ABSTRACT
Over the last quarter century, refugees have become increasingly synonymous with the future imagined as catastrophe. While we tend to think of the idea of a refugee apocalypse as the outcome of recent history, the connection between refugees and future catastrophe has an older history. This chapter explores the connection between refugees and bad futurity, and considers the ways that refugee writers have represented their own endurance in time despite their association with future ruin. It shows how mid-century refugee writers such as Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, and Bertolt Brecht turned to forms of anti-teleological and heterotemporal narrative and poetic modes in order to write themselves into political futures that are radically different but not catastrophic.
