Artists and Intellectuals in Exile in 1970's West Berlin

Artists and Intellectuals in Exile in 1970s West Berlin explores how displacement and exile became catalysts for artistic and intellectual innovation during a pivotal period in European cultural history. Drawing on extensive archival research, fieldwork, and interviews, the book examines how exiled and migrant artists - including Günter Brus, Romy Haag, Anne Jud, Marwan Kassab-Bachi and Akbar Behkalam - transformed the divided city of West Berlin into a crucible of creative resistance. Blending art history, urban studies, feminist and queer theory and migration scholarship, the book develops a new understanding of exile as a creative condition - a mode of living and making that redefines belonging, identity and the politics of space. Through close readings of performance, painting, film and collective practices, it reveals how marginality and dislocation generated new aesthetic forms and transnational solidarities. Artists and Intellectuals in Exile in 1970s West Berlin will be of interest to postgraduate and undergraduate students in art, cultural and migration studies, as well as general readers interested in Berlin's cultural history.

Azadeh Fatehrad is Professor of Art and Public Policy and Programme Director of Inclusive and Empowered Places at Teesside University, UK. Her research explores participatory art, migration and social cohesion. Her recent publications include Community, Culture and Space: Mapping Belonging (2025) and Negotiating Belonging: Migrants' Home-Making Practices in Transitional Urban Spaces (2026).

Introduction, 1. Kreuzberg, the District of In-Betweenness, 2. Günter Brus: Exile, Collaboration, and the Poetics of Reinvention, 3. Romy Haag: Gendered Exile and Queer World-Making in West Berlin, 4. Anne Jud: Feminist Performance, Exile, and the Material City, 5. Marwan of Syria: Exile, Figuration, and the Politics of the Face, 6. Akbar Behkalam: Exile, Revolution, and the Politics of Form, 7. The Community of Creative Exiles in West Berlin