Resistance Fighters Research Articles

Transitional justice and human rights in Afghanistan*

Like other societies emerging from protracted conflict, Afghanistan confronts a legacy of past crimes and violence. Communist rulers, Soviet occupiers, rural resistance fighters, Islamist parties, the Taleban movement, Pakistani volunteers, al-Qaeda members, power-seeking warlords, and the anti-Taliban coalition all contributed more or less to the litany of abuses since 1978. Almost no one in the society has been untouched, and almost no one with any power has clean hands. For these very reasons, caution and care are necessary. Demobilizing and reintegrating tens of thousands of irregular militia, as well as creating new security forces are the necessary conditions for the rest of the peace-building agenda, and, as shown by the author's first-hand experience in the Bonn negotiations over the post-Taleban succession, raising the issue of past crimes prematurely may lead fighters to revert to previous modes of behaviour. He argues for a careful start that emphasizes documenting the scale of the abuses with an emphasis on the suffering of the victims rather than the guilt of the perpetrators, in order gradually to support an Afghan debate on how to reconcile the society with its history.

Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune litterature juive

Very few Jewish writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed a reception comparable to that of the political activist, self-styled guerrilla, gangster, and author Pierre Goldman. In 1979, the assassination of the thirty-five year old Goldman by members of a right-wing commando provoked an outcry from the general public and prompted a reevaluation of the dangers of anti-Semitism among French Jews. The Marxist critic Regis Debray and the Jewish writer Helene Cixous responded to Goldman's slaying by devoting entire books to the question of how his life and death came to challenge the very foundation of the grande nation. The novelist Catherine Axelrad suggested in her novel La Varsovienne (1990) that the circumstances of Goldman's murder--his killers had never been found and remained at large--enabled the extreme Left to offer quasi-national funerals for the revolution. More than 15,000 people attended his funeral, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Yves Montand, and many of the Jewish student leaders who never had gained Goldman's support. (1) For many of his peers, the killing of the Jewish enfant terrible brought the issue of their own status and safety as outspoken Jews to the forefront. The journalist Luc Rosenzweig--a colleague of Goldman at Liberation--took the event as incentive to conduct a series of interviews with young Jews, which he later published as La France juive, a title sardonically alluding to Edouard Drumont's notorious anti-Semite pamphlet La France from 1886. According to Rosenzweig, the hors-la-loi Goldman became a martyr for those who, facing the choice between Judaism (particularism) and the University (universalism), chose the latter. (2) Rosenzweig's collection of interviews came to stand as powerful homage to Goldman, not as a political extremist, but as a persecuted Jew whose death told the story of France's inability to render justice to its Jewish citizens. In his preface, Rosenzweig, the son of German communists, wrote: En tuant Pierre Goldman, ses assassins, quels qu'ils soient, ont tente de mettre un terme definitif a une histoire que la France traine comme un boulet: celle de la lachete collective d'un peuple qui accepte d'envoyer 'ses' juifs a la mort. (3) In the first survey of the emerging jeune litterature juive presented in 1982, the literary critic Lazare Bitoun explained the impact of Goldman's life and memoirs by pointing to Goldman's rejection of the discourse of victimization. Instead of using the israelite et sa connotation aigre-douce de la langue francaise, Goldman had had the courage to replace it le mot Juif qui revendique et affirme une difference. (4) The opening line from his autobiography Souvenirs obscurs d'un Juif polonais ne en France (published in 1975), which contained in condensed form his historical, generational, and biographical point of departure, was canonized by his peers and the authors following him: suis ne le 22 juin 1944 a Lyon, en France, en France occupee par les nazis (longtemps j'ai pense que j'etais ne et mort le 22 juin 1944).... Je n'avais pas l'age de combattre, mais, a peine en vie, j'eus l'age de pouvoir perir dans les crematoires de Pologne (27). It is this line that Henry Raczymow uses almost ten years later as an epigraph to his novel Un cri sans voix, in which he describes the lethal fate suffered decades after the Shoah by a young Jewish woman whose identification with the resistance fighters from the Warsaw ghetto ultimately leads her to commit suicide in 1982. Another Jewish writer of Goldman's generation, Myriam Anissimov, dedicated one of her books to Goldman. Even authors of Sephardic background, such as the Algerian-born Jean-Luc Allouche, turned to Goldman as a Jew who --because he could never be assimilated--embodied the absolute stranger, the lueur d'une derniere fraternite desesperee. (5) Allouche had remembered in his autobiography how he, a Maghrebi-born Jew, had felt quite vexed by a slogan celebrating solidarity with the student leader Danny Cohn-Bendit during the student protests: . …

