Mot d’ordre: Survivre Mémoires de l’exil méditerranéen de l’intelligentsia allemande
Watchword: Survive Memories of the German Intelligentsia’s Mediterranean Exile

Summary/Abstract: First of all, our aim is to recall the memories of the turbulent, hurtful history of a community of German intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish artists, who took refuge in 1933 in the south of France, in the hope that the Hitler regime would be short-lived. Henceforth, we propose to follow the route of other foreign and French intellectuals who ended up joining this community in search of a simple refuge where they could survive and organize their fight, the resistance against the advancement of the war that turned these refugees into “personae non gratae”, into “foreigners”, into “enemies”. We will note that the French defeat of 1940 led to arrests and confinements in camps, obliging these intellectuals to head for a new escape. Finally, we will point out that this intelligentsia was desperately looking for papers to obtain an exit visa or to enter a host country. In the absence of such papers, some ended up using escape routes, which appeared at the time, such as the “Marseille escape route”, to leave Europe, legally or not, by means of the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean towards the promised land.

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