Female Exiles in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Europe

FEMALE EXILES IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE

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FEMALE EXILES IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE

Edited By Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn

FEMALE EXILES IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE

Copyright © Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8369–5 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8369–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Elena and Gabriel, Mikki and Saskia

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CONTENTS

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn

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The Grammar of Contested Memory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts of Diaspora Mary S. Vásquez

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Part I The Political and Personal: History, War, and Resistance Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria: Voice of the Anti-Franco Movement (1939–1975) Mary Ann Dellinger Female Voices of Resistance in Neus Català’s De la resistencia y la deportación: The Triumph of Life, Dignity, and Solidarity during the Holocaust Maureen Tobin Stanley Off the Record: Voices of Ordinary Jewish Survivors of the Shoah Marion Gerlind Part II

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Literature and the Arts

Dancing Out of Bounds: Valeska Gert in Berlin and New York Sydney Jane Norton

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CONTENTS

A Gypsy in Exile: “Home” and “Nostalgia” in Creative Works by the Austrian Romni Ceija Stojka Gesa Zinn

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Passion and Participation: Motherhood and Exile in the Works of María Teresa León María del Mar López-Cabrales

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Wife, Whore, Witch: The Portrayal of Violence in the Works of Mercè Rodoreda Victoria L. Ketz

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The Four Free Walls of Paris: Nivaria Tejera’s Exiles in Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución María Hernández-Ojeda

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Part III Immigration, Integration, and Community in Contemporary Europe: Culture as Articulated in Language, On the Body, and within Space How to Eat Würstel: Two Generations of Female Shoah Exiles in London Eva Eppler Multiculturalism and Citizenship in the United Kingdom: The Case of Female Genital Mutilation Anouk Guiné and Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes Rising above the Bottom of German Society: Reflections on Interviews with Female Roma Refugees from Former Yugoslavia Monika Halpaap

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List of Contributors

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Index

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LIST OF FIGURES

Leave by Joellyn Rock Bird in the Bush by Carla Stetson “Valeska Gert in Canaille (Whore)” (1925). Photograph by Suse Byk. Courtesy Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln Sommer (1992) by Ceija Stojka. Courtesy of Patricia Meier-Rogan Excerpt (1997) by Jayme Christine Mourning “my evening’s joy” (2005). Part of a series of works, Widow’s Weeds, by Janice D. Kmetz

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104 126 138

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

e would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance given to us by friends, colleagues, the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and of course, our families. In particular, we would like to mention our two thorough research assistants Emily Mowchan and Brianna DeSanto. We kindly appreciate the proofing by Kärin Haidos, Milan Kovacovic, Thomas Stanley, Janelle Wilson, and Eileen Zeitz, who provided invaluable suggestions, as well as all others who helped bring this volume to fruition. We especially extend our gratitude to reputed artist Joellyn Rock, who coordinated the artwork included in this anthology.

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INTRODUCTION Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn

emale Exiles in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Europe represents an effort to raise consciousness about the marginalization of exiled women within one hundred years of European history. Despite their many differences, the women studied in this anthology have at least one thing in common: they live in exile. They perceive themselves or are perceived as “other” within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe. Exile, immigration and transience all constitute an interstitial reality that permeates every aspect of existence. This type of existence, as “living in the margins,” is a construct that is not causally linked to a specific place, ethnicity, religion, or social status, for exile experiences are plentiful and varied, spanning the socioeconomic, ideological, ethnic, geographical, and generational gamut. We must stress the paradox of the uniqueness of individual exiles as they, in turn, contribute to the multiplicity and plurality of exile. A number of historical events of the twentieth century gave rise to migration, immigration, and exile to and within the European continent. Borders have crumbled, nations have been (re)built, and peoples have been displaced. The Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Francoist Regime, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, various revolutions and persecutions, and the formation of the European Union (EU) have all been catalysts for displacement. Today, the EU is a banner for progressive ideals.1 In essence, it has shaped how human beings in the twentieth century perceive culture, identity, and home. With its ambitious ideals has come the promise of hope for a better way of life that promotes unity by bringing together states and ethnically, culturally, and economically diverse peoples. This dream, in turn, has resulted in an influx and fluctuation of various populations, some in light of wars and ethnic strife. For example, between 1988 and 1998 asylum applications in Spain totaled 81,980; in France 355,470; in the United Kingdom, 416,990; and in Germany, 2,119,850. Overall, the EU member

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states of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom received 4,050,280 asylum applications within that ten-year span (van Selm 230). Since 1989 and the reemergence of civil war and ethnic conflict—especially in the Balkans—the plight of those displaced by conflict and turmoil has added to the large-scale migrations that include the displaced as well as those seeking employment and opportunities, both legally and illegally. Women make up an often overlooked portion of uprooted populations. As authors and editors of this book we offer small glimpses into twentiethand twenty-first-century women’s exilic experiences within Europe, in order to shed light on gendered exile experiences in general that result from women’s marginality in all of history, not just those stemming from recent events. In times of geopolitical change, beliefs and values are in flux, resulting in the questioning of allegiances. Exiles are subjects in transit. Hence, it is not uncommon for the exiled to ponder: Where do I belong? Who am I? In compiling this anthology, we wish to investigate who these exiles are, how they perceive themselves or how they are perceived by others, in order to open a dialogue about their lives, their influence on history and culture, and their self-understanding as expressed in their art and writing, as well as in their public and private lives. These exiled women are examples of cultural hybrids. The cultural critic Edward Said expressed it this way: “The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybrids that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” We explore the trauma of geopolitical exiles that, as cultural hybrids, are transplanted from one place to another in the fight for survival; more importantly we would like to investigate their exile as a mental construct. Both inner and outer exiles often bring with them the awareness of linguistic and cultural dislocation, resulting in mourning for lost dimensions of self, shattered communities, and disrupted traditions. The outcome is a rebuilding of structures reminiscent of the former “there”: a place, a family, or a home. It was the social critic Benedict Anderson who spoke of the “construction” of home as nation or community. Home as community can be created within the literary imagination. And, as these women’s experiences as well as their literary or artistic production show, home is ultimately a state of mind, and consequently so, we believe, is exile. Exile, then, it appears, is an end and a new beginning, a rupture and a (re)construction. It is an existence in flux, one in which hope for a better future occupies a large space in women’s minds, often in the form of myths and dreams as they move beyond border living. Yet, as we see in some of the essays, a real “beyond” is not always given, for the past cannot be left behind.

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That is why cultural critic Homi Bhabha speaks of beginnings and endings as “sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle,” he believes, “we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.” Like Benedict Anderson and theorist Victor Turner, Bhabha underlines the existence of imaginary homelands in exile experiences. We, too, affirm that the women studied within this volume create, write, and articulate new spaces. Their new female realities constitute “home” precisely after the crossing of geographical, spatial, and mental borders. The “beyond,” thus, marks a spatial distance. For Edward Said, exile “marks progress” and “promises the future.” This is certainly true for some of the exiles in our essays, yet not for all. In some cases they yearn for promise yet do not discernibly progress; others fall victim to despair. Yet all of the women’s exilic experiences contained within our volume describe the very act of going beyond into, as Bhabha articulates, the “unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’ which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced.” It follows, then, that exile experiences by women teach us how diverse discontinuities and inequalities are, then and now, and how women—a vast section of displaced people—are still in the minority in terms of a written body of work that addresses their recounting and recollection of their dislocation. As authors of this book, we invite you to learn more about the exile experiences of women within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe, for we believe that you will discover, just like feminist scholar Hélène Cixous, that exile “is an uncomfortable situation, though it is also a magical situation . . . [Exiles can] endure it differently. Some exiles die of rage, some transform their exile into a country . . . Some exiles can draw joy from rage” (qtd. in Heitlinger). Exile can be a sign of marginalization resulting from geographic displacement, or a celebrated interstitial reality between borders and identities. Despite the uniqueness of each individual’s exilic experience, there is one unifying trait among these female exiles: their hybridity. Within this volume, we scrutinize, study, and analyze the manner in which they cope with and express their hybrid condition. Although it frequently constitutes a form of geographical displacement, exile is most significant for being a state of mind. The hybridity of exilic reality is precisely what the critics within our volume study. Each exiled woman carries her cultural home within her, which she brings to her host culture. Not infrequently, the conflict between the old and the new home results in homesickness and nostalgia. Roberta Rubenstein refers to this conflict as a “longing for belonging.” For Rubenstein “homesickness” is a spatial/geographical separation; whereas “nostalgia” constitutes a temporal separation. In other

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words, one can return to a space, but not to a previous time when one occupied that space. Rubenstein states that “the original home is less an actual place than a site located in memory and fantasy, a psychic space invested with nostalgia for an idealized notion of wholeness. By the time it can be imagined, home is always already lost” (127). Longing for home, thus, becomes “a yearning for recovery or return to the idea of a nurturing, unconditionally accepting place/space” (Rubenstein 4). Needless to say, “home” inhabits psychic space and temporality, for it is an idealized view of a crystallized moment in time within a particular space. The French feminist psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva ponders the possibility of happiness for the displaced individual. Kristeva queries, Can one be a foreigner and [be] happy? The foreigner calls for a new idea of happiness. Between the fugue and the origin: a fragile limit, a temporary homeostasis. Posited, present, sometimes certain, that happiness knows nevertheless that it is passing by . . . The strange happiness of the foreigner consists in maintaining that fleeing eternity or the perpetual transience. (4)

And, it is within their “fleeing eternity” and “perpetual transience” that these women negotiate and create the psychic reality of “home” within exile. In spite of their marginality, which stems from geographic displacement as well as from gender, the female exiles studied within this anthology seek a sense of belonging. It is our aim to give voice to the displaced who long for belonging, whose voices have been silenced or were silent far too long. Although all exile experiences are unique, many share common characteristics as one will soon discover in reading this volume. Women’s voices speak of new beginnings, elation, disappointment, homesickness, nostalgia, pain, and, sometimes, peace. Like a chorus, they echo what was, is, and will be part of (geo)political, outer and inner exile. Yet, their individual voices are heard as well. Due to sociohistorical circumstances, some women have been silenced on various levels, whereas others have simply not been equipped to voice their plight. In this collection of essays, scholars from various fields within the United States and Europe bring to light the stories of the displaced and make their voices be heard, so that we might hear, see, and appreciate their unique qualities and contributions as political figures, writers, artists, and everyday women. In an attempt to reflect the plurality of women’s voices, we have organized our volume into three overlapping sections. Mary S. Vásquez’s study of the permutations of female exile, “The Grammar of Contested Memory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts of Diaspora,” is featured as an overarching introduction to the book. Vásquez

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analyzes the underlying structure of gendered exilic writings, that is the “grammar of contested memory.” As an acclaimed authority on twentiethcentury Spanish literature (literature of the Civil War, postwar writers, narrative under Franco, and Spanish women writers) as well as on U.S. Latino literature, Vásquez provides an overview of multiple exile experiences before studying in detail the writings of Spaniards María Teresa León, Carme Riera, and María Zambrano. The remaining essays are structured as follows. The first section encompasses essays on “The Political and Personal: History, War, and Resistance.” The second section, “Literature and the Arts,” includes essays on literary and artistic figures whose works respond to the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy that plagued the twentieth century. The third section of the volume addresses cultural expression within exile through “Immigration, Integration, and Community in Contemporary Europe: Culture as Articulated in Language, on the Body and within Space.” The Political and Personal: History, War, and Resistance The Marxist Dolores Ibárruri, also known as the iconic and legendary Pasionaria, was elected to the Spanish Congress in 1936 during the Spanish Republic. The onset of the Civil War and the fall of the Republic forced Pasionaria to seek exile in Russia, from where she headed the Spanish Communist Party. Mary Ann Dellinger “explores the dynamics of Ibárruri’s political activism as the voice of resistance.” Dellinger studies twenty speeches and articles that attest to Ibárruri’s conviction and commitment to the people of Spain. Through her exilic oratory and writing, Ibárruri proved her undying commitment that resulted in her “iconic stature as the anti-Franco.” Dellinger claims that Ibárruri eluded the existential crisis that plagues exiled individuals due to a vital fact: that this Spanish woman constructed her personal identity by assuming the persona of and becoming Pasionaria. As Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri incarnated the ideals of the Spanish Republic. Maureen Tobin Stanley, coeditor of this volume, also studies Spanish female exile. It is estimated that 10,000 Spaniards—400 of whom were women—were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps with the implicit endorsement of Franco’s regime. Tobin Stanley looks at Neus Català’s compilation of testimonials of over fifty Spanish women active in the French Resistance, many of whom were deported to the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück (Germany). Tobin Stanley studies aspects of the 1931 Spanish Republican Constitution, the United Nation’s 1948

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1978 Spanish Constitution to show that these women of humble background embraced humanity politically, personally, and morally. The democratic climate in the final decades of the twentieth century fostered Català’s efforts to make known the dual fight for peace and women’s rights. Tobin Stanley observes that the female voices recorded by Català are proof of feminist moral psychologist Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care,” a gendered moral reasoning that privileges human bonds. These female camp survivors profess their moral—and consequently political—commitment to life and fellow human beings in spite of the dehumanization and genocide they witnessed. In “Off the Record: Voices of Ordinary Jewish Survivors of the Shoah,” Marion Gerlind presents a novel perspective to Holocaust studies by analyzing the importance of social class. As agents and makers of history, ordinary women play a vital role in recounting their deprivation, trauma, and survival. Yet many have remained speechless, not as a result of being female, but as a result of being female and poor. Far too often the marginalized within privileged middle-class backgrounds have pushed working-class women further toward the margins. Gerlind shows how material differences played a significant role in escaping and surviving the Holocaust. By providing excerpts from oral history interviews, which serve as audio clips from survivors’ complex biographies, Gerlind gives voice to the working poor. She destigmatizes a discourse on poverty and manual labor, and challenges dominant narratives that limit the impact of the Shoah to a single catastrophic event, rather than a number of events that include the escalation and longterm consequences of oppression, and suggests that (German) Shoah Studies should integrate voices from the margins as an essential part of Jewish cultures’ heterogeneity. Literature and the Arts Through the written word, the authors in this section give voice to female figures silenced by the dominant discourse. It is imperative to introduce this section on women’s exile literature and the arts with the understanding that the authors and artists included carry out a feminist project. Their written or artistic work constructs a space appropriated by the female creator that makes possible the break with preexisting orders and the creation of the new. The British feminist writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) propagated that the woman writer must overcome oppression to give voice to silenced female experiences. In the second half of the twentieth century, as the French feminist critic Hélène Cixous claims in The Newly Born Woman, “Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise and it is not obliged to

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reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds” (Cixous and Clément Newly Born 72). It is through writing and artistic expression that female experiences come into being. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan noted, “lettre” (the written word) is inextricably linked to its homophone “l’être” (being); that is, through writing (and by extension artistic expression) one comes into being. Precisely through artistic expression, female authors and artists eke out a niche for themselves and, therefore, invent new worlds. Sydney Norton’s essay on the dancer and performance artist Valeska Gert investigates the effects of inner and outer exile(s) on Gert’s life and art in Berlin until 1938, when Gert went into exile. Intent on breaking down static aesthetic structures of nineteenth-century theater, Gert’s grotesque caricatures of urban type characters were viewed as subversive and cast her in the role of an exile within her own country and culture. Norton discusses Gert’s unconventional life style and socially critical art that was tainted by unforgiving disapproval from the German Jewish exile community in New York. In addition to providing close readings of Valeska Gert’s dance performances, Norton comments on Gert’s return to Berlin at the end of the Second World War, where, again, Gert was unable to capture audiences. This dance caricaturist was energized by her experiences of exile and alienation to carry on her creative project. It was not until the 1960s and early 1970s, when German filmmakers were seeking theatrical and filmic strategies for exploring the moral paradoxes of the German citizen, that Gert’s extraordinary contributions to dance and film were rediscovered. Through Norton’s work, an English-speaking audience is introduced to a productive and influential female artist. The life, art, and poetry of the Roma Ceija Stojka also bear witness to exile as a catalyst for artistic expression. In the literary imagination, “home” functions as a tangible place and a liminal site; it can be a particular location or a state of mind. Gesa Zinn, coeditor of this volume, studies the representation of home in recent creative works by this Austrian gypsy writer, singer, painter, and poet. Stojka is a Holocaust survivor and the first female Romni in the German-speaking world who describes Romni life in the concentration camps, writes about the diaspora of her people, and discusses her life as a Romni during and after the Second World War. Zinn explores Stojka’s longing for a world that once was, as well as her construction of a place that Victor Turner describes as a “place that is not a place, and a time that is not a time.” For Zinn, Stojka’s longing for an ideal, harmonious past is a central aspect in the Austrian gypsy’s paintings. As a “lying nostalgia” it points to the impossibility of recovering through memory and painting/

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writing the “authentic” version of past experiences. Stojka’s desire to recover a previous time and space, thus, fuels the (re)construction of “home” within the poetic and artistic spheres. The writer and political activist María Teresa León is a key player in the Spanish diaspora following the Civil War. León witnessed the onset of modernization during the Spanish Republic (1931–1936) that conferred equality to women and recognized them as citizens. She was a writer of the important literary movement Generation of 27 that included poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. After the fall of the Republic, she went into a thirty-seven-year exile, returning to her homeland only after Francisco Franco’s death. In “Motherhood and Exile in the Works of María Teresa León,” María del Mar López-Cabrales views María Teresa León as “an orphaned woman without a homeland” who paid a high price to pursue a professional literary career: divorce from her first husband, separation from her children, and exile. Based on a close analysis of León’s texts and letters between León and her family and friends, López-Cabrales argues that estrangement from her children shaped the author’s works. In her writings, León is drawn to female and child characters who, because of separations, forge new “families” that cannot fill the void. In Memoria de la melancolía, María Teresa León voices the pain of exile and separation from her own mother and children through the voices of female characters who suffer similar experiences. As López-Cabrales states, “her voice is lost in an ‘I’ (exile) and a ‘you’ (family and Spain) of different voices.” LópezCabrales identifies León as having two exiles: first from her children and second from her country. In the chapter “Wife, Whore, Witch: The Portrayal of Violence in the Works of Mercè Rodoreda,” Victoria Ketz studies how voicelessness is inextricably linked to loss of mother, mother tongue (lengua materna), and homeland (madre patria) in three narrative works by the Catalonian Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), who went into exile following the fall of the Spanish Republic and the inauguration of Francisco Franco’s Fascist regime (1939). Ketz deems Rodoreda voiceless, due to her exile in Switzerland (where the dominant language was not her own), and as a result of her “silenced” literary production until the second half of the twentieth century. Rodoreda’s protagonist-narrators from the novels La plaza del Diamante (Time of the Doves) and La calle de las Camelias (Camellia Street) and the short story “La salamandra” (“Salamander”) are also voiceless. Ketz perceptively discerns that voicelessness gives victimizers license to act violently upon their victims. The characters’ silence renders them powerless and vulnerable to violence, thus leaving them incapable of protesting against it. Ketz analyzes the progression of violence: physical and mental abuse within marriage in La plaza, gang rape and sequestration in La calle,

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and finally, gang rape, dismemberment, and burning at the stake in “La salamandra.” Ketz aptly discerns the tie between language and body and draws the parallel between lack of voice and lack of power over one’s own body. Nivaria Tejera, author of Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (I Await the Night to Dream of You, Revolution), scrutinizes the constructs of home and belonging. As María Hernández-Ojeda notes, the experiences and writings of this novelist reflect her transatlantic crossings. Tejera’s childhood in her father’s native Canary Islands, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War and the early Francoist dictatorship, her adolescence in Cuba during the Batista regime, and her adult life in Paris defined her as a writer whose unique literary expression defies authority through poetic discourse. And just as Tejera’s nationality is blurred, so is the genre of Espero la noche. Hernández-Ojeda observes that Tejera’s text is an “auto-biographical poetic novel,” a “testimonial/novel/essay/poem that is an inspirational work of art with an innovative style and ethical commitment.” Hernández-Ojeda’s reading of Nivaria Tejera’s Espero la noche makes manifest that the CubanCanarian writer has created a space of resistance in which she “resists authority by trespassing political, national, literary, linguistic, gender and genre borders” in her life and literature. In her close study of Espero la noche, Hernandez-Ojeda analyzes Nivaria Tejera’s revolutionary nature that permeates every aspect of her existence. Immigration, Integration, and Community in Contemporary Europe: Culture as Articulated in Language, on the Body, and within Space Exile, immigration, and displacement problematize one’s language, the body, and a sense of one’s own space, for all three reflect national, ethnic, and cultural identities. We are what we speak and how we speak, just as our bodies and what we do to them reflect cultural identity within the space that we occupy. Cultural markers—expressed through language and customs— reveal one to be within or without the dominant culture. The manner in which immigrants and exiles reminisce and recall the past establishes the continuity of identity. As is often the case, the overriding primary cultural identity is frequently at odds with the secondary culture. For immigrants— and subsequent generations—the tension between the initial “home” and secondary “home” are made manifest in daily practices, speech patterns, and bodily rituals. The question arises, what elements of her primary culture can and should the immigrant relinquish? One must also contemplate, what elements is the dominant culture forcing the immigrant or migrant populations to surrender? Clearly, the new land becomes the displaced

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person’s host country. Yet, now she must straddle two spaces and two times, thus creating a new “home” within this interstitial psychic reality. Therein lies the paradox: the immigrant is from a place that was, and is not from the place where she presently is—at least not yet. Therefore, cultural practices are negotiated and compromised. The refugee, immigrant, or exile is a hybrid, whose relationship to the mainstream culture as well as her culture of origin is inevitably precarious. This tension results from cultural negotiation. It affirms and problematizes the concepts of inclusion and exclusion. The identity paradox puts into question precisely how one defines, first, nationality and, second, cultural identity that originates from a specific geographic location. Yet when one is displaced, the attempt— often collectively—is made to perpetuate heritage through language, tradition, and cultural practices. Eva Eppler’s sociolinguistic study of three generations of Austrian Jews living in Great Britain is an investigation into how language use reflects the concepts of home, culture, memory, and identity. As part of a larger project establishing the sociolinguistic profile of the Austrian-Jewish Refugee community in London, Eppler uses excerpts of an interview with Dor, her daughter Viv, and her grandson Nic to analyze the underlying tensions between the family members. These are visible in their choice of words and their choice of English and/or German. Dor fled Austria in 1938, and has since been living in London without calling it her home. Viv, who is bilingual and bicultural, feels very much at home in London, and attempts to bring up her son Nic as a “proper Englishman.” Dor’s attempts to pass on her Austrian history and culture to the following generations interfere with Viv’s goal of educating her son about “English culture.” Their conflict between mother and daughter is emblematic of immigrant families coping with issues relating to alienation, integration, and assimilation on a daily basis. Similarly, the practice of Female Genital Mutilation by immigrants in Great Britain is a way of perpetuating cultural identity. In “Multiculturalism and Citizenship in the United Kingdom: The Case of Female Genital Mutilation,” Anouk Guiné and Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes analyze the manner in which Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) practices challenge Britain’s normative, ethical, and legal framework, a nation that in principle is committed to the protection of the basic human rights of the individual. Moreno and Guiné study the United Kingdom’s limited multiculturalist policies that, while promoting cultural diversity and tolerance, result in a low degree of protection of the individual rights of women and girls, and, therefore, prove unsuccessful in reducing the incidence of FGM practices.

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In “Rising above the Bottom of German Society: Reflections on Interviews with Female Roma Refugees from Former Yugoslavia (Berlin 2004),” peace worker and theologian Monika Halpaap provides a humanitarian perspective on the lives and living conditions of recent Roma refugees. Halpaap learned of the numerous obstacles that displaced Roma women face on a daily basis, including overt and insidious prejudice, precarious immigration status, and the inability to be gainfully employed. The most prominent characteristic that the interviewees made manifest was their dogged commitment to forge a better life for themselves and, most importantly, for their families in their new home and host country (Berlin, Germany). Halpaap argues that Europe is still under construction and is eager to become a continent of peace. Through numerous initiatives, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), partnerships, experiments, and training, it aims to provide peaceful solutions to the globalization of violence. Halpaap’s article should be viewed as a beginning, a door that is opening to the perception and treatment of refugees within the EU in our new millennium. Conclusion In summary, the Spanish Civil War, Francoist Regime, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Revolution, as well as the influx of new immigrant populations into the EU provide the background for investigating women’s exile experiences. Various contributors document and discuss the individual and collective circumstances of a diverse group of women in exile on European soil. We are grateful for the contributors’ extensive research, expertise, diligence, and patience in bringing this text to fruition. Above all, though, we congratulate and thank them for bringing to our readers’ attention a cultural and political phenomenon that will forever be with all of us, regardless of age, gender, national, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. Exile experiences are plentiful and diverse, especially today within Europe’s fluid boundaries and borders. We do not claim or aim to represent the entirety of exiled women in one hundred years of European history. In fact, it should be obvious that the essays included herein deal with a sampling of women who have been displaced. It is our humble goal that by presenting these essays, we can hear a chorus of gendered voices that articulate their interstitial reality of border living as well as the desire to construct the psychic space called home. Hopefully, Female Exiles in Twentieth- and Twenty-FirstCentury Europe will bring about the emergence of many more women’s voices from the margins, voices that are still to be discovered or recovered, gendered voices that must be heard.

