Fred Wander: Between Exile Studies and Holocaust Studies

abstract: Focusing on the biography and literary work of the Austrian-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Fred Wander, this article interrogates a conceptual divide within the literary scholarship on exile, refuge, and persecution during the Nazi period that rigidly separates the experience of exile from the Third Reich from that of persecution within the Holocaust. Wander's work, particularly his 1991 autobiographical novel Hôtel Baalbek , challenges the simplistic binary division implied by the longstanding divergence between Holocaust studies and exile studies, thereby establishing potentially productive points of contact between the two fields.