Transnational District
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Aribert Reimann Transnational District European political Exile in Mexico City 1939-1959 KUPS – Kölner UniversitätsPublikationsServer 2020 2 research funded by: ERC grant no. 312717 “Left-wing Exile in Mexico, 1934-60” University of Cologne Department for Iberian and Latin American History © Aribert Reimann 2020 All rights reserved. 3 Transnational District European political Exile in Mexico City, 1939-1959 Aribert Reimann Introduction The urban topography and political practice of exile 7 Part I: The unlikely Sanctuary 21 a. Transnational Politics in the Centro Histórico in 1939 23 b. Early Institutions and Encounters 42 Part II: City of Exile 61 a. Memories of Arrival 63 b. The residential Topography of Exile 88 c. Islands of Exile 100 d. Exploring the Cityscape 119 e. The ex-patriate Colonies 132 f. New Centres of Political Sociability in Exile 152 g. Informal Sociability: Cafés and Rooftops 177 4 Part III: Political Practice in Exile 193 a. Consolidation of Exile (1939 – 1941) 195 b. Mobilisation (Jun 1941 – May 1942) 220 c. War (May 1942 – February 1943) 254 d. Polarisation (March 1943 – Aug 1943) 276 e. Winning the War (September 1943 – May 1945) 320 f. Victory (1944 – 45) 361 Part IV: Post-war 385 a. A government in exile 387 b. Dissolution of the German-speaking community of exile 409 c. Into the Cold War 437 d. Politics into Culture 499 Conclusion Politics of exile in a transnational metropolis 517 Bibliography 525 Index of locations 565 Index of names 577 5 Und wenn mein Leben vorerst nichts sein sollte als ein Herumgeschleudertwerden, so wollte ich wenigstens in die schönsten Städte geschleudert werden, in unbekannte Gegenden.* * Anna Seghers: Transit (3rd pb impr. Berlin, 1997), p. 33: „And if my life, so far, should consist of nothing but being hurled around, then at least I wanted to be hurled into the most beautiful cities, into unknown parts of the world.“ 6 7 Introduction The urban topography and political practice of exile On the 16th of April 1942, members of the German-speaking community of exile in Mexico gathered in a small theatre, the Sala Mendelssohn, in a building at calle Venustiano Carranza no. 21 in the south of the historical city centre of Mexico City. The building was commonly known as the Casa Schiefer, named after a shop for musical instruments owned by the Schiefer brothers which used the small theatre, named after the German-Jewish 19th-century composer Felix Mendels- sohn-Bartholdy, for instrumental demonstrations and recitals. The meeting of the 16th of April had been organised by the Heinrich-Heine-Club, the cultural association of the German-speaking political emigration during the 1940s, dominated by the movement Alemania Libre, founded the previous year under the guidance of the German communists in exile in Mexico. It was the first time that the Heinrich-Heine-Club met at this address.1 The president of Alemania Libre, the writer Ludwig Renn, introduced the speaker of the evening, the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, former director of the prestigious Bauhaus design school in Dessau, who had settled in Mexico permanently in 1939. The topic of his lecture, accompanied by a slide show, was “Mexico City – from the point of view of urbanism”. It is likely that his lecture covered much of the same ground as an article he published the following year as “fragments of an urbanistic study” about Mexico City.2 Meyer had directed the Mexican Instituto de Planeación e Urbanismo in 1940/41 before moving on to the ministry of labour as a project leader for the planning of working-class homes.3 As a left-wing socialist, Meyer approached the Mexican capital city from a strictly Marxist point of view as he had laid it out four years earlier: “All landscape organised by man is the result of the socio-economic structure. […] The real power relations in any given society find their architectonic expression in the organically developed urbanism.”4 His perspective thus encompassed the colonial and post-colonial development of the city, the topographic manifestation of social class differences, and the resulting inequality and deprivation across the rapidly growing Mexican capital. Population density, the mismanagement of the transport infrastructure in a city of vast geographical proportions, and the long distances travelled by working class family 1 Heines Geist in Mexiko, ed. by Heinrich-Heine-Klub (México D.F., 1946), p. 25. 2 Hannes Meyer: „La Ciudad de México. Fragmentos de un estudio urbanistico“, Arquitectura 12 (Apr 1943), pp. 96-109. 3 See: Georg Leidenberger: „»Todo aquí es vulkanisch«. El arquitecto Hannes Meyer en México, 1938 a 1949“, in: Laura Rojas and Susan Deeds (eds): México a la Luz de sus Revoluciones, vol. 2 (México D.F., 2014), pp. 499-539. 