The Same Dust, The Same Wind

The Same Dust, The Same Wind How does one do justice to a woman who drove a Ford across the Hindu Kush, yet died in a fall from her bicycle near her home in Switzerland at the age of thirty-four? Annemarie Schwarzenbach is a European cult figure: journalist, noveUst, antifascist, archaeologist, drug addict, world traveler. It is her travel writing—a significant part of her oeuvre—that best illuminates her complex, multifaceted personality. Her journey to Afghanistan with EUa Maillart from 1939 to 1940 is one of her life's most telling episodes , an ambitious, fruitful failure. Maillart's account of the journey, The Cruel Way (London, 1947), has long been considered a classic of travel Uterature. Sadly, though, Schwarzenbach's life and work remain virtually unknown to the English-speaking world, since at the insistence of Schwarzenbach's mother, Renée, Schwarzenbach was fictionalized in the narrative as "Christina." By insisting that Annemarie be transformed into "Christina," Renée Schwarzenbach was merely having the last word in a protracted power strugglebetweentheSchwarzenbachfamilyand itsblacksheep. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was born on May 23, 1908, into one of Switzerland's wealthiest and most conservative industriaUst famuies. Renée was the dominant figure in the family. As a child she had wished to be a boy, and as a mother she transferred this wish to her favorite daughter, Annemarie. She spoke of her chüd playfuUy as her "page" and into Annemarie's teen years liked to dress her daughter as a boy. Annemarie studied history in Zurich and Paris, receiving her doctorate in 1931, at the age of twenty-three. That same year her first novel was published. Despite all her talents and privileges, her life was filled with difficulties. She felt attracted to women early on, and with her androgynous beauty—she had "the face of an inconsolable angel," according to Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard—she was soon embroiled in scandalous affairs. No one was more scandalized than the mother who had unconsciously encouraged her daughter's homosexuality. Schwarzenbach remained dependent on her mother all her life, both financially and emotionally, and despite her frequent rebellions Renée never cut off her often manipulative support. Schwarzenbach met Klaus and Erika Mann when she was twentytwo . Their father, Thomas Mann, mentions her more than sixty times in The Missouri Review · 89 his diaries between 1933 and 1940. The Mann siblings, both gay writers, introduced her to an environment in which she could develop freely. But they also introduced her, directly or indirectly, to drugs; addiction haunted Schwarzenbach for the rest ofher life. Her Ufelong relationship with the Mann siblings was often rocky, due to Schwarzenbach's emotional instabiUty and her unrequited passion for Erika Mann. After Hitler's rise to power the Mann siblings were leading figures in the Uterary and antifascist exUe scene, and Schwarzenbach often sponsored their initiatives. Schwarzenbach has sometimes been portrayed as a dedicated antifascist resistance fighter. She certainly supported the cause but did not entirely feel comfortable in the role of hero. Her constant struggle with depression made it difficult for her to commit herseU fuUy. Renée took great exception to Annemarie's friendship with the Manns. In November 1934 the conflict came to a head: the Pfeffermühle, Erika Mann's legendary political cabaret in Zurich, was disrupted by gangs of profascist rowdies and ultimately forced to close. The Manns suspected Renée's involvement (their suspicions are now considered unfounded) and took Annemarie to task for it. At the time of the scandal , Annemarie had been on an archaeological expedition in Persia. Immediately upon her return she took up the matter with her family and openly expressed her support for the antifascists. Her relationship with the Manns suffered nonetheless. Under the strain of this conflict Schwarzenbach attempted suicide in January 1935. That April she traveled to Persia to marry, against her parents' will, the gay French diplomat Claude Clarac, whom she had met the previous year in Persia. In October 1936 she accepted the invitation of her friend and sometime lover Barbara Hamilton-Wright to travel to America, where Erika Mann was working on the American debut of the Pfeffermühle. Schwarzenbach's...

