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Migrations and the Americas Taking Humboldt into Exile: Antifascism and Antiracism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

  • Thursday, 22 October 2026, 20:15
  • HCA, Atrium
    • PD Dr. Andrea Acle-Kreysing, Universität Heidelberg, Historisches Seminar

What happened to Alexander von Humboldt’s legacy when German-speaking intellectuals fleeing National Socialism encountered it from exile in Mexico? This talk explores how Humboldt’s political afterlives were reshaped after 1933 in a country where his name carried exceptional symbolic weight. Humboldt had long stood for European scientific engagement with the Americas, but also for recognition of the region’s political and cultural significance. Precisely for that reason, his legacy became contested. Celebrated by the German colony and claimed by Nazi-aligned cultural institutions, Humboldt was reread by antifascist exiles as a different kind of German ancestor: one whose rejection of biological definitions of race could be mobilized against Nazism. Focusing on German-speaking Jewish writers such as Alfons Goldschmidt and Egon Erwin Kisch, the talk builds on Nicolaas Rupke’s argument that elements of the later GDR canon of Humboldt — especially the image of him as an anti-imperial and anti-racist figure — began in wartime Mexico.

Karte der Welt als Fußabdruck

It also asks what this canon left aside. In the Mexican exile context, Humboldt was invoked not only as a defender of Indigenous peoples, but also as a figure whose universalism could speak against antisemitism. Read against other contemporaries writing on Mexico, Goldschmidt and Kisch show how exile transformed the struggle over German cultural heritage into a critique of racial thinking and of the asymmetries embedded in European representations of Latin America. The talk thus treats forced migration not as mere background, but as the condition that made this reworking of Humboldt’s legacy possible.

All Dates of the Event 'Migrations and the Americas'

Migration movements turn out to be a particular global challenge of the twenty-first century in many regions of the world. The HCA addresses this topic together with the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies and the Institute of Geography with the lecture series “Migration and the Americas,” with a special focus on the United States and Latin America.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yaatsil Guevara GonzálezProf. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard

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