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Note 1. One should think of human rights issues such as the abolition of the death penalty. Also of note is the recognition of same-sex union in some EU nations.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991 (revised). Bhaba, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Heitlinger, Alena, ed. Émigré Feminism: Transnational Perspectives. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. León Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious of Reason since Freud.” Ecrits, A Selection. New York: WW Norton, 1977. Roberta Rubenstein. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Boston: Harvard UP, 2000. van Selm, Joanne, ed. “UNHCR Statistics” (1998, table 17). Kosovo’s Refugees in the European Union. New York: Pinter, 2000. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Publications, 1982. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

THE GRAMMAR OF CONTESTED MEMORY: THE REPRESENTATION OF EXILE IN SELECTED FEMALE-AUTHORED TEXTS OF DIASPORA Mary S. Vásquez

elipe Fernández-Armesto, in his Millennium: History of the Last Thousand Years (1995), has written, “If cultures and civilizations are the tectonic plates of world history, frontiers are the places where they scrape against each other and cause convulsive change” (20). One of the prognoses for our new century is that it will bear witness to more displacements, diasporas, migrations, movements of populations both voluntary and unsought, and often, surely, the mixture of the two, than any other period in recorded human history. Such movements inevitably involve borders and frontiers: national, those often arbitrary, and hardly inviolable, lines of political function, if not creation. Ideological borders, linguistic ones, borders of cultural norms and expectations. The borders between a before and an after, between a loss and its content, a gain and its antecedent. Borders— both excisions and those navigated, negotiated spaces—carried within. Many scholars across disciplines today work with Border Theory, that many-pronged consideration of boundaries and how we define them, insert ourselves within them, attempt to push them out or even obliterate them entirely, cross them, and cross back in an ongoing journey along, across, over, through the multiple borders that mark the forms in which we live our lives. The twentieth century, to be sure, had its own abundant share of displacements. The Republican exile following defeat in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Cuba. Chile. Argentina. Colombia. Nicaragua. El Salvador. And the economic exile experienced by many who leave, or rotate to and from, Puerto Rico, Mexico. And what of the telling of these

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displacements, the rendering of, variously, living away from, living in, and living between spaces as multiply defined? Of inhabiting borders? I propose to consider in the present essay the textual recreation, positing, invention of the experience of a particular kind of displacement, that of exile. I distinguish here between the term exile and the words emigration and immigration. First, emigration and immigration, the movement away from and the movement into, are more general terms, and often more neutral ones, encompassing a variety of possible circumstances and motivations of displacement. Furthermore, these terms often, though not necessarily, carry a sense of a willed movement, one even sought. Exile, on the other hand, is a specific sort of emigration, and the term does not speak of the other end, the “entry into” that is immigration. Exile, with its etymological weight of banishment, is a severing, and, even if voluntary, even if sought, carries the connotation of an impetus of some urgency that propels one away, not toward. I propose to explore selected female-authored texts of re-memoration in exile, texts that move in time and space in a conjuring of the experience of exile and the textual combat that that conjuring involves. We may think of such navigation in the terms employed by Norma Elia Cantú in her imaginative memory text Canícula: Memories of a Girlhood en la frontera (1995), with reference to the acts of rememoration of a Chicana girl’s growing up on the U.S.–Mexican border: “[T]he stories mirror how we live in our memories, with our past and our present juxtaposed and bleeding, seeping back and forth, one to the other in a recursive dance” (Cantú xii). The bleeding evoked in Cantú’s words suggests that violence, that clash of ways of being and knowing, suggested above by Fernández-Armesto. The contest between the effort to remember and perhaps an equal one to forget. Between past and present, loss and gain, dream and disillusionment. Between memory and its erosion, its self-correction. Between conflicted versions and impulses. These are the terms, or some of them, of a grammar of contested memory. I will view them in these pages through an exploration of texts emerging from, or evocative of, the Republican exile of 1939 at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. In this context, I will consider the cases of María Teresa León and María Zambrano, along with a story of exile by Carme Riera. I will include references to insights from two U.S. Latino theorists of exile due to their relevance and applicability to women writers’ contemplation of the severing that came at the end of the war for Spain and because of the importance of the Americas in the Spanish exile of 1939. Eliana Rivero, in a series of articles—“Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict” (1985), “From Immigrants to Ethnics: Cuban Women Writers in the U. S.” (1989), “Cubanos y

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cubanoamericnos: perfil y presencia en los Estados Unidos” (1989), and “(Re)writing the Sugarcane Memories: Cuban Americans and Literature” (1990)—distinguished helpfully between what she terms exiles and ethnics: those who pass into exile and who remain defined by the culture whence they have come, learning to make a path in the new one but with the homeland often predominant in their thoughts, and the ethnic, the child and grandchild of exile, who possesses a dual identity made up of two very distinct and often conflicted parts and who must negotiate, on a very individual basis, a hybrid identity. At a time when ethnic identification has again come to be seen often as pejorative and undesirable, particularly by those so identified, Rivero’s theoretical distinction remains useful as a temporal line of demarcation when one approaches texts of memory. The primacy of the homeland in first-generation exilic memory is illustrated by the Spanish exile character in Isabel Allende’s De amor y de sombra who, as a symbolic gesture of discrepancy, refuses to wear shoes, even in winter, stubbornly persisting in limiting his footgear to alpargatas, in solidarity with the humble people of Spain for whose interests he had fought in the war. His insistence surely served, too, to mark the certain temporality of an exile that would prove permanent, all the more so because, once the Franco dictatorship ends, this exile figure elects not to return; his children’s lives, and hence his own, are in Chile. One also recalls a story recounted by a character in the 1982 “Volver a empezar” (Begin the Beguine; dir. José Luis Garcia), a film that treats the return to Spain and, for a time, to a lost love of a dying Republican, a successful professor at a California university. This protagonist, in conveying to his love the primacy of roots in exile memory, tells of a university colleague who one day in class suddenly paused in the lesson and began to execute the steps of a traditional dance of his native Chile; a few days later this exile died, having performed once more, albeit in absence, his Chilean identity. One recalls the words of poet Rafael Alberti to the effect that everything was about Spain, that even when it seemed that Spain was not the topic of the exile’s words, it was, always. And Spanish Republican exile María Teresa León wrote in her memoir, to be discussed later in this essay, “Lucky are you who carried on your backs the sweet burden of the memory of Spain, those who saved the highest word in our language, the word that has caused so much suffering to those of us who speak Spanish, and for which Spaniards have died so many times, that ‘Liberty!’ which we will never achieve.”1 The force of this memory and of the ideals that fired the flawed and ultimately failed Second Spanish Republic are central to a new book by the scholar of Spanish Republican exile Francie Cate-Arries of the College of William and Mary that adds importantly to the pioneering work done by José María Naharro-Calderón of the University of Maryland and the

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Universidad de Alcalá de Henares on the prison camps of southern France. Cate-Arries’s book, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–1945 (2004), views the Spanish carcelary experience through a prism of affirmation. When the Spanish Republicans fled by the thousands on foot over the Pyrenees into France in the winter of 1938–1939 after the loss of the Battle of the Ebro in the fall of 1938 had made the Republic’s loss of the war a virtual certainty, the government of the neighboring democracy reacted by placing these Spaniards in crude camps where many would die of unsanitary conditions, of hunger and cold, of their accumulated wounds of body and spirit. Many survivors would go on to form part of the famed French Resistance against the Vichy government and Hitler. Spanish Republican women bravely served as couriers in the Resistance. The subject of CateArries’s book is the effort, beginning in the camps themselves, to preserve their national, ideological, cultural identity. She explores with what courage these Spanish Civil War exiles, under the most humiliating of circumstances, faced their new circumstance, affirmed and survived, sought to craft a new Spanish Republican imaginary in exile. Their efforts took the form of writing, song, performance and laid the base for the permutations of exile identity, the Spanish exile imaginary, to be lived in later exile by those who survived. Cate-Arries’s book is almost certain to be controversial; some will perhaps see in it a look away from the suffering and death that occurred in those camps, from the trains departing them for Mauthausen carrying Spanish Republicans, many of whom did not return. Yet the book begins to write the valuable chapters we need in order to understand the perpetuation of identity through its reconstruction, the courageous attempts by these refugees and prisoners to reinscribe their various Spanish Republican identities into a vastly altered context in which they had become the Other, as their new destinations, physical and figurative, would be for them strange, alien, other. To write and retain collective memory, to use the Word with a grammar constant yet new, one to counter the silencing in their beloved Spain, the imposition of the official story, rewritten to such a degree that the new generation was taught that the Republic had begun the war. Novelist and former editor of Barcelona’s Lumen publishing house Esther Tusquets comments in an interview by Mercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez that she was a teenager in her native Barcelona before she became aware that such was not the case. I always thought that the war [Spanish Civil War] had been started by the reds; it was a long time before I realized that it was a rebellion by the nationalists, that the Republic was a reality. I had always thought that one fine day the

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common people had taken to the streets and had begun killing and sacking, against an established system, and historically, it was the other way around. (Mazquiarán de Rodríguez 179)

Tusquets expresses this same late awareness, one common to the children of the haute bourgeoisie, in the lengthy and substantive interview by Geraldine Cleary Nichols in her Escribir, espacio propio, published by the Center for the Study of Ideologies and Literature at the University of Minnesota in 1989. Shirley Mangini, in her much-consulted study Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1995) entitles three of her chapters “War as Memory,” “Prison as Memory,” and “Exile as Memory.” Mangini brings out the vital role of memory texts emerging from the prison and/or exile experience of Spanish Republican women in making known the ideological commitment, ideals, and societal roles of these women along with the female experience in a history traditionally authored primarily by men. Taking up the stories of Constancia de la Mora, Isabel de Palencia, Silvia Mistral, Concha Méndez, María Teresa León, Federica Montseny, Victoria Kent, María Zambrano, Mangini terms this body of writings “women-woven texts, fused together to form a historical quilt” (Mangini 56). She treats the recollections of those women who spent time in the camps studied by Francie Cate-Arries, those who were sent from there to Nazi concentration camps, those who made their way to Mexico and other Latin American countries, and those who paid heavily for their Republican ideals in Francoist Spain. The ironies lived by those Republicans who sought refuge in their fellow democracy across the Pyrenees were multiple. The treatment of those fortunate Spaniards—often the relatively privileged— who arrived in Mexico cannot be compared to the hostility and tragedy that awaited those in France. The world became a prison for Spaniards who stayed in Spain and for those who went to France. Ironically, it also became a prison for the French, who had unwittingly made the decision to imprison the Spanish behind barbed wire while they themselves were slowly being encircled by the Nazis. (Mangini 154)

Inmaculada de la Fuente, in her Mujeres de la posguerra. De Carmen Laforet a Rosa Chacel: historia de una generación ( 2002), follows the lives and analyzes the contributions of thirteen Peninsular women, seven of whom made their lives in Franco’s Spain—Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, Josefina Aldecoa, writer and educator Dolores Medio, and the open adherents to the Franco regime Mercedes Formica and Mercedes Salisachs—and six major intellectual figures of female Republican exile: writers Rosa Chacel, Mercè Rodoreda, María Teresa León, and Concha

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Méndez, painter Maruja Mallo, and philosopher and educator María Zambrano. Mangini articulates in powerful terms the significance of study of those women who people her book and de la Fuente’s, as well as in numerous articles and monographs appearing in recent years on a number of the neglected female figures of Republican exile by such critics as Roberta Johnson, Salvador Oropesa, Janet Pérez, Melissa Stewart, Alda Blanco, Concha Alborg. [A]ll of the female voices of exile provide us with a unique perspective on the double apocalypse that befell the anti-Franco population at the end of the Spanish civil war. Without them we would consider only the plight of the male population. Tragic and massive though it was, that experience alone would not give us any sense of the female nomads—their resistance to deportation, to prostitution, to demoralization—and their fight against the persecution that followed them out of Spain and into France in those profoundly tragic years of overlapping wars. (de la Fuente 174)

In 1937 the Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles (Service of Evacuation of Spanish Republicans, SERE) was founded in France. Thousands of Republicans were sent by ship to Lázaro Cárdenas’s Mexico, and Pablo Neruda organized the transport on the Winnipeg of others to Chile. A second group, the Junta de Ayuda a Refugiados Españoles (Aid to Spanish Refugees, JARE), was founded in 1939. In Mexico, the Comité Técnico de Ayuda a los Españoles en México (Technical Committee for Aid to Spaniards in Mexico, CTAE) actively facilitated the incorporation into Mexican society of Spanish exiles. The Casa de España established in 1938 by President Cárdenas became two years later the important intellectual center Colegio de México. (This history is recorded in Mangini 151–54 and in Ruiz Funes and Tuñón.) Three ships, the Sinaia, the Ipanema, and the Mexique, carried Spanish Republican exiles to Mexico in the immediate postwar period. Of these, the best known is probably the Sinaia, surely in part because it was the first and perhaps also because of the newspaper published on board during the crossing. The story of the Spanish Republican diaspora has been studied minutely in Palabras del exilio. Final y comienzo: El Sinaia (1982) by Concepción Ruiz Funes and Enriqueta Tuñón. The authors draw upon data gathered by the CTAE to note that among the 1,599 passengers of the Sinaia there were 393 women (Ruiz Funes and Tuñón 18). A facsimile edition of the issues of the shipboard newspaper printed and distributed by these women and men was brought out by Mexico City’s UNAM in 1989. The contents include expressions of Republican solidarity—despite the ideological diversity represented among the ship’s passengers—sketches, and many lessons on Mexico, this last an implicit expression of hope that, though

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absolutely consistent with Republican pedagogical principles at their best, is astounding in the context of Republican defeat, the lived horrors of the war just ended, and the expectation by most of an early reintegration into Spain upon the certain fall of Franco. The Republican exile women, in Mexico and elsewhere, amid the sorrows, bitterness, and triumphs, great and small, of their exilic lives, would at least always know who they were, their Spanish identity having been fully formed to adulthood before their need to leave the land of their birth. For the children of exile parents who remained outside the Peninsula, on the other hand, identity would often prove a vexing dilemma. Josefina Aldecoa’s 1994 novel Mujeres de negro (Women in Black), the second of her novelistic trilogy on women in the Spanish Civil War—the others being Historia de una maestra (Story of a Schoolteacher, 1990) and La fuerza del destino (The Force of Destiny, 1997)—presents the problematics of childof-exile self-identification, formulated theoretically by Eliana Rivero, as discussed earlier. While the exile Gabriela never wavers in her identification of herself as a Spaniard and a Republican partisan, her daughter Juana passes through ambivalence. Through friendships with other children of Spanish exile in Mexico followed by her university experience in Spain, Juana struggles with conflicting emotions. First there is awakened in her a sense of “my need of a past.”2 Soon comes nostalgia for what she cannot summon in memory except in brief flashes: I felt nostalgia for the unknown city. The moving exercise of memory by my new friends was filling the empty places of the past that I lacked. As Spain began to take shape in my daydreams, the real presence of Mexico continued to affirm itself in my daily experience.3

Concluding at that time that the Spanish language was her homeland, “my one, my true country,”4 Juana, finding herself among her university friends in Madrid, would feel her familial roots pulling her not so much into the past, property, after all, of her parents—or so Juana believes—but into the absolute immediacy of her new experiences: “A powerful force dragged me to the present. My true life was in Spain now.”5 Significantly, the verb was is estaba, connoting not only change but also impermanence. Indeed, Juana will reject her mother’s Spain, going to France in an ironic replication of the route of flight of so many Spanish Republicans, though not her mother, planning then a return to Mexico, “my urgent necessity. Returned from exile, I now needed to exile myself again. Exile and return and exile.”6 Aldecoa employs the verb desterrar, the loss of one’s land, a rending from it. Juana, exile and child of exile, returns to her ancestral home, which is also her own, only to pass to a third terrain

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before choosing that other home, site of half her life, both temporally and symbolically. As both exile and child of exile, Juana’s experience is akin to that of Gustavo Pérez Firmat, in my view our best theorist of U. S.–Cuban exile experience. Pérez Firmat evokes in the opening pages of Next Year in Cuba (1995), his memoir, the departure of his family from the island by sea in 1961. The narrator’s remembered self, the eleven-year-old boy standing on the deck of the ship, looking back toward the harbor and the only world he has ever known, unable for years to come to grasp the full import of the truncation that is occurring. In that harbor, standing on the deck, is an eleven-year-old boy looking at him, watching himself move away, as the boy on the deck watches himself stay behind. Pérez Firmat’s narrator will forever carry within both of those boys, each perpetually watching the other, the two the same and irrevocably distinct. And yet the problematics through which Josefina Aldecoa’s character passes are distinctly gendered. As a female exile and child of exile, Juana must separate herself from the passivity displayed by her mother—this strong, passionate ideologue and teacher—in the face of her husband’s infidelity and return, decide to terminate a love affair with a man who allows his mother to condemn Juana in the lowest of terms, and reject a model of female life, that of the somber women in black, the mujeres de negro of the novel’s title, for whom the war, numerous wars, have never concluded. For those of us, across disciplines, who teach about the war for Spain in the 1930s, an extensive new book was recently published by the Modern Language Association, Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War. Brilliantly assembled by Noel Valis of Yale University, the volume’s essays plumb many facets of the war, attempting to achieve a balance in the representation of ideological fires. María Teresa León , a major intellectual and cultural figure in that war, wrote in her memoirs Memoria de la melancolía (Memory of Melancholy, 1970) of woman’s experience of the early 1930s in Spain, when the evermounting pressure for a democratic government over the last two decades had culminated in the arrival of the Second Republic in free elections throughout Spain in April of 1931 and when ideas, literature, film, political philosophies had poured into Spain, finding there a receptive, creative, and fertile terrain. María Teresa León, the centennial of whose birth was in 2003, writes of doors that never closed, windows thrown open. There are several suggestions implicit in such evocations. First, perhaps, is the nineteenth-century image of the mujer ventanera or woman at the window. During the very long period during which the prevailing view of patriarchal society was that women from non-humble strata of the social order, particularly, had as their appropriate space the domestic sphere

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alone, this image of the woman at the window, looking out at the world going by, at street life, seeing men go past and even maybe fleetingly seen by some of these men, was a negative one. Such a woman was, in her curiosity, departing from correct practice and was, thus, subversive, dissident. María Teresa León’s words, then, mark a symbolic end to female reclusion. Her image of windows flung wide evokes, too, openness to ideas, expansion of inquiry, and the full intention to be part of it. Finally, her words denote inclusiveness, reciprocity between what came through the window and what issued from it. It is hardly accidental, given this image of the woman at the window, that Carmen Martín Gaite, one of the foremost narrative artists of post–Civil War Spain and the first theorist, in Spain, of female experience of those decades, should entitle her 1982 book of essays Desde la ventana (From the Window or Looking Out the Window). María Teresa León became an important figure in the Spanish Republic, carrying out a central organizational role in the propaganda theater at the front for Republican troops and charged with the transfer of Madrid’s art treasures from the capital city to greater safety in Valencia, a task that was beautifully orchestrated under her direction and movingly conducted, with the theme held throughout the process that the art works were the patrimony of the people, and it was for them that the treasures had to be saved. In exile following the Republic’s defeat in the Spanish Civil War, however, María Teresa León, still intellectually and culturally active in Buenos Aires, passed increasingly into the shadow of the celebrated poet Rafael Alberti, her adored husband, an exceptionally public figure. “Now I am the tail of the comet,” she wrote in her memoir. “He walks ahead. Rafael has never lost his light.”7 Alberti’s multiple infidelities, the move to Rome when the rise of Juan Perón brought ominous encroachment, and, finally, Alzheimer’s disease resulted in a series of progressive silencings of María Teresa León. Exile was, then, for María Teresa León, on two continents, a gradual but advancing retreat, a diminishment, a passing from, and of, the light. She fought through the gathering fog created by the illness to write her memoirs, a richly detailed account of the euphoric period of seemingly endless possibilities, when ideas and projects sparkled and crackled everywhere, then the searing loss of so much promise, the sorrows of exile and the joys yet harvested from it, and the combat waged with and through silence in the artistic enterprise that is this testimonial text. There is a textual tension throughout Memory of Melancholy, a simultaneous movement outward and inward. Inward as the author searches the storehouse of memory with the imperfect instrument she now possesses, and inward, too, as the assault upon memory advances. And outward as the narrating self, the voice telling the story, engages time and again in textual

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skirmishes, the implacable and advancing enemy of forgetfulness and erasure. Assault, retreat, refortification, counterattack. The re-memorative act, then, always problematized in a testimonial text by selective filter, corrective memory, and the complexities of authorial intent, is here further complicated by memory’s erosion, the struggle against which, ironically, energizes the text, imbuing it with greater life. As the shadows gather, her effort is to yet perceive their lingering outlines, then endow each of those outlines with name, face, body, movement in a particular moment: to “kiss the shadows,” as she writes, to renew intimacy with them, to know them again and anew. There is much at stake in this testimonial enterprise—the recovery of voice, the resistance to erasure. She remembers viscerally as well as cerebrally. “Yo pienso con la sangre del corazón” (León 224). I think with the heart’s blood. León utilizes the instruments common to all memorialists: memory, with its imperfections and its lapses, plus intent, which occasions rewritings, self-censure, the correction of one’s lived history. Yet for her the basic instrument of memory is as inconstant as an errant lover; it appears and retreats. When present, it must be courted, cajoled, and heard in every word it is willing to speak. Hence, perhaps, the especially populous pages of the León memoir, full of names of those present at a gathering, those involved in an undertaking. Her text names those shadows, caresses them, seemingly grateful for the gift of recall of them. This textual courtship of eroded memory is León’s grammar of contested memory, an urgent summoning of the ghosts to gather again to be counted, their names to be spoken once more. The contest is one of time in the fight against the accretions of loss. Memory of Melancholy is a very different text from the memoirs authored by Rafael Alberti, her husband: the six-part La arboleda perdida (The Lost Grove), his own memoirs, which he began to compose in earliest exile, during the solitary nights spent in the office of the Paris radio station whence he broadcast for a time in Spanish. The reader notes that, whereas the León memoir does not claim protagonism for its authoring and narrating subject, the Alberti text most definitely does so. The León text moves primarily around others from the remembering axis of the self. The Alberti memoir, on the other hand, moves elliptically to fold in others, but always around the self, not only as remembering and organizing consciousness but as central figure as well. One may identify in this implicit textual dialogue—Alberti concluded his own memoirs after the completion of Memory of Melancholy— another aspect of the grammar of contested memory. Additionally, the titles of the two memory texts confront one another. In Alberti’s chosen title, the grove evoked a fragrant cluster of trees in his town, El Puerto de Santa María, on the turquoise-and-silver Bay of Cádiz, perhaps more sweetly scented still and its shade more inviting in nostalgia,

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that is, recall with loss is also a metaphor for a lived time of fullness and promise, later lost with the severing from Spain. Tellingly, in León’s title what is remembered is deep sadness, the habit of sorrow that is melancholy. The grammar of exile is, of course, a gendered one. One recalls, for example, the considerable discrepancy in the kinds and places of work assigned to women as contrasted with men among the Republican refugees in Mexico, that most generous of all nations to those who, for better or for worse, carried the defeated ideals of the Second Republic into exile. And one notes that, in the Alberti memoir, it was he who headed up the successful transfer of art treasures from Madrid to the relative safety of Valencia, when it is verifiable fact that the person named by the Republican government to carry out that enterprise, and the person who succeeded in doing so, was María Teresa León. León experienced in multiple ways, then, the displacement, the loss of place that is the removal of the self, with all the internal baggage sacrificed and added, into exile. Place is, of course, far more than the space we occupy. It is also, and more importantly, the relation established between us and it, our way of walking in a place and the imprint it makes upon us; our accommodation to its contours, the shape and smells of that space, our measurement of the quality of the light and of human interaction, and, on the other hand, its role in the formation of our intellect, sensibilities, ideology: our relation to the world. When Spanish philosopher María Zambrano reached from Cuba back through the decades to a remembered Spanish childhood to write in her Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties, as gracefully translated by Carol Maier (1999), of “the light of a winter day in a crystalline Madrid winter, a light that seems to come from the snow on the sierra, bringing the scent of pines, of the thyme that is always green, of the poor sierra, naked beneath the blue light” (11), she evoked just that experience of lived place, with its multiplicity and contradiction, the changing calibration that, in times of peace and circumstances of option, causes us to stay, leave, return; that generates in us the ongoing measurement both of degrees of belonging and of our part in collective memory, memory’s impulse in us. With the imposition of exile, place in all of its modes must become more urgently portable, the need to preserve what is left, or what may be lost forever in the life left behind, joined to the imperative—the burden and the responsibility—of collective memory. The Republican exile of 1939 involved for women a particular additional loss and legacy of exile memory: the hard-won, imperfect, yet very real possibilities of activity in the public ideological, governmental, and intellectual spheres opened to their gender in the years of the Republic. Zambrano, a contemporary of María Teresa León and a Republican exile in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and, like María Teresa León, Rome,

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shared with León both the activism and celebratory hope of the Republican years and the disillusionments of exile. A student and disciple of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, from whom her thinking later distanced her, Zambrano was one of twentiethcentury Spain’s major philosophers and a major European intellectual— and female intellectual. She was also a pioneering woman in Spain and in exile. The land of her birth and formation, to which she was able to return when she was elderly, accompanied Zambrano as a vital presence throughout her exile peregrinations. Her longevity was remarkable, like that of two fellow members of Spain’s Generation of 1927 and 1936, Rosa Chacel and Rafael Alberti; Zambrano was, however, little known for several decades. The recipient of numerous honors in Republican Spain, Zambrano was not only erased in Spain during the years of the Franco dictatorship but was, until recent years, neglected in Hispanism outside Spain. Like León, Zambrano was involved in the Republic’s Misiones Pedagógicas or Pedagogical Missions, an initiative that, in consonance with the view that cultural production was the shared legacy of all Spaniards, sent teams of artists and intellectuals to remote areas of the country in cultural visits that would ideally involve the entire town. The philosopher was also active in such journals as Hora de España and counted significant publications in Spain and Latin America. She was highly considered in Caribbean and Roman intellectual life. In the United States, Roberta Johnson and Alda Blanco are two of those few scholars who have done much to remedy the lack of awareness of Zambrano’s work. The translation of Delirium and Destiny, accompanied by an excellent study authored by Roberta Johnson, who has contributed much to our understanding of the intersections of philosophy and literature in twentieth-century Spain, has opened access to Zambrano’s thought to many more readers. The Zambrano text is a philosophical, ideological, and obliquely personal autobiography set within a biography of Spain. Her beloved homeland is seen as an organic being growing toward the Republican ideal and moving through it into failure, though not death, and the carrying of a tenuous but enduring hope. A major textual strategy deployed by Zambrano is the convergence of the communal and the individual, the collective and the personal. Zambrano often employs the phrase “the dream of Spain” as she follows the gestation, fruition, and denial of an idea. Her text records the voyage of a people and that of a female intellectual and ideologue, with both delirium and destiny marking the communal and individual travel toward the realization of an ideal, as well as the bitter experience of defeat and exile. The subtitle, A Spaniard in Her Twenties, places the author at the axis of her testimonial text and privileges those years in which her dream and Spain’s moved together.

