–2000’, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology of the European Union. His publications include In Search of the Migrant Child: Global Histories of Youth and Migration between Knowledge, Experience, and Everyday Life (special section of the Journal of Contemporary History, edited Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Bettina Hitzer and Sheer Ganor, 2025); Lost Knowledge: Approaching Migrant Knowledge After Migration (special issue of the Journal of Migration History, edited with Philipp Strobl, 2025); Environments of Exile: Nature, Refugees, and Representations (edited with Helga Schreckenberger, 2025); Navigating In-Betweenness: Jewish Refugees in Global Transit (special section of The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, edited with Simone Lässig, Anna-Carolin Augustin, and Carolin Liebisch-Gümisch, 2024); Migration und Zeitgeschichte (special issue of Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 2022); Refugees from Nazi-Occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories (special issue of Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, edited with Anthony Grenville, 2020); Knowledge and Young Migrants (special issue of KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, edited with Simone Lässig, 2019); Knowledge and Migration (special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, edited with Simone Lässig, 2017).
