Drama / 3m, 4f / Unit set This is a touching, fragile portrait of a group rarely seen in traditional Holocaust literature--those who are unwilling to give up Germany as their home, despite the Nazi threats. Wolfgang, a hat maker, is forced by others to flee Germany for England, leaving his mother behind, who refuses to go. Filled with love for his homeland, he is unable to accept that she has probably been interned in a death camp, and he staunchly refuses to give up his German identity in fro

The year is 1932 and Michael Renner is en route from Halifax to Berlin to oversee the affairs of his ailing grandmother. Reluctantly abandoning his unrequited adoration of the boy next door, Michael has given in to familial pressure and boarded the General von Steuben, where he meets his first Berliner, an odd little man named Tristan who instantly pronounces Michael a dear sweet country boy whom Berlin will eat alive. Staying with his faltering grandmother who has been reduced to letting rooms in her once grand home, Michael is witness to the crumbling edifice of Berlin aristocracy. The house is home to a rag-tag assemblage, including Dr. Linder and his niece Hélène, both Jews. The beguiling Hélène takes Michael under her wing and introduces him to Berlin's high society, as well as its many lows. Upon his grandmother's death, Michael's cousin and her husband quickly move in, dispatched to protect the family assets. When they discover that Michael is engaged to Hélène, they break up the union, expose her as a Jew and summarily send her to Austria as the fascists tighten their stranglehold on Berlin. Michael is strategically married off to the dutifully pious Lonä, and before he knows it he is a father, working for his father-in-law auctioning the property of persecuted Jews. Years pass as Michael leads a double life, once again enthralled in unrequited love for a young man, the beautiful and mercurial Jan. From the relative safety of his respectable lifestyle, Michael despairs at Jan's unconcealed promiscuity. After Jan is nearly killed during a stint in prison under the Nazi-revised Paragraph 175 targeting sexual deviancy, Michael risks everything to become Jan's caregiver, siphoning money from his father-in-law's business to cover Jan's expenses in hiding. When their secret is exposed, Michael in turn is rescued by Peter, a dashing SS officer who has a habit of assisting Michael in desperate times, though not without expectation of returned favours. Through it all, Michael continues his peculiar friendship with Tristan, who as it turns out is the wizard behind the mind-blowing displays of debauchery at the most decadent of the legendary Berlin cabarets. Miraculously protected in a disused factory complex and underground abattoir, Tristan's club cranks out nihilistic amusements for Berlin society, including many Nazi officers, a fun-house mirror of the horrors above. As madness swirls about them, Michael and Jan come to rely on each other for comfort and safety. But Michael is haunted by the removal from his life of his son Billy, the only part of that “respectable” life that he loves. When Peter provides Michael with an escape route from the ruin that inevitably will snare him and all who remain in Berlin, Michael finds he cannot abandon Jan and Billy. Because of his love for them, he must walk back into the doom of the holocaust, marked by horrors never before imagined on earth. Exhaustively researched and ablaze with searing detail, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin is a literary monument of unflinching compassion, glittering with the decadence of Berlin cabaret society, resonant with the horrors of the holocaust, and giving form and voice to the ghosts of the tens of thousands of people murdered because of their sexual orientation. This important book carries a warning for all generations to come, of the deadly stealth of fascism in whatever form it may take.

This book explores the border-crossing mobilities of refugees within Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and Italy, it examines the precarious everyday lives of non-citizens living between and beyond EU internal borders. With attention to the constant re-construction of borders within Europe through negotiation practices, the author shows how the tensions that exist between refugees on the move and the structural constraints that limit their movement produce ‘interstices’ – small spaces of possibility that open up as a result of refugees’ struggling within structural constraints. A comprehensive understanding of the long-term effects of EU borders upon refugees’ lives is then afforded through a particular focus on the post-arrival period. Examining the protracted precariousness and multi-directional hyper-mobility in Europe that emerges from the dynamics of the relation between structural mechanisms and the agency of individuals, Lives in Transit reveals how the border regime in Europe impacts mostly upon the temporal rather than the spatial dimensions of refugees’ lives, affecting their subjectivities and sense of self. This ‘dispossession’ of time is advocated as the main problem with the experience of refugees in Europe, causing them to claim a temporal justice, which seeks to gain back control of their own lives and personhood. Calling for migration to be understood as a process of ‘becoming subjects’, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and politics with interests in migration and diaspora studies.