An Anthropologist's (New?) Dress Code: Some Brief Comments on a Comparative Cosmopolitanism

In his provocative article Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the 'New World Society' in this issue of Cultural Anthropology, James Ferguson wants anthropologists to pay attention to Africans who deploy Western discursive genres and sartorial fashions to claim membership in a global imagined community. He argues that anthropologists generally ignore such people: We are embarrassed by the scandal of Africans who want to like because we need cultural difference in order to make countermodern critiques of the West. Ferguson notes that this embarrassment parallels the distaste colonial administrators felt for the cheeky African, the savvy boy, or the trousered African. In that sense, the colonialist's and the anthropologist's dress codes ironically converge. We are discomforted when our informants are (and here Ferguson borrows Bhabha's phrase) quite/not white because we would rather that our subalterns resist than assimilate. And this affects the ways we theorize gestures of similitude, or mimesis. When Africans become possessed by the spirits of colonial officers and froth at the mouth like mad dogs, or when Africans parade the boulevard like the most foppish of flaneurs, we want to interpret such acts of mimesis as either or appropriation. Mimesis as parody is subversive rebellion, while mimesis as appropriation is covert resistance wherein natives maintain ancient traditions disguised as assimilation. For Ferguson, this kind of theorizing about mimesis also tends toward a misplaced optimism. Natives who parody or appropriate get patted on the back for their agency. They are portrayed as heroes in a struggle-as resistance fighters or tricksters. In celebrating them we fail to emphasize enough the fact that real borders in the new world order are not permeable-that modernity is about maintaining and even exacerbating material inequities. Indeed, we fail to emphasize that a good deal of mimesis itself is precisely a local effort to overcome this fact. The more mundane and prosaic forms of mimesis-the beseeching or angry letters that frame Ferguson's article-tell us this if we would only listen.

Renovating politics in contemporary Vietnam

Introduction: Dissidents and Democratization in Vietnam. Politics in Vietnam. The Nhan Van-Giai Pham Affair and the Legacy of Dissent. The Debates over Democratization and Legalization. The Battle over Intellectual Freedom and Freedom of the Press. The Club of Former Resistance Fighters: Dissension from Within. Religious Freedom and Civil Society. The VCP: Coping with Internal Dissent and External Pressure.

Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation (review)

edited by Esther Fuchs. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999. 148 pp. $30.00.The experience of the has been written about and told mostly by men. In the past decade, a small but growing literature of women's experiences during the has emerged. Some argue that focusing on gender differences trivializes their experience by making invidious comparisons among victims, or detracts from the notion that Jews were persecuted because they were Jews. Nonetheless, testimonies and memoirs by women survivors reveal that Nazi theory and practice impacted males and females differently, and gender roles affected how men and women handled their experience, and how they remember and narrate their stories.This edited volume adds to this small but growing literature that gives voice to women's experiences. It shows a variety of ways in which scholars can highlight women's experiences by using gender as an analytical category in understanding how the victimized women and men differently.Women and the contains eleven diverse contributions. For instance, in Lesbians and the Holocaust R. Amy Elman convincingly shows how gender impacted Nazi policy and persecution against homosexuals. She argues that Nazi legislation prohibited male homosexuality but not lesbianism, because lesbians posed a less serious threat to the Nazis than gay men since they were fewer in number, politically less prominent, and harder to identify. In Reproduction and Resistance During the Holocaust, Katharina von Kellenbach frames genocide as an attack on women's reproductive functioning. She argues that becoming pregnant and giving birth during the was an act of resistance against the Nazi policy of genocide as it presents the possibility of a future to Jews.Two chapters deal with representation in film. Laurence Baron's Women as Resistance Fighters in Recent Popular Films: Case of Hanna Senesh and Helen Moszkiewiez shows how gender can be exploited in feature films. By comparing their representations in films to their historical record, Baron shows how directors embellished the stories and fabricated new episodes for dramatic or political purposes. Likewise, in The Construction of Heroines in Films: Jewess as Beautiful Soul, Esther Fuchs, the volume editor, examines how women heroines are portrayed in a small sample of films from 1950s through the 1990s. She argues that Jewish heroines are consistently idealized in traditionally female ways, as compassionate, idealistic, hopeful, humble, altruistic, and optimistic.In Women as Agents of Suffering and Redemption in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs, Erlis Glass Wickersham focuses on the representation of women in the poetry of this Nobel Laureate. …

