Exiles Traveling

Book excerpt: This volume presents for the first time a study of the interface between exile and travel within the context of exile from Nazi Germany. The nineteen essays share the overarching aim to compare the tropes of travel and exile as generators of a critical discourse and as central categories within German exile, in particular literature, music and film. The essays are guided by powerful questions: How does travel compare to exile, and how much overlap is there between these two categories? How do exiles travel, as practitioners of displacement? Or rather, to what extent does the concept of travel apply to the exilic predicament? Do the terms “exile” and “travel” still have validity in our postmodern era of cosmopolitanism, ever increasing mobility, the embrace of otherness, and tourism? How does exile literature in which travel is thematized compare to the tradition(s) of travel writing? And how are the critical moments of leavetaking, re-membering home, and return imagined and narrated? The essays feature numerous German and Austrian authors, musicians, and filmmakers and lend fresh insights into German Exile and the field of Exile Studies at large.