Alienation from one's country, government, and culture
Not to be confused with Internal migration.
Inner emigration (German: Innere Emigration, French: émigration intérieure) is a concept of an individual or social group who feels a sense of alienation from their country, its government, and its culture. This can be due to the inner emigrants' dissent from a radical political or cultural change, or due to their belief in an ideology that they see as more important than loyalty to their nation or country.
The concept also applies to political dissidents who live under a police state, but who secretly violate the accompanying censorship of literature, music, and the arts. This concept is a regular theme in dystopian novels.
The similar term internal émigré was used in the Soviet Union as an insult towards Soviet dissidents, by suggesting that they had the same opinions as anti-communist refugees in the West.
In a private letter to the vocally rebellious fellow poet Titsian Tabidze, future Soviet dissident Boris Pasternak urged his friend to ignore the attacks against their poetry in the press: "Rely only on yourself. Dig more deeply with your drill without fear or favor, but inside yourself, inside yourself. If you do not find the people, the earth and the heaven there, then give up your search, for then there is nowhere else to search."[1]
The most controversial use of this concept refers to Germans who agreed with the writers of Anti-Nazi Exilliteratur from the German diaspora, but who chose to continue living in Nazi Germany while outwardly appearing to conform.
The term inner emigration was most famously used by novelist Frank Thiess in response to Thomas Mann's BBC broadcast alleging German collective guilt for Nazi war crimes and The Holocaust. Thiess replied that Mann had spent the Nazi years in the relative freedom and safety of Switzerland and the United States and had not experienced the police state tactics used by the Nazi Party and the Gestapo. Mann therefore had no right, according to Thiess, to pass judgment upon the compromises made by those who had. Thiess further argued that many German people who had outwardly appeared to conform had proven far more heroic than political refugees like Mann, who now passed judgment on them after spending the Nazi years in other, freer countries.
^Suny, Ronald Grigor (1994), The Making of the Georgian Nation: 2nd edition, p. 272. Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-20915-3
Inneremigration (German: Innere Emigration, French: émigration intérieure) is a concept of an individual or social group who feels a sense of alienation...
letter to facilitate emigration. When that failed, Webern served as his godfather in a 1939 baptism. Polnauer, whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern...
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction Biopunk Digital dystopia Dissident Inneremigration Kafkaesque List of dystopian comics List of dystopian films List of...
published during the Third Reich and is regarded as a proponent of Inneremigration. His writings have been categorised as Naturmagie and his novel Schwarze...
novelist and poet, known mostly for his autobiographical novels, and his inneremigration during the Nazi era. He studied medicine, working as a field surgeon...
those who continued to apply for emigration despite repeated rejections. Those who repeatedly submitted emigration applications faced charges of "impeding...
(Exilliteratur) and others submitted to censorship ("inneremigration", Innere Emigration) InnerEmigration: Gottfried Benn, Werner Bergengruen, Hans Blüher...
open resistance using such means as leaflets or went into a kind of inneremigration. In his speech during the 1936 socialist trial [de] of 28 people accused...
themselves". Peukert wrote that even those Germans who went into "inneremigration", withdrawing from society as much as possible to avoid dealing with...
August 1961. Thereafter, emigration from the Eastern Bloc was effectively limited to illegal defections, ethnic emigration under bilateral agreements...
Communists, dissident writers and intellectuals living a secret life of inneremigration and who defied government censorship by illegally circulated anti-Nazi...
(20 November 2018). Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From InnerEmigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany. Princeton University Press...
The inner German border (German: innerdeutsche Grenze or deutsch–deutsche Grenze; initially also Zonengrenze) was the frontier between the German Democratic...
power, and unlike authors such as Thomas Mann who first fled into ‘‘inneremigration‘‘ and then went into exile, she took a stand against the Nazi doctrine...
the individual rather than the masses. Like many other proponents of inneremigration in a police state, their outward "Sovietness" concealed deep searches...
chose to stay in Germany, some retreated into an “inner exile”, or “inneremigration" (“Innere Emigration”). Artists had the choice of collaborating or resisting...
John (2015). Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany: The Literature of InnerEmigration. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 978-1-57113-909-2. Koehne, Samuel (2014). "Were...
in 1937. The last ten years of his life were spent in a state of 'inneremigration'. Max Bill, in his obituary of Schlemmer, wrote that it was 'as if...
fleeing occupied Europe, taking cover in the "Resistance", or within Inneremigration. Between 1933 and 1939, prolific centers of anti-Nazi German writers...
Volker R. (2020-08-04). Journalists Between Hitler and Adenauer: From InnerEmigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany. Princeton University Press...
who had been close to the KPD before 1933 and then withdrawn into “inneremigration,” called the West German postwar left a “homeless left.” The working...
Nazifaschismus, Innere Emigration, Exil (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), p. 152. Also in English as Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, InnerEmigration, and Exile (New...
Hindemith Foundation Catalogue of Works Schott Music Publisher page An InnerEmigration, notes on Hindemith and Der Schwanendreher by Ron Drummond Paul Hindemith...
2008. ISBN 978-99956-650-3-6 Morgan, Peter (2011) "Ismail Kadare's InnerEmigration", in Sara Jones & Meesha Nehru (Eds.), Writing under Socialism, (pp...
Of particular importance are works of art by artists who went into InnerEmigration at the time of the Third Reich and retired to the Lake Constance region...
"farewell performance in Germany". Until 1936 he lived in seclusion in the inneremigration in Berlin. There he also composed his song cycle Sieben Lieder on poetry...
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