The Power of Solitude: My Life in the German Resistance

'Dearly beloved Child of my Heart, we are probably standing at the end of our beautiful and rich life together. Because tomorrow the People's Court intends to sit in judgment on me and others. I hear that we have been expelled from the army. They can take the uniform from us, but not the spirit in which we acted' - Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, in a letter to his wife. Marion Yorck von Wartenburg was involved in the Nazi resistance group known as the Kreisau Circle, whose co-founder was her husband, Peter. The Kreisau Circle participated in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Peter's cousin Claus Stauffen-berg and other members of the military resistance carried out the attempt. When they failed, hundreds of people were arrested, tried, and executed, including Peter. Marion and other members of the conspirators' families were also arrested and spent months jailed under miserable conditions. In this memoir Marion recreates the terrifying reality of her life as the wife of a resistance fighter and at the same time conveys the depth of the bond that existed between her and her husband. Julie M. Winter is co-director of the Foreign Language Institute in Helena, Montana, and the author of Luther Bible Research in the Context of Volkish Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. Peter Hoffmann is William Kingsford Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal. His works include Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944.

Shooting for a Jewish State: College Basketball Players and the 1947 U.S. Fundraising Campaign for the Jewish Revolt against the British in Palestine

Readers of Freedom, the newsletter of the New York-based Palestine Resistance Committee, found a rather unusual announcement buried at the bottom of the back page of the August 1947 issue: the committee had recruited a basketball team that will play at summer resorts for the benefit of the Resistance Fighters, that is, the Jewish underground militias fighting to wrest control of Mandatory Palestine from its British administrators. The team boasts such outstanding college stars as Lionel Malamed, Vince Verdeschi, Richard Sherman, and the former St. Johns and Columbia ace—Lucio Rossini, the newsletter continues. All of these stars will donate their time and effort to bring funds and recognition to the fight for Freedom in Palestine. Games were scheduled for a number of the most prominent resort hotels in the Catskills, including the Harmony Country Club, the Flagler Hotel, Hotel Windsor, and others.

Cartoons from Another Planet: Japanese Animation as Cross‐Cultural Communication

Geisha, samurai, kimono, sushi, sumo ...eccentric mind-boggling animation? For years, Japanese animation has been heralded as an exciting, albeit bizarre, artistic phenomenon from the same country that introduced us to the tranquil Zen garden and the shockingly hard-working businessman. Despite often being stereotyped as nothing more than senseless cartoons featuring cutie-pie romping pocket critters, anime, as it is commonly called, is a delightfully inventive reference manual into the world of Japanese symbols, folklore, religion, history, social musings and aesthetic traditions. When audience members are no longer exclusively Japanese, anime unexpectedly becomes a vehicle for cross-cultural communication. Examining the history of anime distribution and fan appreciation in America is a free-for-all revelation into the effects of cultural appropriation, as well as a reflection of Western mores and artistic preferences. It also serves as an example of how art forms can cross national boundaries, uniting audiences from all over the globe under the guise of pure unadulterated entertainment. Disney fans beware; the following just might have dear Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic freezer! Don't Call Me a Cartoon Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a beautiful princess trapped in a shining castle. One moonlit night, a handsome prince rode up on his brilliant white horse and rescued her to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, being the cyberpunk flesh-craving gamine cyborg that she was, the princess had to neuromancer his brain, then decapitate and eat him. Naturally the prince, a genetically engineered resistance fighter, willingly sacrifices himself to her vampire-like appetite in accordance to his people's code of honor. But I digress... This is not your father's animation. Nor is it really yours. Or is it? Welcome to the world of Japanese a world where any imaginable subject, setting, or theme can pretty much find itself represented in the likeness of entertainment. Anime (a term borrowed from the French by the Japanese to refer to the entire medium of but adopted by the West to refer solely to animation from Japan, go figure) is an art form used to tell stories in ways barely even alluded to in Western animation. In America especially, with the Disney name brand practically inseparable from the word animation, this particular art form unfortunately suffers a restricted and limited fate. Animation here is predominantly kiddy fair (or at least stereotyped as such), stuck in the overly exhausted realm of fairy tales with manufactured happy endings and token animal sidekicks voiced by television comedians who were annoying enough before they were animated. American animation that veers away from the socalled harmless Disney model (Bambi is excluded; I still find it traumatizing!) always seems to be forced into sub-cultural, limited exposure film festivals labeled with names such as Sick and Twisted. This is not to say that anime (also called Japanimation) is only intended for older viewing generations. Much of it is highly geared to appeal to youngsters of a variety of ages. Japanese however, does have a much freer palette from which to choose its audience and subject matter. It is hard to think of any cinematic or literary genre that is not represented in anime. Within the medium of Japanese you can find: wrenching dramas, cheesy romances, storybook adventures, spooky thrillers, historical fantasies, robot shows, gothic fairy tales, slapstick parodies, futuristic dystopias, sports dramas, sci-fi series, gimmicky sci-fi series, sexy cyberpunk techno-- mythologies, misogynistic violent pornography, sword and sorcery stories, spoofs of sword and sorcery stories, epic environmental cautionary tales, Norse Goddess romantic comedies, not to mention your normal, everyday life family soap operas. All of this is achieved with nowhere near the stratospheric budgets allotted to big Disney productions, which tend to reach skyward of $100 million. …

Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997

At Wanping, around 50 kilometres from the centre of Beijing, the shots that began the eight-year war between China and Japan were fired in 1937. On the site there now stands the Memorial Museum of the Chinese People's War of Resistance to Japan (the museum's own translation of its title, Zhongguo renmin kang-Ri zhanzheng jinianguan). Inside, a wide array of materials is displayed, but among the most prominent are the waxwork diorama reconstructions of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese. One such display shows a Japanese scientist in a white coat, intent on carrying out a gruesome bacteriological warfare experiment, plunging his scalpel into the living, trussed-up body of a Chinese peasant resistance fighter. But just in case this is not enough to drive the message home, the museum designers have added a refinement: a motor inside the waxwork of the peasant, which makes his body twitch jerkily as if in response to the scalpel, an unending series of little movements until the switch is turned off at closing time.

Renato Constantino, 1919-1999

After an arduous and protracted illness, Renato Constantino (humanist, anti-japanese resistance fighter, paramount social scientist of his nation, teacher, and journalist extraordinaire) has tragically departed from our lives. He was a shaft of dazzling analytical light, of generosity combined with a compulsive desire to write and to persuade but never to coerce. His decades-long writing and struggles against imperialism remain his lasting testament to humanity. He enriched his friends, and thousands of readers and students in the Philippines and elsewhere, who had the privilege of being enlightened by him.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Ernst Trier Mørch: inventor, medical pioneer, heroic freedom fighter.

Ernst Trier Mørch: inventor, medical pioneer, heroic freedom fighter.

Werner Ernst Reichardt Ph.D: founder of modern computational visual neurophysiology and anti-Nazi resistance fighter.

Werner Ernst Reichardt was born on January 30, 1924 in Berlin and at age 19 was drafted into the Luftwaffe and assigned to an electronic signals section laboratory. He became an active member of a resistance group and supplied radios for the movement in Germany. He emerged from the ashes of the Second World War and dedicated his scientific life to the development of the newborn specialty of biological physics. Following graduation from the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, he did a fellowship at CalTech under Max Delbrück. On returning to Germany he joined the Max Planck Institut and later became Director of the Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik in Tübingen, West Germany. Reichardt was one of the founders of the quantitative study of visually controlled orientation in animals. His work is very nearly unique in its close dialectic between elegant non-linear mathematical theory and quantitative experimental test of their predictions. During the 1950s Reichardt and his collaborators jointly developed an autocorrelation model (i.e. the firing rate of the involved visual neurones is closely correlated with the features of the pattern stimulating them) of how moving patterns are perceived by motion detectors in the visual system of the fly. This was the first mathematical description of a biological abstraction process. His findings apply to vertebrate vision, including motion detection and figure-ground description in human vision. His Max Planck Institute became a world renowned center for the computational approach to information processing by the nervous system. At his retirement party from the Institute he founded, Reichardt died on the evening of September 11th, 1992.