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Zambrano’s narrating self, like León’s, views the dream, the lost land, and the life lived upon it through the prism of exile. She composed the text in the late summer of 1952, in response to financial need, for submission to a French writing competition. When her manuscript did not win, it suffered a precarious destiny of its own, according to Johnson, not only remaining unpublished but saved several times from Zambrano’s intended destruction by her cousin, Rafael Tomero Alarcón (227). It was he who engineered the book’s publication at last in 1969, in Madrid, after substantial editing by its author, writes Johnson. It is significant that Zambrano should conceive of the autobiographical project as one of intellectual and ideological trajectory. This understanding is consistent with the intellectual passion and ideological intensity of her formation as thinker and partisan, and with her fervent commitment to the Republican ideal. Her ideas were woven in a time when philosophy, ideology, and personal history were intertwined patterns in a single cloth. For both León and Zambrano, the experience of exile is the frame into which the lives are inserted for recollection, from which they are summoned up by the re-memorative process. In narrative fiction, exile tales, even those authored by non-exiles, frequently feature a frame, metaphor perhaps of the frame of exile within which their lives move, a frame that conditions all that they do. Carme Riera, a Mallorcan writer who is also professor of literature at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, is not herself an exile, belonging instead to the generation of the children of Franco. But her story “Sí, me llamo Helena” (Yes, My Name is Helena) from her 1980 collection Palabra de mujer (Woman’s Word), employs the framing device in a poignant extended metaphor of exile. Protagonist L.F. Sotomayor addresses, amid numerous disclaimers, an unidentified female interlocutor, giving his written authorization for publication of a story he has written. The accompanying tale contained within this frame encloses, in its turn, two embedded stories. The outer one of these involves an interview given by Sotomayor to a young researcher named Helena. Enclosed within this story is the second embedded tale—actually the third within the encompassing frame—that is the true center of Riera’s narrative: Sotomayor in his flight into exile on the last boat leaving from The Hague, bound for the Americas. Bereft of almost everything and carrying the weight of Republican defeat—his defeat—Sotomayor meets Helena, another exiled Republican. They pass together into exile in their parallel loss and parallel, if unequal, need. When she leaves behind his love of dependency and desperation, Sotomayor is again bereft. Night and day I waited for her, alert to the creaking of the garden gate, the noise of the keys in the lock, the sound of the doorbell. I lay in wait for the mailman . . . And the rehearsed words: “I don’t care where you’ve come

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from. I love you. Don’t leave me,” repeated millions of times during those years, rotted in my mouth because I never had the chance to say them. Her absence filled the void into which I had now irremediably fallen.8

The eternal unbroken wait, its conclusion deferred, the object of longing distant, silent, is surely a metaphor for exile itself. In one embedded tale, Sotomayor, elderly and failing, awaits each afternoon the arrival of the birds, whose presence he cannot always perceive. Their arrival takes him back to his town on the south coast of Spain, to which he has never returned, yet leaves him where he is, their invitation to an imagined flight of return to the shores of home confirming precisely that return’s impossibility, underlining his loss, their addition simultaneously a subtraction. Their absence denies him the sensorial impetus to an imagined return, yet their presence makes the awareness of truncation sharper still. In the grammar of exile, return is both a transitive and an intransitive verb.

Leave by Joellyn Rock.

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Many Latin Americans have also come to speak and to write a grammar of exile, which has had much to do with the forging of U.S. Latino literature. Second- and third-generation Latinos—or first-generation Latinos who have come to the United States or the mainland as infants, children, or even young teens—speak often of the experience of negotiating a hybrid identity between two cultural spaces, those of familial origin and of the U.S. mainstream. They tell of inhabiting, and forging an identity within, an in-between space, neither one nor the other but an amalgam of the two. This new space, created of both presence and absence, acceptance and rejection, is above all an intensely personal one; its terms and parameters vary with the individual who has combined and defined them. In the selected literary expressions of Spanish Diasporas considered in these pages, exile moves along the borders of loss and recollected celebration, the frontiers of affirmation and denial, rage and longing. Receiving national spaces are enriched, expelling ones lessened. Past and present spaces seek to meet in the exile imaginary; memory is not always adequate to the task. In individual and communal exile experience, liminal spaces become land masses adrift, as after a cataclysm of origins. Identities past and present enter into dialogue, compete, seek their common ground, the shared space that the self can inhabit. Hybridity and polyvalence prevail. Lines are simultaneously linear, elliptical, circular as the self moves through its re-memorative task, its place of origin and departure lost yet carried within in some reconstructed form rewritten by time and by re-memorative intentionality. The exile self doubles back to a past altered by a future, inhabits textually a present never dreamed from that past. Its story, irreducibly singular, is unavoidably communal. Exile, like love, is always singular, unique. Experienced by the individual, it becomes plural in the conjugation of experience, through the multiple grammar of contested memory. Notes A lengthier and quite different version of this essay was delivered as the Hispanic keynote address, University of Louisville Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, February 25, 2005, with the title “Exile Losses, Exile Dreams: The Grammar of Contested Memory in the Literature of Hispanic Diasporas.” Portions of the María Zambrano material appeared in substantially different form in a review by this critic published in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 4 (2000): 326–28. 1. “Bienaventurados los que os llevasteis a cuestas la dulce carga del recuerdo de España, los que salvasteis la palabra más alta de nuestro idioma, esa que tantas penas costó siempre a los que hablamos español, por la que el español ha

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

muerto tantas veces, esa ‘¡Libertad!’ que no alcanzaremos nunca” (León 228); all translations from the León text are my own. “mi necesidad de pasado” (Aldecoa 116); all translations from the Aldecoa text are my own. “Sentí nostalgia de la ciudad desconocida. El conmovedor ejercicio de la memoria de mis nuevos amigos iba llenando del pasado que me faltaba”; “Mientras España empezaba a tomar cuerpo en mis ensoñaciones, la presencia real de México continuaba afirmándose en mi experiencia diaria” (Aldecoa 117). “mi única, mi verdadera patria” (Aldecoa 117). “Una fuerza poderosa me arrastraba al presente. En España estaba ahora mi verdadera vida” (Aldecoa 143). “. . . mi apremiante necesidad. Regresada del destierro, necesitaba ahora desterrarme de nuevo. Exilio y regreso y exilio” (Aldecoa 203). “Ahora yo soy la cola del cometa. El va delante. Rafael no ha perdido nunca su luz” (León 126). “La esperé día y noche pendiente del crujido de la puerta del jardín, del ruido de las llaves en la cerradura, del sonido del timbre . . . Aceché la llegada del cartero . . . Y las palabras ensayadas: ‘Me da igual de donde vengas. Te quiero. No me dejes’, repetidas millones de veces durante aquellos años, se me pudrieron en la boca porque nunca pude llegar a pronunciarlas” (Riera 72–73).

Works Cited Alberti, Rafael. La arboleda perdida, I. Primero y segundo libros (1902–1931). Madrid: Anaya, 1997. ———. La arboleda perdida, II. Tercero y cuarto libros (1931–1987). Madrid: Anaya, 1997. ———. La arboleda perdida, III. Quinto y sexto libros (1988–1996). Madrid: Anaya, 1997. Aldecoa, Josefina. Mujeres de negro. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1994. Cantú, Norma Elia. Canícula: Memories of Girlhood in la frontera. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995. Cate-Arries, Francie. Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–1945 Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years. New York: Scribner’s, 1995. de la Fuente, Inmaculada. Mujeres de la posguerra. De Carmen Laforet a Rosa Chacel: historia de una generación. Barcelona: Planeta, 2002. Garcia, José Luis, dir. “Volver a empezar.” Film starring Antonio Ferrandis and Encarna Paso. Cine Español, 1982. Johnson, Roberta. “The Context and Achievement of Delirium and Destiny.” In Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties. Ed. María Zambrano. Trans. Carol Maier. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. 215–35.

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León, María Teresa. Memoria de la melancolía. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999 (1970). Mangini, Shirley. Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995. Martín Gaite, Carmen. Desde la ventana. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1987. Mazquiarán de Rodríguez, Mercedes. “Talking with Tusquets.” In The Sea of Becoming: Approaches to the Fiction of Esther Tusquets. Ed. Mary S. Vásquez. New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood P, 1991. 173–88. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Next Year in Cuba. A Cubano’s Coming-of-Age in America. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Riera, Carme. “Sí, me llamo Helena,” Palabra de mujer. Barcelona: Laia, 1980. 63–77. Rivero, Eliana. “Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict.” In International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera. Monographic issue of Revista Chicano-Riqueña 13.3–4 (1985): 173–92. ———. “Cubanos y cubanoamericanos: perfil y presencia en los Estados Unidos.” Discurso Literario 7.1 (1989): 81–101. ———. “From Immigrants to Ethnics: Cuban-American Women Writers in the U.S.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. Asunción Horno Delgado et al. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. 189–200. ———. “(Re)Writing the Sugarcane Memories: Cuban Americans and Literature.” In Paradise Lost or Gained: The Literature of Hispanic Exile. Monographic issue of The Americas Review 18.3–4 (1990): 164–82. Ruiz Funes, Concepción and Enriqueta Tuñón. Palabra del exilio. Final y comienzo: El Sinaia. Mexico City: Departamento de Estudios Contemporáneos del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1982. Sinaia. Diario de la primera expedición de republicanos españoles a México. Facsimile edition. Presentation and Epilogue Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma and UNAM, 1989. Valis, Noël, ed. Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. Zambrano, María. Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties. Trans. Carol Maier. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.

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PART I THE POLITICAL AND PERSONAL: HISTORY, WAR, AND RESISTANCE

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DOLORES IBÁRRURI, PASIONARIA: VOICE OF THE ANTI-FRANCO MOVEMENT (1939–1975) Mary Ann Dellinger

“Turn on the radio. Pasionaria is going to speak.” From the film Las bicicletas son para el verano

hroughout the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), one woman stood as ultimate spokesperson for the Spanish Republic, her voice booming across battlefields and commanding the rear guard, while boosting public morale with her radio speeches. In 1936 she had resolved, “No pasarán” (They shall not pass; “¡No pasarán!”),1 and Madrid resisted the onslaught of Nationalist troops. She rallied women with the reminder that “Más vale ser viudas de héroes que mujeres de cobardes” (it is preferable to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward; Pasionaria y los siete enanitos) and they took up the work of the men in the factories, the fields, and the defense of the capital. She reminded her supporters, “El pueblo español prefiere morir” (Better to die on your feet than live on your knees; Pasionaria y los siete enanitos) and they kept on fighting against the Fascist war machine. But by the end of 1938, it was clear that the Loyalists needed nothing less than a miracle to defeat their enemy. On November 1, on the verge of defeat, Dolores Ibárruri, known as Pasionaria,2 delivered her final address “Hasta pronto, hermanos”—“Farewell, Brothers”—to the then departing International Brigades. Six months later she herself would be forced to flee the Peninsula, passing the Pyrenees to France and later to the Soviet Union where she would remain until 1977. In spite of the geopolitical parameters of Pasionaria’s banishment and through the continuous publication of her speeches by international Communist parties, her weekly articles in the underground Spanish press, and above all her broadcasts through Radio Independiente España (La Pirenaica),

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Ibárruri remained a thorn in the side of the Franco regime throughout the thirty-eight years of her exile. Never relinquishing the political spotlight, she continued to be at the forefront of the anti-Franco movement until the death of the dictator in 1975 and was denied a reissued passport by the elected Spanish authorities until two years later for fear of a Communist-led insurrection against the new and fragile democracy. This essay explores the dynamics of Ibárruri’s political activism as the voice of the Resistance, a role she fervently played throughout the long years of her exile. I will show how Ibárruri manifested her unyielding commitment to the social and political issues of Spain through her writing and her oratory, cementing her iconic stature as the anti-Franco among the Spanish working classes, and—perhaps most significantly—eluding the inherent existential crisis of the exiled individual by never questioning her personal identity as Pasionaria or her allegiance to Spain. The Spanish Diaspora of 1939 The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 is frequently represented as a mere ellipsis in the annals of European history, overshadowed by Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Mussolini’s sweep to the East. Yet the exile of half a million Spaniards (Rubio)3 represents a unique phenomenon not only within the context of Spanish history, but also within the chronicles of exile as social experience due to: (1) its political nature, (2) its demographic magnitude, and (3) its representation of the Spanish Republic as far as territory, society, and professions (Sánchez Vázquez 1). Obviously, the motivating force behind the exodus was rooted in the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic during that nation’s Civil War (1936–1939) and the consequent establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Nevertheless, the political character of the exile would not end with the events of 1939. Although many of the banished would abandon their political commitment in order to dedicate themselves to the reconstruction of their lives in the country where they had found refuge, others refused to resign themselves to the new reality, rejecting both a Fascist Spain and their new status as a “foreigner.” Divided principally across ideological lines and geographical zones, they considered themselves relocated Spaniards whose circumstance as a political refugee would be short-lived. For the Communists, exiled principally in France and the Soviet Union, the armed conflict of the preceding three years solely represented one long and bloody battle within a war yet to be won through the mobilization of the clandestine Marxist community still living in Spain, principally managed and financed by the Komintern.4 The Socialists and Anarchists, for the most part, found asylum in the Americas, intentionally distancing themselves

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from the Communists, the former reestablishing the Second Spanish Republic in Mexico, which continued to be fully functional throughout the decade of the 1940s. It is important to understand, however, that it is as much the demographical diversity of the exiled Spain as ideological differences that characterize this episode within Western history. Unlike other mass exiles, the banished Spaniards did not pertain to one sole sector determined by a common condition, be it economic, intellectual, or religious conviction, but rather groupings of individuals from across the social spectrum. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the magnitude of the Spanish Diaspora of 1939 not only in numerical terms, but also in light of its demographic configuration as well as its geographical dispersion across four continents. Each and every Spanish province suffered a quantitative diminishment in its population, losing citizens from the middle and upper social classes, agricultural workers, industrial laborers, and intellectuals. Indeed, it was an exact replica of the Second Spanish Republic that fled the Peninsula at the conclusion of the armed conflict; hence, the cultural contributions of the exiled Spanish community within their adopted lands were as diverse as they were copious. F. Fernández Alborz notes: “Una cultura no es sólo el libro que se escribe, el cuadro que se pinta, la escultura que se modela, la música que se compone, el fenómeno que se investiga, la clase que se desarrolla. Es también el campo que se ara, la casa que se levanta, el hierro que se forja, el motor que se mueve” (A culture is not only the book that is written, the picture that is painted, the sculpture that is molded, the music that is composed, the phenomenon that is investigated, the class that is taught. It is also the field that is plowed, the house that is built, the iron that is forged, the motor put in motion; qtd. by Caudet “Dialogizar el exilio” 31). Indeed, as the Axis advanced during the first years of the Second World War and the ensuing Allied casualties took their toll on the work forces, the contributions of the exiled Spanish laborers in Europe—especially in France and the Soviet Union—became vital to the stabilization of national economies and the war effort itself. At the same time, the loss of the labor force within Franco’s Spain as a result of the war and the massive exodus, along with the shortage of everything necessary for basic survival, induced many of those who remained behind to seek hope in the impending Revolution promised by the PCE (Partido Comunista de España)5 in their biweekly underground papers, Mundo Obrero and Nuestra Bandera, and the radio broadcasts of Radio España Independiente (REI; La Pirenaica).6 The Exile of Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria Escape from Franco’s Spain shortly before the Generalísimo’s victory undoubtedly signified a setback for Dolores Ibárruri, but like so many of

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her political comrades, she was never to assume defeat. Sentenced to death in absentia on the criminal conviction of rebelión7 and in a civil trial to fifteen years of exile, loss of Spanish nationality, and repossession of all her property (“Cargas”), she fled to Moscow and was reunited with her children, Rubén and Amaya, who had been airlifted to the Soviet capital in 1935 along with the children of other Communist leaders. Most of her work during the first decade of her exile in Moscow involved the organization of the Spanish workers and the education, care, and political formation of the youth; in other words, she was charged with the integration of the Spanish exiled community within Soviet society as best benefited the Party. Trinidad Revolto Cervello recalls: Allí decidimos casarnos Sebastián Piera y yo, tras requerir la opinión de Pasionaria, que trabajaba en el Instituto Marx-Engels, puesto que tal decisión podría condicionar nuestro traslado a España. Pasionaria nos recalcó que nuestra disciplina revolucionaria debía supeditar siempre nuestras conveniencias personales a las directivas del Partido. (Qtd. by Rodrigo 86) [Sebastián Piera and I decided to get married there, and we sought the advice of Pasionaria whose decision could determine our return to Spain. Pasionaria stressed to us that in the spirit of revolutionary discipline, our personal benefits should always be subordinated to the directives of the Party.]

At the same time, Ibárruri served on the Executive Committee of the International Communist Party and was afforded special privileges befitting a Party dignitary, including an apartment near the Kremlin and a dacha in the countryside outside the Soviet capital. By all accounts, she was never comfortable with the special treatment she received, living a simple life in her apartment, and foregoing lavish social events. She especially enjoyed working from her office in Komintern headquarters, where she “was able to follow the events happening far away in Spain on a daily basis” (Memorias 26). The Komintern, like the PCE before them, took full advantage of her unwavering loyalty to the Party, recognizing the power of the affective bond she shared with the working masses. She traveled extensively and continued to take her message of Revolution and impassioned oratory style to the enormous crowds that gathered to hear her. The Writings of Dolores Ibárruri, 1939–1977 Pasionaria’s writings, corresponding to her years in exile, include her newspaper articles and the transcripts of her speeches along with two autobiographies, El único camino and Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977: Me faltaba España. During her years in Moscow, she also authored two tomes, Historia del Partido Comunista de España and Guerra y Revolución en España,

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1936–39, both subsidized by the Soviet Communist Party. After she had returned to Spain and the Spanish Communist Party had been legalized, she published La propuesta comunista with Santiago Carrillo. It is important to emphasize that any analysis of Ibárruri’s work must be approached within a political framework that excludes a feminist approach. Mangini explains: Nor was she a feminist. If we attempt to misrepresent her as such, we commit the same errors of history as those who have tried to analyze her within the framework of the male politician who rises to power. Yet Pasionaria’s politicization did emanate from her consciousness of the repressive situation of women. (42)

It would be erroneous to attribute Pasionaria with a feminism corresponding to a later era or suggest that she totally rejected woman’s role as caretaker and homemaker. Indeed, whereas the story of Dolores Ibárruri is certainly nothing less than extraordinary within the Spanish experience, it has also been grossly distorted. There is no doubt that her concern for the social position of Spanish women served as an impetus for her involvement in politics, but it was the plight of the Spanish worker that launched her political career. As Ibárruri states in the documentary film directed by Andrés Linares and Luis Sánchez, “Yo soy el producto de una familia de mineros. Mi padre, minero; mi madre, minera; mis hermanos, mineros; mi marido, minero; y yo, comunista; como consecuencia de toda esa minería acumulada” (I am the product of a mining family. My father, a miner; my mother, a miner; my brothers, miners; my husband, a miner; and me, I’m a Communist, as a consequence of all that accumulated mining; Dolores). Though she never denied equal rights for working women within and outside the home, “[. . .] the ‘woman question’ was irrelevant until after class liberation” (Enders and Radcliff 230). The female population constituted part of the larger social community, but did not represent an exclusive entity in and of itself as far as her political activity was concerned. It is true that Ibárruri directed scores of articles and speeches to her fellow countrywomen, but it was toward the emancipation of the working class that all her energies were directed. At the same time, it is important to remember that the Leftist image of Pasionaria as consoling mother, educator, and moral guide does not contradict established social parameters of the Spanish patriarchy, but rather conforms to them. There can be little doubt that she enjoyed unconditional support of the Party because she personified the values considered “feminine,” not only as reflected in her role as biological and spiritual mother, but also with regard to her physical appearance and, most importantly, her attitude

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toward the role of women, which could not be considered radical, even by the norms of the era. It is true that her earliest articles often centered on women’s right to work and equal pay, parity in the home, as well as childcare, but her resounding silence on the issue of female suffrage and tacit rejection of abortion rights throughout her life—even when it was legalized by the democratic government—must make one consider her views of women’s role as conservative, especially when compared with the true feminist voices of the era such as Clara Campoamor, Margarita Nelken, and María de la O Lejárraga. Although she committed two important faux pas in her personal life by first leaving her husband and later taking on a lover—much to the dismay of Party officials—Dolores was careful to deemphasize any feminine sexuality in her physical appearance and demeanor. She always wore black and tied her hair in a tight bun at the base of her neck. Her speeches were interlaced with references to woman’s abnegation of self, and she proudly accepted the nickname Madre Dolores given to her during the Civil War. As Mangini underscores in her study, Margarita Nelken, the writer and Communist militant, although formally educated and far more eloquent than Dolores, never enjoyed the same favor afforded Pasionaria within the Party, probably due to Nelken’s published feminist writing and also perhaps—albeit to a lesser extent—“her fashionable wardrobe of short skirts and plunging necklines, which was criticized publicly on several occasions” (Mangini 30–31). Pasionaria’s commitment to Spain and the Spanish people emanated exclusively from her Marxist ideology, which identified her as both a woman and a politician. There exists no public document composed by Ibárruri void of references to Marxism, not only because of the inseparability of Ibárruri—historical woman/mythical Pasionaria—and Communism, but because it was the education of her followers that defined her mission and guided her expression. The populist discourse of her essays and speeches was carefully structured to indoctrinate and persuade the people as a social collective, although on different occasions she would address specific sectors of the population; women represented but one sector, as did Basques, Catalonians, and Spanish youth, among many others. Ibárruri, however, established new parameters of populist discourse within a Spanish context and defined by the Spanish Civil War that had recently ended. In her addresses, she never recognizes the impact of the exile on the situation inside Spain, nor does she view the dispersion of Spaniards around the world as a problem: “Por donde quiera que nos encontremos, . . . nos sentimos indoblegablemente españoles” (Wherever we may find ourselves . . . we continue to be Spaniards; “Alocución del 30 de abril 1972” 1).

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The Spanish people, in their historical role, and the oppressed people, versus the oppressor—the anti-people, emblematic of all populist theory— dominate the discourse of Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria. This explains how through her newspaper articles in Mundo Obrero and Nuestra Bandera, publications circulated clandestinely by the PCE during the dictatorship, as well as her broadcasts on Radio España Independiente (La Pirenaica), she was able to maintain her affective bond with Spaniards still in Spain and with the exiled community throughout Europe, thereby strengthening her image as a political leader and consoling Mater magna of the working masses: the image that defined both her personal and public personae. Phase I (1939–1955): The Rebuilding of Spain Pasionaria’s political activity during her exile consisted of two different phases, corresponding to the two periods of the Franco dictatorship; the post–Civil War period and the Cold War. The pact between Spain and the United States in 1953 and the consequent installation of U.S. military bases on the Peninsula changed the political horizon considerably, with Franco receiving international recognition as the Spanish head of state and his nation’s admittance to the United Nations; events that would force Ibárruri and the Communist Party to reevaluate their political strategy. Until that turning point, however, the Spanish Communists continued to believe that Franco’s overthrow could be achieved through armed revolution. Ibárruri’s articles and speeches corresponding to the first part of her exile, therefore, center on the reunification of the anti-Fascist forces dispersed in the exterior as well as the organization of the guerrilla movement within the Peninsula. Lo hemos dicho ayer y lo repetimos hoy y mañana y siempre que sea necesario. El pueblo español no vertió su sangre inútilmente, defendiendo la legalidad constitucional; defendiendo su régimen elegido en el libre juego de la práctica democrática, para aceptar hoy, resignadamente al régimen falangista impuesta con las bayonetas alemanas. (“Sobre el futuro de España” 1–2) [We said it yesterday and we will repeat it today and tomorrow and for as long as necessary. The Spanish people did not futilely spill their blood defending constitutional legality and in defense of the system elected through democratic process, just to resign itself today to accept the Phalangist regime, which has been imposed by German bayonets.]

The evocation of the Civil War, especially as concerns the resistance of the people and the role of the Spanish women during the conflict, appears consistently throughout Ibárruri’s writings and speeches of this period. The war as well as the executions, imprisonment, exile, and guerrilla movement

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that followed had converted Spain into a “nation of women” (Romeu Alfaro 15–16), and for this reason, many of Pasionaria’s speeches during the first part of her exile are directed to her fellow countrywomen. From Paris, she reminded them: Nosotras, las mujeres, las madres, las hijas que hemos visto caer a los nuestros, que hemos vivido los sufrimientos de nuestra Patria, no tenemos miedo de mirar frente a frente el dolor. No podemos olvidar porque olvidar es traicionar. Si olvidamos el pasado, traicionaríamos el recuerdo de los que han caído con gloria en los campos de batalla, de todos los que han caído con honor y dignidad en las cárceles y campos de concentración. No podemos olvidar, porque olvidar sería un crimen, olvidar sería dejar las manos libres a los que piensan y hasta hablan ya de empezar nuevas guerras de agresión. (“Alocución en el primer Congreso de la Unión de Mujeres Francesas” 12) [We, the women, the mothers, the daughters who saw our men fall, we who have lived the sufferings of our homeland, are not afraid to come face-toface with anguish. We cannot forget, because forgetting is betrayal. If we forget the past, we betray the memory of those who have fallen in glory on the battlefield, of those who have fallen with honor and dignity in prisons and concentration camps. We cannot forget, because forgetting would be a crime, forgetting would be surrendering to those who are thinking and even talking about new wars of aggression.]

