On Shoreless Sea

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Boston University. He works at the intersection of film and media studies, migration studies, and maritime history.

"…Grundmann dismantles the convenient moralism that casts the West as a passive bystander. Instead, he situates the voyage within an unbroken continuum of imperial power, where mobility, citizenship, and racial worth are determined by the same hierarchies that once structured colonial governance. His argument both historical and urgently contemporary, reveals how the St. Louis still drifts through the politics of today's border regimes, its denial of asylum replayed across a new global order of exclusion." — Postcolonial Interventions"Scrupulously researched, the work draws on a rich trove of primary sources—passengers' memoirs, the captain's log, and the corporate records of the ship owners—while navigating the treacherous shoals of Holocaust studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics." — Cineaste"Written in lucid prose and supported by detailed archival work, this book is a significant contribution to the argument that the Holocaust and colonialism were not two separate processes but profoundly entwined." — Max Silverman, Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Leeds, and author of Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film"Grundmann digs beneath the layers of international popular memory and scholarship by coupling impressive archival research with novel conceptual frameworks to provide new—if still controversial—perspectives on the facts as well as the myths and cultural lore about the tragic incident. He implicates the degraded ethical legacies of Western racist biopolitics and colonialist histories as inadequately assessed factors leading to a tragedy not dissimilar to those occurring today. Readers may find most striking Grundmann's searching readings of films and other popular cultural memorial forms that, informed by Michael Rothberg's concept of 'multidirectional memory,' can generate revelatory investigative strategies for Holocaust studies scholars to pursue and provide new insights into contemporary tragedies." — Stuart Liebman, Emeritus Professor of Art History and Film Studies, CUNY Graduate Center"On Shoreless Sea is an incredibly detailed and comprehensive examination of the events involved and is of particular interest to the film scholar readership toward whom the book is especially dedicated. Grundmann shows himself to be an astute interpreter and chronicler of history and a passionate advocate that this story is worth memorializing in detail in readable prose and with intelligent organization." — Dr. Richard Barton Palmer, Clemson University

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I1. Jews During the Third Reich: Between Flight and Entrapment2. Neocolonialism, Biopolitics, and the Jewish Migrant Business: HAPAG and MS St. Louis3. Voyage 98: The Unfolding of a Fateful Odyssey4. The St. Louis Passengers and the Press Coverage of Voyage 985. On Shoreless Sea: The St. Louis Voyage, the State of Exception, and the Colonial Turn in Holocaust StudiesPart II6. The St. Louis Voyage in Popular Memory7. Voyage of the Damned on the Big Screen8. Germany Revisits the St. Louis Voyage: Die Ungewollten — Die Irrfahrt der St. Louis (The Unwanted — The Voyage of the St. Louis)9. The St. Louis Voyage and Grassroots Historical Revisionism: Robert Krakow's Independent Film Complicit10. The St. Louis in Multidirectional MemoryEpilogue: "With Whose Blood Were My Eyes Crafted?" Philipp Scheffner and Merle Kröger's Havarie (2016), the Mediterranean Migrant Crisis, and the St. Louis VoyagePart IIIAppendix 1: Introduction to Gustav Schröder and His Accounts of Voyage 98Appendix 2: Homeless on the High Seas (1949) by Gustav Schröder, translated by Roy GrundmannAppendix 3: Captain's Log, Voyage 98, Part 1, translated by Roy GrundmannAppendix 4: Captain's Log, Voyage 98, Part 2, translated by Roy GrundmannAppendix 5: Addendum to the Captain's Log of Captain Gustav Schröder, MS St. Louis, on the 98th Voyage home, translated by Roy GrundmannNotesBibliographyIndex