Paper short abstract:

Associated with sea side tourism, the village of Sanary-sur-Mer in Southern France has been one of the most popular places for German artists fleeing from the Hitler Regime in the 1930s. Its history helps us to track more specifically the production of modernism in literary articulations of exile.

Paper long abstract:

The commonsense opposition between the country of origin and the country of reception has become increasingly problematic in recent exile studies. Many critics have fastened upon ideas of displacement or deterritorialization to abandon modernist tropes of exile and modern practices of exile central to Western culture's narratives of political formation and cultural identity (Caren Kaplan). What is at stake is a nuanced interpretation of exile as a symbolic formation, moving beyond current mystifications of the lived experience, expatriation and irreparable loss. Exile can also be represented in a historically and culturally analyses of the social and literary practices produced in a situation of temporary mobility. To question exile, then, is to inquire into the ideological function of exile being one of the most important ‚places' of cultural production since the beginning of the 19th century. Associated with sea side tourism, the small village of Sanary-sur-Mer in Southern France has been one of the most popular places for German artists fleeing from the Hitler Regime in 1933 and later (Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht and many others have been and have lived in Sanary-sur-Mer). Its history in the 1930's offers a unique reference for mapping exile communities, it helps us to track more specifically the production of modernism in literary articulations of exile, and it proposes historical paths of enquiry into emigration comparing it to other, similar and overlapping forms of mobility.

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