Word.ws English Dictionary

inner emigration

inner emigration noun: the retreat to one's private life in the face of an oppressive state, instead of overt opposition or emigration to another country.

Noun

inner emigration (uncountable)

  1. The retreat to one's private life in the face of an oppressive state, instead of overt opposition or emigration to another country.
    • Many Easterners went into so-called “inner emigration”, withdrawing from a system whose ideological impulse had long faded.2023 April 28, Frederick Studemann, “Katja Hoyer: we need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC

Origin of inner emigration

Calque of German innere Emigration, popularized by German writer Frank Thiess in his response to Thomas Mann's BBC broadcast, defending the choice of some German intellectuals to remain in Nazi Germany despite being opposed to Nazism.

Questions about inner emigration

What does inner emigration mean?
Inner emigration means the retreat to one's private life in the face of an oppressive state, instead of overt opposition or emigration to another country.
What part of speech is inner emigration?
Inner emigration is a noun.

Words near inner emigration in the dictionary

  1. inner critics
  2. inner diameter
  3. inner diameters
  4. inner ear
  5. inner ears
  6. inner emigration
  7. inner experience
  8. inner eye
  9. inner eyes
  10. Inner Hebrides
  11. Inner House

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inner emigration (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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