Historical Background: During the 1930s and 40s thousands of intellectuals, writers and journalists
opposed to or targeted by the Nazi regime, had to flee their native lands coming under the rule of the
National Socialists and to seek refuge in foreign countries. With the help of International PEN, a number of national PEN Centers and numerous individuals worldwide, the German PEN Center in Exile, London, founded in 1934, was able to assist hundreds of them to escape and settle elsewhere.
In appreciation of the practical assistance received by these exiles in countries around the globe, State Minister for Culture Michael Naumann in 1999 devised a project which was to provide at least six refugee writers and journalists with a safe haven in Germany for a number of years, time to adjust to a foreign environment, culture and language. German PEN was entrusted with the implementation of this government-funded Writers in Exile Program, and the first six scholarships were granted in the summer of 1999.
The Program: Scholarship recipients are being housed in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, and Munich in apartments rented and furnished by PEN and are provided with living expenses as well as health and other insurance from the funds received. At present, the program includes a journalist and her daughter from Chechnya, a Columbian writer, a Cuban writer with his wife and son, a writer/translator from Iran with his son, a Tunisian magazine editor and her daughter, and a journalist from Zimbabwe. Scholarships run for a year at a time and may be extended. The central German PEN office in Darmstadt and local PEN volunteers provide assistance in questions of registering with the police, getting and extending residency permits, opening bank accounts etc., while in asylum matters, for instance, outside legal advice is arranged by PEN and, when necessary, paid out of program funds or donations.
A first brochure introducing the initial six participants of the program to a wider public as individuals and writers was published by PEN in 2000 and included, beside a photograph, a short portrait written by a German colleague and - in German translation - some ten pages from his or her writing. A second brochure with new texts by last year's participants has been available since early 2006. Participants are included in all major PEN events, in panel discussions and readings, and are assisted in making contact with German publishers by PEN members.
Language: While our foreign colleagues are strongly urged to learn German as quickly as possible to be able to integrate, experience shows that in general far more than a year is needed for them to acquire even the basic language tools - depending on the culture they come from, previous exposure to German or any other West European language, ability to learn a foreign tongue and not least age. Further impediments at language learning and integration are the special circumstances under which our colleagues had to flee their country, the severity of the persecution (including torture) they were exposed to and most of all the degree of traumatization usually coming to light long after they have reached safety. While German PEN has been able to negotiate free language instruction (at several Goethe Institutes) and free trauma treatment (at the Berlin Center for Victims of Torture), if at all, these options are taken up quite late.
Security: In some cases, writers, though in exile, are not necessarily safe from threats issued by their country's secret services, mafia elements or groups of their countrymen. In several cases, apartments had to be equipped with safety measures, personal police protection had to be arranged and two colleagues and their wives had to be relocated in another town, when, even though their names had been changed, their identity was discovered.
Networking: German PEN has long been cooperating with other organizations in Germany providing general assistance or yearly respectively shorter-term scholarships for harassed foreign colleagues (i.e. Hamburg Foundation for Politically Persecuted Persons; Heinrich Boell House; Reporters sans Frontieres, et al.). In addition, a number of artists’ retreats have been offering occasionally vacant apartments as refuge in urgent cases, with living expenses secured by various means via PEN. Since the inception of our program moreover, a number of German cities have joined the network financing annual scholarships for exiled writers out of their own koffers or co-funding them with local foundations, with German PEN acting as adviser and suggesting names of endangered refugee writers and journalists identified by network participants or the International Writers in Prison family. Close relations are also being maintained with the Austrian cities of Vienna (with its reactivated Writers in Exile project) and the International House of Authors in Graz and of course with the International PEN Writers in Exile Network, for which PEN served as clearing house from 2000 until 2002, when PEN Canada took over this function.
The Problem of what happens afterwards: The writers in our program are usually given limited residency permits for the duration of their scholarship. If no consecutive grant is available, those who cannot return to their own country have little option but to ask for official asylum. Given the legal constraints within the countries of the Schengen Agreement including Germany, refugee status, medium-term or permanent asylum are only granted after stringent and time-consuming procedures the outcome of which may be doubtful. If asylum is denied by the local authorities (neither the Foreign nor the Internal Ministry can exert much influence in those matters), the alternative is deportation. The scare is real. So while the scholarship period within our PEN program may be extended to a maximum of three years, the only way open, if returning home is impossible and asylum denied, lies in an ever new search for the next available placement. Not infrequently, to be able to help at all, we are passing our friends on from scholarship to scholarship, from city to city, from country to country adding to their trauma and displacement. And this is our greatest problem.
Dr. Karin Clark
Sponsored by the Federal Government Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs
Charter