On Shoreless Sea

The MS St. Louis Refugee Ship in History, Film, and Popular Memory

Combines new archival research with innovative theory to reassess the ship's dramatic voyage and analyze its representation in a broad range of texts, films, and artifacts of popular memory.

Finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the History category

In 1939, the ocean liner MS St. Louis undertook a dramatic voyage with over nine hundred Jewish refugees that caught the world's attention and has been remembered in numerous printed texts, films, and artifacts. Denied permission to dock in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, the ship was finally forced to return to Europe, where many of teh refugees ultimately perished in the Holocaust. On Shoreless Sea is the first work to comprehensively analyze the journey's unfolding, its historical context, and its key representations in various media. Based on new archival research and featuring a translation of Captain Gustav Schröder's account of the voyage, the book corrects long-standing misassumptions about its subject. Author Roy Grundmann illuminates the voyage's historical significance and demonstrates its relevance to our present, in which prosperous nations once again stem mass migration. Arguing that the Jewish refugee crisis was caused not only by anti-Semitism but also by colonialism and neocolonialism, Grundmann calls for Holocaust studies to expand its field of inquiry and methodology. Working at the intersection of Holocaust studies, postcolonial theory, film and media studies, and cultural studies, On Shoreless Sea reads St. Louis memory culture as a reservoir of contradictory attitudes toward migration whose texts both intentionally and inadvertently testify to the need to discuss the Holocaust in relation to other genocides without denying its uniqueness.

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