ABSTRACT
The existing scholarship on refugee scholars has a strong bias towards a certain small portion of exiles: an elite group of researchers from the best German universities who went on to have enormously successful careers in the leading American research universities. However, beyond this numerically quite small but well-known group, among European academics the vast majority never achieved such success. For many, exile was a process of marginalization and silencing. For a range of reasons, the doors of academia in exile was never opened to them and scientific careers were either put on hold or abandoned completely. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this process of marginalization through case studies that illustrate factors that determined how and why refugee scholars were omitted and excluded. These factors ranged from external factors (such as differences in scientific cultures and the needs of universities, racism, cultural, political and ideological exclusion) to individual factors (such as lack of friends, colleagues and other helpers, lack of linguistic skills as well as psychological and health reasons such as will power). The innumerable and heterogenous obstacles laid the framework where individuals made their way through a maze where Catch-22 situations and coincidences could determine their fate are very difficult to assess on a general level. Beginning from a few historical case studies from the scientific emigration in the 1930s, the chapter seeks to outline some of the major dangers and negative factors facing refugee scholars.