Interjections recounting the Resistance of Madrid in 1937 along with reiterated references to the human casualties in the battles fought—and of course, in Guernica—propose that the war has not yet finished and that the Republic can still be victorious; but only through the regrouping of Loyalists. Pasionaria’s speeches and essays of this first period are methodically outlined, composed, and delivered/published, with careful attention to the events occurring throughout Europe, and in coordination with the organization of the guerrilla. But it is the meticulous outlining of both purpose and method against the background of the Civil War, and attention to literary devices that she brought to her writing—albeit secondary to its demagogic structure—that make her writing quite extraordinary within the genre of Marxist discourse. Without a doubt, the creation of Radio España Independiente (La Pirenaica)8 in 1941 represents perhaps the most crucial event in Pasionaria’s exile affording her the ideal venue with access to the biggest audience she would ever address. She spoke of Revolution with words of encouragement and unwavering will, detailing what actions needed to be taken in order to regain Spain from its Fascist oppressor. On July 18, 1945, the Spanish still reeling from the throes of the postwar famine, she reminded her fellow countrymen: “Un pueblo que quiere ser libre, un gobierno que quiere

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defender la independencia de su país, pelea con armas o sin ellas, con pan o sin pan, por fuerte y poderoso que sea el enemigo que le ataca” (A people that wants to be free, a government that wants to defend its country’s independence, fights with arms or without them, with bread or without it, no matter how strong and powerful the enemy that attacks it; “¡18 de Julio de 1936! Aniversario de una gran lucha” 2). As already noted, Dolores remained informed on the day-to-day happenings within Franco’s Spain, so her radio addresses were predominantly a call to arms and justification for the renewed sacrifice of blood, and she used her broadcasts to instigate other problems for the regime and its friends. In 1943, for example, she instructed potato farmers to plant only enough for their families and communities (“Las patatas tempraneras”) and rice growers to hide their harvests so that the authorities could not buy them at an unfair price (“Defiende tu cosecha”). Similarly, and perhaps most significantly, she used her broadcasts to relay directives to the guerilla, addressing specific groups according to region and describing the types of attacks needed, such as the blowing up of supply trains on the border or the cutting of crucial communication lines. As would be expected, she habitually urged all Spaniards to aid the guerrilla in any way possible. This is not to say that Dolores forgot the role of Spanish women in the new warfront. In fact, one of her first editorials on La Pirenaica was addressed to Spanish mothers, whom she instructed to keep close watch on what their children were learning at school at the hands of their Phalange9 teachers: Cada madre, cuando los chicos vuelven de la escuela, debe preguntarles que es lo que el maestro les ha dicho, y de que se ha hablado en la escuela. Y las madres, con esas palabras que ellas saben hacer llegar tan directamente al corazón de sus hijos, pueden destruir en un momento, la obra nefasta de los llamados educadores fascistas. (“¡Madres!” 1–2) [When their children return from school, every mother should ask them what their teachers told them that day and what was talked about at school. In this way, mothers—who always know what words to use to reach their children’s hearts—can destroy the abject work of the so-called Phalange educators in just one moment.]

Her radio speeches, more than any other of her activities while in exile, not only strengthened the ties between Pasionaria and her followers through her broadcasts, but they also allowed her to take part in the day-to-day problems in Spain, “as if we were there”: “Pero los que hemos tenido una radio, Radio España Independiente en la que constantemente hemos estado hablando a España, trabajando cara a España, no seremos extraños, hemos recibido los informes y las noticias de España y toda nuestra actividad

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está ligada a nuestro país” (Those of us who have had the radio, Radio España, through which we have had constant contact with Spain, working for Spain, will not be strangers [upon our return] because we have always received information and news from Spain, and the sole purpose of all our activity here has always been to benefit our country; qtd. by Carabantes and Cimorra 61). Although most of her speeches and articles corresponding to the first years of her exile concerned the Second World War, her focus remained firmly on Spain. There are abundant references to the Allies whom she never forgave for the “No Intervention”10 Policy of 1936, but in whose efforts to abolish Fascism in Europe she saw the possibility of a future revolution against Franco. As would be expected, she was deeply worried about the relationship between the Spanish dictator and the Axis leaders in Europe, Hitler and Mussolini, but only as these pertained to the repercussions for Spain. First, last, and foremost in her discourse is Spain: “Y antes que Varsovia está Guernica; antes que Amsterdam están Madrid y Barcelona; antes que el martirio de Lídice está Nules. Precediendo al dolor y la ruina de Europa, están la ruina y el dolor de España” (And before Warsaw is Guernica; before Amsterdam is Madrid and Barcelona; before the martyrdom of Lídice is the martyrdom of Nules. Preceding the pain and ruin of Europe is the pain and ruin of Spain; “Discurso pronunciado en París el 5 de octubre 1945” 45). The end of the first period of Ibárruri’s exile not only coincides with the agreement between Spain and the United States, but also with the death of Stalin, who had always been her role model as a Communist leader, “espejo en el que se reflejaba su propia actuación política” (the mirror in which her own political performance was reflected; Cruz 178). Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about the atrocities committed by Stalin troubled Pasionaria and worsened her already chronic insomnia (Ibárruri qtd. by Cruz 186). Indeed, from that point forward, she rarely mentioned his name again, except in retrospective recognition of his efforts on behalf of the guerrilla movement (Memorias 89–90). Phase II (1954–1977): “National Reconciliation” During the second period of her exile, Pasionaria found herself having to reassess not only her own role as concerned the situation inside Spain, but also her vision for the nation’s future, having to now consider the international recognition of Franco’s regime and, consequently, the improbability of popular support in favor of the armed revolution the Communists had planned. She focused her attention on what she believed would be an imminent end of the dictatorship and her return to Spain. Toward that

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end, she crafted the “National Reconciliation” plan, adopted by the PCE in 1956. Her essays and speeches of this period, therefore, center on political topics of the day both within the Peninsula and internationally. During this second part of her exile, her radio addresses were key in keeping alive within Spain the revolutionary image of Pasionaria; on one hand, because the diffusion of La Pirenaica within the Peninsula had increased considerably and, on the other, because the imposing vigor of her communication continued to attract both followers and adversaries. Every time there was a major event in the news, Ibárruri took to the airwaves. Nevertheless, the “National Reconciliation” policy remained the focal point of both her radio addresses and her newspaper articles, as she called for the resolution of Leftist ideological differences and lingering resentments through the consolidation of anti-Franco forces at all levels: “Al cabo de 30 años de separación, los caminos de la democracia española, aún distintos entre sí, comienzan a converger en un punto concreto: en la necesidad de cerrar el paréntesis de la dictadura y de establecer un régimen democrático, y en el que sea posible la convivencia civil y el libre juego de todas las fuerzas políticas y sociales” (After thirty years of separation, the roads to Spanish democracy—although each different in its own way— are beginning to converge at one specific point: in the necessity to close the [historical] parenthesis of the dictatorship in order to establish a democratic regime; one in which civil coexistence and free movement of all political and social forces are a reality; REI July 26, 1966 1–2). The call to arms emblematic of Pasionaria’s writings during the first part of her exile has now been replaced with the appeal for national unity, although the references to the Civil War and denouncements of Franco’s regime remain constant. In fact until Dolores returned to Spain, the war would continue to be the key reference point in all her speeches and articles. Now, however, she reiterated that the war “es ya historia” (was history; REI July 26, 1966 2), as she looked forward to mending proverbial fences through “national reconciliation.” The Voice of Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria The voice of Dolores Ibárruri, as writer/speaker, clearly represents the woman Pasionaria who considered herself neither exiled from Spain nor repatriated in the Soviet Union, but simply a Spaniard who had temporarily relocated as a result of the war. She explained to Carabantes and Cimorra: “Es decir, que [la Unión Soviética] no es un país en el cual echamos raíces para decir ‘nos quedamos aquí.’ Estamos aquí porque la vida nos lanzó en ese impetuoso movimiento desgraciadamente de derrota, de la República. Por lo demás, estaríamos en España” (In other words, [the

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Soviet Union] isn’t a country in which we are putting down roots to say “we will stay here.” We’re here because life thrust us here in that unfortunate moment the Republic was defeated. Under any other circumstance, we would be in Spain; Carabantes and Cimorra 60). Exile was the cross that Dolores embraced without vacillation or ignominy, not because it symbolized defeat, but rather because defeat was the result of having fought. In 1974, when the imminent end of the dictatorship seemed possible only through Franco’s death, Ibárruri wrote: Pero aún doliéndonos el largo exilio, que a veces ha hecho decir, como a un amigo portugués, emigrante como nosotros: “esto da volontade de morir,” no nos arrepentimos del camino emprendido, porque tenemos el legítimo orgullo, el orgullo revolucionario, de haber luchado por una causa justa y la seguridad de que el mañana democrático ha comenzado a amanecer ya hoy sobre nuestro país. (“El mañana democrático” 5) [Even as painful as this long exile has been, as many times as we have said, “we might as well be dead,” we do not regret taking the road we chose to follow, because we are genuinely proud of our revolutionary spirit; proud of having fought for a just cause and the assurance that a new democratic tomorrow has begun to dawn on our country.]

Indeed, a careful reading of Ibárruri’s work written during her exile, suggests an underlying sentiment on the part of the author, surging from both her love for her homeland and her disdain for Franco. It is the implication of a contest, a mano a mano, or dispute, far more personal than ideological, between Dolores and the dictator; one in which Franco himself obviously did not participate. Dolores saw the loss of a battle reflected in her exile, but she never accepted having lost the war against Fascism. For this reason, the analytical reading of her writing brings to light her tacit rejection not only of the possibility that she might die in exile, but even the chance that she might die without witnessing the downfall of the dictator. So many exiles dream of their homecoming to the land in which they were born, however, it was an implacable determination to return triumphantly that drove Pasionaria. Any other alternative was not acceptable to her as it would solely represent: [. . .] una solución reaccionaria que obligará a los dirigentes republicanos, o a resignarse a morir en el exilio—como los últimos mohicanos de la segunda República—o a volver a España tolerados y vivir en ella humillados, como sombras del pasado, sentados alrededor de la camilla, sin ningún peso ni influencia en la vida pública, evocando en la intimidad familiar los días de triunfo y de apogeo de la República de 1931. (“La unidad de la clase obrera” 70)

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[. . .a reactionary solution that would obligate Republican leaders to either resign themselves to die in exile—like the last Mohicans of the Second Republic—or to return to Spain to be merely tolerated; to live in humiliation, like shadows of the past, sitting around the parlor table with no weight or influence in public life, remembering the triumphant days and the apex of the Republic in 1931 within the confines of family life.]

Thanks to her iron will, strengthened by her hate for Franco and the system he represented, along with her profound sense of political and maternal responsibility on behalf of the Spanish people, the mythical Communist leader never lost faith in her future return to Spain. This determination to return to the Peninsula only in conjunction with her role as a political leader in a post-Franco Spain remains a constant in all her writing throughout the years of her exile, and is revealed in the isotopes of her discourse. Although various isotopes change in Ibárruri’s discourse in accordance with the change of Party policy, many remain consistent throughout her writing. From the beginning of her exile until her return to Spain, she favors certain words to describe Franco and his regime, especially vileza (vileness) and its adjectival derivative vil (vile), to describe the dictator within his two historical roles of wartime general and dictator as well as the Phalangist political organization. What is most intriguing about this phenomenon is not the definition of these words themselves, or Ibárruri’s rejection of possible synonyms, but rather their onomatopoeic function. Pasionaria’s writing reveals her predilection for words with strong and violent phonemes to denounce her enemies. The significance of this practice not only applies to her oratory, but also to her articles, considering that the unskilled reader—representative of the Spanish working class of the era—often reads aloud in order to ensure comprehension. The reading aloud of Ibárruri’s text permitted the onomatopoeic effect to underscore the infamy associated with the anti-people. Similarly, the repetition of the pronoun we not only distinguished the people from the anti-people over and over again, but also served to remind Pasionaria’s reader/listener of her continued participation in their political struggle and her omnipresence in Spanish life in spite of the distance that separated her from the Peninsula. On the other hand, the isotopes serpiente (snake) and víbora (viper), her preferred choice of nouns in reference to Franco, correlate extratextually to the Republican iconography of the Civil War in which a serpent was consistently used to picture the enemy. The image of a snake was also in harmony with the idea of vileness, of course, but Dolores seems to conscientiously choose derogatory sibilants in order to invoke the image of the snake that silently slithers through the grass stalking his unsuspecting prey

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in order to establish the antithetical people/anti-people relationship. Other isotopes favoring the alliteration of the “s” sound include ensañarse (to treat brutally), sinuoso (sinuous), and miseria (misery) as well as a marked preference for the collective noun fascistas (Fascists) over falangistas (Phalangists), especially during the second phase of her exile. These nominatives also reveal the blind spots in Ibárruri’s perception of reality, especially as concerns her interpretation of the Civil War. When Franco died, she wrote: “Como el despertar de una angustiosa pesadilla, nuestro pueblo ha conocido la muerte de Franco. Francisco Franco, principal responsable de tantos crímenes, de tantas depredaciones, de tantos lutos, de tantos dolores, ha muerto. Que la tierra le sea leve” (As one awakes from an anguishing nightmare, so have our people known the death of Franco. Francisco Franco, personally responsible for so many crimes, so much deprivation, so much loss of life, so much pain, has died. May the Earth be gentle with him; “La hora de la democracia” 1). The evocation of Guernica, and the omitted reference to Paracuellos, the memory of the Ebro, but the exclusion of the Alcázar in Toledo,11 as well as the violation of human rights against the Spanish clergy on the part of Republicans—not to mention the injustices committed within the Soviet Bloc—all are part of Pasionaria’s selective memory, although all have been exposed with the democratization of Spain and the definitive failure of Communism to regain power after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in spite of its attempt to present itself as a kindler, gentler, and less Soviet guise of eurocomunismo (European Communism). It is due to these same circumstances that Ibárruri’s writing is now considered anachronistic, having lost validity within a post-Franco Spain, and above all, the political dynamics of the European Union. Nevertheless, the Pasionaria myth persists, no thanks to Ibárruri’s literary prowess, but rather her perseverance, represented by her voice that echoed from her exile, attracting some and repulsing others, but always firm in her opposition to the enemy and her omnipresence. Conclusions Dolores Ibárruri died fifty years after her expatriation from Spain as a result of the Nationalist victory and the Franco dictatorship. Whereas the memory of other figures of her era are now only relegated to a brief biographical description in history textbooks, the myth around Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, continues to reinforce her undeniable authority as an iconic figure of the anti-Franco movement. The analysis of Ibárruri’s literary production, more notable for its quantity than its quality, whose Marxist authority has been disaccredited by the

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fall of Soviet Communism as well as the failure of European Communism, and whose anachronism has buried it in the back shelves of the Spanish National Library and the historical archives of the PCE, leads one to conclude that Pasionaria’s is a body of work now rendered irrelevant. Lamentably, however, through this process of disremembering, the significance of her production in the making of the Pasionaria myth has also been lost; a legend that owes little to her literary skills and the impermanence of her written word, but everything to her commitment to speak out and be heard by followers and adversaries alike. What has not been lost, and perhaps never will, is the image of the tall female figure, dressed in black with a tightly rolled bun at the nape of her neck and her fist raised in defiance of the regime she so distained, etched in the collective memory of the Spanish people. Her message brought hope during the darkest years of Franco regime, and her unfaltering commitment to her political ideals served to transform her pseudonym in metonymy. Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, disdained by millions and adored by as many others, earned her place in the annals of Spain’s twentieth century through the same abnegation she demanded of others, reflected above all else by the thirty-eight years of her exile and by her tacit rejection of defeat. Notes The author is indebted to the PCE for their generosity in affording unbarred access to their historical archives and in particular to Victoria Ramos Bello and Patricia González-Posada Delgado whose help in this project, as in many others, was invaluable. Thanks also to Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri for her time and allowing me access to her mother’s personal library. Travel was funded in part by a Virginia Military Institute Grant in Aid of Research. 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2. Ibárruri assumed the pen name of “Pasionaria” in her first newspaper article, “Hipocresía religiosa” published in 1919, although she is popularly referred to as “la/La Pasionaria.” Whereas this can be attributed in part to the oral tradition associated with her story, the pejorative use of the definite article has consistently been a practice among her political adversaries and critics. During my interview with Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri, Pasionaria’s daughter, she stressed that her mother should not be referred to as “La Pasionaria,” but rather as “Pasionaria” or “Dolores” as Ibárruri herself chose to be called (Ruiz). References to Pasionaria and Dolores in this essay are not intended to suggest personal bias, but are in accordance with the request made by Ruiz Ibárruri. 3. The exact number of Spanish exiles remains unconfirmed. Caudet challenges Rubio’s figure of a half a million, hypothesizing that the actual number in 1939 was probably between 200,000 and 300,000 (86). Nonetheless, it is

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

important to remember that the exodus began at the beginning of the war in 1936 and continued throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. The Komintern was the International Communist Party. Partido Comunista de España (PCE). The official name of the Spanish Communist Party. As were all political parties except the Phalange— la Falange—the PCE was banned during the dictatorship. It was officially recognized in 1977, barely a month before Ibárruri’s return to Spain. Radio España Independiente (REI). REI’s radio broadcasts were transmitted from Budapest and were received in Spain as well as other neighboring countries. REI was financed and directed by the Komintern and, therefore, its broadcasts were propagandistic in nature. Rebelión (rebellion) or Auxilio a la rebelión (aiding the rebellion) were the charges the Franco regime used to convict those enemies they considered war criminals. REI was first broadcast from Moscow, and later from Budapest. To give the impression that the broadcasts were being emitted from the Pyrenees— suggesting the closing in of anti-Franco forces—it was nicknamed La Pirenaica from its inception. The Phalange—la falange—was the only political party permitted by the Franco regime. As such it is the true example of pure Fascism as it existed in Spain. Through the “No Intervention” Policy, the Allies agreed to remain neutral in the Spanish Civil War. Approximately 1,500 Nationalist prisoners-of-war were slaughtered in Paracuellos under the direction of Santiago Carrillo. In the defense of the Alcázar de Toledo, Republican troops were victorious at a cost of numerous Nationalist casualties, including cadets from the School of Infantry housed in the Alcázar at that time.

Works Cited Carabantes, Andrés and Eusebio Cimorra. Un mito llamado Pasionaria. Barcelona: Planeta, 1982. “Cargas contra ‘La Pasionara.’ ” La Prensa. April 21, 1939. Madrid, n.p. Caudet, Francisco. “Dialogizar el exilio.” El exilio literario español de 1939. 2 vols. Ed. Manuel Aznar Soler. Barcelona: Gexel, 1998. 31–56. ———. Hipótesis sobre el exilio. Barcelona: GEXEL, 1998. Cruz, Rafael. Pasionaria. Dolores Ibárruri, Historia y Símbolo. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999. Dolores. Andrés Linares and José Luis G. Sánchez, dirs. Videocassette. 110 minutes. Enders, Victoria Lorée and Pamela Beth Radcliff. Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain. Albany: SUNY, 1999. Ibárruri, Dolores. “¡18 de Julio de 1936!—Aniversario de una gran lucha.” REI. Ts. June 6, 1942. Fundación Dolores Ibárruri, Madrid.

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———. “Defiende su cosecha de arroz.” REI. Ms. June 24, 1943. Archivo PCE, Madrid. ———. “¡Madres! No dejéis que la educación falangista penetre en vuestros hijos.” REI. Ts. February 4, 1943. Archivo PCE, Madrid. ———. “Sobre el futuro de España.” Ms. February 18, 1943. Archivos PCE, Madrid. ———. “Las patatas tempraneras.” REI. Ts. April 4, 1943. Archivo PCE, Madrid. ———. “Discurso pronunciado en París el 5 de octubre 1945.” ¡Por la libertad de España! Mexico: Partido Comunista de España en México, 1945. ———. Escritos y discursos: edición de homenaje en su 60⬚ aniversario. Buenos Aires: Anteo, 1955. ———. “La unidad de la clase obrera, base de la victoria sobre el franquismo.” Por una paz duradera, por una democracia popular. May 20, 1955: 62–71. ———. Historia del Partido Comunista de España. Warsaw: Ed. Polonia, 1960. ———. REI July 26, 1966. (REI Trascript for Untitled Broadcast). ———. Guerra y Revolución en España, 1936–1939. 2 vols. Moscow: Progreso, 1967. ———. “Alocución del 30 de abril 1972.” REI. Ts. April 30, 1972. Fundación Dolores Ibárruri, Madrid. ———. “La hora de la democracia.” Ts. November 20, 1975. Fundación Dolores Ibárruri, Madrid. ———. Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977: Me faltaba España. Barcelona: Planeta, 1984. ———. El único camino. Madrid: Castalia, 1992. ———. (“Alocución en el primer Congreso de la Unión de Mujeres Francesas.” In ¡Por la libertad de Espana! Partido Comunista Espanol en Mexico, 1995. ———. “El pueblo español prefiere morir a vivir de pie a morir de rodillas. Discurso pronunciado en un gran mitin de solidaridad con el pueblo español, celebrado en París en el velódromo de Invierno, el 8 de septiembre de 1936.” Pasionaria y los siete enanitos. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Planeta, 1995. 399–402. ———. “Más vale ser viudas de héroes que mujeres de cobardes. Intervención en el mitin por la defensa de Madrid.” Pasionaria y los siete enanitos. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Planeta, 1995. 402–07. ———. “¡No pasarán! Llamamiento pronunciado en nombre del Partido Comunista ante los micrófonos del Ministerio de Gobernación el 19 de julio de 1936.” Pasionaria y los siete enanitos. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Planeta, 1995. 398–99. ———. “El mañana democrático ha comenzado a amanecer sobre nuestra patria.” Mundo Obrero. N.d.: 5–7. Ibárruri, Dolores and Santiago Carrillo. La propuesta comunista. Barcelona: Laia, 1977. Mangini, Shirley. Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War. New Haven: Yale, 1995. Rodrigo, Antonina. Mujer y exilio, 1939. Madrid: Compañía literaria, 1999. Romeu Alfaro, Fernanda. El silencio roto. Mujeres contra el franquismo. 2nd ed. Madrid: El Viejo Topo, 2002.

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Rubio, Javier. La emigración de la Guerra Civil 1936–39. Vol I. Madrid: San Martín, 1977. Ruiz Ibárruri, Amaya. Personal interview. June 22, 1999. Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. “Del destierro al transtierro.” March 2000. Ateneo español de México, Mexico City. January 8, 2001. http://www.ateneo. unam.mx/transtierro.htm.

FEMALE VOICES OF RESISTANCE IN NEUS CATALÀ’S DE LA RESISTENCIA Y LA DEPORTACIÓN: THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE, DIGNITY, AND SOLIDARITY DURING THE HOLOCAUST Maureen Tobin Stanley

“Je est un autre” (I is an other) Arthur Rimbaud

n The Origins of Totalitarianism, completed in 1949 and published in 1951, Hannah Arendt recalls a joke that came about after the conclusion of the Second World War: “An anti-Semite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other” (Arendt 5). The joke documented by Arendt highlights the irrationality inherent in totalitarianism. In fact, we could state that the selection of the victim is arbitrary and absurd. The comedic example utilized by Arendt in no way makes light of the massacre of millions of human beings; rather, as the author claims, “The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat implies that the scapegoat might have been anyone else as well. It upholds the perfect innocence of the victim” (Arendt 5). Although the Jews were clearly the collective scapegoat for the Nazi regime, they were not by any means the only victims. In this essay I will be covering an understudied phenomenon that is beginning to receive scholarly attention: Spaniards in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It is estimated that more than 10,000 Spaniards were interned in Nazi camps with the implicit endorsement of Francisco Franco’s regime. I will specifically address the case of female Spaniards who fought in the French Resistance,

I

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many of whom were deported to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp primarily for women. Approximately 400 female Spaniards were imprisoned by the Nazis. The aspect I will focus on is the gendered perspective of survivors interviewed in the early 1980s by Neus Català (a survivor herself) four decades after the Spanish Civil War, exile, deportation, and liberation. Though testimonials deal with the events of the 1930s and 1940s, Català published her collection of interviews for the first time in 1984, nine years after the death of Franco and six years after the new democratic constitution. The contemporary democratic political framework should be viewed as a catalyst that spurred the retrospective, namely the return to the past to identify and applaud the origins of human rights within a twentiethcentury Spanish context. The collected testimonies bear witness to the fight against a totalitarian force, but above all, symbolize a celebration of human rights as well as a bright past and future.

Bird in the Bush by Carla Stetson.

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The female testimonials as a collective referenced herein profess a key fact: that Fascism was viewed as a pause in Spain’s democratic history. Instead of viewing the Republic (1931–1936) as an anomaly, it must be viewed as a beginning, a thread that was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and ensuing Francoist regime (1939–1975), and which was resumed in 1978 with the creation of the new Constitution. Since the latter occurrence and the subsequent formation of the European Union, Spain is a democratic, plurinational, pluriethnic country that defends human rights. I will attempt to show that these women of humble backgrounds embraced humanity politically, personally, and morally, and, thus, argue that the female voices recorded by Català are proof of moral psychologist Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care,”1 a gendered moral reasoning founded on human bonds. In essence, Català and her interviewees profess their moral—and consequently political—commitment to life and fellow human beings in spite of the dehumanization and genocide they witnessed. Silence Shattered by Female Voices It was not until 1975 that it was “discovered” that Spanish women had been imprisoned in Nazi camps. Thanks to the efforts of the feminist Catalonian writer Montserrat Roig, this historical reality came to light. Roig, who had been compiling her tome Els catalans als camps nazis (Catalonians in Nazi Camps, published in 1977), learned of the presence of female Spaniards in the camps at an ex-deportee reunion of the Amical Association2 in Paris on the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps. As David Serrano i Blanquer claims, in Les dones als camps nazis (Women in Nazi Camps), several of the female ex-deportees who knew of Roig’s book project “wished to inform her that as of yet she had only heard male voices: that there had been Republican women in Nazi camps” (15).3 In 1980, Mercè Núñez Targa published her memoirs El carretó dels gossos: Una catalana a Ravensbrück (The Wagon of the Dogs: A Catalonian Woman in Ravensbrück).4 At a conference in 1981, Roig insisted that a book on Spanish women in the camps must be written (Serrano 16). Català’s text was printed in 1984. Fourteen years later, a scholarly essay on Català written by Christina Dupláa appeared in Letras Peninsulares. In 2003, David Serrano i Blanquer’s Les dones als camps nazis appeared in print. The silence enshrouding the Spanish concentration camp experience, compounded with the issue of gender, forced the female camp survivors to live a double exile: outer exile and an “especially and incredibly difficult inner exile”; these Spanish female deportees were “aware that if anyone continued exerting authority over the word regarding deportation, it would primarily be the male sex” (Serrano i Blanquer 17).5

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Several Spanish male survivors have published testimonial and memorialistic accounts of their camp experiences: Manuel Alfonso (1998), Joan de Déu Amill (1995), Ramon Bargueño (1999), Francesc Batiste (1999), Josep Borràs (1989), Jacint Carrió (2001), Francesc Comellas (2001), Joan Escuer (2003), Lluís Marcó (1998), Felipe Martínez-Robles (1999), Lope Massaguer (1997), Marcial Mayans (1999), Josep Salvat (1975) and Amadeu Sinca (1980) (Serrano i Blanquer 20). To this list we could add the fictionalized accounts of male survivors Joaquim Amat-Piniella (K.L. Reich) and Jorge Semprún (Le Grand voyage, L’écriture ou la vie). Francesc Boix’s photographic memoir of his experience at Mauthausen should also be included. Therefore, the female voices documented by Català, like Mercè Núñez Targa’s autobiographical account and Montserrat Roig’s 500-page research tome that gave voice to the silenced, are significant as testaments to the gendered efforts and experience that tune into a collective of female voices that had been muffled.6 The Chosen Few versus All of Us Català’s efforts to make the women’s voices heard bear an express purpose: the vindication of a forgotten and suppressed gendered past. Serrano i Blanquer insists that the recovery of the past must be viewed within the context of the hegemonic structures following the Civil War: The Francoist dictatorship is the direct perpetrator, just as its collaborators are accomplices through action or omission, of the fate of each and every one of these women forced to flee in 1939. It is a unique case of a government, albeit fascist, that does not insist upon the return of its citizens, not even to take reprisals against them within its own territory. Furthermore, it is a unique case of a government that allows another State, Germany in this case, to take on this repression. The generation of the diaspora, by ignoring the immediate fate of compatriots and neglecting liability, punitive in this case, . . . accentuates the degree of accountability . . . of an entire system. (30–31)7

Serrano’s comment is an explicit indictment of the Francoist regime, whose collaboration with Nazi Germany eliminated republicanism and, more concretely, Republicans from Spanish history. The goal of totalitarian governments is total domination; coexistence is impossible (Arendt xi–xii). In other words, totalitarian governments promote the annihilation or elimination of those who are not deemed part of the correct group. As Arendt asserts, “terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient” (6).

