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About In Global Transit

Since 2015, one research focus of the German Historical Institute (GHI) Washington has been the history of flight and forced migration. Our next workshop in this series, Archives in/of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present will take place on June 28 & 29, 2024 at the University of Southern California (USC in Los Angeles). See call for papers for details.

GHI has jointly organized two conferences on Jewish refugees in global transit between the 1930s and 1960s with external partners: one in 2018 in Kolkata, India, and another in 2019 at the GHI Pacific Regional Office in Berkeley. In 2020, the online workshop “Jewish Refugees in Global Transit: Spaces – Temporalities – Interactions” inspired a more general, conceptual, and theoretically informed exchange about “transit.” The participants discussed its analytical potential and connections to other innovative fields of historical research like refugee history, imperial history, and postcolonial history. The fourth event in the series – the online workshop “Archives of Global Transit: Reconsidering Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe” in October 2021 – advanced the discussion with a focus on methodological questions and the sources available to approach transit and in-betweenness.

Refugees in Global Transit

International Conference

Refugees in Global Transit: Encounters, Knowledge, and Coping Strategies in a Disrupted World, 1930s–50s

February 13 – 14, 2025 | Conference in Mumbai, India | Organized by Simone Lässig (German Historical Institute Washington), Sebastian Schwecke (Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi), and Swen Steinberg (Queen’s University, Kingston). in collaboration with Christoph K. Neumann (OI Istanbul), Maria Framke (Erfurt University), and Jens Hanssen (OI Beirut). It is also part of the foundation-wide event series “Ends of War – International Perspectives on World War II” of the Max Weber Foundation.

Between the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and decolonization after World War II, a range of non-Western, in many cases colonial, regions became hubs for people in transit. A growing body of new research on refugees “In Global Transit,” many of them Jews in flight from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, has highlighted this forced migration to and in the Global South. Scholars are documenting refugee encounters with local populations and colonial authorities, their search for more permanent new homes, as well as their attempts to maintain contact with, and facilitate the escape of, those left behind.


This conference builds on the emerging scholarship on cultural, social, and political encounters – connections and disconnects – among diverse groups of European and non-European refugees and with highly stratified host populations, including existing Jewish communities, colonial officials and settlers, and other migrants. While much of this research has relied on sources produced by state or colonial officials or the refugees themselves, this conference aims to explore new approaches and sources that require knowledge of local and national languages, archives, and histories.
“Transit” refers to individual and collective experiences of living in-between – that is, in spaces people did not envision remaining in permanently. However, it also refers to regions and countries like Turkey, Palestine, and India, where refugees from Nazi Europe found a safe haven while these regions were themselves undergoing turbulent transitions.


Examining this volatile historical moment raises further questions applicable to other refugee and migrant experiences in crisis: What kinds of knowledge transfer can we observe, and what kinds of boundaries and prejudices obstructed such transfers? What were the differential impacts of class, gender, and age on notions of ethnic, national, “racial,” and religious differences? And how can we uncover the long-term memories of this global diaspora of WWII refugees after most of them moved beyond their transit spaces in the decades following independence, state building, and – in some cases – new forms of forced migration?

The conference will be held in English.