Camille Graeser – refugee or homecomer?

In 2015, Hans-Dieter Huber discovered a small agenda from 1933 in the archives of the Camille Graeser Archive, Zurich, in which Camille Graeser recorded his escape from Stuttgart to Switzerland. He noted the people he met in Stuttgart and Zurich, the places where he stayed and the political and economic contexts. The notebook is unique in that there are no records from either the time before or the time after. It is only much later in Switzerland that Camille Graeser begins to keep a diary. The text reconstructs the social network and the topology of the social space in which Graeser moved in Stuttgart and in Zurich. Hans-Dieter Huber uses two texts by the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schütz, who had to flee to the USA from the Nazis in 1939, as narratives. His first text, published in the USA, is “Der Fremde” (The Stranger), a second “Der Heimkehrer” (The Homecomer). Hans-Dieter Huber takes these two texts and transfers their argumentation to the existential situation of the nascent artist Camille Graeser. The text is available in German, English and French editions.

Camille Graeser – Flüchtling oder Heimkehrer? In: Vera Hausdorff/Roman Kurzmeyer im Auftrag der Camille Graeser Stiftung Zürich (Hg.): Camille Graeser. Vom Werden eines konkreten Künstlers. Köln: Wienand Verlag 2020, S. 16-41.