Die Angst kam erst danach. Judische Frauen im Widerstand 1939-1945

Strobl, Ingrid. Die Angst kam erst danach. Judische Frauen im Widerstand 19391945. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998. 479 pp. DM 28.00 paperback. Ingrid Strobl's new book, complete with illustrations and an extensive bibliography, is much more than an expansion of her impressive study Das Feld des Vergessens. Judischer Widerstand und deutsche Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (1996), which also examines women's anti-fascist resistance, including armed resistance. Traditionally historians have avoided the latter topic. Even the women who took up arms were often not inclined to publicize their resistance activities for fear of appearing unfeminine. Moreover, Strobl points out, the specific tasks women were engaged in, saving lives by caring for the infirm and children, including rescuing children from deportation, tend to be considered mere rather than a vital part of the resistance. Yet, their underground social work was no less important and effective in opposing the Nazis than armed resistance and guerilla activities. Rarely cited, decorated, or rewarded, female members of the many different resistance movements and networks were reduced to a position of inferiority or insignificance, and their skills and their were underrated, if not belittled, by their male fellow fighters and male historians. Die Angst kam erst danach is a comprehensive study organized according to geography, culture, and nationality. The countries under examination are France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Poland. In each case, Strobl evaluates female resistance in the context of cultural trends and the history of the country's occupation. Strobl establishes the history of women in various resistance movements by tracing the experiences of individual women. Extremely well informed about the mission and politics of different groups and organizations that, like the Communist resistance, had Jewish women as their members, including Jewish organizations, religious and Zionist, Strobl moves from the unique individual case to larger trends. She provides insight into an intricate network of resistance activities, at the same time revealing the mobility of certain women activists who pursued their dangerous missions under different guises and identities as best they could. In the second part of Die Angst kam erst danach, Strobl examines the background of Jewish women resistance fighters and the conditions under which they performed their dangerous tasks. She reveals that most of the women joined the resistance at a young age. While they came from all walks of life, many of them had a traditional family background. Many were members of the lower middle class. It seems no coincidence that a large number of them were women with international experience; they or their families had lived in more than one country. The fact that many of them had experienced the loss of a parent or gone through a divorce seems to have contributed to their sense of independence and love of freedom. …

Confessions of a Palestinian Returnee

In this essay, a Palestinian refugee and resistance fighter recounts his thoughts and feelings upon returning to Gaza with the Palestine Authority in 1994. Shifting between memories of exile and the present, the author finds that the "dream" of the homeland nurtured during twenty years of exile does not match the reality and moves from bitterness to resignation to a note of cautious optimism.

'This Inquisitive Age': Past and Present in the Scottish Enlightenment

1 Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present/1 So wrote Marc Bloch, French social historian and patriot, whose own involvement with the leading events of his time he became a Resistance fighter during the German occupation of his homeland led to his tragic death in front of a Nazi firing squad in 1944. Many historians in other ages have shared Bloch's acute sense of the inevitable interplay between past and present, 'this solidarity of the ages' as he memorably called it. It is not only that history is intended to reflect upon the age which writes it, but that the historian unavoidably does facilitate that precious connectivity; that, in other words, the author of history cannot avoid both shaping the past and re-formulating the present: these are, perhaps, the common understandings of most self aware historians in most ages. To take a particularly stark example from our own times, the publication of English Society 1688-1832 by Jonathan Clark in 1985 was marked by violent abuse of those historians whose errors its author claimed could be attributed to the

Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic

In 1961 the East German writer, Hedda Zinner, wrote a stage play, Ravensbriicker Ballade (the 'Ballad of Ravensbrick').' This anti-fascist play was a homage to the approximately 132,000 female prisoners who were interned in this concentration camp and the more than 70 outer camps during the second world war.2 It is based on fact and tells of the rescue of the prisoner, Wera. The remarkable feature of this play is that the situation in Ravensbriick concentration camp is described in a very realistic way. For example, it tells of the tension between the so-called 'criminal' and 'political' prisoners. The play was praised in East Germany not only by the media, but also by the general public. Maybe the painful recognition of many survivors was a reason for this appreciation. In connection with the fortieth anniversary of the capitulation of the Third Reich, a version of Ravensbriicker Ballade was prepared for East German television in 1985. Suddenly, however, orders were issued from political superiors to stop the production. What had happened since its first performance in 1961 to justify the play's suppression? It became evident that Otto Funke, chairman of the East German 'Committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters', had used his influence to stop the TV production. Funke argued that the role of the 'nonpolitical' and 'anti-social' prisoners was over-emphasized. According to Funke, the play also gave too much prominence to the fact that a political prisoner collapsed under pressure from the SS and committed treason, while an 'anti-social' prisoner behaved heroically. Finally, he claimed that the SS was presented in too broad a light. Hedda Zinner argued in vain that she had researched very thoroughly, and that hero-worship was the worst enemy of the heroic. Her protest, however, appeared to be of no use, and the suppression of the play was upheld. This censorship in 1985 of an anti-fascist stage play that had been praised in 1961

"An Unholy Inquisition"

DV: You call this An Unholy Inquisition; don't you like being closely questioned? JF: About as much as a resistance fighter being interrogated by Gestapo or an atheist by Inquisition! But I don't, as some seem to think, just blindly disregard academics. Certainly not so much as that little gibe I put in dedication to Behind Magus essay (For CIRCE and all other tomb-robbers) might suggest. The Circe there is real, charming Kirki Kephalea who teaches at Athens University, but by the other tomb-robbers I was sniffing like a fox at other academics. Most academics want facts, facts, facts, and of course I know that their pursuit is profoundly useful. It's just that my daily, present world sometimes seems very remote from theirs. Novels are like old love affairs, there is so much, not all bad, that one doesn't want to talk about, so much one can't. A great deal of all novels' beauty and excitement for writer lies in now in which they were or are being written. Like most I am a bit manic depressive, though poles for me seem to lie much more between a writing self and a non-entity. One self knows profoundly it is neither important nor socially relevant at all; another, far rarer, seems sometimes possessed. I feel identity with average tribal shaman. DV: How do you feel about state of arts, especially novel, at end of millennium? JF: I should guess I'm more optimistic than most. I don't like way pessimism - black, absurdist view - has so often become fashionable - a supposed proof that artist really understands world - during this century. This isn't to dismiss its only too real and manifold cruelties and horrors, just to question whether black view isn't being exploited because it's so much easier to maintain and defend than its opposite. Optimism, however slight, always relies on an element of rational, of realism. I don't believe we shall ever achieve valid art through formlessness and unthinking hazard. We need less of would-be all-comprehending vision, and more of honest craftsmanship. Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche sent this century, almost as much by being misunderstood as reverse, through a prolonged typhoon, but there seem signs that planet is trying to right itself from wreckage. Many of our changes of direction already seem wrong in retrospect, and we now realize better what a dangerous evil-fascinated species we are. I am torn, believing arts must be allowed to evolve. Attempts to stop that are futile. At moment I'm just reading a very good new poetic novel (Philip Marsden's The Bronski House, 1995) about history of Poland during this century: its endless and catastrophes, destruction of all stable family life . . . yet somehow something seems to survive amid horrors and holocausts. In a way it resembles that of poor old novel, how in spite of countless invasions by visual arts it still makes a nonsense of that silly question I've been hearing most of my adult life: Is novel dead? Like Poland, it isn't! DV: In past, you have indicated that you have half a dozen or so unfinished novels. If I recall correctly, Daniel Martin once fell into such a category. Do you have any plans for revising and publishing any of these? Your readers are anxiously awaiting next Fowles novel. Do you have any plans for a new novel? JF: I can't pretend I sit on a hoard of unfinished books and am obsessed with being published. I should loathe being so bound. There are two possibilities. I have talked publicly of one, usually a sure way of aborting any project. It is a novel set in a quasi-mythical Balkans. I've been fiddling with that for nearly a decade now and my feelings towards it remain impossibly mobile and fluid. I reconceive it every month or so. This is a pleasant experience for a unique and only reader (myself), but a nightmare for anyone else, including publishers. …

In the Aftermath of Nazi-Germany: Alexsander Mitscherlich and Psychoanalysis -- Legend and Legacy