Like the best true life adventures, the story of Werner Pelz is stranger than fiction. Forced to flee Nazi Germany for being Jewish, he was then interned in England for being German. Shipped to Australia on the notorious HMT Dunera, he spent two years in internment camps in Hay and Tatura. After returning to Britain, his life evolved into a spiritual quest that led him to become an Anglican vicar, to author popular books (including God Is No More), to frequently appear on the BBC, and to become a Guardian columnist. Decades after his wartime Australian exile, he returned to teach Sociology at La Trobe University, continuing his search for a new way of thinking, a new mythology. In the mid-1980s, a young university student, Roger Averill, was taught by this quietly charismatic man. The two developed an unlikely friendship, one that was to last until Werner’s death, after which Roger’s research unexpectedly revealed a deeper dimension —a personal life filled with familial drama, pain and poignancy. Both memoir and biography, Exile: The Lives and Hopes of Werner Pelz is a compelling account of a remarkable man’s life-long search for a truth unbound by orthodoxy.

Hugged and hated by Hitler, cheered by Churchill, traumatized by Tracy and Turner, loved and wounded by luscious women--Paul Kuttner's life can only be described as an accumulation of sky-high adventurous summits and, on the other side of the human scale, an endless row of diabolically hard times. An early life of goo fortune turned when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Two meetings with the Gestapo, and an internment by the English on the Isle of Man for suspected spying later, and Mr. Kuttner made his way to the United States where he worked as a Hollywood reporter. This thrilling and poignant memoir recounts a sensational life filled with personal struggles and lingering memories of extraordinary encounters with Hollywood legends, a few saintly people, and some of the most heinous war criminals of the twentieth century.

When Paula Kogel was young, she fell passionately in love with a Dutch soldier and the couple moved to the Dutch East Indies to raise a family. Upon the outbreak of fighting in World War Two, the family moved to the suburb of Tjideng in Batavia. Their small two-bedroom house in the Ampasiet district is the setting for the book.When Japanese Armed Forces took control of the Dutch East Indies in March 1942, soldiers were immediately transported to POW slave labour camps such as the Burma Railway and the coal mines in Japan, while the civilian men, and later boys as young as 10, were removed from their families. The women and small children left behind were interned in camps, often fenced-off town districts, where they had to fend for themselves. In Tjideng, Paula and her two young sons were imprisoned in their own home, ultimately sharing their house at Ampasiet with 21 other prisoners, each allotted just 50cm of ‘living space’. It was unbearably cramped, dehumanizing and tense and conditions deteriorated rapidly. Survival meant working together for the sake of the children. What shines through is the courage and strength Paula and her fellow internees showed in the face of such unbelievable cruelty.The book also tells the story of Paula’s husband Jan, enduring transportation by the so called ‘hell ships’ to prison destinations, working on the railway and in the mines until the Atom bomb in August 1945 ended the war and saved his life.Paula was born in Germany in 1911. She had always filled her life with music, and when she returned to The Netherlands after the war she became a successful music teacher. She also toured the country with her puppet theatre, and brought much joy to her students and audiences alike. Always claiming that nobody would be able to kill her spirit, her eternal optimism was a quality that helped her survive the horrors of the Tjideng prison camp.The House at Ampasiet was originally published in Dutch in 2000 by Paula’s daughter Lore Ridings, fulfilling her mother’s dearest wish to have her story published.

This memoir is the story of my childhood and teen years. It begins when I was very young with my parents' divorce, then goes on to living with a spiteful and unloving stepmother, World War II, my father being wounded, the fear of the approaching Russian front, our fleeing from them and bombings. After the end of war, as we tried to make our way back home, I was terrified of the Russian soldiers and war prisoners who roamed our countryside. I feared my father would be shot or imprisoned. I listened to women screaming for help while being raped. I endured the sorrow of losing my beloved father, followed by living with my stepmother's cruelty. My agony ended with the happy reunion with my real mother, my sister, Oma my loving grandmother, and family. After WWII ended, my family and I lived behind the "Iron Curtain" in East Germany under the Russian occupation Stalin's "Iron Fist." His communist regime imposed such strict isolation and extreme hunger on us that in June of 1953 the citizens of East Germany waged an unsuccessful uprising to gain freedom from Russia and communism. Finally, in the fall of 1953, when I was eighteen, we escaped to West Germany. These are the memories of my childhood and teen years.