Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project

Book excerpt: This book explores an aspect of the complex cultural history of 20th-century exile: the influences of transnational experiences on the views of emigrants and exiles concerning their own academic, scientific and intellectual cultures. These essays focus on the reflections of people who left their countries during the period of 1933–1945. Many of them reconsidered their own past in the old country and compared it with their actual experiences in the adopted homeland. The individual cases presented here share a similar theoretical framework. The book is divided into two sections: the first one focuses on the German and Spanish lost project, and the second one deals with the East European projects – focused on Polish and Rumanian examples above all. From the perspective of transnational history, Merel Leeman analyzes the cases of two special exiles: George Mosse and Peter Gay. Spaniards’ American projects is the main topic of Carolina Rodríguez-López’s analysis of Spanish scholars in the US. Natacha Bolufer focuses on associations and newspapers like Liberación which paid special attention to Spanish leftists suffering from Franco’s political measures. José M. Faraldo looks at the cases of refugees from Eastern European countries – mainly from Romania and Poland – who escaped to Spain after the fall of the axis in 1945. Mihaela Albu describes the diversity and plurality of Romanian exiles in the Western world, in diverse countries of Europe and also in the US. This book aims to encourage the dialogue and comparison among diverse exiles.