‘Who Is British Music?’ Placing Migrants in National Music History

In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary, became prime minister, following the upheaval caused by the country's plebiscite to leave the European Union. One of the main strands of argument of the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign centred on the ‘deep public anxiety . . . about uncontrolled immigration’ and promised to reduce numbers of immigrants to the country. This desire to control the nation's borders continued to dominate the official soundscape of Britain's government. At the 2016 annual Tory conference, May endeavoured to draw clear lines on issues of belonging, territory, citizenship, and the fuzzy notion of British values, discursively excluding not only migrants, but also anyone with an international(ist) outlook from the national debate: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world’, she posited, ‘you are a citizen of nowhere.

"The splinter in your eye": uncomfortable legacies and German exile studies

This chapter examines the theorization of displacement in the field of Exilforschung (exile studies) in Germany since 1945. I adopt a historio-graphic approach, which endeavors to situate Exilforschung within Germany’s wider political history. The promotion of Exilforschung not only highlights the particular ways in which the two postwar Germanys dealt with the Nazi past, it was also a political act played out against the background of the Cold War in which both East and West Germany aimed to justify and bolster their existence. I voice criticism of the tendency within Exilforschung to focus almost exclusive attention upon the biographies of elite intellectuals that left Nazi Germany, and argue that such studies are narrated as political metaphors stressing the victimhood of the displaced, writing their histories as tales of passivity, and therefore disempowering their voices. This interpretation fails to take account of the fact that displacement is a contextual phenomenon that can be viewed as an opportunity, since many displaced creative figures made willful non-victim decisions to rebuild their lives outside Germany