„But where could one go?“ Intercultural Spaces in Fred Wander’s Refugee Novel Hôtel Baalbek (1991)

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which intercultural spaces are depicted in Fred Wander’s autobiographically tinged novel Hôtel Baalbek (1991). In this context, it is of particular importance that the text takes up various positively connoted elements of the mediterranist discourse, but turns them into the negative in order to illustrate the catastrophic situation of its protagonists: At the beginning of the 1940s, they are on the run from Hitler’s regime of terror and have ended up in Marseille, where they desperately and mostly in vain try to continue their journey to America. In view of this, it makes sense that the novel varies a series of not least tourist topoi and motifs in such a way that hardly anything remains of the promise of the intercultural.