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The belief in violence as both a means and an end is irrefutably menacing. Of course, within a totalitarian system, domination is asserted through violence; but pointless violence is also essential to exerting complete control over subjects. The result is order that has stemmed from fear. The violence creates sacrificial victims, whose elimination is purported to restore social order. Those not victimized applaud the otherness of the sacrificed ones; thus, those spared can feel safe for being dissimilar to them. Yet, as evident in the testimonials compiled by Català, the women who took a stand against Fascism felt a connection with their peers. The overriding emotion is the human connection. Secundina Barceló states that she kept silent during interrogation and torture and that “deep inside I felt great satisfaction and pride of having had the moral and physical strength to withstand the Nazi beast . . . I knew that I had fulfilled my duty and that no one else had fallen into the hands of the Nazis because of me” (Català 97; my emphasis).8 The driving force within Barceló was her moral commitment to her peers. Precisely because of the sense of solidarity, Català’s interviewees celebrated the Republican (i.e., democratic) cause (that defended human rights) and presented opposition to the dehumanizing forces. Having served as a liaison in the Resistance, Concha González de Boix speaks of her duty, solidarity, and sense of collective efforts. She claims to have fulfilled her duty not for glory, fame, or heroism, but rather to defeat Fascism. She states that her contribution to the “liberation of the country was modest, and consisted of teamwork, well directed by capable leaders, as well as of the ability to balance daring with meticulousness . . . We all went through difficult times and delicate situations, in which our lives were at stake, but the love of freedom was immeasurable and the camaraderie our reason to live” (Català 245).9 The highest priority, hence, constitutes the bonds with and duty to others. Her individual efforts were a part of a collective force that aimed to benefit all. It goes without saying that Fascism is diametrically opposed to the concept of human rights. At the risk of oversimplifying, I will state that the difference lies in the answer to one key question: who matters? For the Fascist, the Nazi or the nacional, the answer would be: “we few matter, for we are the sons of the great nation”;10 whereas one who upholds human rights would claim “we all matter.” It is precisely this tenet of assigning value to all human beings and feeling a sense of solidarity with all that characterizes the testimonials within Català’s collection. Although Fascism (in its diverse and permutated forms) is viewed as abhorrent, the totalitarians are not demonized, vilified, or dehumanized. In spite of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the flight into France, Nazi occupation, and the struggle to survive in a concentration camp, these survivors, who lived to tell their tale, to remember and reconstruct Spain’s

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legitimate democratic past and Spanish Republicans’ insistence on preserving democracy (i.e., rights for all), are recovering a history that was lost during Franco’s nearly forty-year rule and are salvaging the collective democratic memory from oblivion. Documenting Human Rights For our purposes, three documents attest to the propagation and protection of human rights in Spain: the 1931 Spanish Republican Constitution, the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1978 Spanish Constitution. The Preliminary Title of the 1931 Republican Constitution states, “Spain is a democratic Republic of workers of all classes, that is organized in a regime of Freedom and Justice; The powers of all its branches emanate from the people” (Article 1); “All Spaniards are equal before the law” (Article 2); “Spain renounces war as an instrument of official policy” (Article 6); and “The state will adhere to the universal guidelines of international Law” (Article 7).11 The fundamental concepts that reappear in the other two documents as well include freedom, justice, peace, equality, solidarity with other peoples, and government as a reflection of the will of the citizens. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was created by the United Nations precisely as a result of the Holocaust, because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Its Preamble states that “the inherent dignity” and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [my emphasis] [are] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world . . . [Human] rights should be protected by the rule of law . . . [The] peoples of the United Nations have . . . reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person . . . and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life.

Article 10.2 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution (SC) affirms that its guidelines regarding fundamental rights and freedoms are in accordance with the UDHR. The Preamble of the 1978 Constitution reads as follows: The Spanish Nation, wishing to establish justice, freedom and security and promote the good of its constituents . . . proclaims its will to: Guarantee democratic co-existence . . . in accordance with fair economic and social order; Consolidate a State of Law that insures the rule of law as an expression of the will of the people; Protect all Spaniards and peoples of Spain by exercising their human rights . . . ; Promote cultural and economic progress to insure a suitable quality of life for all; Establish a democratic and advanced society; and

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Colaborate in the strengthening of peaceful relations and effective cooperation among all the peoples of the Earth.” (“Constitución Española” Preamble)12

All three uphold peace, freedom, and equality, but it is the UDHR and the 1978 Constitution that promote progress and dignity and refer specifically to a collective human bond as indicated by the term “human family” in the UDHR as well as by the final statement of the Constitutional Preamble, which calls for “peaceful relations and effective cooperation among all the peoples of the Earth.” The concept that individual rights are the basis for collective, that is social, well-being is further expressed in Article 1 of the UDHR (“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”) as well as in Article 10.1 of the 1978 SC (“The dignity of the person, the inherent inviolable rights, the free development of personality, the respect of the law and the rights of others are the foundations of political order and social peace”).13 Clearly the familial bond (“brotherhood”) takes on not only a political but also a moral connotation. The ties to an equal are indissoluble for they foster not only personal well-being, but also that of peers and that of society as a whole. The concept of equality is clearly expressed in Article 25 of the 1931 Constitution, which states that origins, affiliation, sex, social class, wealth, political ideas, or religious beliefs cannot be a basis for judicial privilege. Similarly, Article 2 of the UDHR affirms that everyone merits freedoms and rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” In a parallel fashion, the 1978 Constitution stipulates that all Spaniards are equal before the law regardless of “birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance” (Art. 14).14 The right to life and security of person are expressed in Articles 315 and 516 of the UDHR, as well as in Article 15 of the 1978 Constitution.17 Each of these documents has identified, defined, and explained the concept of human rights that was the foundation for the Republic; they were reaffirmed following the Holocaust in the UDHR, and were reinstituted in Spain in 1978 with the inauguration of a democratic State. It is with the 1978 Constitution that Francoist Fascism and its vestiges came to an undeniable and definite conclusion. Deportation of Spaniards to Nazi Camps The deportation of Spaniards to Nazi camps, during the first years of Franco’s regime, should be considered within the context of human rights,

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and how the rights as described in the Republican Constitution were systematically stripped. The trajectory is as follows. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) concluded with the fall of the Republic and the victory of the nacionales, leading to the nearly forty-year Fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The defeat of the Republic and the rise to power of the Francoist Fascist regime following the Civil War in spring of 1939 constituted a victory for Fascism in Western Europe and a prelude to the Second World War that commenced in the autumn of that year. Once the Republic’s defeat was evident in January and February of 1939, masses of Spanish refugees crossed the border into France. France was a logical destination of refuge for many reasons: first due to the geographic proximity. Many of the exiles originated in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Aragon.18 Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, is a mere 150 kilometers from the French border. Furthermore, as decreed by the French constitution of 1793, France had official policy of asylum (Dreyfus-Armand 35). Between 1936 and 1939, three waves of refugees arrived in France: 15,000 refugees after the fall of Basque Country, 120,000 upon completion of the nationalists’ northern campaign, and 25,000 once Aragon was occupied (35–36). Children were evacuated to the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Soviet Union.19 It is imperative to note that the safety of children was promulgated in the Republican Constitution (Art. 43) in accordance with the Geneva Declaration. But the massive retreat in January and February of 1939, after the fall of Catalonia, constituted an exodus. By March of that year it is calculated that half a million Spaniards had sought asylum, and this is the most significant immigration into France to date (Dreyfus-Armand 53; Vilanova 83). To say the least, the Spaniards were not welcomed with open arms. In spite of the official policy of asylum, the French right-wing thought ill of the Republican neighbors from the south. In fact, newspapers at that time labeled the refugees as the “torrent of ugliness,” “carnivorous beasts of the Internacional,” “the foreign swarm,” “bottom-dwellers and the dregs of prisons,” and “the dregs of world anarchy” (Dreyfus-Armand 48–49).20 These denigrating epithets are strikingly not dissimilar to those that appeared in postwar Spanish newspapers referring to the masses of exiles as “beasts,” “hordes,” and “flocks” (Emmanuelle Salgas in Vilanova 94).21 The Republican Spaniards were neglected by their home of origin and disdained by the nation of refuge. Under the Republican Constitution, those born of a Spanish parent in or outside of Spain, those born on Spanish soil of foreign parents, and those born in Spain of unknown parents (meaning orphans) are all Spanish citizens (Art. 23) to whom correspond the protection of the State. Even orphans, according to the 1931 Constitution, were under the charge of the Republic. Article 31 affirms that the residence of all

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Spaniards and foreign residents in Spain is inviolable. Yet the postwar situation rendered these Spaniards not only homeless, but political orphans. The French camps for the Spanish refugees were barely able to meet the basic needs (food, shelter, and hygiene) of these human beings, thus, they were living in subhuman conditions (Dreyfus-Armand 61). The French government, reluctant to assimilate close to 500,000 refugees, provided them with four options: to join labor companies, to emigrate to another country, to enlist (i.e., the Foreign Legion), or to repatriate (DreyfusArmand 71; Roig 15; Vilanova 83–85). The final option was unappealing given the persecution of Republicans in Francoist Spain. In the first year of Franco’s regime approximately 200,000 individuals came to be imprisoned and sent to labor camps. Between 1939 and 1944 there were 192,684 executions in Spain (Fontana xiii). Therefore, during the Nazi occupation and the French Vichy government, many Republican Spanish exiles participated in the French Resistance. As Arendt claims, “the Spanish refugees felt they fought against Franco when they helped the French against Vichy” (Arendt 283). When interviewed by Català, Josefa Bas attests to this fact: “For me, just as for many refugees from Catalonia and all of Spain, the fight continued, and the fight against Nazi-fascism meant to pursue the same enemy that had taken root in our home, rising up against the legal and democratic state, [in other words] the branch of fascism called Francoism” (100).22 A communiqué dated June 1940 stated that Republican Spaniards in France were enemies of the Reich and a threat to public safety. According to Francesc Vilanova, the “Rotspanier” (Spanish reds), suffered “a double antiGerman condition: prisoners of war and political enemies” (Vilanova 107).23 An agreement was established between Madrid and the Nazi occupying force that high-ranking Republican exiles would be extradited. Once returned to Spain, they were executed, such as Lluís Companys, ex-president of the Generalitat (Catalonian government) (Dreyfus-Armand 144). By September of 1940, it was decided that Republican combatants would be deported to Nazi camps. Article 29 of the 1931 Republican Constitution states that “No one shall be arrested or imprisoned without cause of a crime.”24 Nonetheless, 7,200 Spaniards were interned in Mauthausen alone, 5,000 of whom perished. It is estimated that 10,000 Spaniards were sent to Nazi camps. Yet, this figure cannot be considered exact, given that many prisoners, arrested and deported in France, were labeled as French. The number of Spaniards who were interned in camps due to their involvement in the Resistance is difficult to assess since they were dispersed throughout the “concentrationary” universe, especially in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossembürg, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, and Auschwitz (Dreyfus-Armand 122).

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The idea that civilian refugees could be deported was deemed incomprehensible to the Catalonian camp survivors interviewed by Montserrat Roig. In her 500-page report Els catalans als camps nazis (1977), Roig studies the case of the 2,000 civilians shipped from Angulema to Mauthausen. Finding no proof (only oral testimony) of the internment of Spanish civilian refugees, she labeled it a “legend.” Recent research, through the retrieval and study of correspondence between the German and Spanish ministries of Foreign Affairs dated 1940 and 1941, has proven Madrid’s indifference to these 2,000 civilians and their subsequent deportation, thus, demonstrating that the investigation of testimony provides the missing pieces in history.25 Before Roig interviewed the Spanish minister of Foreign Affairs Ramón Serrano Suñer in the late 1970s, the survivors she interviewed claimed that Serrano Suñer had washed his hands of them, stating that, as Republicans, they were not Spaniards and they had no country. Roig had incredulously pondered how it was possible that 2,000 civilian refugees had been deported to a Nazi concentration camp if they had not had a chance to participate in the French Resistance, and, further, were not Jews (Roig 15). Roig’s query reinforces the concept that when the point of violence is violence itself, anyone can become a victim. Without a homeland, the Spanish refugees had no rights and no legal recourse. Criminals have rights and protection under the law but refugees are “in between”; their interstitial reality defies legal characterization. These Spanish refugees in France were truly orphaned. In Strangers to Ourselves, the feminist psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva states that “the foreigner has lost his mother” (5). The exiled and deported are orphaned. They are unwanted by the land of origin and not accepted by the secondary “home.” This was certainly the case of the Spaniards exiled in France, living in subhuman refugee camps and repudiated by the Vichy government. Once the Nazi occupying forces were in place, the Spaniards’ second-class status worsened. Arendt notes the ancient policy of quid quid est in territorio est de territorio (he who is in the territory is of the territory); in other words, by being geographically located within a certain jurisdiction one must abide by the laws and also be protected by the laws (Arendt 280). But deportation (or transfer to camps) abolished asylum, that is, deportees were not protected by laws. They were outside of the law. As Arendt states, they were outlaws (Arendt 280). Without legal status, they became expendable. The human lives of these civilian refugees were disposable. Sadly, this pathetic reality, of the 2,000 civilians who were deported to Mauthausen for lack of protection under any jurisdiction, did not even become part of the official transcript of the Nuremburg trials. While testifying, the only Catalonian witness, Francesc Boix, was silenced by the French Republic delegate, and, thus, this collective history was also muted.

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Women, War, and Politics The female testimonies shed light on a suppressed past, and prove that the fight against Fascism and dehumanization was not lost. Historiography is essential to the construction of national identity that is founded on collective memory. The alliance between Franco and Hitler was suppressed during Francoist Spain following the fall of the Axis powers in the Second World War. By giving voice to her interviewees, Català highlights that these women fought against a worldview that blatantly disregarded human rights. In many cases, the interviewees stated their moral and political beliefs in terms of a personal relationship. This way of looking at the world, according to leading thinkers in moral psychology, ethics, and political thought, is gendered. Their gendered view is closely aligned with enlightenment ideals such as the “rights of man and citizen,” which in the twentieth century evolved to be human rights. Therefore, these resistants and survivors denounce totalitarianism and uphold democracy as an ideal political and personal worldview. The study of Republican testimony is relatively recent due to the imposed silence of the repressive Francoist dictatorship that ended in 1975. Neus Català compiled fifty-nine testimonials of Spanish Republican women for two reasons: to avoid new wars by sharing the barbaric consequences of conflict and bloodshed, and to make known the experience of Spanish female prisoners who had fought in the French Resistance. Collecting and analyzing cultural sources of the female experience is a way of combating historical amnesia. As Català herself insists, “We Spanish women were involved in the fight in a thousand and one ways. We were not simply auxiliaries, we were combatants” (Català 28).26 If Franco’s victory is to be considered a prelude to the Second World War, symbolizing the triumph of Fascism and the defeat of human rights, Català’s collection proves that even during the reign of Fascism, the fight for universal human rights persisted. Català’s collection of female testimonials is proof of the recovery and reconstruction of democratic (female) memory, a retrospective whose objective is to shed light on human experience that had previously been overshadowed by totalitarianism. Therefore, it is most relevant to research and study concentration camp experiences. As Simon Wiesenthal writes, “without truth there cannot be justice. My intention to carry out justice was always in the hopes of preventing a resurrection of the atrocities of the Shoah” (qtd. in Serrano i Blanquer 12).27 As Joan G. Tristany of the Catalonian Association of Former Political Prisoners affirms specifically regarding Catalonian women in the camps, “it is imperative to recognize the importance of the role women played in the long, hard and difficult fight against the terror that signified all forms of

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fascism” (Serrano i Blanquer 14).28 Català herself articulates, “We do not vindicate the truth as a privilege, rather for justice and the reconstitution of a piece of history that began in 1936, out of respect for our dead [female comrades], [and] to make amends (to indemnify) to so many forgotten women” (Català 47).29 Christina Dupláa reminds us that one of the most valuable aspects of Català’s compilation is the gendered reality that permeates the work (175). During the Spanish Civil War, a singular icon personified the Republic: Dolores Ibárruri, known as Pasionaria. The interviewee Graciosa Gurometa found inspiration in this female role model and applied her fervor to the anti-Fascist fight in France: “Yes dark, poorly dressed and almost barefoot fighters, with hardly any weapons, in a proportion of two against a hundred, defeated the prideful lords of war, the gods of the skull and bones . . . Here was fulfilled what a great female figure, not only of Spain but of the world, Dolores Ibárruri, stated during our war: ‘They shall not pass!’” (Català 253).30 The historical role played by women must be noted. Lola Casadella fought on the front line. Segunda Montero was a female combatant whose participation during the liberation of Paris in August of 1944 led to her death. The efforts of Alfonsina Bueno Ester were recognized by the American, British, and French military (Català 144). Celia Llaneza was awarded the War Cross. Carmen Buatell was the first woman to be tortured by the Gestapo in Marseille in October of 1941 for her role as a resistant. Català writes “All those in her group were recognized as resistants except Carmen. [Why?] Because she was a Spanish Republican woman? Has everything possible been done to correct such an injustice?” (Català 136).31 Regina Arrieta sardonically claims, “After all we are just ‘auxilliaries.’ For them [i.e., men], the honors; for us women, oblivion” (Català 88).32 Català also incorporates two male voices—that of Commander Rubio and that of the guerrilla chief Vitorio Vicuña—whose testimony speaks to the role of female participation. At first blush, it seems peculiar to include these masculine voices among the female testimonies, yet upon closer scrutiny Català’s purpose becomes apparent. If one of the goals of the volume is to complete History—which is vastly composed of male heroes and masculine acts of heroism—then the author aspires to communicate the role of Spanish women in the fight against Fascism. The testimony provided by these two accepted and established leaders of the French Resistance confers authority onto the remainder of the work, onto the female voices that had not been collectively recognized until the publication of De la resistencia. Vicuña speaks to the role of Spanish women who received the War Cross, Carmen and Emiliana Blascos among them (Català 410). Commander Rubio comments on the general participation of Spanish

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women in the Resistance and stresses the great importance of their role (Català 369). Català’s Regarding Resistance and Deportation, then, not only denounces past Fascism, values human rights, and raises consciousness surrounding the role of women, but it also aspires to prevent totalitarianism and dehumanization in the future. Kristeva claims, “We all know the foreigner who survives with a tearful face turned toward the lost homeland, melancholy lover of a vanished space, he cannot in fact, get over his having abandoned a period of time, the lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never be able to recover” (10). Yet, when these women gave their testimony, they knew Spain was democratic—as had been their hope when they became refugees after the fall of the Republic or partook in the French Resistance against the Nazi occupants. No, they could not turn back the clock during the time of the Republic, but they were alive to witness the continuation of Spanish democracy. By 1931 all Spaniards had rights granted by the Republican Constitution. Not only were there rights for women such as the right to vote (Art. 36), equality in marriage, and the right to divorce (Art. 43), but also a general state of well-being for all as seen in equality in the workforce (Art. 40), protection for all workers (Art. 46), and the care for the sickly and elderly, as well as for children and pregnant and new mothers (Art. 43). In the 1978 Constitution, duty and protection are applied not only to the elderly (Art. 50), children, and the family (Art. 39), but also to the environment (Art. 45) as well as to the historic, cultural, and artistic patrimony of the peoples of Spain (Art. 46). Should the Republic and the present Spanish state not be viewed as a “maternal” or “motherly” government that cared for all if we think of Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care, a morality based on the importance of each individual’s needs? The initial studies in moral psychology, which came about precisely because of the Holocaust, are based on a lofty, impersonal, and abstract concept: justice. Yet both Gilligan’s different moral voice and truly Republican constitutions aspire to fulfill the needs of the individual. In so doing, in theory, society is cohesive, human, and humane. It is imperative to note that before facing the dehumanization of the French refugee camps or Nazi concentration camps, Català’s female interviewees were secure in their value as human beings whose rights had been guaranteed and protected under the Spanish Republican Constitution before they were nullified or suspended, respectively, by the Francoist regime and the Nazi occupation. What becomes clear in the testimonials is that the worldview maintained by these brave women is not that of “us” and “them,” but rather that of “we all.” Their solidarity is evident in myriad forms: the treatment of each other, the rapport they share, the terms

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“comrade” and “sister,” and the hymns they sing in unison, such as “La Marseillaise” and “Des Partisans.” It is precisely the collective bond that empowers them to confront a tyrannical force. Solidarity, Song, and Resistence “La Marseillaise” and “Des Partisans” communicate resistance and solidarity. The lyrics of “La Marseillaise” affirm “Allons enfants de la Patrie . . . Contre nous, de la tyrannie, . . . Aux armes citoyens!” (Let’s go, children of the homeland . . . Tyranny is against us . . . To arms, citizens!). In essence, the song articulates that in solidarity (as a collective) we fight against tyranny. The French national hymn, known as “La Marseillaise,” came about after the French Revolution. The Spanish version “La marsellesa” refers to, of course, the ideals of the French Revolution: “liberté,” “fraternité,” “egalité.” Each of these key principles is expressed by those interviewed by Català as well as in the 1931 Republican Constitution, the UDHR, and the 1978 SC. The notion of “fraternité” (brotherhood, sisterhood) I will refer to as solidarity, for it is the bond between equals and the fight against the oppressor that motivated Català. The women interviewed express a bond with their fellow survivors, with those not fortunate enough to survive, with their compatriots on the other side of the Pyrenees, with others who also fought with the French Resistance, and with other maquisards. We see this link in the songs “Des Partisans” and “La marsellesa.” “La Marseillaise” became more than French; it is a universal emblem, representing human rights and the fight against a tyrannical hegemony. Many of Català’s interviewees attest to the fact that these two songs were sung frequently as an act of resistance and proof of solidarity. Carmen Buatell recounts that upon being transferred to Reims and deboarding the train car, she, along with other female prisoners, began singing “La Marseillaise” in order to prove their quality as resistants (Català 128). Pilar Claver relays that the hymn “Des Partisans” was common: “‘Ami, si tu tombes, un autre ami sort de l’ombre et prend ta place’” (Friend, if you fall, another friend will step out of the shadows to take your place; Català 165). Both the “La Marseillaise” and “Des Partisans” are popular chants that communicate an esprit de corps, a collective struggle against repression. Curiously, these songs are quite bloody and violent, yet the references to them in Català’s collection lack the gore of battlefields. The allusions to these hymns within the testimonials focus on solidarity, not vengeance that leads to violence. For these women, the fight against Fascism connotes standing up for one’s rights. Although in the late eighteenth century, the tyranny referenced in the original version of “La Marseillaise” referred to Louis XVI and his enlightened

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despotism, by the early twentieth century the tyranny constituted totalitarianism in its diverse permutations: Nazism, Francoism, and Fascism. Just as “La Marseillaise” has eternally commemorated the eighteenth-century popular movement that founded the values of equality and democracy, and has emblematized the fight against tyranny, “Des Partisans” has come to stand for the underground resistance of the people against a totalitarian force.33 “Des Partisans” became known as the “Marseillaise of the Resistance.” Furthermore, this hymn has been adopted by the National Federation of Deportees, Prisoners, Resistants, and Patriots (http://www. fndirp.asso.fr/chantpartisans.htm). In Ravensbrück, the inmates were from various homelands, yet those who broke into song chanted “enfants de la patrie” (children of the homeland); this universal homeland is portrayed as one that protects and nurtures. Singing was a form of resistance, as were the songs themselves. But the protest and fight carried out by these women varied, from participation in the Resistance, to combat, to sabotage. The gendered fight was rooted in an affinity for peers, regardless of gender, age, nationality, or beliefs. Alfonsina Bueno Ester recounts how an interrogating Nazi agent “did not understand how we Spaniards could defend France after so many punishments we had experienced since the atrocities of that country. ‘It’s understandable that the French would do so, but you all, why?’” (Català 139).34 The implicit reply is that they were unified in their fight against Fascism and in their belief in freedom and solidarity. Their resistance took many forms. Català harbored French and Spaniards who were called to Germany as forced laborers, prepared false documentation for ex-combatants that arrived from the International Brigades, received and manufactured explosive devices, obtained weapons, and acted as a liaison (as did many women), thus running the risk of being discovered and tortured (Català 30). The first act of rebellion in Ravensbrück consisted of screaming a resounding “No!” in unison as an objection to the abject conditions (i.e., room capacity for 100 when there were 500 inmates). As a result, the Kapos and Aufseherinnen35 began beating the prisoners closest to them, while the masses of women advanced against the captors (40). Carmen Buatell describes a mutiny in which the prisoners threw their shoes at the guards (128). Buatell also relates the manner in which inmates came to the rescue of a group of fellow prisoners being beaten by several guards. The bellowing roar of their indignation was so immense that “it frightened the SS guards such that they ceased beating” (133).36 Català also notes that although the prisoners were forced to work in munitions factories, they sabotaged ten million howitzers. Català aptly likens this example of female resistance to the Odyssey’s Penelope who sabotaged her enemies triumph by weaving by day and unweaving the

