What’s it like living in two worlds, one of which is lost forever? How does it feel to be part of a culture you were expelled from and to live in another culture that accepted you but always remains alien? In her new book “Goethe in Buenos Aires”, Henriette Kaiser explores this question, which is central to the existence of billions of people in our times of flight and expulsion. The writer and director interviewed German emigrants in Argentina, who are actually refugees, because one decides to emigrate, one is driven to flee, as one of her interlocutors says.
They fled with their parents from Hitler in the 1930s, to the end of the world, to Argentina, one of the last places of refuge, long after other countries had closed their doors. It was said to have been between 25,000 and 40,000, but no one knows exactly how many, because the Argentine authorities were not too keen on documentation. What is certain is that the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, together with New York, is now the largest outside of Israel. Henriette Kaiser’s book closes a gap between family memories that are hardly accessible to the public and the sparse scientific documentation on this little-known chapter of Argentine and German history. And it’s a gripping read – following the people on their chaotic flight, the crossing on banana steamers and freighters, into this strange world between the smell of jasmine, Lapponia ice cream and men walking the streets at night in pajamas in the tropical heat defy, as it says at one point.
Most of the newcomers got off the ship penniless, but with survival instincts and everyday skills
You learn a lot about the amazing cosmos of émigrés from Buenos Aires, the Pestalozzi school and the German language Argentine daily newspaper, which was founded by Swiss emigrants and which offered the refugees an unexpected platform. All of this formed a counter-world to the colony of Germans living abroad infiltrated by the Nazis, official company representatives, Nazi diplomats and the radical right-wing rabble. Two worlds that cut themselves off from each other like hostile villages, as Balder Olden once wrote.
A longtime employee of Argentine daily newspaper, Marion Kaufmann was the one who got Henriette Kaiser to interview the last surviving eyewitnesses. They are now very old, but spread the most vital confidence. And that is what is really astonishing about the book: the conversations with those who escaped showed her how “despite such events, an affirmative, future-oriented existence is possible,” writes Kaiser.
Henriette Kaiser: Goethe in Buenos Aires – Talks about flight and expulsion. Faber & Faber, Leipzig 2022. 200 pages, 22 euros.
(Photo: Faber & Faber)
“I didn’t find it all that terrible,” admits the emigrant Liesel Bein. Most of the newcomers got off the ship penniless, but with survival instincts and everyday skills. One hears “not a syllable of lamentation” throughout the book. Despite the chaotic politics, most people see their host country positively. “I’ve never felt anti-Semitism in anyone,” says Rodolfo Leeser. Only President Perón was opposed to many Jewish refugees because of his acceptance of old Nazis. But Kaiser even tells of cases in which the worlds mixed in an almost unbelievable way, for example when the Auschwitz survivor married the daughter of a former career Nazi.
In Argentina, regardless of the reasons for fleeing, the premise “governing means populating” was followed – as well as the country’s first constitution, which expressly allowed newcomers to preserve their own culture, something many Argentines are still proud of today, as Henriette Kaiser says. The power of the mega-metropolis Buenos Aires lies in the “coexistence of different cultures”. In an interview, she draws the conclusion: “Germany’s refusal to see itself as an immigration country is a mistake.”
Some later rose socially, became entrepreneurs or even ministers
In Argentina, on the other hand, immigrants were and have always been considered useful, which is why Jewish investors like Baron Hirsch founded agricultural colonies in remote provinces long before the Nazi era, where refugees were then also taken in. But most of them didn’t fit the job description on a farm, they stayed in Buenos Aires, hired out as domestic help, gardeners, upholsterers. Some later rose socially, became entrepreneurs or even ministers. What most couldn’t shake off: the longing for German forests and for the language area of Goethe. It was a life in two worlds, not both-and, but “neither nor”, as Liesel Bein says. And then again and again this “Never again Germany”.
In Argentina she found “a piece of Germany that no longer exists in Germany,” writes Henriette Kaiser. Through the research, she became aware again of what Germany had lost: “It wasn’t just people who were being expelled, but also attitudes.” The fact that she documented these attitudes at the last possible moment is no small merit, because with the remaining contemporary witnesses, the direct power of eyewitnessness also disappears. It is valuable when, as Henriette Kaiser’s book does, we are whispered into our everyday routine: War, flight and expulsion can happen to anyone, at any moment, at any time.