Refugees Magazine
 
Refugees Magazine Issue 147 ("The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless") - Stateless achievers

by Cécile Pouilly

ALBERT EINSTEIN
(1879-1955) physicist, born in Germany, stateless from 1896 to 1901


Einstein was stateless for five years before acquiring Swiss citizenship in 1901:
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

Albert Einstein had the unusual distinction of being a stateless person in the 19th century and a refugee in the 20th. He was born German, but renounced his nationality in 1896 and remained stateless for the next five years. In 1901, he became a Swiss citizen. He regained his German citizenship in 1914 when he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. After Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Einstein resigned from the Academy, renounced his German nationality for a second time and became a refugee (not stateless this time, since he had retained his Swiss citizenship). He moved to the United States, where he received a hero's welcome, and in 1940 became an American citizen.

MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH
(1927-2007) cellist, conductor and political activist, stateless from 1978 to 1990


Legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in front of the Berlin Wall in 1989:
"You have no idea how humiliating it is to be a 'worthless citizen' – they chased us out."

On 15 May 1978, Mstislav Rostropovich, the most famous cello player on earth, learned from watching the news on French television that he and his wife, the renowned Bolshoi soprano Galina Vichnevskaïa, had been stripped of their Soviet nationality for "systematic acts harmful to the prestige of the USSR."

"We were obliterated," he recalled in a 1997 interview with Strad magazine. Claude Samuel attended the press conference that followed: "It was very moving: he spoke about the injustice and she, Galina, of the cruelty of the decision. Those who were present will never forget it – it was so powerful. They hadn't planned what they were going to say, hadn't written anything down. It came straight from the heart. They had been ripped from their country."

Their principal crime in the eyes of the regime was the support they gave to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, whom they accommodated in their dacha after he lost his home in Moscow. The final straw came in 1970 when Rostropovich wrote an open letter defending Solzhenitsyn and protesting against the restrictions on cultural freedom.

For the next four years, Rostropovich and his wife were isolated and their performances were heavily circumscribed. Finally, in 1974, they were granted exit visas. Although personally devastated, Rostropovich's career flourished. His fame was such that several of the 20th century's most famous composers, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten wrote pieces specifically for him.

The impulsive and irrepressible Rostropovich had a huge appetite for life, and continued to champion dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov.

But, despite all the success, the pain of exile never disappeared. Rostropovich decorated his Parisian apartment in a manner reminiscent of one of the Tsar's palaces: "It's my dacha in the Far West, I buy everything that reminds me of my Russia," he told his friend, the French TV producer Jacques Chancel.

In November 1989, Rostropovich flew to Berlin and played Bach in front of the Berlin Wall as joyful Germans tore it down. It was a quite extraordinary scene, but for Rostropovich it was much more than an act of showmanship."There, in front of that wall as it lost its stones, I suddenly regained my lost citizenship... Those who have been deprived of their identity understand what I had to put up with – the sheer pain, the most intimate of wounds. That moment lit up my whole life. It wiped away fifteen years of disgrace and humiliation."

In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was officially restored by President Mikhail Gorbachev. When communist hard-liners tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991, Rostropovich rushed to the besieged Parliament and linked up with Boris Yeltsin and others opposing the coup.

When he died, just four days after Yeltsin in April 2007, thousands of tearful mourners filled Moscow's golden-domed Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, alongside President Vladimir Putin, Solzhenitsyn's wife Natalya, Yeltsin's widow Naina, and his own widow, fellow exile and life-long soulmate, Galina. When the burial ceremony was over, the mourners burst into spontaneous applause.

Rostropovich, and the state he loved and criticized in equal measure, were finally definitively reconciled.

MARGARETHE VON TROTTA
Film-maker, born stateless in Germany in 1942


Margarethe Von Trotta in 1977, directing her first solo feature "The Second Awakening of Christa Klages":
"I don't even know if I wanted to be German... If, every time someone asks you what nationality you are, you say 'stateless,' it is as if you don't fully belong anywhere."

Margarethe Von Trotta is one of Europe's best known female directors. She began her career as an actress, working with several of the great late 20th century German film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. As a director, she soon carved out her own reputation as a brilliant analyst of complex female relationships, and has made a string of acclaimed movies including "Marianne and Juliane" (1981, winner of the Lion d'Or at the Venice Film Festival) and "Rosenstrasse" (2004).

"I was born in Berlin, and because my mother never tried to become German, she remained stateless and I was automatically stateless too," she told REFUGEES magazine in an interview."My mother was born in Moscow. After the revolution, the whole family had to flee and – like many Russian emigrés at that time – they lost their nationality."

Her mother was not married, and the pair struggled financially. Although she was a good student, the young Margarethe was stigmatized for being stateless, fatherless and penniless.

"It was a constant problem. I studied in Paris for a while. You always had to have a visa, and people to act as your guarantors. To get to Paris, I had to cross Belgium, and for that I needed a transit visa. One time, I didn't have one – I was only 18 – and in the middle of the night they made me get off the train at the border. I was in the middle of nowhere. I had to hitch a lift to Paris, because I had no money left...

"I wanted to have a nationality – I didn't care if it was French or German – just because I wanted to be freed from all those travel difficulties." She finally got rid of her fremdenpass (the German passport for certain people without a nationality), when she got married for the first time, aged 23."But I still feel like a foreigner everywhere I go," she said."That has stayed with me."

STEFAN ZWEIG
(1881 – 1942), author, born Austrian, made stateless in 1938


Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was forced to flee by the Nazis:
"Formerly man had only a body and soul. Now he needs a passport as well, for without it he will not be treated as a human being."

Stefan Zweig was a celebrated European intellectual and writer. Deeply depressed by World War I, he became a committed pacifist. Because he was Jewish, in 1934 he was forced to flee his country of birth, Austria, and became stateless. He ended up in Brazil, where he and his wife committed suicide in February 1942. He wrote about being stateless in his autobiography The World of Yesterday:

"The fall of Austria brought with it a change in my personal life which at first I believed to be a quite unimportant formality: my Austrian passport became void and I had to request an emergency white paper from the English authorities, a passport for the stateless... [E]very foreign visa on this travel paper had thenceforth to be specially pleaded for, because all countries were suspicious of the 'sort' of people of which I had suddenly become one, of the outlaws, of the men without a country, whom one could not at a pinch pack off and deport to their own State as they could others if they became undesirable or stayed too long...

"Since the day when I had to depend upon identity papers or passports that were indeed alien, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself. A part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed forever."

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 147: "The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless"
(September 2007). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (1.8 Mb) here or high-resolution (6.8 Mb) here.