Success or failure: The Evian Conference of 1938

‘This is not a conference’, announced the head of the French delegation on the opening day of a gathering of 32 nations at the French resort of Évian-les-Bains in July 1938. ‘There was no story’, says a character in Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt who reports back from Evian. This talk argues that neither of these statements is true. The Evian Conference, convened by President Roosevelt, ostensibly to help the refugees from Germany and Austria, was undermined before it began. New research reveals the significant role of the British Colonial Office regarding Evian, and how it succeeded not only in the omission of Palestine from the discourse of the conference – which is well known – but was determined to exclude Jewish refugees from all of Britain’s colonies.

Speaker

Dr Antoinette Moses is a poet, playwright and author with extensive experience in teaching creative writing. She has published over twenty award-winning books of language-learner fiction, often based on contemporary history. She is also a playwright with a PhD in documentary theatre, exploring the aesthetics and ethics of writing fiction from real lives. She retired in July 2019 after ten years as a lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and is currently writing a history of the Evian Conference on refugees, which has the working title: Wretched Strangers: Uncovering the Evian Conference of 1938.

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