2026 Theses Doctoral

Papers and Trails: Holocaust Refugees and U.S. Immigration Control

Tal, Didi H.

This dissertation investigates the consolidation of modern immigration and citizenship administration through the historical encounter between the United States and refugees escaping Nazi Germany. Reconfiguring the history of German exile during the Holocaust in a transatlantic framework, the dissertation shifts attention from individual refugee narratives to the bureaucratic infrastructures that governed their possibilities of survival. It argues that immigration paperwork—passports, visas, affidavits of support, and naturalization files—was not merely an administrative apparatus but a decisive cultural and political force that shaped both refugee experience and the evolution of U.S. immigration control.

This project addresses a gap in German Studies, where scholarship has largely considered Exile Literature primarily in relation to Nazi persecution, by situating the German exile within a larger context of growing international border restrictions and immigration governance. Conceptualizing the relationship between the physical body and its documentary signifiers as “body-paper,” the dissertation demonstrates how immigration control increasingly naturalized the conflation of identity, legality, financial worth, and mobility.

The Holocaust refugee crisis thus emerges not only as a humanitarian issue but as a formative moment in the consolidation of a bureaucratic regime that continues to shape modern understandings of identity, citizenship, kinship, and refuge. Drawing on consular archives, literary texts by displaced German-language authors such as Transit, refugee trajectories, films such as Casablanca and Hold back the Dawn, and contemporaneous media coverage, the project rethinks immigration as a cultural structure embedded in administrative and aesthetic forms.