Creative Exile

Artists and Intellectuals in Exile in 1970s West Berlin explores how displacement and exile became catalysts for artistic and intellectual innovation during a pivotal period in European cultural history.

Drawing on extensive archival research, fieldwork, and interviews, the book examines how exiled and migrant artists- including Günter Brus, Romy Haag, Anne Jud, Marwan Kassab-Bachi, and Akbar Behkalam- transformed the divided city of West Berlin into a crucible of creative resistance. Blending art history, urban studies, feminist and queer theory, and migration scholarship, the book develops a new understanding of exile as a creative condition- a mode of living and making that redefined belonging, identity, and the politics of space. Through close readings of performance, painting, film, and collective practices, it reveals how marginality and dislocation generated new aesthetic forms and transnational solidarities.

Artists and Intellectuals in Exile in 1970s West Berlin will be of interest to postgraduate and undergraduate students in art, cultural, and migration studies, as well as general readers interested in Berlin’s cultural history.