To mark the Leo Baeck Institute’s 70th anniversary, the LBI conducted a series of in‑depth conversations with leading scholars of German-speaking Jewry. In this interview, Dr Till Greite speaks to Dr Anthony Grenville about a life shaped by Viennese Jewish roots and post-war Britain, and about a career spent documenting the experience of refugees from Nazism and the legacy of exile in the United Kingdom. Their discussion moves from Grenville’s childhood in north London and his family’s journey from Vienna, through his path into German studies at Oxford, to his long involvement with the Association of Jewish Refugees and the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies. It also reflects on questions of cultural identity, memory and belonging across languages and generations, and on what it has meant for Grenville to work in, and write about, the field of Exile Studies over several decades.
Dr Anthony Grenville, son of Jewish refugees who fled from Vienna to London in 1938, was educated at Oxford (BA, DPhil) and lectured in German at the Universities of Reading, Bristol and Westminster, 1971-96. He worked for the Association of Jewish Refugees, London, including as Editor of its monthly publication, AJR Journal, 2006-2017. He is a founder member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, and since 2013 has acted as its Chair. He served as a member of the executive committee of the Gesellschaft für Exilforschung for several years and in 2020 was awarded Ehrenmitgliedschaft (Honorary Fellowship) of the GfE. He has published widely in the field of Exile Studies, principally on the refugees from Nazism who settled in Britain after 1933. Publications include Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933-1970: Their Image in ‘AJR Information’ (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010) and Encounters with Albion: Britain and the British in Texts by Jewish Refugees from Nazism (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018).
Dr Till Greite has been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, since 2024, and is a member of the academic staff of its Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS). At the ILCS, he is pursuing a research project on German-Jewish exile in Britain entitled The Legacy of Exile. He completed his PhD at Humboldt University Berlin, where he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for German Literature until 2023 and was a member of the transnational doctoral research network Das Wissen der Literatur. His visiting fellowships have included Princeton University, University College Dublin, and the Moses Mendelssohn Centre in Potsdam. Among his publications are Die leere Zentrale. Berlin, ein Bild aus dem deutschen Nachkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2024) and the edited volume Die lange Stunde Null. Beiträge zu Literatur und Film einer Übergangszeit um 1945 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2026), co-edited with Erhard Schütz.
