Ruerup organised her lecture around successive episodes in the history of statelessness and the changing legal and political regimes that produced it. The first followed the First World War, when new states and redrawn borders left many people without secure citizenship. The second centred on the National Socialist regime, whose unprecedented legislative and administrative measures created a vast category of denaturalised Jews. The third examined the post-war period, when international institutions and emerging human rights frameworks attempted—often imperfectly—to manage refugee movements and restore legal belonging. Drawing these episodes together, Ruerup emphasised continuity rather than rupture: denaturalisation was not a single event but an ongoing process whose consequences extended through the war and into post-war struggles over restitution, citizenship and legal recognition.To illuminate these broader developments, Ruerup moved between different kinds of historical evidence. Literary works and memoirs—from Stefan Zweig's reflections on exile to Erich Maria Remarque's Flotsam—captured the psychological consequences of losing citizenship and home. Newspapers and community periodicals, she argued, served as connective tissue for dispersed refugee communities, while collections such as those of the Wiener Library remain indispensable for reconstructing networks, debates and campaigns. At the microhistorical level, seemingly ordinary sources—including cookbooks, market registers and even the shopfronts of Portobello Road—demonstrate how displaced people rebuilt livelihoods and sustained cultural practices. Such materials reveal that diasporic belonging was forged not only through memory and political identity but also through the routines of everyday economic and social life.
The lecture also highlighted the striking geographical diversity of exile. Refugees encountered very different legal and social environments depending on where they arrived, while destinations such as Shanghai illustrated the truly global reach of the German-Jewish diaspora. Ruerup drew attention to the travel documents, transit arrangements and legal mechanisms that enabled some refugees to move or send remittances across borders, demonstrating how migration was embedded within wider diplomatic and commercial networks. She also argued that the German-Jewish experience should be understood alongside other histories of statelessness—including Palestinian displacement and the vulnerability experienced by colonial subjects under changing imperial regimes—allowing historians to identify both the distinctive features of each case and the common legal mechanisms through which exclusion was produced.
A recurring theme was the question of where the "centre" of diasporic identity should be located. Challenging narratives that place Zion at the primary centre of German-Jewish exile, Ruerup argued that many refugees continued to orient themselves culturally and linguistically towards Germany despite having been stripped of citizenship. Diasporic communities should therefore be understood not simply as severed from their homeland but as maintaining complex transnational attachments to places they had formally lost. At the same time, she stressed that experiences of exile varied considerably according to class, profession and gender. Highly educated professionals often struggled to rebuild careers in exile, while women sometimes encountered distinct pathways to citizenship through marriage or other gendered routes to naturalisation.
Methodologically, Ruerup advocated combining legal history with social and cultural history. Laws, administrative files and citizenship records reveal the mechanics of exclusion, but memoirs, literary texts, newspapers and ephemeral cultural artefacts show how individuals experienced, negotiated and contested their loss of belonging. Writing an "almost global" history therefore requires following both legal categories and human experiences across multiple receiving societies—from Britain and Palestine to East Asia—while tracing broader international efforts to address statelessness through new concepts such as world citizenship and international travel documents.
The discussion returned repeatedly to the question of how historians should identify and measure diasporic persistence. Is belonging expressed through nostalgia, language, institutions or political mobilisation? Ruerup suggested that no single source can answer this question. Instead, historians should triangulate different forms of evidence, recognising that cookbooks, newspapers, memorial institutions and other everyday artefacts may reveal enduring attachments that remain invisible in official records. Questions about the contrasting responses of British and American policymakers prompted further discussion of the moral and geopolitical dilemmas surrounding refugee policy. While some states created limited routes to refuge, many refugees remained excluded, and governmental responses often reflected strategic calculation as much as humanitarian concern.
Ruerup concluded by reiterating the broader historiographical significance of her approach. Treating statelessness as both a legal structure and a lived experience enables historians to recover the often messy processes through which refugees sought security, negotiated identity and built transnational communities. Her project ultimately reframes the German-Jewish diaspora as both a distinctive phenomenon, shaped by German law, culture and the Nazi assault on citizenship, and as part of a much wider twentieth-century history of displacement. For scholars of migration, memory and legal history, the lecture offered a compelling research agenda: follow the archival traces, attend to everyday forms of evidence, and place national histories within broader global circulations.
By Yangyang Zhao (Events Assistant)
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