Seite - 165 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

The article deals with the passage of German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1938. Neither the departure nor the arrival will be portrayed but the very passage on the ship itself. The prot- agonists are migrants, who left Germany in order to make Palestine their new home as well as travelers, who had no intention to migrate and would return to Nazi Germany after a couple of days or weeks in Palestine. The protagonists of this article are Jenny Aloni, herbert friedent- hal (later herbert freeden), Gertrud and Willy cohn, Paul Mühsam, Gabriele Tergit, Martin hauser, Manfred Sturman, heinemann Stern and his wife. I focus on the stories, descriptions and reflections of the protagonist that can be found in diaries, letters, travelogues, or even novels, which some of them wrote after the trip. I show how these people acted on the ship, how the perceived their fellow travelers, what the trip as such meant to them, what they thought about their destination, about their past, present and future, and last but not least: what general thoughts they had of their own place in life. Even though the material presented here is available in different published forms it has never been composed and analysed in this way before. Most of research on the topic in this very period concentrates either on the place and process of departure or the place and process of arrival. The time and space in between, however, is blurred. Almost no scholarly work has been written yet on the ship passage itself. Even less is known about those German Jews, who tra- veled to Palestine in order to return to Nazi Germany instead of keeping aloof. Insofar this arti- cle contributes to the growing field of Jewish cultural studies, which concentrates on processes of transition which a dire focus on the people itself, who were the protagonist of these processes. And it can also be perceived as a contribution to a very new field, still in its very beginning, than might be termed as Jewish maritime studies, recently introduced by Joachim Schlör. The findings of this research are astonishing. After boarding the ship, within a couple of hours, almost all of the protagonists fell in a kind of limbo. The moving of the ship, the Jewish fellow travelers, the passage between time and space affected them deeply. All thoughts and reflections became almost metaphysical. The travelers found themselves torn between different spaces: Europe, Asia, and “the Orient” and also between different times: The Old Europe of the enlightenment of the individual and the New Jewish homeland of the redemption of the Mobile culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 1 2015, 165-166 Editor reviewed article Open Access: content is licensed under cc BY 3.0 On board of life The ship passage of German Jews to Palestine 1933 to 1938 as experience of transit between time and space Extended Abstract David Jünger