New York University Remarque Institute Mosse Lectures
Exile was a deeply personal and profoundly intellectual theme for two generations of European writers, including George and Hilde Mosse, as well as the Institute’s namesake: Erich Maria Remarque. Living in exile deeply influenced how Europeans—especially exiled Germans, European Jews, and Russians—abroad thought of their relationship to the homelands to which they aspired to return. Some sought to express the ways in which they were carrying something of the Old World with them, others to think about that world and its inaccessibility. Reflecting on Hilde’s life in March 1982, George outlined how Hilde found “an almost superhuman strength” after being displaced. After leaving Germany, she overcame her natural shyness and self-doubt to speak defiantly against fascism on Swiss radio out of Basel. It was exile that drove Hilde to dedicate herself to cultivating critical minds and improving the mental health landscape of New York City.
As scholars have long recognized—and as they begin to ask new questions of the subject—intellectual attitudes on exile of course varied considerably and have been largely determined by the experience itself, something scholars long recognized but have begun to interrogate anew. Remarque himself famously told a reporter that “I do not think in German nor feel German, nor talk German. Even when I dream it is about America, and I swear, it is in American,” whereas Thomas Mann no less famously declared upon arriving in America that he hadn’t left Germany behind, that Germany was simply where he was. Others—from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote much about his own exile, to Zhang Ailing, who never managed to break into American letters as she had in China—inhabited variable, often extremely precarious worlds, in which they both profited creatively and suffered greatly. The émigré generation has continued to provide an intellectual framework for artists and scholars currently displaced from their homelands.
And yet exile is historically contingent; it remains today a particularly tricky and confusing concept. Is it something we use specifically for intellectuals and to understand prohibited speech? Does it really exist anymore in the same way that Hilde and George experienced in the twentieth century? How has it mutated? In what way can we think of refugees or those seeking political asylum as exiles? How do we single out—or interweave—these different concepts? Put another way, how do we rethink the history of the twentieth century across the history of exile from our perspective today? And, in more contemporary questions: Who gains the place or disposition of an émigré, of a writer in exile—and how do they do so? What kind of symbolic capital does exile rely on, or feed into? How and where are exiles welcomed today? In what ways is the tide shifting given new political trends and policies on migration and refugees? Where does the concept begin and end?
Remarque Institute Mosse Lectures Leadership:
Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute and a Professor of History at New York University. His books include The Invention of Prehistory (2024), The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (2018, with Todd Meyers), and Transparency in Postwar France (2017). He has co-edited a dozen books, including Power and Time (with Natasha Wheatley and Dan Edelstein, 2021), The Routledge Handbook in the History and Sociology of Ideas (with Gisèle Sapiro, 2023), and Staging the Third Reich (by Anson Rabinbach, co-edited with Dagmar Herzog, 2020). He is the co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and a series advisor for the George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas at the University of Wisconsin Press.