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tapestry by night. Rita Pérez explains the impetus for collective efforts, “We did what had to be done: combat fascism, because fascism has to be fought wherever it might be found. Since the war was won, fascism did not take root in Europe” (327).37 Català’s interviewees imagined themselves as linked to their peers, their compatriots, and their fellow human beings who fought against a tyrannical hegemony. As such they are all, as noted in “La Marseillaise,” “enfants de la patrie,” children of the homeland, a collective, universal homeland. In both Spanish and French, “homeland” (“patria” and “patrie” respectively) evolved from the Latin “pater,” father, so it could be said that these women considered themselves children of the fatherland. But, I will state the view of one’s country as “madre patria” or mother homeland, a not uncommon expression in Castilian. This terminology reveals the political ethic described by feminist scholars Nel Noddings, Anne Phillips, Susan Moller Okin, Sara Ruddick, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, a politics in which the individual must be nurtured to contribute to the greater good. This is precisely the political standpoint evident in the Republican Constitution, the UDHR, and the 1978 SC. The Rights of Woman38 The moral and political ideology professed by Català’s interviewees highlights precisely the fact that humanity, human bonds, supercede all other duties. Kristeva notes that there is a conflict between the “rights of man” and the “rights of the citizen” and claims that the quality of humanity should supercede that of citizenship. These are humble women with strong convictions. The ideas they communicate are not based on the study of jurisprudence or the Republican Constitution as a lofty political document. Rather, their knowledge of the rights and privileges granted them as individuals and women is based on the experience of having had a say in their governance and having acted as and been treated as equals. Alicia Alted, in her article “The 1939 Spanish Republican Exile from the Women’s Point of View,” summarizes the role of women during and after the Civil War. In fact, when the military rose up against the legitimate Republican government and civil war broke out, women bore arms and fought in the war as part of the Republican Popular Militia. The quality of revolution of the masses that characterized the beginning of the war prompted women who were spurred on by the egalitarian discourse of the Republic to take an active role on the battle field alongside their male compatriots and comrades. Although these women enlisted in battalions and militia corps and fought as equals against the nacionales’ military insurgents, by October 1936 (just months after the military uprising), a decree

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reorganizing the militias mandated that women were to take on only auxiliary functions at the front or to resume the wartime roles reserved for the female sex (Alted 1). Thus, the women tended to the ill, the elderly, and children as well as served as teachers. It is also notable to add that women were needed in “special services,” that is, they acted as spies, gunrunners, and liaisons, relaying information or goods as needed. Furthermore, women were responsible for the evacuation and development of provisional schools for the masses of displaced children. Women also organized and accompanied the children of the war on collective expeditions/transports to Russia, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and England (2). These actions are reflections of maternal thinking and maternal politics. So with their newly gained freedoms and privileges, Republican women as a whole did their part, not only during the fratricidal conflict, but also in its aftermath. Precisely because they had internalized the dignity granted to all under the Constitution, they could fight for the collective cause. Gendered Moral and Political Thought In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan qualifies a tendency or standard in women’s moral judgment as based in “an ethic of nurturance, responsibility, and care” (Gilligan 159–60). As Cass Sunstein observes in Feminism and Political Theory, the initial studies on moral psychology carried out by Lawrence Kohlberg that linked moral reasoning to concepts of social justice and subsequently to political thought are based on distinctly male standards (Sunstein 2–3). In other words, political and ethical norms (founded on justice) are male-biased and have been skewed according to sex. While most people use both orientations—justice or care—some of the time, “one orientation dominates moral thinking and . . . the direction of dominance is gender linked. Recent research [Lyons 1983; Gilligan and Wiggans 1986] shows that . . . [m]en and women distribute themselves bimodally on the justice and care ends of the scale” (Flanagan and Jackson 39). Grace Clement in Care, Autonomy and Justice: Feminism and the Ethic of Care distinguishes the two ethics accordingly: (1) the ethic of justice takes an abstract approach, while the ethic of care takes a contextual approach; (2) the ethic of justice begins with an assumption of human separateness, while the ethic of care begins with an assumption of human connectedness; and (3) the ethic of justice has some form of equality as a priority, while the ethic of care has the maintenance of relationships as a priority. (11)

Susan Moller Okin attempts to balance the purported split in gendered moral reasoning consisting of Gilligan’s ethic of care and Kohlberg’s ethic

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of justice (Okin 15), and states that justice has been overrated as the basis of moral reasoning due to an “overly . . . abstract male bias in moral philosophy. Justice itself . . . should be at least supplemented, if not supplanted, by an ethic of caring, in which one’s responsibility to care for those close to one takes priority over or entirely replaces what have generally been regarded as obligations to [an abstract] broader range of people” (Okin 33). Nurturing moral reasoning based on care for a specific individual can generalize to caring for an entire group or all humanity. I affirm that the original personal context in which the ethic of care is evident can develop a reasoning that is universizable.39 Yet there are certain political lines of thought that aim at inclusion and meeting the needs of dependent individuals. Such could be said for democracy and socialism, where the basic needs are met for all, where all have adequate living conditions, medical care, education—including higher education—and can work toward selfactualization; both Sara Ruddick (214) and Grace Clement (89) argue likewise. Perhaps we should view this nurturing stance within politics not as gender-specific, but rather as mindset that originates with human bonds, a tendency that is preponderantly feminine and specifically maternal. The political scholar Anne Phillips, in Democracy and Difference, questions the concept of “fraternity” delineated in the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen and, thus, indicates the irony of a document that purports rights for man—meaning literally, men—yet keeps silent on the other half of humanity (Phillips 28). In Català’s collection, the women do have a true sense of solidarity. I purposefully avoid the gendered terms fraternity or sorority. The non-gendered Spanish term “hermandad” could be translated as siblinghood: a familial, affective bond with an equal or peer.40 Let us recall that the UDHR refers to brotherhood and the human family as a basis for human rights. It is precisely this bond of equals, of solidarity, that permits Català and campmates to uphold what Flannagan and Jackson term “morally good caring” and make ethical and political decisions based on “one’s particular connection to the other” (38). The human, affective bond that begins with the particular is generalized to the universal. Again let us reiterate the underlying tenet: every human being matters. Feminist ethics theoreticians Sara Ruddick and Jean Bethke Elshtain have proposed that mothering provides the foundation for “a new politics of compassion that would reconstruct the political sphere” (Phillips 82). Similarly, Nel Noddings, in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Education, states: “The experience of mothering . . . generates a more generous and less interest-regarding set of values. Mothers do not put their own interests first, for they can never forget the vulnerability of the human child. Women thus bring to politics a kind of morality and civic virtue that can displace . . . selfish materialism” (Phillips 82). Noddings proposes that

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what makes an action morally sound is an intrinsic, underlying ethical tenet: that life, in the abstract, is valuable and that specific individual lives are unconditionally worthy of respect (1–2). The testimonials of Català’s interviewees bear witness to the ethic of care on a personal and political level. Celia Llaneza, who was awarded the War Cross, explicitly links her duty to her homeland with her duty to her daughter: “I left Asturias (in 1937), I came to France and did not want to stay because I considered that war continued in Spain and that I had an obligation, not only as a Spaniard, but also because I was widowed and had to defend the rights of my daughter as well as the rights of Spain” (Català 274).41 In the ethic of care, compared to other ethics, subjectivity is of supreme importance and constitutes the “foundation in relation.” Whereas other philosophies of ethics deem anguish to be the basic human affect, Noddings’s view, rooted in relation, identifies joy as the essential human affect. Thus she states “the joy that accompanies fulfillment of our caring enhances our commitment to the ethical” (Noddings 6). This is the case for Sabina González who was deported to Ravensbrück with her mother; the latter lost her life in the camp. González comments on the conviction and unquestioned human duty: “it seemed so natural [to my mother and me] that it never even occurred to us that we were forming part of and collaborating with the French Resistance against the Nazi occupant” (Català 239).42 In an interview published by the City Hall of Cerdanyola del Vallès in the spring of 2005, octogenarian Neus Català states: “We women [in the camps], with culture and solidarity, constructed a barrier that the Nazis were never ever able to break through” (Ajuntament),43 and identifies her fight as having been for “peace and the rights of women.”44 Precisely because of a sense of connection between themselves and to others, the interviewees were committed to human well-being on various levels: personally, morally, and politically. As we have seen, in Regarding Resistance and Deportation, Català’s female interviewees affirm life and love, and denounce the dehumanizing ideology they witnessed in Civil War–torn Spain, in occupied France and, of course, in Ravensbrück. Most significantly, Català and her peers celebrate and promote collectivity and solidarity as fundamental to a kind, humane, and ethical political belief system. Català’s final call to peaceful, metaphorical arms recapitulates the human rights evident in the two democratic Spanish constitutions as well as in the UDHR: “We want peace, we do not want war. We want well-being, not death . . . We will fight and we will speak indefatigably for liberation, human brotherhood, for equality and for life” (413).45 Català fights against past violence without vengeance or anger, simply in the hope of future solidarity (Dupláa 176). In so doing, she underscores life, the primordial human right. Català feels a bond with the

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millions of individuals who perished. This commitment to life, in light of the horrors she and her peers witnessed, should be considered a gendered moral and political standpoint. Notes 1. In previous publications, I have viewed Gilligan’s care ethic in relation to female characters in Rodoreda’s fiction as well as in films by del Toro and Saura. I have published an article comparing Català’s Holocaust text to Héctor Faver’s Shoah film. 2. The Amical is an association of ex-deportees and ex-prisoners. Said association was vehemently promoted by Joaquim Amat-Piniella, to whom Roig dedicated her work. 3. “li volen fer saber allò que ella encara no ha sentit de cap veu masuclina: que als camps nazis hi va haver dones republicans” (15). 4. The publisher Edicions 62 published Núñez’s work in Catalan. Her work is available in Spanish through the press Península. It is not uncommon for works to appear in Catalan through Edicions 62 and be available in translation through Península. Such is the case for Roig’s Els catalans as well as Català’s De la resistencia. 5. “conscients que si algú continuarà exercint l’autoritat de la paraula sobre la deportació aquest serà majoritàriament l’home” (Serrano i Blanquer 17). 6. On March 7, 2005, the director Susana Koska debuted her documentary Mujeres en pie de guerra. Català was one of the seven women featured in the film who recounted their wartime experiences. 7. “La dictadura franquista és responsable directa, com en són còmplices tots els seus col.laboradors per acció o omission, del destí de totes i cada una d’aquestes dones obligades a fugir en 1939. Es tracta d’un cas únic de govern, per feixista que sigui, que no reclama retorn dels seus conciutadans ni que sigui per a represaliar-los dintre del seu territori. A més, és un cas únic de govern que acepta que sigui un altre Estat, l’alemany en aquest cas, que es responsabilitzi d’aquesta repressió. La generació de la diaspora, desentender’s del destí immediat dels compatriotes i la deixadesa de responsabilitats, punitives en aquest cas, . . . acentúa el grau de responsabilitat . . . de tot un sistema” (30–31). 8. “íntimamente sentía una gran satisfacción y orgullo de haber tenido la fuerza moral y física de haber resistido a la bestia nazi . . . Sabía que había cumplido con mi deber y que nadie había caído en manos de los nazis por mi culpa” (Català 97). 9. “Mi aportación a la liberación del país fue modesta, y consistió en un trabajo de conjunto, muy bien dirigido por jefes hábiles en saber conjugar la audacia con la meticulosidad . . . Todos pasamos horas difíciles y ocasiones delicadas, en donde nuestra vida estuvo en peligro, pero el amor a la libertad era incomensurable y el compañerismo nuestra razón de ser” (Català 245).

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10. According to Roger Griffin, Fascism is based on the myth of national rebirth (Griffin 8). The life of a Fascist individual only has value if it contributes to the well-being of the nation (3). 11. “España es una República democrática de trabajadores de toda clase, que se organiza en régimen de Libertad y Justicia; Los poderes de todos sus órganos emanan del pueblo” (Art. 1); “Todos los españoles son iguales ante la ley” (Art. 2); “España renuncia a la guerra como instrumento de política oficial” (Art. 6); “El estado acatará las normas universales del Derecho internacional” (Art. 7) 12. “La Nación española, deseando establecer la justicia, la libertad y la seguridad y promover el bien de cuantos la integran . . . proclama su voluntad de: Garantizar la convivencia democrática . . . conforme a un orden económico y social justo; Consolidar un Estado de Derecho que asegure el imperio de la ley como expresión de la voluntad popular; Proteger a todos los españoles y pueblos de España en el ejercicio de los derechos humanos . . . ; Promover el progreso de la cultura y de la economía para asegurar a todos una digna calidad de vida. Establecer una sociedad democrática y avanzada; y Colaborar en el fortalecimiento de unas relaciones pacíficas y eficaz cooperación entre todos los pueblos de la Tierra” (“Constitución Española” Preamble). 13. “La dignidad de la persona, los derechos inviolables que le son inherentes, el libre desarrollo de la personalidad, el respeto a la ley y a los derechos de los demás son fundamentos del orden politico y de la paz social.” 14. “nacimiento, raza, sexo, religión, opinión o cualquier otra condición o circunstancia personal o social.” 15. “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). 16. “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). 17. “Todos tienen derecho a la vida y a la integridad física y moral, sin que, en ningún caso, puedan ser sometidos a tortura ni a penas o tratos inhumanos o degradantes. Queda abolida la pena de muerte, salvo lo que puedan disponer las leyes penales militares para tiempos de guerra” (1978 Spanish Constitution). 18. The Basque Country is a northern region that extends into the Pyrenees. Catalonia is in the northeast. Aragón borders both. 19. This is similar to Germany’s Kindertransport. 20. “ ‘el torrente de la fealdad,’ ” “ ‘las bestias carnívoras de la Internacional,’” “ ‘la turba extranjera,’ ” la “ ‘hez de los bajos fondos y de las cárceles,’ ” “‘la hez de la anarquía mundial.’ ” 21. “bestias,” “hordas,” y “rebaños.” 22. “Para mí, como para muchos refugiados procedentes de Cataluña y de toda España, la lucha continuaba, y la lucha contra el nazi-fascismo era perseguir al mismo enemigo que [se] había implantado en nuestra casa, sosteniendo un alzamiento contra el estado legal y democrático, la sucursal fascista llamada franquismo” (Català 100).

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

“una doble condición antialemana: prisioneros de guerra y enemigos políticos” “Nadie podrá ser detenido ni preso sino por causa de delito.” Francesc Vilanova found the supporting documentation (Vilanova 111–12). “Las mujeres españolas, las muchachas de la JSUC nos incorporamos de una y mil maneras al combate. No fuimos simples auxiliares, fuimos combatientes” (Català 28). “sense la veritat no hi pot haver justícia. La meva intenció a intentar que es faci justícia ha estat sempre procurer prevenir una resurrecció de les atrocitats de la Shoah” (Serrano i Blanquer 12). “és indispensable reconèixer la importància del paper de la dona en aquella llarga, dura y difícil lluita contra el terror que significava tota forma de feixisme” (Serrano i Blanquer 14). “No reivindicamos la verdad como un privilegio, sino por justicia y reconstitución de una parte histórica que arranca de 1936; por el respeto a nuestras muertas, por desagraviar a tantas mujeres olvidadas. Más de 400 españolas pasaron [a campos nazis] procedentes de veinticinco departamentos controlados de los noventa y cinco que tiene Francia” (Català 47). “Sí, unos combatientes oscuros, mal vestidos y peor calzados, con muy pocas armas, en una proporción de dos contra cien, vencieron a los soberbios señores de la guerra, a los dioses de la calavera y las tibias . . . . Aquí se cumplió lo que una gran figura femenina, no sólo de España, sino del mundo, Dolores Ibárruri, dijera durante nuestra guerra: ‘¡No pasarán!” (Català 253). “Todos los de su grupo han sido reconocidos resistentes y condecorados menos Carmen ¿Porque era republicana española? ¿Se hizo todo cuanto fue necesario para reparar una injusticia semejante?” (Català 136). “A fin de cuentas somos ‘auxiliares.’ Para ellos [o sea los hombres], los honores; para nosotras, el olvido” (Català 88). Although it was composed in 1943 in London, contemporary twenty- to thirty-year-old Europeans have adopted it with one modification: the enemy (ennemi) is now xenophobia (xenophobie). “no comprendía cómo los españoles podíamos ponernos a defender a Francia después de tantas penalidades como nos hacían pasar las atrocidades de aquel país. ‘Que lo hagan los franceses es normal, pero ustedes, ¿por qué?” (Català 139). Nazi officials who were part of the hierarchical structure of the camps and had direct contact with the inmates. “clamor inmenso de indignación de odio que espantó a los propios SS, que dejaron de pegar” (133). “Lo que hemos hecho era porque debíamos hacerlo: combatir al fascismo, porque el fascismo hay que combatirlo en donde se encuentre. Gracias a que se ganó la guerra, el fascismo no se instaló en Europa” (Català 327). This heading implicitly refers to and recontextualizes the eighteenthcentury “Rights of Man and Citizen.” The six stages of the Kohlberg scale are grouped into three categories as pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. “Universizability” is a feature of the highest stage.

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40. Phillips elaborates on this point: “The analogy with the family makes it clear: this is something deeper and more intimate than voting the same way in meetings. As so often, the language of kinship is employed to assert a powerful and emotive bond. But the other side of this is moralism. It is more testing to be a good sister than a sound political ally, and more distressing to fail in affection than to fail in political will” (32). 41. “Salí de Asturias (en 1937), vine a Francia y yo no me he querido quedar en Francia, porque consideraba que la guerra continuaba en España y que tenía una obligación, en tanto que española, y más porque yo era viuda y tenía que defender los derechos de mi chica como defender los derechos de España” (Català 274). 42. “nos parecía tan natural [a mi madre y a mi] que ni siquiera se nos pasó por la cabeza que estábamos formando parte y colaborando con la Resistencia francesa contra el ocupante nazi” (Català 239). 43. “Les dones, amb la cultura i la solidaridat, vam construer una barrera que mai, mai, els Nazis no van poder trencar.” 44. “la pau i pels drets de les dones.” 45. “Queremos la paz, no queremos guerra. Queremos el bienestar, no la muerte . . . lucharemos y hablaremos incansablemente por la distensión, por la fraternidad humana, por la igualdad y por la vida” (413).

Works Cited Ajuntament de Cerdanyola del Vallès. “Neus Català, Lluitadora Antifeixista.” http://www.cerdanyaola.info/pgs/entrevista37.php. Alted, Alicia. “El exilio republicano español de 1939 desde la perspectiva de las mujeres.” Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres 4:2 (July–December 1997): 223–38. http://clio.rediris.es/exilio/mujerex/mujeres_exilio.htm. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966 [1951]. Català, Neus. De la resistencia y la deportación: 50 Testimonios de mujeres españolas. Barcelona: Península, 2000 [1984 Adueña]. “Chant ‘Des Partisans.’ ” http://www.fndirp.asso.fr/chantpartisans.htm. Clement, Grace. Care, Autonomy, and Justice: Feminism and the Ethic of Care. Oxford: Westview P, 1996. Constitución Española. http://www.congreso.es/funciones/constitucion/const_ espa_texto.pdf. Constitución de la Republica Española. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~chema/ republica/constitucion.html. Dreyfus-Armand. El exilio de los republicanos españoles en Francia: De la guerra civil a la muerte de Franco. Barcelona: Crítica, 2000. Dupláa, Christina. “Testimonio de la ex deportada de Ravensbrück, Neus Català.” Letras Peninsulares (Spring 1998): 168–79. Flanagan, Owen and Kathryn Jackson. “Justice, Care, and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited.” Feminism and Political Theory. Ed. Cass Sunstein. Chicago and London: U of Chicago, 1982 (reprint 1990). 37–52.

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Fontana, Josep. “Prólogo.” In Una inmensa prisión: Los campos de concentración y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo. Eds. Carme Molinero, Margarida Sala, and Jaume Sobrequés. Barcelona: Crítica, 2003. xi–xvi. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Griffin, Roger. Fascism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. León Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. “La Marsaillaise.” http://www.educar.org/Culturafrancoargentina/marsellesa.asp. Molinero, Carme, Margarida Sala, and Jaume Sobrequés, eds. Una inmensa prisión: Los campos de concentración y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo. Barcelona: Crítica, 2003. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Okin, Susan Moller. “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice.” In Feminism and Political Theory. Ed. Cass Sunstein. Chicago and London: U of Chicago, 1982 (reprint 1990). 15–36. Phillips, Anne. Democracy and Difference. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993. Roig, Montserrat. Els catalans als camps nazis. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1977. Ruddick, Sara. “Preservative Love and Military Destruction.” In Mothering. Ed. Trebilcot. Totowa, NY: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983. 231–62. Serrano i Blanquer, David. Les dones als camps nazis. Barcelona: Pòrtic, 2003. Sunstein, Cass, ed. Feminism and Political Theory. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1982 (reprint 1990). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html. Vilanova i Vila-Abadal, Francesc. “En el exilio: de los campos franceses al umbral de la deportación.” In Una inmensa prisión: Los campos de concentración y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo. Ed. Carme Molinero, Margarida Sala, and Jaume Sobrequés. Barcelona: Crítica, 2003. 81–116.

OFF THE RECORD: VOICES OF ORDINARY JEWISH SURVIVORS OF THE SHOAH Marion Gerlind

They Did (Not) Make History It is common knowledge that most German Jews in the Weimar Republic belonged to the urban middle class. A lesser known fact is that nearly every fifth Jew in Germany was foreign-born, many were Polish, Russian, and Austrian immigrants, and the majority belonged to the working poor (Richarz 6). Ilse H., herself a German Jewish Holocaust1 survivor of middle-class background, remembers Ostjuden (East European Jews), living in Dresden during the interwar years (1919–1938), and commented, “They were not important for history.”2 Social class differences were often the cause for conflicts between German and East European Jews and German Jews often felt “culturally superior.”3 Ilse H., for instance, called them a “lost generation” whose lives “were of no consequence.” When I asked her what happened to these immigrants during the Nazi regime, she said that they were sent back to the Polish border in 1938.4 She asserted: “They didn’t make history.” Paradoxically, the sheer number of Jewish Holocaust victims alone—the vast majority being Eastern European (Hilberg 1220)—made history as the most horrific genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. I infer that a large number of Raul Hilberg’s estimate of 5,100,000 Jewish victims belonged to working-class populations. It is true, however, that ordinary people were not considered important for history and are almost entirely absent in historical representations. The working poor have no public voice (hooks where we stand 5).

