"Refugee Blues" narrates the hardship of a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The poem reflects a historical reality: as persecution of Jews, alongside other minorities and political dissidents, worsened during Nazi rule, increasingly large numbers of these groups attempted to flee Germany and its occupied territories. Many were prevented from emigrating by both domestic, anti-emigration policies and by quotas and anti-refugee legislation abroad. Some of those who escaped were eventually captured by Nazis, while others, despite social stigma and other barriers, found safety in their new countries. Auden's poem does not specify the country to which the speaker has escaped. However, its 1939 publication suggests that it is based on the experience of Jewish refugees during the early waves of emigration from Germany, before Nazi policies made it significantly harder to leave the country. In late 1941, Jewish emigration from Germany and its territories was outlawed, and most of those left living under Nazi rule did not survive the war.
Prior to Hitler's 1933 takeover in Germany, the country's population included 523,000 Jews. Most of them lived in urban areas, particularly Berlin. Relative to their counterparts in Eastern Europe, German Jews enjoyed a fairly high level of material prosperity and social assimilation. Indeed, just like the speaker in "Refugee Blues," these German Jews generally fully identified as German and did not necessarily view this identification as being in conflict with their Jewishness. Hitler's overtly antisemitic rhetoric, in addition to Nazi policies such as a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants, spurred roughly 37,000 German Jews to emigrate. They fled largely to nearby countries such as France or the Netherlands, and eventual German occupation of these countries led to the capture and death of many of these emigrants. A larger wave of emigration occurred in 1938, and a larger one still in 1939, as conditions for Jews in Germany became dramatically worse following the seizure of Jewish-owned property and the night of mob violence known as Kristallnacht. Over 100,000 Jews fled Germany and German-occupied Austria in 1938 and 1938, at roughly the time that Auden published "Refugee Blues." During this period, German policies actually encouraged Jews to leave the country—but immigration restrictions abroad kept many from doing so.
In the summer of 1938, representatives from thirty-two countries, including the United States, met in France to discuss the worsening refugee crisis, but these countries did not come to a decision about how to address it. National-origin quotas in the United States limited the number of individuals allowed in from each country, meaning that only 27,000 out of the hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian, and Czech visa applicants were permitted. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, granted 10,000 unaccompanied minors visas as part of the kindertransport program. By the time Germany passed the authoritarian Nuremberg laws in 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had taken refuge in the U.S. Smaller numbers settled in Palestine, the United Kingdom, a range of South American nations, and, to a lesser extent, China. However, anti-refugee policies led to a huge number of deaths. Nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees aboard the ship MS St. Louis were refused entry by border guards in Cuba, the U.S., and Canada. Most later died in Germany. Indeed, in 1939, 83% of Americans opposed admitting refugees, in large part because they feared that an influx of immigrants would damage an American economy still fragile after the Great Depression.
Despite the violence they'd faced in Germany, many Jewish German refugees maintained some degree of German identity in their new homes. Some countries, including the United States—the most common place of refuge for these immigrants—already contained significant German or Jewish communities, including, in some cases, family members of the new arrivals. However, refugees were not reliably able to find community in non-Jewish German enclaves, since pro-Nazi politics were growing stronger in these areas. Moreover, the United States as a whole in the 1930s and 1940s saw an increase in antisemitism. In 1939, the year that "Refugee Blues" was published, a group of 20,000 gathered in New York's Madison Square Garden to celebrate Nazi ideologies. To a great extent, Jewish German refugees created their own communities and institutions, among them New York's German Jewish Club and Prospect Unity Club.
Today, a new refugee crisis is playing out worldwide. At the end of 2019, 79.5 million individuals—1% of the world's population— had been displaced from their homes. 40% of these displaced people are minors. Most of these 79.5 million come from five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. Meanwhile, Germany, from which refugees like the speaker in Auden's poem once fled, now takes in the fifth-highest number of refugees worldwide, after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, and Uganda.
