Refugee Academics from Chile: WUS‐SPSL Collaboration

This chapter describes the author's contacts with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) in the 1970s when, as the Secretary of the World University of Students (WUS), he worked closely with Esther Simpson and the SPSL in finding support in the universities for the refugees from Pinochet's Chile. Scholarship and bursary programmes were established for Chilean academics and students, which had many direct and indirect benefits for Chilean and later other refugees coming to the United Kingdom. The relationship that had begun between WUS and SPSL through the links with Esther Simpson and Lord Ashby, then Chairman of SPSL and also Vice-President of WUS, was strengthened through the collaborative work undertaken by the two organizations. Mutual trust and community of purpose led in due course to a compact between the SPSL and WUS, which assured the continuation of the SPSL as an independent body.

Czech Scholars in Exile, 1948–1989

The mobility of scholars is one of the significant social phenomena affecting scientific development. The mass exodus of intellectual elites from countries dominated by totalitarian regimes, however, represents a specific type of unwanted mobility or ‘forced migration’, which generally leads to devastating cultural and social damage over several generations. The historical experience of Czechoslovakia's waves of exile between 1918 and 1989 provides a suitable case for research into scientific exile in its varied forms. This chapter focuses on the escape of scholars from Czechoslovakia in the years between 1948 and 1989, when the country was part of the Soviet power bloc.

Esther Simpson: A Correspondence

Among the hundreds of Austrian refugees who arrived in Britain in 1938 after Hitler annexed Austria was the author's father, Engelbert Broda, who shortly afterwards was joined by his wife Hildegard. Engelbert Broda later made contact with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), and it was through Esther Simpson, the long-time Secretary of the SPSL, that Charles Goodeve took him on to work on visual purple (rhodopsin), a vital component of the human retina. This chapter presents a selection of letters between Esther Simpson and Engelbert Broda. The extracts given here relate to the foundation of the Academic Assistance Council, Esther Simpson's beliefs, Engelbert Broda's memories much later of what her help had meant to him personally, and the state of the world. Other regular topics are their work, her musical activities, and the comings and goings of mutual friends including L. Kowarski, J. Guéron, and O. R. Frisch, all of whom they knew from Cambridge days. The emphasis in this selection is in representing Esther Simpson's own attitudes and achievements in her own words.

Plutarch’s Thesis: The Contribution of Refugee Historians to Historical Writing, 1945–2010

Can exile be seen as a blessing in disguise? The Greek moral essayist Plutarch, and others after him, argued that it can. This thesis that exile is a blessing in disguise is referred to as Plutarch's thesis, and this chapter attempts to test it. It analyzes 764 refugee historians — drawn from 63 countries on all continents — who made their contribution to historical writing after 1945. The overarching question is whether the loss for the country of origin featured as a corresponding benefit for the country of destination. For the countries of origin the three stages of exile — departure, sojourn abroad, and return — had repercussions. The brain drain was a devastating blow to history-writing, as ‘critical historical writing’ was replaced, for the most part, ‘by servile propaganda on behalf of repressive regimes’. During their sojourn abroad, many refugee historians edited ‘influential editions of sources’, while on their return, their influence was initially limited. Through their continued scholarly networks and contact with scholars and ideas from abroad, however, they enriched both their own scholarship and often the discipline itself. And although it was often delayed, in due course the works of those refugees who remained abroad became known or were rediscovered in their countries of origin.

‘Bending the rules’: South African Refugees in the UK, 1960–1980

In this chapter, the author reflects on her long personal association with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL)/Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and many of its South African grantees. The academic refugees who came to the SPSL's notice in the 1960s, specially the South Africans, bent the ‘rules’ and signalled the new ways in which the SPSL was going to have to work in a very changed social and educational environment in Britain, and equally great changes in the nature of the academic refugees. Before the rise of Hitler, German scholars had advanced the frontiers of knowledge in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. And in many of these fields the Jews of Central Europe had played a crucial role. Increasingly from the 1960s, however, many of the refugee academics to the UK were from the so-called ‘third world’, especially Latin America and countries just emerging from colonialism in Africa. Academic refugees from South Africa formed something of a bridge between the old and the new. While most of the South African grantees were white and from institutions modelled on British universities, they were on the whole younger and less highly qualified than the earlier generation of grantees. The very small number of Africans assisted at this time were in fact far more eminent; significantly, however, they were the very first Africans to be assisted by the Society.

‘Protests Butter No Parsnips’: Lord Beveridge and the Rescue of Refugee Academics from Europe, 1933–1938

This chapter examines in detail the central role of Lord Beveridge in establishing the Academic Assistance Council, in a context of economic depression, social and political turmoil, and pervasive anti-Jewish hostility in Britain. Lord Beveridge's work with British academic refugee organizations was on a par with his leading role in the major expansion of the London School of Economics, the building of London University's Senate House in the 1920s, and perhaps even with his famous 1942 report on Social Insurance and Allied Services.

Karl Mannheim and Viola Klein: Refugee Sociologists in Search of Social Democratic Practice

This chapter recounts the story of a relationship forged out of a shared intellectual past, a passion for sociology as a discipline, and the circumstances of being academic refugees. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), whose sociological writings count amongst the classics in the discipline, arrived in Britain in 1933 as one of the first beneficiaries of the Academic Assistance Council/Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL). Viola Klein (1908–1973), a pioneer in the field of the sociology of women, also arrived in Britain as a refugee from the onslaught of National Socialism, though without the assistance of SPSL. For a brief period during the war, Mannheim became Klein's Ph.D. tutor at the London School of Economics. Theirs is a story of academic success and enduring intellectual legacy, but also of the hardships of displacement, marginality, tireless networking, and backbreaking daily slog to find employment, academic recognition, and a platform from which to contribute to the country they proudly came to see as their own.

Introduction1

The contributions to this collection were originally given at a conference held at the British Academy on 3–4 December 2008, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academic Assistance Council in 1933, later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (1936–98), and now the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. This introductory chapter discusses the story of the SPSL and the flood of European refugee scholars and scientists from Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and their subsequent contribution to specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Within Two Tyrannies: The Soviet Academic Refugees of the Second World War

This chapter places the exodus of Russian scholars in the context of the country's turbulent twentieth-century experience of ‘three revolutions, two world wars, civil strife, and several changes of political regime’. It presents an account of the plight of Russian academics in German occupied territories who were caught ‘in the dead space between two tyrannies’. For some the price of survival in the 1940s involved temporary collaboration with the Nazi invaders, which is illustrated in the morally ambiguous wartime experiences of Nikolas Poppe, Professor of Oriental Studies in Leningrad University, a leading expert of the languages and literatures of northern inner Asia; and of Ivan Malinin, professor and head of the department of pathology in the Krasnodar Medical Institute. Both found a way of resisting the communist state through temporary ‘collaboration’, and thus, reaffirmed ‘the right of the individual to make choices’. The chapter concludes by noting the change in Soviet policy towards the emigration of scientists after perestroika and its double-edged effect: ‘On the one hand, emigration impoverishes home institutions, but, on the other, the free migration of scientists has become one of the most effective mechanisms for integrating the country into the global scientific community’.

Eva and Esther

This chapter presents the story of how two women, the author's mother, Eva Ehrenberg, and the late Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, Esther Simpson, saved his life and gave him an academic career. He believes that his story might not be worth telling but for the fact that few who escaped from the clutches of Hitler can have been as fortunate as he had been.