Roads Less Traveled

Natalie Eppelsheimer

ROADS LESS TRAVELED

German-Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya,
1933–1947

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

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Cover image: Stefanie Zweig together with her parents and Owuor. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #63600. Courtesy of Ruth Weyl. Copyright of USHMM.

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 1072-0626

ISBN 978-1-78997-537-6 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78997-538-3 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78997-539-0 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78997-540-6 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Natalie Eppelsheimer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Natalie Eppelsheimer is Associate Professor of German at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her main areas of teaching and research are Holocaust and Exile Studies as well as language pedagogy. She has facilitated several workshops for colleagues in German (Studies) programs on teaching difficult topics in undergraduate German courses. Currently, she is planning a digital storytelling project that maps refugee stories and incorporates oral and video testimony from archives.

About the book

Before Nowhere in Africa won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002, the fate of German-Jewish exiles in Africa was not widely discussed. The film, based on the autobiographical work of Stefanie Zweig, tells the story of the Zweig family, who escaped the perils of Nazism and found refuge in the British colony of Kenya.

Taking Zweig’s written works Nowhere in Africa and Nirgendwo war Heimat: Mein Leben auf zwei Kontinenten [Nowhere was Home: My Life on Two Continents] as a point of departure, and drawing on extensive sources – including previously unexplored government files from the Colonial Office and other archival records, correspondence, first-person accounts and personal communication with former refugees – this book provides a detailed historical look at German-Jewish emigration to Kenya. The volume explores British immigration policies and the formation of the Plough Settlement Association, under whose auspices German-Jewish refugees were to be settled in Kenya as farmers. It also traces the difficult lives of refugees, both adults and children, within the complex dynamics of British colonial society in the Kenya of the 1930s and 1940s, paying special attention to the experiences of children in the colony.

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This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

introduction

Roads Less Traveled

Chapter 1

Kenya? Historical Background of Jewish Emigration to Kenya 1903–1939

Chapter 2

Safe Haven in Kenya: First-­Person Accounts

Chapter 3

Refugees’ Status in Kenya Colony

Chapter 4

Experiences of Refugee Children in Colonial Kenya

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Figures

Figures 1 & 2: Cover and interior page to a tourist brochure for Kenya acquired by the Berg family shortly after they fled there from Germany. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #63521 and #63521A. Courtesy of Kurt and Jill Pauly. Copyright of USHMM.

Figure 3: Map of Kenya, indicating locations of towns mentioned in this chapter: Gilgil, Londiani, Limuru, Mombasa, Nairobi, Nakuru, Ol’ Joro Orok, Rongai. Designed by Sarah Howard ’19, Middlebury College.

Figure 4: Ruth Weyl and her African staff in front of her boarding house in Nairobi, Kenya. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #63593. Courtesy of Ruth Weyl. Copyright of USHMM.

Figure 5: Group portrait of the extended Berg family who had found refuge in Kenya. First row, left to right: Gisela Berg, Herman Mayer with Egon on his shoulders, Hannah, and Inge Berg. Second row, left to right: Ernest Berg holding Phillip, Else Berg, Klara Berg, Joseph Berg, Erna Berg, Rosel Berg, Sara Berg, Josef, and Adolf. Courtesy of Kurt and Jill Pauly. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #49600. Copyright of USHMM.←ix | x→

Figure 6: Stefanie Zweig, visiting Eldoret with her parents. Stefanie is third from the right and Owuor on the far right. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #63599. Courtesy of Ruth Weyl. Copyright of USHMM.

Figure 7: Poem written by Stefanie Zweig for her father, Walter Zweig, for his birthday on September 5, 1945. Source: Splitternachlass Zweig (SpNL EB 2016/004), Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945 der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted with permission of Walter Zweig.←x | 1→

Acknowledgments

This book could absolutely not have been written without the support of friends and family, colleagues and staff at archives and libraries in Germany, Great Britain, Kenya and the US.

I was very fortunate to work with Laurel Plapp, Laura-Beth Shanahan and Jonathan Smith at Peter Lang, who showed extraordinary patience during my writing of Roads Less Traveled. I also want to thank Diane DeBella for reading my work and for helping me prepare the first version of the manuscript. While she bears no responsibility for the flaws that may remain in the final version of this book, her comments and criticism proved helpful time and again. I want to express thanks to Jutta Vinzent at the University of Birmingham, too, who shared with me documents from her archival research on German refugees from Gross-­Breesen interned as enemy aliens in Kenya and with whom I enjoyed talking about my book project. It is not often that one finds scholars who so generously share their archival discoveries. I am especially grateful to the staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in particular photo archivist Caroline Waddell and reference librarians Ron Coleman and Vincent Slatt; the director and staff at the Exilarchiv at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt, in particular Sylvia Asmus, Jörg Hasenclever, Katrin Kokot and Regina Elzner; the friendly librarians at the National Archives in Kew and The London Metropolitan Archives, Great Britain. I would also like to thank Adinah Zola at the Nairobi Hebrew Congregation for granting me permission to research the NHC archives and for taking me in when things got a bit chaotic in Nairobi. I am also grateful to the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for giving me the opportunity to participate in the Jack and Anita Hess and the Curt C. and Else Silberman Faculty Seminars and to return to the Mandel Center as a follow-­up scholar to collect materials for use in my teaching about the Holocaust and Exile. I also want to thank Middlebury College for supporting my←1 | 2→ travels to conduct research in Kenya, Great Britain and Germany and Sarah Howard, a student in Middlebury’s Geography department, for drawing the Kenya maps for this book.