Building from the endeavors of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, this project explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of global transit. The concrete spaces of transit such as camps, visa offices, ships, or airports and the temporality of transit – especially the undetermined length of the phase between flight and arrival – are of particular interest. In Global Transit consequently promises to open new geographic, chronological, and conceptual perspectives on refugees’ experiences of flight and belonging as well as on the scope of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or racism in varying contexts of “departure” and “arrival.” In doing so, the project addresses common research gaps and questions, for example, by situating specific transit experiences in the context of a general migration history – as well as the history of flight and forced migration which is at the heart of the GHI’s research programs since its foundation in 1987.

To this day, refugees have traveled long and circuitous routes, which can take weeks, months, or, if longer stopovers are involved, sometimes years, with the final destination often unforeseeable. The experience of Jews who fled to countries in the Global South during World War II makes a particularly interesting and contrastable case due to the length of their transit situation, their phase of in-betweenness often extended far beyond the caesura of 1945. The project defines refugees as actors who intermingled with the surroundings they faced during their flight in all phases of their transit, developing relationships which in many cases influenced the trajectory of their lives. These relationships include those with other refugees as well as with “local” people, the aspect of personal belongings, memory, and material culture, but also (trans)regional networks, which they encountered in widely varying colonial, postcolonial, or other political constellations; they also experienced new sorts of interactions between the sexes and generations.