Germany Revisits the St. Louis Voyage: Die Ungewollten/The Unwanted—Die Irrfahrt der St. Louis

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This article analyzes the German TV film Die Ungewollten—Die Irrfahrt der St. Louis [The Unwanted—The Voyage of the St. Louis], which depicts the journey of the MS St. Louis, a passenger liner from Nazi Germany which, after Cuba denied its over 900 Jewish migrants entry, went on a dramatic voyage that foregrounded the world’s complicity in the Jewish refugee crisis triggered by Nazi Germany. Placing the film in the intersecting contexts of German Holocaust memorial culture and the spectacularization of history by German “event TV,” the article argues that the film simultaneously invokes and disavows parallels between the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s and the migrant crisis that, since 2015, has been unfolding on the Mediterranean. This ambivalence can be traced to the perceived incommensurability between Germany’s Holocaust remembrance and Germany’s attempts to assimilate current migrants, many of whom are Muslims. The emerging frisson points to certain lacunae and biases in Germany’s Holocaust remembrance, especially the unease of reassessing the Holocaust in relation to other genocides.