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Voices from the Margins It was challenging and required perseverance to locate and interview survivors who, first, identified as rural or working class and, second, emigrated to the United States.5 Borrowing Mary Jo Maynes’s concept of “worker,” I define “ordinary” women as those who came from the milieu of unskilled and skilled manual labor in either industry or agriculture (8). I compare Polish Jews with German Jews, in both urban and rural environments. Postulating a spiral of victimization, I incorporate the interwar and postwar years (after 1945) into the temporal framework of the Shoah rather than beginning with the November pogrom (“Kristallnacht”) in 1938 and ending with the liberation in 1945. Jewish women in exile bear witness to the trauma of the Shoah even though they are conventionally not defined as survivors.6 By highlighting gender, class, religious, geographical, and temporal variables, I contextualize the escalation and long-term consequences of oppression rather than limiting the impact of the Shoah to a single catastrophic event, thereby challenging dominant constructions. I argue that working poor and rural women’s oral histories provide a broader understanding of the Shoah through the complexity and diversity of their accounts. It is these narratives on which I focus here. Within this space, I can only touch on topics from women’s Alltagsgeschichten (day-to-day histories), which are explored in depth in my doctoral thesis, such as struggles for material survival and happiness vis-à-vis poverty, discrimination, and resistance based on antiSemitism, limits of education, early (thoughts of) emigration and escape, experiences of trauma such as death, and survival. I found that poverty is a prevalent oppression in numerous life stories of ordinary women and takes much room in their testimonies and consciousness. Rose Lerman My first audiotaped interview was with Rose Lerman, who immigrated to the United States from Poland, in 1934. Lerman was born in 1914 as the tenth and youngest child of orthodox Jewish parents in a small village in rural Eastern Poland, near Mir, close to the Russian border. Her mother died at age fifty-two, when Lerman was thirteen years old. Her older sisters and her father, who was a blacksmith, raised her. The family also owned four hectares of land, which barely sustained them. Throughout her girlhood, Lerman suffered from deprivation and anti-Semitism. With the help of an older brother, she was able to emigrate. In November 1941, Lerman’s father, her three sisters, and all their children were murdered by SS Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads).7 One brother survived in hiding

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and another (adopted) brother survived three concentration camps. To this day Lerman carries the trauma of losing members of her family in this catastrophe. Lerman’s recollections led to my understanding that there were many important stories of the Shoah left unrecorded. In comparing her life as a rural poor Polish Jew with that of other survivors in written records, I was struck by the ways her struggle was manifest on a daily basis. Although she was able to emigrate early and was not physically affected by the genocide, she is nonetheless traumatized by the loss of her family under Nazi rule. A Feminist Oral History Method Lerman’s testimony launched my wider search for other missing voices, and after identifying the absence of ordinary women’s narratives in scholarly and published auto/biographical writing, I looked for them in several Holocaust archives. Given the general dearth of archival findings, I conducted interviews with other Polish and German Shoah survivors. My study is primarily based on ten oral history interviews and twenty-six videotaped testimonies from the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. For this essay I have chosen short excerpts from audiotaped interviews I conducted with Rose Lerman and Mathilda Wertheim Stein as well as two videotaped interviews conducted with Fela P. and Doba A. by interviewers from the Shoah Foundation. My goal is to amplify voices of women who did not have the time or means to write their autobiographies. More general statements are inferred from interpreting numerous oral history interviews, which do not claim to be representative for all. These are preliminary findings in a new field, which need to be corroborated with further in-depth studies. My approach focused on each participant’s memories of everyday experiences, not only relating to the Shoah, but to her entire life. Informed by feminist methodologies and practices, I was particularly sensitive to issues of social positioning, reciprocity, and power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee (Stanley Feminist Praxis; The Auto/biographical I; Stanley and Wise). My social location as a scholar in German and Feminist Studies is partial and composed of gender, class, sexual identity, ethnicity, and age, impacting interactions and interpretations.8 I grew up in a workingclass Lutheran family near Hamburg, Germany, in the 1960s and 1970s and immigrated to the United States in 1994. I used a feminist oral history method that acknowledges and emphasizes the multiple subject positions of the survivors as well as my own as a researcher. As agents and makers of history, women recount narratives of deprivation, trauma, and survival, reconstructing more heterogeneous

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testimonies of the past. I grappled with tensions between the survivors’ beliefs and my own, struggled with the varied assumptions of Polish or German Jewish narrator and non-Jewish German listener, faced generational and linguistic gaps, as well as worried about the survivors’ risks of retraumatization versus the educational benefits of making their stories public. Gendered Voices Early researchers rarely considered gender differences because the premise was that all Jews were subject to Nazis’ genocidal politics, regardless of their gender.9 Joan Ringelheim (“Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust” 141–49) began questioning the “generic” approach to Shoah Studies in the 1970s and encountered opposition for bringing up the issue of women’s invisibility and sexism. Since then, scholars have shown that although all Jews were threatened with annihilation, gender differences must not be overlooked.10 Jewish women lived in double jeopardy as Jews and as women—subjected to particular gender/sex-specific persecution.11 At the same time, Jewish and non-Jewish women of working-class and middleclass background were very effective as members of resistance movements because the Nazis underestimated women’s courage.12 Although feminist scholarship has proven extensively that gender mattered, an analysis of gender differences remains absent or, at best, marginalized in prominent representations of the Shoah.13 Recent publications underscore the significance of linking the Holocaust and gender (e.g., Baer and Goldenberg; Ofer and Weitzman); however, they fail to emphasize that class was a pivotal factor in survival. The majority of German Jewish women whose memoirs are published and archived came from middle-class backgrounds, as Lorenz (172) has pointed out. My research provides evidence of significant differences of rural and workingclass women’s day-to-day lives compared to their urban middle-class counterparts whose upbringing and education did not prepare them for the deprivation and horror of the Shoah. Fela P. Beginning with childhood, ordinary women experienced material and/ or emotional deprivation as integral to their lives and often prematurely took on adult responsibilities. Many knew that their limited education would overshadow their future. Familiar with oppression, they saw no hope for a better life in Germany or Poland and sought ways to emigrate before the Shoah. Early on, many ordinary women crafted their personal

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as well as their families’ survival. Moreover, their struggles did not end with emigration but continued in exile, for example, while making a living as domestics, cashiers, or factory workers. Survivors are “coming out” about the stigma of poverty. An example is Fela P. who was interviewed by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1997. She speaks directly about her class background and the covering up of poverty. I am not ashamed to tell you I was poor because a lot of people were ashamed to tell—they were poor but I am not because I am telling the truth.14

She asserts her own position of truthful telling, recognizing that social class is a slippery category, which can be hidden or masked. In order to avoid the stigma associated with poverty people are willing to construct their narratives in an “untruthful” way. Her statement hints at much complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction inherent in survivor testimonies. Fela was born in Warsaw in 1922 and describes her childhood memories as “not happy” (01:05:35) because of poverty—her father worked as a sales assistant in a shop—and anti-Semitism. Her orthodox Jewish parents, Fela, and three siblings shared a two-room apartment with another family. After seven years of public school Fela could not bear anti-Semitism much longer. Soon after the beginning of the Second World War and bombing of Warsaw in 1939 she insisted on accompanying her father to the Soviet Union—against his wish, for he could not pay for her ride. Both reached the Russian-occupied part of Poland safely but Fela decided to return alone to rescue the extended family, which she accomplished successfully. She recounted that her uncle, who was better off than her family, could not cope with the material scarcity in wartime Russian-occupied Poland and returned home where he perished. However, Fela and her family members were able to adjust to the poor living conditions and worked under the Russian occupation until the Nazi German invasion in June 1941. Fela again guided her family further east out of immediate danger and everyone survived the war in Kazakhstan. Exiled in the Soviet Union, she worked as a crane driver in a factory and eventually as a bookkeeper. After the war her family returned to Poland where they were again confronted by antiSemitism. She eventually moved to Israel in 1950 and reunited with her family in Melbourne, Australia, in 1960. Escalating anti-Semitism and the oncoming war motivated Fela to leave everything behind and escape early on, taking the risk of further hardship and uprootedness. The assertiveness in her decisions to flee against all odds and her adaptation to many deprivations can be interpreted as a tool for survival.

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Class Theory and Praxis In her book feminist theory: from margin to center bell hooks (30) criticizes bourgeois class biases in feminist theory, which has been subject to the “hegemonic dominance” of white academic women: “Had poor women set the agenda for feminist movement, they might have decided that class struggles would be a central feminist issue; that poor and privileged women would work to understand class structure and the way it pits women against one another” (61–62). Thus, she promotes intellectual work that is in itself feminist praxis (114) and part of a revolutionary cultural transformation, encompassing the lives and ideas of women and men on the margins (163). She has expanded the concept of material determination in defining class by understanding that “. . . class was more than just a question of money, [. . .] it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received” (hooks “Confronting Class in the Classroom” 178). The complexity of social class (besides gender and Jewishness) constitutes the third axis of a person’s social location.15 The potential fluidity of class positions in various temporal frames and individuals’ biographies (between the First and Second World Wars; in exile; in later life) as well as the many gray zones of class definitions complicate and subvert static categories. Material differences mattered, even or especially, in extreme situations as they still do today. Nobody wants to live in poverty. People tried to escape this oppression but often did not have the means to do so. Despite their possible visions of life without poverty, reality held them back. If one looked at the (con)texts of the Shoah through the “lens of class”—whom and what would one see? Confronting class means raising the issue of Jewish (male) upper- and middleclass bias as a social and ideological construction. Privileged classes have constructed ideologies that legitimize a stigmatization of working classes in addition to their economic oppression.16 As hooks (where we stand 93) has pointed out, the Holocaust started with deprivation, not murder. I argue that Jewishness, gender, and class differences need to be examined concurrently. Feminist Holocaust scholarship has developed theories to differentiate analyses on gender; and even though inquiries into social class have been done successfully (e.g., Kaplan The Making of the Jewish Middle Class), they focus on Jews of the normative (urban) middle class— an unmarked category.17 Working poor women are thus almost absent and underrepresented, even in feminist research. History from the Borderlands Ruth Klüger, scholar and Holocaust survivor from Vienna, includes reflections on class, gender, and ethnicity in her autobiography and

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analysis. She points out that material differences mattered when it came to emigration. Denn ohne Geld konnte man nicht auswandern. In allen Ländern der Welt waren die armen Juden noch weniger willkommen als die wohlhabenden. [For one could not emigrate without money. In all the countries of the world, poor Jews were even less welcome than wealthy Jews.] 18

Education was in general much more accessible to middle-class Jewish women until the Nazis’ intervention. The influence of Bildung (education) can certainly not be denied for Klüger. Her early girlhood (born 1931) was in a sheltered, middle-class home. She was one of two children in the family. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, schooling for Jewish children deteriorated and Klüger’s formal education ended after four years. However, at home she continued reading literature to pass the time. Lerman went to school for five years and did not own a book. And you know, I remember when I was—[. . .]—was my mother alive or not? I went to a neighbor and she gave me a book [. . .]—that’s the first time that I read a book—something like a love book. I had to hide behind the— in the other room—so I could read it because you had to work. Reading wasn’t allowed during [the week]—only on Saturdays . . . (Lerman 13)

Spending time reading a secular book was not appreciated in Lerman’s family. Defiantly, she had to hide it and herself in a neighbor’s house. She was supposed to work, not read, during the week; it was a secretive activity (Zborowski and Herzog).19 When I asked her about what joys she remembered from her girlhood, moments when she was happy as a child, Lerman (21) recounted: And Hanukkah was, well, the only good thing about Hanukkah was that they would light candles and my mother, and then my sister when my mother died, they would bake potato pancakes. And that was a big thing and that was a happy time. And we didn’t have enough money, my father didn’t have enough money for candles, so he would take a potato, cut [it] out in the middle, and put oil and then put in a—some kind of cotton, and that would burn instead of [candles] . . . [C]andles were expensive and we couldn’t afford it. Because they had to do it a whole week, you know. When you think of it, everything was so hard, a little—even a candle.

In a striking parallel, Lerman’s narrative of the Hanukkah candles resonates with Sybil Milton’s (314) description of how women in concentration camps improvised resources in order to celebrate the Sabbath.

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When Sabbath candles were unavailable they [Orthodox Jewish women from Hungary and Subcarpathian Ruthenia] blessed electric light bulbs; their colleagues assigned to the Canada barracks at Auschwitz (the barracks where food, clothing, jewelry, and other goods taken from prisoners were stored) filched supplies for them to make Sabbath candles improvised from hollowed-out potato peels filled with margarine and rag wicks.

Women were resourceful and creative given the scarcity of basic materials in the camps.20 Lerman’s example indicates that easy access to candles cannot be taken for granted in interwar Europe and that they were luxury products for poor Jewish families. Also, it illustrates the necessity to problematize dominant class representations and analyze the Shoah as part of an escalating spiral of oppression. Recent research suggests that not only do texts need to be contextualized but also contexts need to be textualized (Felman and Laub xv). In other words, the precursors leading to the genocide, including its axis of class, have to be examined more closely.21 Maynes agrees with Emmrich when he suggests a different yardstick to measure autobiography of proletarian accounts in comparison with those of the middle class. The plotting of a human life course along an “ascending line” could not capture the experience of people who struggled to stay afloat and were beset by the chronic insecurity, poverty, illnesses, accidents, and family tragedies so common in working-class existence. (Maynes 33)

In fact, many ordinary women who had to overcome the deep loss of a parent and other tragic events in their families developed various coping mechanisms for emotional and material deprivation and struggled for their survival. Lerman’s entire family nearly succumbed to typhus after the First World War and her beloved mother died of emphysema after a long sickness when Lerman was a teenager. And how important that is, because my tragedy of my life with my family is not just something very light, like my mother died a natural death. Unfortunately, also because we were poor and we didn’t have a doctor. But, my father and my sisters were killed by Hitler . . . (Lerman 234)

Carolyn Steedman (144) argues that working-class autobiography is history from the borderlands and defies its absorption by the central (bourgeois) history. She points out the tensions and ambiguities of working-class life histories, the “drama of class” (22). Their subjects are denied emotional complexity and a particular personal history (10–11).

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Double Margin Much research on Nazi totalitarianism (1933–1945) has focused on Germany, and only recently have scholars started to analyze women’s lives in Poland during the interwar years (Ofer and Weitzman, Bacon, Ringelheim). This period has been overshadowed by the devastating murder of about 3,000,000, ninety percent, of Polish Jewry. Consequently, memoirs of survivors concentrate on the horrors of the Shoah, often romanticizing prewar childhoods. Lerman is an example of a Jewish working poor woman in the interwar years, who has not received any scholarly attention even though her family was victimized. Her class background compounds the unlikeness of scholarly interest. She is doubly marginalized: she emigrated “too early” and belongs to the “wrong” class.22 Paula Hyman (34) calls attention to the interwar years in Poland when “most Jews struggled even more fiercely [than middle-class Jews] to simply survive.” Poverty was prevalent among Jewish workers who made up between a third and a quarter of the population in major Polish cities and towns. They faced growing institutionalized and popular anti-Semitism and economic deprivation. All family members had to work for their collective survival.23 Lerman realized as a young girl that there was no future for her in Poland. She pleaded with her mother to let her move to France. Even though she was very close to her mother, her despair was so great that she wanted to leave her family and Poland behind. You just had to go to work, milk your cow, bring milk home and go in the garden or go in the fields. Work. (Lerman 8) And especially in Europe, where you were pushed around, because you come from such a big family that you’re not very much counted as a human being, you know. When I say that, I mean, you know, you’re neglected . . . (12) You know, it’s amazing how little communication there was in our family. It’s not only our family, it’s life was so hard, just work like a horse. [. . .] Like an animal; you just worked, and you worked. (25–26)

Lerman observed the struggles of her older sisters and decided that she wanted a different life. Talking about her eldest sister, Elke, she said, “I wouldn’t accept many, many things that my sister accepted. I am the tenth child, and in these years, things were changing very drastically in Europe” (249). Lerman had dreams and expected more of life than her sisters and parents before her. I wanted more love than just marriage. Besides, I saw how unhappy my sisters were. When I say unhappy, I mean the poverty was so great, and I just never wanted to live like that. Life changes with times, and their type of life

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was not really that what I wanted it, even though we were pretty bad off, too, believe me, under Fascism, trying to get out of Poland as much as possible. But, I’ll tell you, some things maybe in the primitive life wasn’t so bad, because the fact that she [Elke] was happy. When I say happy, how can you be happy when your life is always work, work, work? But, I mean, they didn’t quarrel, or there was no bitterness among them. (249)

Unlike common templates of Holocaust representation, Lerman is not a camp survivor, a resistance fighter, or an immediate victim of the Shoah. She experienced the trauma in exile. However, her background sensitized her early in her girlhood to discrimination based on gender, religion, and class. This consciousness motivated her to find ways out of an oppressive situation before it took on genocidal dimensions. Doba A. Women’s stories sometimes attest to the simultaneity of poverty and happiness. A few survivors recounted that they had been poor and happy. One such story is Doba A.’s.24 Both her parents worked in a textile factory in Bialystok, Poland. Her father died in 1919 when she was not yet two years old. Her mother worked very hard to support her two daughters by herself. Doba describes her mother as a “very poorly educated” but “modern” person (01:05:40) whom she trusted and admired. We did not have any food but the spirit was absolutely unbelievable. It enriched my life, I think. It gave me the strength to survive everything. (01:07:54)

A survivor of the death camps Treblinka, Majdanek, AuschwitzBirkenau, and Bergen-Belsen, Doba credits her mother for giving up her food in the ghetto to keep Doba strong. Her mother was murdered in Treblinka. Before the war, she had been active in the socialist Bund25 and its women’s organization YAF (Yidishe arbeter froyen) and sent Doba to the socialist children’s organization SKIF (Sotsyalistisher kinder farband). For a child like me who was poor and even sad sometimes I can’t wait long enough to run to SKIF. It took by foot hours to come to SKIF. And over there was a new world, a world of birds, like a bird, free and enjoyable . . . (01:15:10)

At SKIF Doba learned music, songs, sports, and discussed beliefs without judgments. She feels lucky that she received instruction and love from helpful teachers who influenced her life.

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Poor but happy, can you imagine such a thing? A bird who can sing when it’s in pain. I put it that way if you understand what I mean. And—here I meet many Jews from Poland as well but they might have had a better life materialistically. (01:17:17)

Doba remembers feelings of “jealousy” because she did not have dolls or a piano and sees the paradox in her childhood; however, her ideal values are not about material wealth. She developed her creative skills and became a (Yiddish) writer. I loved reading and I loved writing and somehow my mother encouraged me because she was proud to see that I do something. I write and I draw. And I could still manage to find a pencil [. . .]—always. And that I think that was the only thing Mother could have the joy—could be happy about her children [. . .]. She said [. . .], “There is something good in store for you.” That’s what she said about my writing. I read to her everything . . . (03:11:15)

Doba wanted to go to high school but her mother could not afford it financially and sent her to a technical school instead. She explained this decision to her. “If a war breaks out,” that’s what she said, “you are left with a skill to do something with your hands. You can always help yourself.” And it was true. (02:00:30)

Her mother’s foresight prepared Doba for the hard physical work in slave labor and concentration camps later on. Even in the ghetto Doba continued her writing, which became part of her survival strategy. She worked in the ghetto underground as a courier until she decided that it was more important to stay with her mother. One of the resistance leaders was Yankl Goldman26 whom she describes as a big man with “yellow” hair. I think he was a shoemaker. And then, in our time, a shoemaker wasn’t much of a big deal. Even then, can you imagine, even in those times, I thought that [a] shoemaker didn’t have much knowledge. Much knowledge he had, but not much education. (3:23:48)

Doba self-critically reflects on her internalized class bias in which she had not regarded a shoemaker as knowledgeable. She distinguishes between knowledge and education as she said earlier about her mother “she was born intelligent not having education” (01:08:26). She recognized

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that intelligence and knowledge are not identical with (formal) education but also valuable. She sees intelligence as an inherent ability and knowledge acquisition as possible without formal schooling. One does not need to be educated to have knowledge of the world. Doba’s values contrast middleclass concerns for education “as a marker of class standing and instrument of social mobility” (Hyman 30). Mathilda Wertheim Stein The last voice presented here is Mathilda Wertheim Stein’s (born 1915) who grew up in Lauterbach, a rural town in Oberhessen, Germany.27 Deeply affected by the Shoah, Stein (The Way It Was) was able to write an extraordinary book about the Jewish community, including her extended family, in rural Hesse. Her mother worked as a homemaker and her father as a cattle dealer.28 Even though her family of four belonged to the rural middle class, Stein recalls her parents’ and her own hard manual labor as she was growing up. I remember when my mother was sick at that time I had to knead loaves of bread—I was only nine—I kneaded the dough for three. And the loaves were not small. That must have been at least three pounds of flour, that’s a lot of flour . . . I do not know how these fingers did it to tell you the truth. I think that’s why they hurt so much today. (“Testimony of an Eye Witness in Hessen” 68–69)

Childhood stories of manual labor are common in the narratives of rural and working-class women in the interwar years. Many children contributed their work to the family’s income and maintenance. Children notice class differences early on. Stein recounts that itinerant Schnorrer and Schnorrerinnen from the Bukovina came to her house, requesting food and shelter. Her mother gave graciously to all but dismissed the women quickly because, according to Stein, she did not want her daughters to see them. Stein was also aware of hidden poverty of families in her own Jewish community (41). She remembers that Jewish women in rural Hesse worked in the public sphere as seamstresses and Flickfrauen (women who mended clothes) as well as milliners. It was a combination of class oppression and anti-Semitism that became the decisive factors in Stein’s decision to emigrate. In first grade (in 1921) she encountered anti-Semitism and decided that she must leave Germany as soon as possible. It began . . . the day I entered school as far as I am concerned but it was more open later. You know, in a way I was glad when it became more open, I

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mean, within myself, I never shared this with anybody, certainly not my parents. I was glad when it became more open because before I thought it was almost a personal thing and people disliked me as a person, which wasn’t the case at all . . . (71)

Stein recalled that her elementary school teacher beat up a little Lutheran boy from a working poor family every day. She believes that the teacher did not want to see the child’s poverty, for he had “fingers like sticks.”29 She describes another daily occurrence when it came to classes of Christian religious instruction. MWS: [The teacher] began screaming at the top of his lungs, “Juden raus!” [Jews out!] So there were two little boys, they weren’t any taller than I was, maybe a tiny bit taller, and I was very tiny. He opened the door, “Juden raus!” And we had to stand in the hall for forty-five minutes or whatever fifty minutes whatever the length of the school period was. He never gave us a book, we didn’t have a seat, if you have to stand, you can’t stand free for forty-five minutes, you have to lean against the wall, right? And you wouldn’t have dared talking to each other. [. . .] So after forty-five minutes, he screamed again, “Juden rein!” [Jews in!] You know the blood comes up in my head right now. This is eighty years ago. Eighty years later the blood comes up in my head, can you believe it? [. . .] It was very shocking. This went on five days a week, Saturday there was no catechism. [. . .] I mean, unbelievable. Unbelievable. And I want you to know I had no youth, I had no adolescence, they robbed me. Nothing. I was a very unhappy child to say the least. And at that time I decided I would not stay in Germany, regardless. Maybe I would try another city, but I wouldn’t stay in Hessen. MG: What time did you decide that? MWS: By the end of the first grade. (73–74)

In some rural areas in Germany with long traditions of anti-Semitism, many Jews read the alarm signals of Fascism early on and left as soon as possible. Mathilda Stein is convinced that “Hitler only legalized and intensified the persecution, which had been going on for years. I never knew anything else” (85) Stein recounts that she was not only attacked for her Jewishness but also discriminated against because of her father’s profession. She was seven or eight years old when her Lutheran girlfriend’s father provoked her. Well, we were playing dolls, she had a marvelous assortment of dolls and I really think I liked her because of, you know, how children are, we were playing and he came in and he would say, and I kept on playing, he said, “Nu, was kostet die Kuh?” [Now, how much is the cow?] I mean, this was to

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be a slander on me and my father’s occupation. I’m wondering that I had enough stamina within me at the age of seven to try to ignore him. Can you imagine? (109)

Stein is proud that she “toughed it out” (109). She continued her friendship with the girl who became a Nazi and “spat out” in front of Stein in 1933 (110). Stein did not wait much longer. As Lerman did, she emigrated to the United States in 1934. Soon after, her father was forced to give up his work and eventually—with her help—her immediate family escaped Germany. During the interview Stein told me that she still has nightmares— as do Doba A. and Lerman—and lives with an “injured soul” (124). Her struggles did not end with her emigration; memories of the first years in the United States were still too painful to talk about (120). Lerman struggled with unemployment and language barriers after her arrival in the United States but eventually found work in New York’s Lower East Side’s garment industry. She was fired for union activism but ultimately escaped poverty. However, she never left her working-class sensibilities behind and still acts in solidarity with oppressed populations.30 As one of many compelling voices, Lerman insists, “My life is a part of history” (233). Notes I owe much gratitude to all “ordinary” women, and especially to Rose Lerman and Mathilda Wertheim Stein, for sharing their life stories with me. I also wish to thank my spouse, JB, for her tireless support and editing of several drafts of this paper. Furthermore, I appreciate Dr. Virginia Steinhagen, Dr. Monica Clyde, Dr. Norma Smith, and Dr. Arlene Teraoka for their helpful suggestions along the way. It is through careful collaboration that voices of ordinary Jewish survivors of the Shoah are recorded. 1. I use the terms Holocaust/Shoah interchangeably. I find the Greek-derived Holocaust problematic in its connotation to sacrificial offering, however. 2. Telephone conversation with Ilse H. (name changed) on June 6, 2004. She escaped Nazi Germany in April 1939. 3. Richarz (20–22); Koonz (362). According to Kaplan’s source (“Sisterhood under Siege” 193–94, n4), by 1933 only 8.7% of German Jews identified themselves as “workers” and 46.4% as “independent” (shop owners, people in commerce, or members of free professions, such as lawyers, doctors). It is not clear how “worker” is defined in this context and how the remaining 44.9% identified. 4. Telephone conversation with Ilse H. on June 6, 2004. In October 1938, Nazi Germany deported between 17.000 and 50.000 Polish Jewish immigrants to the Polish border. See Burleigh and Wippermann (89) and Koonz (373).

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5. My spatial focus of research. 6. I extend the definition of the term “survivor” to include all those affected by Nazi persecution after January 1933 (Myerhoff 23–24). 7. Lerman’s account of the massacre in Mir is noted in Gilbert (235, n63). 8. Stanley (The Auto/biographical I 7) argues convincingly that the biographer is socially located, sexed, raced, classed, aged, partial (see also Haraway, and LaCapra 46; Stanley and Wise 60). 9. Joan Scott suggested a very helpful and detailed account for considering gender as a category of historical analysis. Her definition of gender is based on the interconnectedness of two propositions: “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (42–43). Scott points out that within the highly complex, dispersed, and interrelated constellations and processes of unequal power relationships between individuals and society, there is also a component of human agency in the construction of gender. 10. Ringelheim (“Women and the Holocaust” 741–61); Goldenberg (150–66); Rittner and Roth. 11. Kaplan (“Sisterhood under Siege” 175) problematizes the term “race.” Gender/sex-specific persecution includes sexual humiliation, rape, forced prostitution, abortion, and sterilization. 12. Grossman; Strobl (Sag nie, du gehst den letzten Weg; Die Angst kam erst danach). Strobl (Die Angst kam erst danach 305) noticed “deutliche Klassenunterschiede” (clear class differences) among female Jewish resistance fighters. 13. As Ringelheim (The Split between Gender and the Holocaust 346–50) pointed out, women and children often made up 60–70% in the death camps’ first selections for immediate murder. She critiqued the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for omitting a “conceptualization of gender” and facts significant for nuanced Holocaust representation. Gendered Holocaust research, Ringelheim demonstrates, is still in danger of being marginalized or absent. See also a critique of male bias in Bos (23–50). 14. P., Fela. 1997. Interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Melbourne, Australia, July 2. Interview Code 33606, Tape 1, 15:21 15. Scott compares analyses of the three axes of power inequalities: gender, class, race. Her definition of class is based on Marxist theory of economic determination and historical change in which the category of gender is treated as byproduct of economical structural change (30). This Marxian definition, Scott points out, maintains a level of coherence that does not extend to “race” or gender. While Scott critiques Marxian concepts of class in order to complicate it with gender, I think it is necessary to also extend this definition of class; see bell hooks. 16. hooks addresses the hatred and contempt she experienced from individuals with class privilege (where we stand 35). 17. hooks (“Confronting Class in the Classroom” 184). Class is often synonymous with middle class. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon,

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18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

for instance, Gurewitsch. She presents oral histories of women from different ethnic backgrounds and documents the lives of twenty-five women. Only one out of twenty-five is working class, the other twenty-four are middle class. See other examples of middle-class bias in Koonz (61, 147, 347, 353, 36); Lixl-Purcell. Klüger (13–14). Translation from Kluger’s first English-language edition Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (22). In their picture of the shtetl during the pre–World War I period, Zborowski and Herzog distinguish between “people of the week” (unschooled, workers, artisans, peddlers) and “people of the Sabbath” (learned elite) (142–43). They probably mobilized resources they knew before the war. I thank Dr. Norma Smith for this insight. Bos (37) also suggests to “look more carefully into the effects of men’s and women’s pre-war socialisation” because the social location of Jewishness, gender, and class are central to survivors’ narratives. Lerman’s life story is even more unusual because few Polish Jews worked the land. Glenn (13). Hyman (35). She analyzed rare interwar documentation in 350 autobiographical accounts by Polish Jewish conducted by YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) in 1932, 1934, and1939. They show a portrait of a youth who “perceived it had no future” (35). Many youth describe their unhappy and large families, in which six to eight children were common, as economically deprived. Despite that Hyman disputes that Polish Jewish families were typically large (35, n29). A., Doba. 1997. Interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Melbourne, Australia, March 28. Interview Code 29753. Tapes 1–3. Algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund in lite, poyln, un rusland—General Jewish Workers Alliance of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded secretly in 1897 in Vilna. Dobroszycki and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (195–97). Spelling unverified. Stein (“Testimony of an Eye Witness in Hessen, 1920–34).” Personal Interview, Atlanta, 2002. In southern and western Germany, 75% of all cattle dealers were Jews (Richarz 14). Telephone conversation with Mathilda W. Stein on November 18, 2003. For a definition and differentiation between assimilation and acculturation, see Torres (855).

