Travel, Exile and Forms of Nomadic Writing: The (Im)possibility of a Poetics of Exile under National Socialism (1933-1945)

If the phenomena of exile and exile literature during the national socialist dictatorship in Germany has been largely explored, the possibility to identify a precise poetics of exile in German texts from the timespan 1933-1945 can still be problematic. As Johannes Evelein (2009) highlighted in his volume on exile in arts and literature, displacement in literary texts raises the question of the thin line between travelling and exile, which echoes the debate initiated by Gottfried Benn in an open letter to Klaus Mann in the post-war era. The aim of this contribution is to determine in which form the (traumatic) experience of exile and its complex relationship with travel are expressed in different literary texts. More particularly, I will focus on Irmgard Keun’s poems Lieder der Flüchtlinge (1939-1940) as well as Jean Améry’s essays Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1977) and Örtlichkeiten (1980). Both authors fled to Belgium after the Nazi takeover and wrote about their experience in very different forms. My presentation will focus not only on the immediacy of the accounts (Keun wrote while residing in Belgium and the Netherlands, whereas Améry first wrote about his experience in the 1970s), but also on their conception of exile and of a possible return in Germany and Austria after the war. Their choice of a particular literary genre as well as their stylistic representation of uprootedness, loss of identity and refugee experience will also be studied and compared with the aim to establish the (im)possibility of a poetics of exile in the Third Reich