THIS CONCLUSION seeks to look ahead more than to rehearse, and with good reason: exile as a topic of critical reflection is very much alive today, and the field of exile studies remains wide open and continues to receive public attention. Nothing illustrates this better, perhaps, than an open letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, written on June 24, 2011, by Nobel laureate Herta Müller and addressed to German chancellor Angela Merkel. Its headline “Menschen fallen aus Deutschland” (People Falling Out of Germany) was a reference to the largely forgotten Ein Mensch fällt aus Deutschland (A Man Falls Out of Germany) by Dutch-German novelist Konrad Merz (1908–99), who in it painted one of the earliest portraits of exile from Nazi Germany. The letter was an appeal to the German government to establish a museum of exile in Germany. Such a museum would finally begin to do justice to the thousands of authors, artists, and intellectuals who had been forced to leave their country and live abroad under difficult circumstances. A museum, a physical place of reflection, education, and remembrance, would grant the story of exile a long-deserved space within Germany’s landscape of memory. In fact, it would elevate the status of exile, as it would become part of an official narrative of German responsibility and reconciliation.

Müller’s appeal was highly personal, describing Konrad Merz (himself an exile), whom she knew and had invited to recount his harrowing experiences of hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland. It is clear that she spoke, too, as a fellow exile who could relate to the hardship of those who had suffered before her, listening attentively and feeling herself compelled to keep their stories alive. An article she wrote for the German weekly Der Spiegel (The Mirror) in January 2013 as part of an ongoing campaign to build support for the museum underscored her own exile and even began with a portrayal of her forced departure from Communist Romania in 1987. The story of exile, then, is very much Müller’s own story; “Menschen fallen aus Deutschland” applies directly to her, too. What’s more, she purposely wrote her open letter in the present tense to suggest that exile remains very much present in the lives of those on whom this harsh fate is bestowed. Exile knows no end.