In the Aftermath of Nazi-Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and Psychoanalysis — Legend and Legacy* Karen Brecht The First Post-War Legend Regarding Psychoanalysis in Germany In 1977 the German Psychoanalytical Association (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung—DPV) invited the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) to Berlin for one of its next international conferences, which resulted in a heated discussion in the business meeting of that congress in Jerusalem. The invitation was turned down and only later accepted, in a modified form—Hamburg instead of Berlin. Until then little had been known in the DPV about the involvement of German psychoanalysts with the Nazis. Most German publications on the history of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich, originating as they did from contemporary witnesses who presented the analysts as victims, were apologetic and not really informative (Baumeyer 1971; Boehm 1951; Kemper 1973). The picture of German psychoanalysts presented by oral history was one of secret resistance fighters and inner emigrants. There were only two critical reports, but little attention was paid to these (Thomä 1963; Dräger 1971). Käthe Dräger had been one of the psychoanalysts in the “Göring Institute” and a communist, and so was also a contemporary witness. Helmut Thomä, on the other hand, was one of the post-war generation of psychoanalysts and was senior physician in the Psychosomatic Clinic in Heidelberg. Not until the mid-70s was research carried out—and then not yet in Germany—which testifies to, and even documents, the involvement of German psychoanalysts with the Nazis (Cocks 1975; Huber 1977)—but in 1977 they were not yet known in Germany. 1 [End Page 291] In addition to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, newly founded in 1953, and for seven years the only institute of the DPV (founded three years earlier in 1950) there were, in 1977, six other DPV institutes in West Germany and four study group. 2 They all owed their existence to a boom in psychoanalysis resulting from the student movement and Alexander Mitscherlich’s public influence. 3 He saw himself as the founder of post-war psychoanalysis in Germany and was seen as its representative by the general public. His political notoriety and influence created an atmosphere in the West German institutes which led, at least the candidates and younger psychoanalysts—and they had become by now the majority in the DPV—to believe that German psychoanalysts had resisted rather than collaborated with the National Socialists. At that time, 1977, it was even felt by some that the invitation to hold an IPA-Congress in Germany would not have been rejected if Mitscherlich had issued it. The painful disillusionment and the destruction of the legend of the innocent past precipitated by the IPA’s rejection of the German invitation marked the background of our exhibition (Brecht et al. 1985/1993). It led me, furthermore, to investigate the strange phenomenon that the passionate champion of truth and courageous critic Alexander Mitscherlich became, through his actions, a figure who obstructed the view of the true history of psychoanalysis in Germany and the involvement of German psychoanalysts with the Nazis (Brecht 1988). How was this possible? And what does this mean? These were the questions which aroused my interest and which formed the basis for my exploration. This is only a preliminary attempt to shape this phenomenon out of the facts already known and to suggest reasons for it. The Second Legend of Post-War Psychoanalysis in Germany I have already hinted at this. In the sixties and seventies Mitscherlich was the representative of psychoanalysis in West Germany and was seen as the founder of post-war psychoanalysis. This image was based on his own self-image and the [End Page 292] manner in which he presented himself both to the general public and to those specialized circles which, because of their distance from Berlin, knew little about the painful and dramatic developments concerning the founding of the DPV 4 (Brecht 1985/1993, 192–218). This was particularly true for the Psychosomatic Clinic in Heidelberg, which had been founded by Mitscherlich in 1949. Founders of the later established institutes in Hamburg, Stuttgart-Tübingen, Ulm, Kassel, Munich, and Heidelberg-Karlsruhe came from that clinic in Heidelberg...

Patchwork politics in the Netherlands, 1946-50: women, gender and the world war II trauma[1]

Abstract This paper describes the campaign launched in 1946 by a prominent Dutch feminist, resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, to make women wear so-called National Celebration Skirts, homemade patchwork skirts constructed of, for instance, old pieces of cloth of family members and friends that were killed by the Germans or of Jewish children hiding from the German persecutors. The skirts were to be worn on public holidays as well as in private celebrations. The campaigners supposed that by making such skirts women could cope with their wartime experiences. The Celebration Skirt is analysed as a female mode of political expression to be understood in the context of the politics of war, reconstruction and gender. The story of the skirt refutes some standard Dutch historiography on (the failure of) post-war renewal; it gives new information on what happened to women after the war, and on the ways in which some women tried to overcome their grief; and it contributes to the women's studies deb...