Holocaust refugees’ experiences in, out of and nowhere in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eppelsheimer’s article examines Holocaust refugees’ experiences in colonial Kenya. It draws attention to the autobiographical novels of German Jewish author Stefanie Zweig, as well as testimonies and memoirs of former Holocaust refugees who had fled to Kenya, and asks if and how refugees’ own experiences of racial persecution informed their responses to colonial racism. This article illustrates how Zweig responded in aesthetic terms to her experience in colonial spaces. It does so by examining autobiographical aspects of Zweig’s writings, highlighting the author’s upbringing in multiple cultures, literary traditions and languages, and discussing Zweig’s novels in the contexts of white British settler writing about Kenya, as well as the German ‘Africa-novel’­—both of which have shaped the images and perspectives of Kenya among millions of readers. It examines such European colonialist perspectives and discourses in literary texts as well as testimonies. In so doing, it questions whether a text like Nowhere in Africa, which is about the experiences of a German Jewish refugee family in Kenya, contributes to the silencing of African voices and the obscuring of African history by colonial historiography and literature.