In Conversation: “Nothing About Us Without Us”
Ilse Helbrecht, a Thomas Mann Fellow and social geographer, recently met with the Canadian political geographer, Jennifer Hyndman, at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. In their conversation, the two acclaimed scholars are looking deeper into the meaning and transformation of the terms ‘exile’ and ‘refugee.’
Ilse Helbrecht: Jennifer, today, we are in Thomas Mann’s house and when we think of him and the period of Thomas Mann, we always think about ‘exile.’ He has been in ‘exile’ and we call it ‘exile.’ But nowadays, when we look at people who seek political asylum, we speak of ‘refugees’ and of a ‘refugee crisis.’ So, there is a different term being used. You are an expert on refugee politics, you have been working on this for decades, what do you make of this fact that we describe this Nobel Prize winning-author as ‘in exile’ in the 1940s, but when we talk about this topic now it’s ‘the refugees’ and the ‘refugee crisis?’
Jennifer Hyndman: I think that is a really important question because something I have been grappling with is how we make the ‘refugee’ ‘us?’ A refugee is always somebody else. It’s an othering term and I think we have to be really careful to think that through and not talk about ‘refugee populations.’ It dehumanizes ‘those’ people over there. So, I think that ‘refugee’ and ‘exile’ have very similar meanings, but ‘refugee’ has come to be very racialized, very classed, and in this context it’s important to note that Thomas Mann was a bourgeois fellow from Germany — he was white and had a certain social standing, but also a certain nationality. In the 1940s, we’re talking about European exiles and refugees. Today, the vast majority of refugees will be non-white, but some will still be white. I think we need to use both terms and, in some ways conflate them, so that we mix things up. When we use the word ‘refugee,’ we erase some of the subjectivity, some of the agency, some of the decision-making power and volition of the person, which was never taken away from them, but discursively those of us here in North America talking about ‘those refugees’ over there, we sort of evacuate the category ‘refugee’ of agency and subjectivity and its humanness. In French, there are a number of discussions taking place about the different ways in which humanitarianism becomes a form of governmentality and humanitarian governance. I don’t want to get into that too much, but Didier Fassin talks about humanness as something that connects us all. And it also motivates us to act, just as Germany did with the Syrians and you could argue Canada did as well.
I.H.: Right. If I think about it, ‘exile’ and ‘refugee’ — it is even embedded in the language because you can say “I am in an exile,” meaning “I am,” whereas ‘a refugee’ is a category I put on people.
J.H.: It’s true and there is a movement of refugees worldwide, in Europe, Canada and North America for sure, who are particularly concerned about being so othered. They are seen as traumatized, like damaged goods and not as people. There is a saying used by a refugee-led group globally: ‘Nothing about us without us.’ In other words: We’d like to be at the table, too. Thank you!
I.H.: And do you think that going back to the term ‘exile’ or ‘extended exile,’ like you did in your book, would help? Is it important to reclaim that notion nowadays?
J.H.: I don’t know if ‘exile’ does enough work analytically for us to resuscitate it too much, but I think it is good to unsettle the notion of ‘refugee’ and I’ve been thinking hard about this because refugees increasingly are vilified, as are migrants who are sometimes seen as even less legitimate then refugees. In Germany, you might take in Syrian refugees, but not the spontaneous arrivals from Eritrea — ‘we didn’t invite them.’ People will call them migrants as a kind of way of downgrading their claims for safety or their claims for refugee status. So, we need to be very careful about the words we choose! But we also can’t expect any one category to do the political work that needs to be done and the thinking and the careful parsing out of different terms.
I.H.: In the 1930s and 1940s, when Thomas Mann and many others were forced into exile through fascism, it was a national policy. Some countries would accept the Jewish people who fled fascist Germany and some would not. For example: The U.S had what was called a ‘paper wall,’ through which they could not accept you. It was a national thing and people would have to consider when they went into exile as to where they could land and of course Thomas Mann himself was a very privileged figure, so he could land in the U.S, but others could not. Today there is the Geneva Convention, a kind of international framework for how to deal with refugees. How hopeful are you that, in the future, we might come to see a world where there are international regulations fairly applied to refugees? Rather than this nationalism and these nationalist individualistic policies. It seems everybody right now is on her own, finding her own solutions and the international conventions seem to be just words. What is your take on that — this question about nationalism versus international regulations?
