Six Wolfs, Three Weills

David Simpson

• Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America by Jean-Michel Palmier, translated by David Fernbach
  Verso, 852 pp, £29.99, July 2006, ISBN 1 84467 068 6

We have long known that, for all the famous success stories, the welcome extended to Europe’s displaced persons, mostly but not all Jews, in the run-up to the Second World War was partial, insufficient and often less than wholehearted. Yet the temptation to romanticise this piece of the past persists, aided by the fact that exile is a word whose charge has been somewhat blunted by an inclination to celebrate the positive aspects of rootlessness, whether as a gesture against the perceived intellectual and personal constraints which result from living within nation-states and their mindsets or as a virtue made of the need for some kind of global citizenship to compensate for a sensed loss of local autonomy. Nomadism (after Deleuze and Guattari) has become an appealing metaphor for all sorts of freedom, while the more negative refugeedom described in the work of Giorgio Agamben has been taken to define the condition of all of us in a world in which place-based civic and legal securities are increasingly being eroded by a volatile global economy.