Innocence and Experience

Acknowledgements

The editors are most grateful to Ms Jane Lewin of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London, for her kind assistance with the organization of the Innocence and Experience Symposium. We should also like to thank the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Trust for their generous financial support in the production of this volume.

Foreword

The ongoing Insiders/Outsiders project started life in March 2019 as a yearlong, nationwide festival designed to celebrate but also examine in a more detailed and nuanced way the immense contribution made by refugees from Nazi Europe to British culture. As its founding director, I was increasingly struck by the frequent, disparate yet interlinked ways in which childhood featured as a leitmotif.

I therefore decided to approach the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London, with a view to collaborating with them on a conference on this very theme, and was naturally delighted at their keenness to do so. Gratifyingly, all those who attended the online symposium in December 2021 agreed that we had tapped into a richly rewarding and important cultural topic which had hitherto been insufficiently explored. So when Peter Lang agreed to publish an anthology based in the first instance on the conference papers, I was even more delighted.

The process of turning the papers into book form has proved a wonderfully (indeed unusually) smooth one, due above all to the hard work, dedication and commitment of Anna Nyburg and Charmian Brinson, to whom my very special thanks are due. Thanks must also of course go both to the speakers at the conference who so expertly turned their papers into publishable texts, and to the authors of supplementary essays, who although unable to present papers at the symposium, were willing to contribute so usefully to this anthology. Last but not least, I am grateful to the trustees of the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Trust for the financial support that has helped make the present volume a stimulating and thought-provoking reality.

Monica Bohm-Duchen

February 2023

Introduction

In recent years, considerable attention has been drawn to the story of the Kindertransports, the visa waiver scheme for unaccompanied children, which, not long before the outbreak of the Second World War, was to bring some 10,000 children, mostly Jewish and in danger of their lives, to Britain and safety. In Liverpool Street Station, London, there is a poignant sculpture representing the forlorn children with their suitcases; in Harwich, too, there has been a recent memorial created; and in continental Europe there are now also reminders of this lifesaving initiative, one being the statue at the Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin. The children came without their parents, something which marked many of them for life. These children were some of the approximately 80,000 refugees from Nazism to Britain who came between 1933, the year the National Socialists, the Nazis, came to power in Germany, up to September 1939 when war broke out and travel was no longer possible.

However, the Kindertransport refugees were not the only refugee children to experience separation from their parents in British exile. Further refugee children, more fortunate but still victims of forced displacement, accompanied their parents into exile, with persecuted men and women leaving Germany after each act of Nazi legislation intended to make the lives of Jews and political opponents in Germany impossible. Initially, the Nazis focused their attention on those who opposed their regime: the communists, socialists, trade unionists and others against the threatening new totalitarian state. University lecturers and other civil servants were dismissed if they were deemed to be anti-Nazi. In addition, long-standing antisemitism in Germany soon found expression in the expulsion of Jews from all walks of life, in favour of ‘Aryan’ Germans, a half-baked notion of racial difference which the Nazis embraced with enthusiasm.

Some 90 per cent of the refugees were Jewish, which is to say Jewish according to Nazi classification. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, in which was set down the classification system to determine who was officially Jewish. This categorizing had nothing to do with religion, as for Nazi beliefs, race was the only factor considered important. So it was that many Germans, whose parents or grandparents had converted from Judaism to Christianity many years ago, were taken by surprise to learn that they were now considered Jewish.

The largest group of desperate Jews and others from Germany and from Austria, too, left after March 1938, when Austria was annexed into the German Reich. Some of these had already experienced detention in a Nazi concentration camp. In response to the increased demand for entry, Britain now introduced a visa system for immigrants on top of the existing entry condition that incoming refugees have a guarantor: someone who would provide £50 to the government, to ensure that the refugee would not be a burden on the state.