Inner emigration

Inner emigration is a controversial term used to describe the situation of German writers who were opposed to Nazism yet chose to remain in Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933. The term was coined by Frank Thiess in his response to Thomas Mann's BBC broadcast on the subject of German guilt.

Delphine de Girardin, writing in 1839 about French aristocracy during the July Monarchy, uses the term "Émigration Intérieure":

Living in exile in the United States in the 1940s, the German writer Thomas Mann was concerned with the issue of German responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust. He wrote several essays on the subject, including "Deutsche Schuld und Unschuld" ("German Guilt and Innocence") and "Über Schuld und Erziehung" ("On Guilt and Education"). After reading about the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in 1945, Mann said in a German-language BBC broadcast:

Frank Thiess argued that only those who had experienced life in Nazi Germany had a right to speak for Germans about their guilt, and that, if anything, the "innere Emigranten" ("inner emigrants") had shown more moral courage than those who had observed events from a safe remove. In response, Mann declared that all works published under Hitler stank of "Blut und Schande" ("blood and shame") and should be destroyed. As a result of this controversy, German literature of the period is still categorized in terms of the authors' moral status rather than the political content or aesthetic value of their writings.

The term's definition and the moral issues surrounding it have long been a subject of debate. Some argue that certain writers who stayed behind in Germany criticized the Nazi regime in subtle ways, allegorically or by implication, while others contend that such criticisms were "so subtle that they are invisible". The debate is further complicated by the varying degrees to which different writers were under threat, and the varying strength and nature of their protests. Some writers who claimed to be "inner emigrants" appear to have done quite well for themselves during the war, while others saw their works banned or were imprisoned.

At the 1998 Deutscher Historikertag Peter Schöttler, Götz Aly and Michael Fahlbusch were involved in the debate concerning the role of German historians during the Third Reich. The trio challenged the defense of Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze and Karl-Dietrich Erdmann in terms of inner emigration arguing that they were more complicit with the Nazi regime than had been recognised by the next generation of German historians, many of whom were their students.

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