Inclusion and Exclusion: The Discourse about Academic Emigrés in Switzerland (1933-1945)

When on April 7, 1933 the NS-regime passed the so-called “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service”, some 800 academics of non-Aryan descent were to retire. Jewish professors belonged to the first group of people, which lost their jobs in Nazi-Germany. More than half of these academics left Germany with the aim to continue their careers abroad, about fifty of them moved to Switzerland. The prevalent discourse of Überfremdung (over-foreignization) as well as more or less hidden anti-Semitic tendencies in the administration had direct influences on the refugee policy but also on the hiring policies in Swiss universities. The immigration to Switzerland was at first restricted until it was stopped almost completely, nevertheless a number of Jewish emigrants and refugees managed to escape to Switzerland and some even succeeded in continuing their academic career in exile.

This paper examines the contested history of academic refugees in Switzerland. I will focus on questions of recruitment and exclusion of refugee scholars into the Swiss system of higher education. The hierarchical structures in Swiss universities with full professorships (Lehrstuhlprinzip) at the top of the academic ranking system, made the employment of émigré professors difficult; the integration of non-tenured academics with temporal contracts was easier. The hierarchical organization of higher education institutions, however, was only one factor of many, which played a role in the employment of refugee scholars. Thus, this paper addresses the multi-layered discourse about refugee scholars in Swiss universities in the years 1933–1945.