Freies Deutschland : o antinazismo na América em perspectiva transnacional (1933-1945)

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to understand the meaning of the political struggles of the movements of the anti-Nazi Germans who acted in the American continent, having as an analysis perspective the groups organized by German-speaking exiles in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and the United States, seeking the reconstitution of ideas which circulated between them during the years 1933 and 1945. The central thesis is that these antinazist groups that settled in the Americas formed a complex political movement, with now convergent and sometimes divergent objectives, acting decisively in the public sphere and in the construction of the ideas that fought against Nazism, without resorting exclusively to leftist ideologies, but composing a complex set of political ideologies. It should be mentioned that the composition of these political groups was not made by immigrants or descendants, but rather by people who sought to escape the persecutions of Adolf Hitler's government, whose activities were politics, the arts, and the intellectual universe, planning to return to the country of origin. Literary production, such as magazines, newspapers and personal articles and correspondence of the exiles, as well as press materials and police dossiers from Brazil and the United States, were used to investigate these activities. The use of these sources was possible through researches conducted in Brazilian, Uruguayan and US archives, which allowed us to understand how the connections among anti-Nazi people in the American continent contributed to bringing a global debate to national spaces, intertwining with regional conjunctures. In South America, the exiles formed the Das Andere Deutschland in Argentina, the Free German Movement and the German Anti Nazi Movement, both in Brazil and organized the Congress of the Antinazist Germans of South America in Montevideo. In the United States, activities were intense in the border region with Mexico, forming a network of political activities between Los Angeles, California, and the editors of Freies Deutschland magazine in Mexico City. In this way, the perspectives of the transnational history, together with the concepts of the so-called new political history, are the methodological contributions used to understand how the activities of the free German movements overflowed borders, forming a space for the circulation of ideas, without necessarily questions of State.