J.H.: First of all, I think, even Hannah Arendt, before human rights were formally encoded and signed off by all the states, answered this question first and said: ‘It’s great to at least be a person who has the right to have rights,’ but on another hand, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she goes on about how human rights are really very lousy because there is no government to enforce them. Today, we face that — head on! They mean very little. Human rights, whether they be civil or political rights, social, economic or cultural rights, are not worth much. So that’s one piece. Getting to the convention that you speak of, the 1951 Convention Relating to Refugees, it’s still with us and it certainly forms the basis of the recent Global Compact on Refugees that proclaims itself to be the most recent, newest and greatest hope for refugees. But let’s think about that: that’s a legal international treaty, for those countries that have signed on, which is the vast majority of countries in the world, but it defines ‘refugee’ very narrowly. Now we still have to keep it because if we were to just cancel it, we’d lose the capacity to bring in refugees that fit that definition. But we know that the kinds of violence that people face in war, the kinds of human rights abuses that might force people to leave home, are much wider, and many people don’t fit that definition. I’ve talked about that as a kind of ‘legal orientalism,’ to cite Ruskola. That is to say, if you’re not part of that treaty, and some of the biggest countries hosting refugees right now are not, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Bangladesh, India, Thailand — countries that have for years hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees — you are not signatories and yet you do a ton of heavy lifting. So, in this legal orientalism, certain parts of the world have been left out of the Convention.
So, on the one hand, the refugee definition is too narrow and it is very Western-centric, if you want to use a Cold War notion of West and East. But on the other, if we got rid of it, we’d lose a lot of capacity to provide protection for people. To be very precise about it, the way we’re talking about refugees right now worries me. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. And the reason is, if we’re thinking about Canada for example, 15 years ago we used to talk about ‘asylum seekers,’ or ‘refugee claimants,’ but today we use the words ‘irregular migrants’ because they often enter Canada — not all, but most –by overstaying a visa or crossing a border without authorization. Right now, people are being told it’s illegal to cross. But they say: ‘I know, but I want to make a refuge claim.’ And they do. So, it’s not illegal to cross actually. It is administrative, not criminal, law. It is unlawful to cross if you don’t report yourself, but you can do it. A person, who was formerly called a person fleeing danger, is now seen as a threat to the state. So, there are a lot of things going on that worry me about a patchwork quilt that’s prevailing now. National security talk will always prevail. It shouldn’t but it normally will trump issues around refugee and asylum seeker protection.
I.H.: Canada is a country that has such a long history with immigration, parallel of course to the genocide on the First Nations. It was then built on immigration and it has a lot of expertise on how to make an immigrant society, whereas Germany has always denied that it is an immigrant society, even though it clearly is. And recently, there was this large number of people who came, about a million, as a consequence of Angela Merkel opening the borders in 2015, so there is a lot of talk about ‘integration.’ And this is an important topic, because if this kind of debate about ‘integration’ would fail, then the whole decision of letting ‘them’ into the country could be seen as a ‘wrongful’ decision. Yet, if ‘integration’ is successful, then the public opinion might bend towards it was a ‘good’ thing after all. So, ‘integration’ seems to be important to legitimize what happened, but also to navigate the future of Germany as an immigrant society. What do you make of the term ‘integration’ in the context of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration with your Canadian experience?
J.H.: Really interesting points! I think both Germany and Canada use the term ‘integration’ in state policy and objectives and I think it is important to pay attention to it. I’ve seen a lot of traffic in terms of ideas and policy exchange going on between the two countries. I find the term a little bit rigid, a little bit wooden, perhaps because in Canada the state doesn’t define it well at all. But I think some other ways we can think about integration are social inclusion and participation in society. In Canada, and perhaps in Germany, too, integration is defined in theory as a two-way street, that is to say the receiving community needs to change its ways, open its arms, adjust, add new resources to make integration successful. It’s not: ‘Was it a good decision or was it not?’ It is: ‘How do you prepare to make this successful?’ And, of course those coming in also have to adjust, adapt, change their ways and join society. So, this two-way street is often not recognized, at least by the Canadian state. It is really on the refugees and immigrants to integrate and participate. One of my colleagues, Dr. Michaela Hynie, has said it beautifully. She said: ‘It’s not what happened to refugees before they got here. It is what we do with them, for them and to them once they arrive that matters most.’ Understanding that we can’t just stay the same, that we, the host society, can’t just do business as usual, education as usual, healthcare as usual. We’re going to need to change and we’re going to need to continue to change and engage the people who come in, but also because technology and other elements, are changing and we need to be thinking through how ‘we’ can be and do better.
