Abstract
In their attempt to flee from fascism, Jenny Kehr and Walter Benjamin clandestinely crossed the border between Spain and France. A study of their route paths leads to three questions: (1) What do we learn about border crossing by studying specific experiences of refugees during World War II? (2) How do route paths of exiles fit with the memory of World War II in different national contexts? (3) How did individuals experience the locations that they crossed? Mapping the exile routes makes it possible to tackle these questions. These two instances of border crossing that turned deadly reveal common patterns that emerge when considering the borders that shape the lives of migrants far beyond the moment when they cross them by sea or by land.
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Notes
- 1.
There are, of course, some notable exceptions. See Chap. 2 in my book Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory.
- 2.
The Spanish government regularly provided refugees with transit visa—precisely because they were just traveling through the country with no intention to stay. See von Patrick von zur Mühlen 1992, p. 110.
- 3.
Rosa Sala Rose, La penúltima frontera: fugitivos del nazismo en España (Barcelona: Papel de liar, 2011): 220.
- 4.
Ceuta and Melilla are two autonomous cities in North Africa. Their history as Spanish possessions dates back to the seventeenth and fifteenth centuries respectively. Melilla was conquered in 1497. Ceuta became part of the Spanish empire in 1688 with the treaty of Lisbon. Today, both enclaves, with their respective border fences, have become the site of large encampments where migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, endure the sometimes year-long wait before they are able to venture crossing at the only border of the EU that is located in Africa.
- 5.
The differences between voluntary and forced migration are addressed in this book’s introduction.
- 6.
Hugh Schofield, “Hitler’s Atlantic Wall: Should France Preserve it?” BBC News Magazine. September 13, 2011.
- 7.
The acronym SIVE stands for “Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior” (Integrated System of External Vigilance).
- 8.
Marcello di Cintio, “The Walls that Hurt Us,” The New York Times, January 23, 2014.
- 9.
Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire an Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2004): 128.
- 10.
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013): 101.
- 11.
These visits are organized by the Museu Memorial de l’Exili (Exile Museum and Memorial) in La Jonquera. For more information, see http://www.museuexili.cat/.
- 12.
Nevzat Soguk “Border’s Capture: Insurrectional Politics, Border-Crossing Humans, and the New Political.” Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge” eds. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 283–308): 283.
- 13.
von zur Mühlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal, 87.
- 14.
See Wayne Cornelius “Death at the Border: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of US immigration Control Policy.” Population and Development Review, 27(4): 661–685.
- 15.
Soguk, “Border’s Capture,” 285, my emphasis.
- 16.
Josep Calvet, Las montañas de la libertad: el paso de evadidos por los Pirineos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, 1939–1944 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2010).
- 17.
Simone Gigliotti, Marc J. Masurovsky, and Erik B. Steiner “From Camp to the Road. Representing Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945,” Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Eric B. Steiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
- 18.
Margaret Pearce, “Place Codes: Narrative and Dialogical Strategies for Cartography,” 1.
- 19.
Margaret Pearce, “Framing the Days: Place and Narrative in Cartography,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 35 (1): 17–32, 17.
- 20.
Pearce, “Place Codes,” 18.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Calvet, Las montañas de la libertad, 27.
- 23.
Les Back, “Beaches and Graveyards: Europe’s Haunted Borders,” Postcolonial Studies 12.3 (2009): 329–340, 336.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Lisa Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).
- 26.
Mariana Valverde, “Remembering Benjamin from South of the Pyrenees: The Two-Gauge Problem,” Public Culture 21.3 (2009): 440–450, 446.
- 27.
Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 109.
- 28.
Manuel Cussó-Ferrer, “Walter Benjamin’s Last Frontier. Sequences of an Approach,” in For Walter Benjamin, eds. Siegfried Unseld et al., translated by Timothy Neville (Bonn: AsKI, 1993): 154–161, 156.
- 29.
Valverde, Remembering Benjamin from South of the Pyrenees, 446.
- 30.
Fittko, Escape through the Pyrenees, 107.
- 31.
See “Camins de Portbou, Camí Walter Benjamin” https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=103350888404258160771.0004418006cc289f5e339&dg=feature.
Portbou’s city also includes a map of the route on its web page, http://webspobles.ddgi.cat/sites/portbou/Pages_LeftMenu/ruta_walter.aspx.
An animation, prepared with the help of Google Earth, is available on the site of the organization “Senderisme en tren: excursions, trens, i travesses”. The route, however, begins in Portbou and ends in Banyuls. http://www.gpsies.com/mapOnly.do;jsessionid=5D43B664AC181E62D040E726745D35D7?fileId=cdjvhzikdxhwuecu&mode=kmlTour.
- 32.
Sala Rose, La penúltima frontera, 214.
- 33.
Ibid, 220.
- 34.
See Enriqueta Borrás (Rosa Mateu Segalés). Memoria Prisión de Mujeres de Les Corts. http://www.presodelescorts.org/es.
- 35.
James Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Maps: Finding our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 2.
- 36.
Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” Maps: Finding our Place in the World, eds. James Akerman and Robert W. Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 286.
- 37.
Akerman and Karrow, Maps, 4.
- 38.
This can be seen, for example, on GPS file taken from http://walterbenjaminportbou.cat/en/content/rutes/.
- 39.
The GIS maps in Figs. 3–7 were created with the assistance of Ophelia Li. Ms. Li used ArcMap, Adobe Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) and ESRI world terrain base map; Elevation, administration areas data for Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal in http://www.diva-gis.org/Data.
Additional maps can be seen at http://maps.tabealinhard.com/.
- 40.
Lawrence Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps.” Centerpoint 5 (1980): 222–231, 224.
- 41.
Gigliotti et al., “From Camp to the Road.”
Works Cited
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Cornelius, Wayne. 2001. Death at the Border: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Control Policy. Population and Development Review 27 (4): 661–685.
Cussó-Ferrer, Manuel. 1993. Walter Benjamin’s Last Frontier. Sequences of an Approach. In For Walter Benjamin, ed. Siegfried Unseld et al. and trans. Timothy Neville, 154–161. Bonn: AsKI.
di Cintio, Marcello. 2014. The Walls That Hurt Us. The New York Times, January 23.
Fittko, Lisa. 1991. Escape Through the Pyrenees. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Gigliotti, Simone, et al. 2014. From Camp to the Road. Representing Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945. In Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Knowles et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Langer, Lawrence. 1980. The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps. Centerpoint 5: 222–231.
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Schofield, Hugh. 2011. Hitler’s Atlantic Wall: Should France Preserve It. BBC News Magazine, September 13.
Soguk, Nevzat. 2007. Border’s Capture: Insurrectional Politics, Border-Crossing Humans, Ad the New Political. In Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, ed. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, 283–308. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Valverde, Mariana. 2009. Remembering Benjamin from South of the Pyrenees: The Two-Gauge Problem. Public Culture 21 (3): 440–450.
von zur Mühlen, Patrick. 1992. Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal: die deutsche Emigration und der Exodus aus Europa 1933–1945. Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz.
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Linhard, T. (2019). Moving Barbed Wire: Geographies of Border Crossing During World War II. In: Linhard, T., Parsons, T.H. (eds) Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77956-0_5
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