13 to 14 February 2025 in Mumbai
The International Conference: “Refugees in Global Transit. Encounters, Knowledge, and Coping Strategies in a Disrupted World, 1930s-50s” will take place on the 13th and 14th of February 2025 in Mumbai, India. The conference is organized by Simone Lässig (German Historical Institute Washington), Sebastian Schwecke (Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi), and Swen Steinberg (Queen’s University, Kingston), in collaboration with Christoph K. Neumann (OI Istanbul), Maria Framke (Erfurt University), and Jens Hanssen (OI Beirut) and is also part of the foundation-wide event series “Ends of War – International Perspectives on World War II” of the Max Weber Foundation.
Refugees in Global Transit: Encounters, Knowledge, and Coping Strategies in a Disrupted World, 1930s–50s
Between the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and decolonization after World War II, a range of non-Western, in many cases colonial, regions became hubs for people in transit. A growing body of new research on refugees “In Global Transit,” many of them Jews in flight from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, has highlighted this forced migration to and in the Global South. Scholars are documenting refugee encounters with local populations and colonial authorities, their search for more permanent new homes, as well as their attempts to maintain contact with, and facilitate the escape of, those left behind.
This conference builds on the emerging scholarship on cultural, social, and political encounters – connections and disconnects – among diverse groups of European and non-European refugees and with highly stratified host populations, including existing Jewish communities, colonial officials and settlers, and other migrants. While much of this research has relied on sources produced by state or colonial officials or the refugees themselves, this conference aims to explore new approaches and sources that require knowledge of local and national languages, archives, and histories.
“Transit” refers to individual and collective experiences of living in-between – that is, in spaces people did not envision remaining in permanently. However, it also refers to regions and countries like Turkey, Palestine, and India, where refugees from Nazi Europe found a safe haven while these regions were themselves undergoing turbulent transitions.
Examining this volatile historical moment raises further questions applicable to other refugee and migrant experiences in crisis: What kinds of knowledge transfer can we observe, and what kinds of boundaries and prejudices obstructed such transfers? What were the differential impacts of class, gender, and age on notions of ethnic, national, “racial,” and religious differences? And how can we uncover the long-term memories of this global diaspora of WWII refugees after most of them moved beyond their transit spaces in the decades following independence, state building, and – in some cases – new forms of forced migration?
Programm
Thursday, February 13, 2025
8:30 am – 9:00 am Registration / Coffee and pastries
9:00 - 9:30 am Welcome
9:30 -10:30 am Panel 1: Interactions and Illusions
Refugee Political Thought in Transit: The Interaction between Hindu Bengalis and Jewish Exiles in British Bengal, 1930s-40s
Arnab Dutta (University of Groningen)
End of Utopia: The Photographic Archive of a Disillusioned Refugee in Early Israel
Julia Hauser (University of Kassel)
10:30-11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am -12:00 pm Panel 2: Reimagination and Remembrance
Echoes Across Empires: Caribbean Refuge and the Reimagining of Holocaust Histories
Rosa de Jong (University of Amsterdam)
At Home in Transit: German-Jewish Refugees Remember Harbin, Manchuria, 1938-1949
Susanne Hillman (San Diego State University)
12:00 – 1:00 pm Lunch Break
1:00-2:30 pm Panel 3: Negotiating Precarity: German, Polish and Kazakh Refugees in colonial South Asia 1939-1950
Humanitarianism and the Limits of Sovereignty: Polish Refugees in Kolhapur
Pragya Kaul (University of Michigan)
Humanitarianism in Action: Kazakh refugees in Bhopal
Antara Datta (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Barbed-Wire Humanitarianism? : The Internment of German Civilians in Second World War India (1939-1946)
Suchintan Das (University of Oxford)
2:30 - 3:00 pm Coffee Break
3:00 – 4:00 pm Panel 4: Refugees, Hosts and Settlers: The Levant from 1939 to 195
’Nothing to do but speculate about the future:’ Jewish Refugees
in the Beirut Quarantine, 1939
Mohamad El Chamaa (American University of Beirut)
Civic Friendship, Hospitality and Repatriation in 1940s Palestine
Jens Hanssen (Orient Institut, Beirut)
4:00 -6:00 pm Break
6:00 - 8:00 pm Keynote: Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union, New York) followed by a small reception
Friday, February 14, 2025
9:00 - 10:30 am Panel 5: Shalom and Hello Bombay: German Refugees and Migrant Histories of Knowledge in an Indian Metropolis
Ernest Shaffer’s discovery of India: Navigating networks and accumulating expertise in the life of a refugee
Maria Framke (University of Erfurt)
German Camera for an Islamicate Vision: Josef Wirsching, Kamal Amrohi, and the Making of Visual Affect in Bombay Cinema
Razak Khan (University of Göttingen)
“These guys don’t know anything”. Ambivalences from a German aristocratic labour emigrant in Bombay
Jörg Zedler (University of Regensburg / LMU München)
10:30 – 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am -12:00 pm Panel 6: Internationalism and Anticolonialism between the Local and the Global
“Global Transit” in a Colonized World: Internationalism in Colonial Bombay
Ninad Pandit (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art)
Indian and Indonesian Anticolonialism in Transit: Wartime Colonial Subalterns in an Indian Ocean Anticolonial Moment, 1945-47
Naina Manjrekar (IIT Bombay)
12:00 -12:30 pm Final discussion
12:30 – 1:30 pm Lunch Break
1:30 – 5:00 pm Excursion
6:00 Conference Dinner
About In Global Transit:
Website: https://transit.hypotheses.org/
https://www.ghi-dc.org/research/history-of-migration/in-global-transit