4 Hannes Meyer: „Experiencias de Urbanismo. Conferencia dada en la Academía de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (México, 4 Oct 1938)“, in: Arquitectura y Decoración 12 (1938), pp. 251-7. 8 members each day were aspects of his research as a city planning expert.5 Meyer also observed the geographical shift of the business district from the historical centre towards the west, where – centred on the intersection of Avenida Juárez and the long south-west Avenue of Paseo de la Reforma marked by the equestrian statue of the Spanish king Charles IV, commonly known as the Caballito – a financial and trade district had developed including a press district for the thriving newspaper market.6 He paid particular attention to the effects of the speculative housing market on the structure and size of working-class residences, and took inspiration from the communal arrangement of daily life in the vecindades for his own project of modern working-class housing which culminated in his outline for a new housing development in Lomas de Becerra on the south-western outskirts of the city: “Karl Marx says that inside a doomed society there arises a nucleus of a new society which will one day replace it. This statement can also be applied to the forms of housing within a city.”7 As a government employee, Meyer thus attempted to engage actively with the urban environment of the Mexican capital.8 Hannes Meyer was by no means the only European observer of the urban topography which formed the background for the experience of political exile in Mexico City. Already in 1940, José Moreno Villa had published his appreciation of the “Cornucopia de México”, or the “Mexican horn of plenty”. In this metaphor, Moreno Villa celebrated the natural, historical, and cultural richness of his host country, and in particular of its capital city. The starting point of his contemplation was the encounter between the indigenous societies and the Spanish culture of colonial rule which was evident in vocabulary, place names, and the urban structure which Moreno Villa presented as a dichotomy between wide, open, and bright colonial avenues and narrow, dark, and dirty parts of the city.9 The rapid growth of the city led him to suspect that, “if this continues, Mexico will be a single city in a vast desolate country.” Beside the historical city centre, Moreno Villa concentrated his geographical attention on the affluent middle- and upper-class districts of the west and south-west, but he also paid tribute to the central role of the large markets, the aromas and flavours of their exotic pallet of fruits and spices, the variety of sweets, and the abundance of popular artisan craftsmanship.10 More than anything, Moreno Villa’s interest was directed at the language, the gestures, and the social practices and customs of the 5 Hannes Meyer: „La Ciudad de México. Fragmentos de un estudio urbanistico“, Arquitectura 12 (Apr 1943), p. 96. 6 Ibid., p. 98 7 Ibid., p. 103. 8 See: Georg Leidenberger: „La colonia obrera Lomas de Becerra (1942-43) del arquitecto Hannes Meyer. Proyecti pionero de la vivienda social en México“, in: Hector Quiroz Rothe (ed.): Aproximaciones a la Historia del Urbanismo Popular (México D.F., 2014), pp. 171-87. 9 José Moreno Villa: La Cornucopia de México (México D.F., 1940), p. 8. 10 Ibid., pp. 10-5. 9 population, even including a “comparative alcohology” for his readers.11 For many Spaniards, a false sense of familiarity with a Hispano-American metropolis led, on occasion, to misunderstandings of the social and cultural reality of a post-colonial society, but it also resulted in a heightened awareness and interest in the lived social practices of its inhabitants. Unlike Meyer, Moreno Villa did not see the city as a vast socio-economic machine waiting to be upgraded to the next world- historical era by means of urban planning and social engineering, but instead he presented a cultural anthropology of Mexico as a complex social matrix of everyday practices which, day after day, betrayed the traces of their colonial and post-colonial historical genesis.12 The task of this study will be to join both perspectives into an integrated approach to urban topography as well as social and political practice across the cityscape among the European communities of exile. On the one hand, the social topography of the city must play an important part in reconstructing patterns of residence, sociability, and political association. On the other, the subjective experiences of European political refugees arriving in the Mexican capital, their encounter with the new World, and the lived reality of their social and political practice equally deserves full analytical attention in order to establish the processes of gradual appropriation of the urban environment by the European communities of exile. Such dual