Sara Silverstein is an assistant professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. Her current project is For Your Health and Ours: The Global History of Universal Healthcare.
Sara Silverstein
Contributions
Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees by Lyndsey Stonebridge
In her stateless exile, Hannah Arendt read Franz Kafka. He was “rather uncannily adequate to the reality” of statelessness, she wrote (quoted in Stonebridge, 29). In 1933 Arendt had fled Germany through a house that sat on the border with Czechoslovakia (24). She ate dinner and left by the back door, into a legal void that exists on the fringes of the accepted world order of sovereign states and citizenship (24).