“Ich wollte so sehr englisch sein”: Construction of National and Transnational Belonging in Diaries & Memoirs of Refugee Children from National Socialist Germany

Different modes of attachment and alienation, of belonging and not belonging can be extracted from a variety of texts as Linda Shortt shows in her monograph German Narratives of Belonging (2015). Ego documents such as memoirs and diaries, in particular, reveal individual aspects of identity negotiation in new, unknown circumstances and environments. Here, this paper builds on genre and narrative theories concerning exile and the Kindertransport, which was recently discussed by Stephanie Homer in her monograph The Kindertransport in Literature: Reimagining Experience (2022). By moving away from the concept of Heimat, as Shortt also suggests, towards a more inclusive and, at the same time, multifaceted understanding of belonging, this paper acknowledges the various ways of attachment to places, people, and cultures. By anchoring the concepts of belonging in an analysis of selected diary entries and memoir excerpts of children who arrived in the UK on a Kindertransport 1938/39, this paper proposes that these documents are a site of construction of national as well as transnational belonging and identities in flux. Furthermore, by contextualising the personal perspective of the ego-documents within a wider historical and political discourse surrounding the Kindertransport, this paper contributes to underexplored aspects of identities of child migrants. Through close reading of selected examples and textual, this paper will show that the Kindertransportees continued to negotiate their belonging throughout their lives. Here, I’m taking on a comparative approach of looking at diaries and memoirs, two inherently forms of life writing that illuminate aspects of identity development through different temporal dimensions. Hereby, I emphasise the children’s agency in shaping their exile experience and negotiating their identities. In the analysis of the diaries, I will mainly draw on theories of everyday life and memory studies to highlight how we can extract ongoing processes of identity negotiation and changing notions of belonging from the entries even if these themes are not overtly discussed. In contrast, memoirs often deal with issues of identity formation more explicitly. These characteristics then facilitate a comparative approach to investigate the construction of belonging and identity. Considering recent development in British migration politics, investigating notions of belonging and identity of Kindertransportees become ever more important as the scheme is often represented as a success story of integration and cultural assimilation of the child refugees. The ways in which this movement not only impacted the children but also society as a whole and how it has been utilised as a story of great British humanitarian hospitality stand in contrast to one another. This paper illuminates that the Kindertransport experience and its lasting impact situate themselves, similar to the identities of the children, in an in-between of success and failure, of assimilation and alienation.