So, the term for integration in the U.S would be ‘immigrant incorporation.’ ‘Incorporation’ is the language that is used. It’s a little bit different and Canadians find that objectionable because it sounds like they are joining a mainstream that might be racialized as white, that might be a ‘melting pot.’ Canadians love to criticize ‘America’ for being a melting pot. Canada likes to see itself as a ‘mosaic.’ It’s a little bit mythological but Canada always likes to distinguish itself from the U.S, even if it is the little sister, so to speak. So, ‘integration’ is a tricky term, but I mean how can you argue against social inclusion and full participation in education, economic and political life? All of these things are highly important. How we’re doing on it is another question. Canada has a long way to go, but there is progress on certain fronts, and more to be done on other fronts.
I.H.: I know this is a difficult and broad question but let me try and ask you. The Thomas Mann House is a pretty young institution that was just opened last year by the German president. What do you think the meaning of this brand new institution could be in this particular geopolitical moment we are in right now? So, this is a whole new situation of geopolitics, where everything that was solid melted into the air: Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ as a new policy, Europe is shattered in a way, China is on the upswing and most of the players haven’t figured out how to play this new game. In this moment, there comes the Thomas Mann House as an institution that has the mission to work on the issue of democracy in a transatlantic discourse. Do you have any thoughts or recommendations on what the Thomas Mann House could do, should be doing or how it could position itself?
J.H.: It is very hard to say what it should do, given that I have known it for only a very short time, but perhaps it can be the light we cannot see at the moment, perhaps it’s the beacon of hope in a world that is looking very dark at the moment! I think it is interesting to hear the story, and again I am hearing this just as I visit this beautiful and exceptional space, both a cultural and a political space. I find it interesting that the house is basically sponsored by both the foreign ministry and the cultural ministry. And I think the story of Thomas Mann’s daughter is an interesting one. The notion that a generation on, or perhaps two generations on from Thomas Mann, a different version of the ‘white house on the west coast’ can be invented and I guess, I would have to push this question back to you, as you’ve been here for several months. I think the geopolitical moment is very different today. The Cold War is in a different place. We have different contextual pieces at play, like you’ve said, the nationalist movements, ‘America First,’ and even the ‘global War on Terror’ frames the current context of migration and asylum in ways that are different from when Thomas Mann was fleeing the persecution of the Nazis with his family.
I.H.: I have been here a couple of months and what I find fascinating is that when Thomas Mann was forced into exile to the U.S, he was beyond his sixties, he was an experienced writer and, during his time here in the Pacific Palisades, he spent thinking through political terrain: drafting speeches to the German people, trying to bring them to their senses, so the Nobel Prize-winning author had to turn political. And it was, like you said, his daughter Erika, who helped him a lot to figure out how to position himself — how to reflect on what it means to be German. When he entered the U.S and the reporters in New York asked him to give a statement, he said: ‘Wo ich bin ist Deutschland.’ ‘Where I am is Germany.’ Because he wanted to claim that Germany is not lost, but that there is a cultural side of Germany that he carries with him. And so, I think Thomas Mann was really forced, through being an exile, through being here, through repositioning himself, to be self-reflexive on issues of nationalism, culture and identity. And I think that the Thomas Mann House could be in this very dynamic geopolitical situation right now, where nobody really has some kind of ‘master view’, when nobody really knows exactly what to do and so many are disorientated — it could be a site that fosters this self-reflexive discourse of questioning, asking these hard questions of positioning, on those issues of identity and nationalism, exile, transnational movements and refugees. I think the Thomas Mann House could be a site of reflecting and looking for a new kind of humanism. To be reflexive and self-critical.
J.H.: That is hopeful! We need that.
I.H.: Thank you, Jennifer! Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
Ilse Helbrecht studied geography, sociology as well as spatial planning and administrative law at the University of Munster. In 2009, she was appointed Professor for Cultural and Social Geography at the Humboldt University of Berlin. There, she also served as the Director of the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies (GSZ). In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Caroline von Humboldt Chair as part of the German higher education Excellence Initiative. Her recent book, “Gentrification and Resistance” (2018), deals with displacement processes in urban areas.
Jennifer Hyndman is Professor of Geography at York University and the previous Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies, where she is a Resident Scholar. Hyndman’s research focuses on violence, human displacement and the geopolitics of humanitarian response, as well as refugee protection, settlement, participation and social inclusion in Canada. Her current research projects examine private refugee sponsorship and how it is sustained over time in Canadian communities. Her 2017 book with Wenona Giles, Refugees in Extended Exile, unsettles the notion of ‘exile’ as a historical figure from Europe and ‘refugee’ as a more racialized concept.