Works Cited A., Doba. 1997. Interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Melbourne, Australia, March 28. Interview Code 29753. Tapes 1–3. Bacon, Gershon. “The Missing 52 Percent: Research on Jewish Women in Interwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies.” In Women in the Holocaust. Ed. Dalia Ofer et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 55–67.

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Baer, Elizabeth R., and Myrna Goldenberg, eds. Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. Bos, Pascale Rachel. “Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference.” In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Ed. Elizabeth R. Baer et al. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 23–50. Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933–45. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Dobroszycki, Lucjan, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust. New York: Schocken Books, 1977. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, ed. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. London: Collins, 1986. Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Goldenberg, Myrna. “Different Horrors, Same Hell. Women Remembering the Holocaust.” Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust. Ed. Roger S. Gottlieb. Nahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990. 150–66. Grossman, Chaika. Die Untergrundarmee: Der jüdische Widerstand in Bialystok. Ein autobiographischer Bericht. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993. Gurewitsch, Brana, ed. Mothers, Sisters, Resisters. Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575–99. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985. hooks, bell. feminist theory: from margin to center. Boston: South End P, 1984. ———. “Confronting Class in the Classroom.” In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. where we stand: class matters. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Hyman, Paula E. “Gender and the Jewish Family in Modern Europe.” In Women in the Holocaust. Ed. Dalia Ofer et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 25–38. Kaplan, Marion A. “Sisterhood under Siege: Feminism and Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1904–1938.” In When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Ed. Renate Bridenthal et al. New York: Monthly Review P, 1984. 174–96. ———. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Klüger, Ruth. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1992. ———. Still Alive. A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: Feminist P, 2001. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1987. LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Lerman, Rose. “Hoping For A Better World.” Interview by Marion Gerlind. Rec 08/13/94—08/23/98. Audio tapes. Unpublished manuscript. Berkeley, CA, 2001.

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Lixl-Purcell, Andreas, ed. Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiogaphies since 1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Lorenz, Dagmar C.G. “The Interchange between Experience and Literature: German-Jewish Women Writers of the Holocaust.” In Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present. Ed. Elke P. Frederiksen et al. New York: State U of New York P, 2000. 171–85. Maynes, Mary Jo. Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. Milton, Sybil. “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women.” In When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Ed. Renate Bridenthal et al. New York: Monthly Review P, 1984. 297–333. Myerhoff, Barbara. Number Our Days. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Ofer, Dalia and Lenore Weitzman, eds. Women in the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. P., Fela. 1997. Interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Melbourne, Australia, July 2. Interview Code 33606. Videotapes. Richarz, Monika, ed. Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland. Trans. Stella P. Rosenfeld and Sidney Rosenfeld. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991. Ringelheim, Joan. “Women and the Holocaust: a Reconsideration of Research.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10.4 (1985): 741–61. ———. “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust.” Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust. Ed. Roger S. Gottlieb. Nahwah, NJ: Paulist P, 1990. 141–49. ———. “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust.” Women in the Holocaust. Ed. Dalia Ofer et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth, eds. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. New York: Paragon House, 1993. Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Stanley, Liz, ed. Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology. London: Routledge, 1990. ———. The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography. Manchester, NY: Manchester UP, 1992. Stanley, Liz and Sue Wise. Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1993. Steedman, Carolyn Kay. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1987. Stein, Mathilda Wertheim. The Way It Was: The Jewish World of Rural Hesse. Ed. Maureen MacLaughlin. Atlanta, GA: Frederick Max Publications, 2000. ———. “Testimony of an Eye Witness in Hessen, 1920–34.” Personal Interview, Atlanta, 2002. Strobl, Ingrid. Sag nie, du gehst den letzten Weg: Frauen im bewaffneten Widerstand gegen Faschismus und deutsche Besatzung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989.

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———. Die Angst kam erst danach: Jüdische Frauen im Widerstand 1939–1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. Torres, Edén E. “Power, Politics, and Pleasure: Class Differences and the Law.” Rutgers Law Review 54.4 (Summer 2002): 853–64. Zborowski, Mark and Elizabeth Herzog. Life Is with People: The Jewish Little Town of Eastern Europe. 1st ed. New York: Schocken, 1962.

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PART II LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

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DANCING OUT OF BOUNDS: VALESKA GERT IN BERLIN AND NEW YORK Sydney Jane Norton

Und weil ich den Bürger nicht liebte, tanzte ich die von ihm Verachteten, Dirnen, Kupplerinnen, Ausgeglitschte und Herabgekommene. [Because I despised the burgher, I danced all of the people that the upright citizen despised: whores, pimps, depraved souls—the ones who slipped through the cracks.] Valeska Gert, Mein Weg (48)

Life in Berlin 1892–1938 Born Gertrud Valesca Samosch into a German Jewish family on January 11, 1892, in Berlin, Valeska Gert enjoyed many of the advantages associated with typical German upper-middle-class bourgeois households. Her father, Theodor Samosch, managed Zade und Falk, a store that manufactured hat accessories. Gertrud’s mother, Augusta, enrolled her in ballet and Grazie classes when she was seven. Uninspired by academics, Gert dropped out of school. When her father lost his fortune through a poor investment at the beginning of the First World War, Gert worked in a shoe store, as a nanny, as a nurse’s assistant, and satirical writer for the Berlin fashion magazine Die Elegante Welt (The Elegant World) to help support the family. In 1915 Maria Moissi accepted the twenty-three-year-old as a student in her acting school. Gert practiced the roles of a variety of character types while conquering her inhibitions about performing in public. Moissi recognized Gert’s talent for both acting and movement, and referred her to dancer Rita Sachhetto for whom Gert auditioned. Gert’s peers were aspiring young dancers, including Anita Berber, who later became one of the most risqué and scandalous personalities of the Weimar period. Gert’s first choreographed work, Tanz in Orange (Dance in Orange; 1916), was an experiment in facial expressions and gestures ranging from

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fearful to aggressive, graceful and refined, to brutish. The work stood out glaringly against delicately choreographed, Greek-styled dances of the day that showcased elegant tunic-clad young women. In contrast, Gert dressed in garish orange pantaloons; she painted her face chalk white and the area around her eyes neon blue (Mein Weg 30). Exaggerating everyday expressions and gestures to grotesque proportion, Gert’s outrageous figure resembled a placard in its bold, larger than life simplicity. She recalls in her memoirs: As I shot onto the stage, I was so high-spirited and so filled with the desire to shake up the audience that I exploded into the atmosphere of loveliness that the others created. [. . .] and the same movements that I had previously danced gently and gracefully, I now exaggerated wildly. With mammoth steps I stormed across the podium. Hands splayed, my arms swung like a huge pendulum, and my face distorted itself into daring grimaces. [. . .] There was great turmoil in the audience. Some stamped with enthusiasm; others whistled with rage.1

Gert relished in disrupting the contrived pleasantness of the classical dances. She found the bourgeois ideal of feminine beauty inherent in the ethereal works by her contemporaries insipid and predictable. Tanz in Orange brought her a job performing grotesques between movies at a double feature on Nollendorfplatz (Nollendorf Place), a popular bohemian setting known for its bars and nightlife. Moissi soon sent Gert to Munich to audition for director Otto Falckenberg, who hired her as a character actor for a variety of small roles in his Münchener Kammerspiele (Munich Studio Theater). Though unsatisfied with the modest roles, it is there she became familiar with preExpressionist and Expressionist theater. She acted in Frank Wedekind’s Marquis of Keith and King Nicolo, Heinrich Mann’s Madame Legros, and August Strindberg’s fairy tale production Kronbraut. At the studio theater, Gert perfected her ability to impersonate characters, capture a given movement or facial expression with acuity, and then magnify it to monumental proportions. Upon her return to Berlin, she was hired by Max Reinhardt2 at Deutsches Theater, where she continued to play grotesque character roles in a variety of dramas ranging from Molière’s The Citizen as Nobleman to Goethe’s Faust. In 1924, she abandoned theater altogether in favor of film, but the innovations of avant-garde theater were tremendously influential in the making of Gert’s performance art. Her experimentation with and modification of these strategies coupled with personal magnetism and a taste for the bizarre were the makings of an innovative dance theater, elements of which were not to be found in works by any other modern dancer of the Weimar period.

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Gert’s influence on contemporary performance art is unmistakable. During the 1920s Gert pioneered her inimitable grotesque dance as a vehicle for political/social satire and ideology critique. Many of the avant-garde techniques that she introduced into the realm of modern dance of the 1920s—her use of grotesque distortion, montage, her repetition and exaggeration of “ordinary” gestures on stage, and integration of voice into her dances—have resurfaced in the performance art of leading postmodern choreographers today. German choreographer Pina Bausch,3 for example, incorporates an immense repertoire of everyday movements and human behavioral patterns into her work, in order to reveal the ideological underpinnings of social conventions normally accepted as truths. Like Gert, Bausch interprets “ordinary behavior” as a form of learned social performance that requires deconstruction as a means of eliminating destructive patterns in social relationships. American choreographers Sara Hook and Mary Cochran have been known to incorporate voice and text into their choreography as a means of underscoring or intensifying the performative effect of a given social behavior, a process that Gert first introduced into the realm of avant-garde dance in the late 1920s in Berlin. Gert’s performance art, both in Berlin and in exile, is rooted in the theatrical innovations by Max Reinhardt, Frank Wedekind, and many of the early Expressionist dramatists. Like Reinhardt, Gert favored a bare stage that drew audience’s focus to the actors’ expressions. In fact, she furthered his notion by performing on a tiny stage to afford a more concentrated and intimate exchange between performer and audience. She also experienced first-hand Reinhardt’s general de-emphasis of the spoken word and his attempt to liberate audiences from a meaningless web of language. Exaggerated gesture, song, pantomime, dance, and parody—all elements originally reserved for the cabaret, and now present in Reinhardt’s “serious” theater—strongly influenced Gert’s construction of a new dance form. Playwright Frank Wedekind’s skillful incorporation of “low” art forms into drama was also significant for Gert’s performance art. Wedekind combined the colorful imagery of both circus and vaudeville—that is, entertainment for the masses—into his literature as a way of disrupting the formal conventions of classical theater. His grotesque and often satirical depictions of the societal tensions that exist between irrational sexual instinct and bourgeois morality, a phenomenon that Gert, too, examines at length in her performance art, initiated the modernist shift from the realistic representation characterized by Naturalism to the exaggerated subjectivity of early Expressionism.4 Gert, like Wedekind, was fascinated by and sought inspiration in popular culture. Boxing, circus acts, variety, and movies became prime subject matter in her dances, not only because these activities were

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movement-based media, but also because her incorporation of them aided in collapsing the ideological boundaries between high art and popular culture, two realms of entertainment that were deemed separate and unequal by the majority of the educated elite. Her incorporation of mass culture into her repertoire, together with her grotesque renderings of modern urban problems and the bourgeois moral hypocrisies, place her performance art within a late modernist, avant-garde genre, which served to expose and dismantle the ideological underpinnings of what many perceived to be an unacceptable social order. The depth and variety of Gert’s dance theater is impressive. From 1919 to 1924 she performed highly subjective Expressionist works such as To Die, Humility, To Love, and Birth. The only historical documentation available on most of these early dances consists of a few lines in her memoirs, photographs, and some brief descriptions by her biographer Fred Hildebrandt. But from these fragmentary sources one recognizes Gert’s close ties with Expressionistic theater in her renunciation of the ornamental, and a total concentration on movement, gesture, and facial expressions. Her dance, To Love, according to Hildebrandt, comprised “nothing more than a single arm movement, torn asunder, which contained everything: the joy and the anxiety, the misery and the torment and the rapture” (132). Gert’s desire to focus on the simplest, purest, and least constructed utterance of a given emotional state is characteristic of the early Expressionist move to simplify. Like the woodcuts created by early Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt Rottluff, Gert eliminated all unnecessary shades and contours, only to magnify the crucial strokes that expressed the ultimate emotion and supplied the dance with form. In To Die, a dance created sometime between 1919 and 1922, and one that she continued to perform during her years in exile, Gert focused exclusively on the physical and emotional changes that take place in a person, any person, at the moment of death. Remaining true to the Expressionist belief that inner necessity was the catalyst for all true art, Gert asserted that her death dance was inspired by the trauma she experienced with her father’s death. Nevertheless, the reason for its overwhelming success in the Weimar Republic is that it fulfilled the spectator’s need to face death on both a personal and a societal level. She described this dance in her autobiography: Motionless I stand in a long, black shirt on a glaringly lit up stage. My body tenses up slowly, the struggle begins, my hands clench into fists, tighter and tighter, the shoulders bend, the face becomes distorted from pain and misery. The pain becomes unbearable; my mouth opens to accommodate a silent scream. I bend my head back, shoulders, hands, my whole body becomes numb. I try to restrain this. Pointless. For seconds I stand there motionless, a

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pillar of pain. Then slowly, the life gradually withdraws from my body, and very slowly it relaxes. The pain quits, the mouth becomes softer, the shoulders fall, the arms become slack as do the hands, I feel the benumbed staring of people in the audience, I want to console them, a glimmer of life slips into my face, a smile appears from far away. Then it rapidly sinks. The cheeks slacken, the head falls quickly. The head of a doll. Out. Away. I died. Death stillness. No one in the audience dares to breathe. I’m dead. (Hexe 49)5

Uncharacteristic of her later works, Gert performed the death struggle without decoration, acrobatics, or musical accompaniment. A black shapeless gown devoid of ornamentation served as her costume. Her chalk white face served only to intensify the expression of suffering. The effect of Gert’s performance of To Die on Weimar spectators was dramatic. A critic from Wiesbaden compared Gert’s ability to reenact the moment of death process to the subtle handwork of a sculptor. Another critic emphasized the pointlessness of using musical accompaniment for a work fraught with such emotional depth: “It is completely logical that the music falls silent: this art of expression works so intensively through itself, possesses so much inner rhythm and spiritual sound, that audible accompaniments would only weaken the impression.” The emotional impact of To Die was so profound that the audience was unable to applaud following the performance (Krey 81). The success of an avant-garde work is purported to depend on its ability to obliterate the traditional aesthetic frameworks that allow the spectator to make predictable emotional associations that reinforce the dominant political and social values of the time.6 Modern dance, even in its developmental stages, is an art form that clearly served the avant-garde objective of breaking with the aesthetic traditions of the past. Valeska Gert is an anomaly in the realm of modern dance, however, in that she was the first dancer who supplied German modern dance with a revolutionary aesthetic that catapulted the art form into the realm of critical thought and social consciousness. As Gert became famous during the mid-1920s, she expanded her repertoire to include movement montages and tone dances. She had become familiar with montage theory through her acquaintance with films created by members of the Russian and German avant-garde in Berlin. Just as avant-garde filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein7 and Walter Ruttman8 employed montage to represent the discontinuities and contradictions of modern life in their works, so, too, was Gert able to reproduce the montage aesthetic with her slice-of-life representations of the modern metropolis. Performed in brief episodic format lasting no longer than two minutes at a time, Gert’s montage compositions resembled film strips in that they consisted of a series of unrelated scenes and images separated from each other only by a momentary black out or freeze. Gert describes: “[In Kino

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(Movies)] I created a film strip by indiscriminately acting out a long distance runner from the newsreel, a cartoonist, a cranking projectionist, an eccentric old lady, the diva, a silly flapper, and pig-headed soldiers. My movements flickered, giving the impression that the camera had moved too much” (Hexe 49).9 Indeed, Gert offered a kinesthetic version of the filmic montage. But rather than fancy editing work, her montages were based on mechanical precision of movements, the mastery of quick tempo that emulated the filmic restructuring of time, and facial and body distortion analogous to the close-ups, enlargements, and diminutions of an object made possible by the camera lens.10 Gert never openly aligned herself with the German or, in exile, the American women’s movement; nevertheless, many of her dances explore aspects of constructed female identity. Her tone dances, for example, used sound and monosyllabic utterances to exaggerate, and thus underscore the social behavior of female figures that traditionally had been overlooked or trivialized by patriarchal society. They include her Erotic Grotesques, a trilogy in which Gert explored the emotions/motivations of the prostitute at various phases in her career; Die Amme (Wet-nurse), in which she magnified and theatricalized the fundamental emotions of happiness and sadness within the parameters of a wet nurse’s identity; and finally Diseuse, Tragédienne, Coloratura, and Chansonette, a cycle of dances parodying the various constructed identities of the bourgeois female artist. Her amplification of the female character’s behavioral patterns helped to expose the discrepancies between the woman’s projected outward behavior and her actual emotional and material circumstances (Norton 152–78). Gert’s provocation and alienation of her audiences via grotesque distortion can best be illustrated by taking a closer look at her Erotic Grotesques, her most scandalous and controversial dance trilogy. The dances spanned several years. The first episode, Die Dirne (Dregs), portrays the life of an adolescent prostitute. It is one of Gert’s earliest works and was rarely performed after 1921. Little has been written about Die Dirne, and no existing footage of this dance exists. Noteworthy, however, is that it was performed independent of musical accompaniment. In its place Gert generated verbal and tonal sounds that both enriched and intensified the effects of her movement sequence. Later, the employment of monosyllabic utterances and sounds would become one of Gert’s choreographic trademarks. Remaining true to the notion that language was nothing but a discursive prison, Gert’s vocal expressions existed as extensions and intensifications of movement and emotion. By the late 1920s, a point at which Gert had appeared in several notable films of the period, Gert had created several sound dances, performance pieces that more intensively explored the interplay between sound and movement.

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The second dance of the trilogy, Canaille (Whore), explores the movements and motives of a prostitute, a woman whose motivation in life is spurred by feigned lust and material necessity. Gert commenced her performance of Canaille with the following visual picture: I wiggle my hips provocatively, raise my black skirt and show the exposed white skin above my long stocking and pink garter for a moment. I’m a sensitive whore. My movements are gentle and lascivious. I wear high-heels and my white face is practically covered with black strands of hair. My head gradually falls and my face disappears except for the bright red mouth showing above the collar that hangs loose around my neck. (Die Bettlerbar 79)

Other choreographers from the 1920s portrayed the non-virtuous, uglier aspects of a woman’s identity, but Gert, who added a human dimension to the outcasts she portrayed, was the only one of her generation to expose the interconnectedness between the woman’s grotesque behavior, her social ostracism, and her material desperation. Gert achieved this through a crass portrayal of the raw sexual act, removing it from the standard narrative framework of bourgeois romantic love. The climax of Canaille is the prostitute’s loveless, but lustful climax with her customer, a brief but graphic scene described in detail in her memoirs: I sink slowly to my knees, open my legs wide and sink even further. In a sudden cramp, as if bitten by a tarantula, I convulse upwards. I oscillate to and fro. My body then relaxes. The cramp dissolves, the jerking becomes softer, weaker, the intervals become further apart, the arousal subsides. One last convulsion, and then I’m back on the ground again. What did he do to me? He used my body, because I needed money. Miserable world!I spit contemptuously to my right, then my left, and I shuffle away. (Hexe 48)11

Through suggestive and grotesque movement, gesture, facial distortion, and monosyllabic utterances that magnified the prostitute’s desperation and social ostracism, Gert captured the essence of the material motivations of a prostitute, while simultaneously revealing the destructiveness of a governing institution fraught with economic and legal inequities for women. Gert’s Canaille underscored the negative consequences of industrial modernity and confronted spectators by alluding to the abysmal social conditions of unskilled women workers, most of whom had moved from the provinces to the urban metropolis in search of economic opportunity. Her performance of the prostitute resounded with particular vibrancy during the 1920s in Germany, a period in which prostitution had become a rapidly growing and undeniable social problem.

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“Valeska Gert in Canaille (Whore)” (1925). Photograph by Suse Byk. Courtesy Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln.

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Gert’s celebrity as a grotesque dancer brought her into contact with many key figures from the avant-garde movement. Bertolt Brecht admired her for her ability to create an alienation effect in the dance medium; he invited her to perform regularly at Die Rote Revue (The Red Revue), his cabaret at the Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich Studio Theater). In 1925, renowned filmmaker G.W. Pabst cast her in the role of the madame, Frau Greifer, in his silent street film Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Streets), where Gert played a supporting role opposite Greta Garbo as Kupplerin (Madame). In 1929, she astounded Weimar spectators in Pabst’s Tagebuch einer Verlorene (Diary of a Lost Girl) with her macabre performance of a sadistic governess in a women’s detention home. In 1931, she appeared as Polly Peachum’s mother in the filmic version of Brecht’s Die Dreigroschen Oper (The Three Penny Opera).12 Because few of Gert’s dances from the Weimar years exist on film, Pabst’s recordings of her phenomenal grotesque character performances are particularly valuable. Exile Years: 1938–1949 As National Socialism dominated the early 1930s, many critics became increasingly antagonistic toward Gert’s theatrical presence, characterizing it as “unGerman” and “unnatural.” Theater critic Adolf Stein, for example, criticized Gert for “her Gallic hatred of everything German” (Stein in Peter 69). Other blatantly anti-Semitic critics, who were counting on Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, drew connections between her choreographic attempts to slander German traditions and her Jewish heritage (Peter 72–77). Nationalists and anti-Semites alike associated her socially critical performance art with a treasonous lack of patriotism, and regarded her persona with intense hostility. Despite the increasing animosity toward Gert’s performative presence in Germany during this time, she experienced notable successes in Budapest, Krakow, Paris, and particularly London, where she developed an enthusiastic following within the city’s avant-garde circles. Her roles in three successful Pabst films helped her land a movie role as a maid in Pett and Pott, a 1934 film directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti. She also continued solo performances regularly and with success. Noteworthy about Gert’s performance art in exile is that her social critiques extended beyond German borders to parody both universal Western phenomena as well as social realities specific to her exiled home. Impressed by Gert’s talent for simultaneously entertaining and alienating her audiences, actor/ theater critic Robin Anderson became her personal manager, and found engagements for her that included numerous pre-theater solo recitals and the role of Canina in Stefan Zweig’s theatrical piece Volpone.13

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Gert, like countless other artists in exile, never fully adjusted to living and working outside of Germany. Political refugees were aware that they were tremendously fortunate to receive asylum. Yet, as newcomers, they were not fully welcome, and very few of the educated ones could actually earn a living working within their areas of expertise. Though some of the most prominent émigrés, such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and the composer Friedrich Holländer, enjoyed immediate professional successes in the United States, most exiles were forced to struggle on the most basic level, in order to fulfill their most fundamental survival needs. As an exile, Gert experienced alienation on multiple levels. Her performance art was deeply rooted in Weimar Berlin’s distinctive vibrant avantgarde scene. Yet with the advent of the Third Reich, Gert had become an alien in her own country. Even relations with her closest friends had become strained as she was singled out in public as a Jew. By 1934, race laws prevented her from using her stage name. Extra benches were erected in parks to prevent Jews and “Aryans” from sitting together. In 1935, she and her first husband Helmuth von Krause14 officially divorced so that he would not be arrested for breaking newly enacted laws against intermarriage between Aryans and Jews, a crime that was punishable by both public humiliation and imprisonment. Despite the fact that Gert had managed to secure engagements in London, leaving Germany was particularly problematic for her because she relied on a close-knit group of friends for emotional, managerial, and even financial support.15 Her tours to Paris and London at this time were disrupted by severe panic attacks, which sometimes prevented her from performing. Once in permanent exile, both in England and in the United States, Gert managed, albeit at times with great difficulty, to remain outwardly functional. She often suffered severe bouts of cultural disorientation, which stemmed from a combination of lack of a network of friends, heartbreak over lost love, financial worries, and isolation from her own, specific cultural milieu. She wrote: I was suddenly left to fend for myself since my three men remained in Europe. Each one of them had his reasons for remaining behind. I didn’t know how one was supposed to earn money, nor how one made connections. In America making contacts is a part of making one’s career. Of course there were many people in the U.S. who knew me from the stage, but I didn’t know them. I also didn’t know that there are many institutions like the New School of Social Research that give money to prominent artists [. . .] I never understood how to play up my “prominence.” (Hexe 97)16

Gert sailed to New York City in December 1939 under the auspices of an American manager who had been impressed by one of her performances in

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London. He gave her a cash advance of 500 dollars and her boat ticket to New York where they had planned to draft a contract. But shortly after her arrival in New York her agent died from a heart attack. Gert was virtually without friends or family in New York. A month after her arrival in New York City, Gert traveled by Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, rented an apartment there, and attempted to secure acting roles in Hollywood. However, her critical approach to performance and her atypical appearance left her, for the most part, unappreciated in a country where light musical comedy and Hollywood romance reigned supreme. Curiously, German artists in the United States who were familiar with, and even complimentary about Gert’s work in the 1920s, showed a lack of enthusiasm. Director Ernst Lubitsch, who moved from Berlin to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, would not cast her because she made openly negative comments about Hollywood actresses. Producer Walter Wanger did not consider her to be the right type for Hollywood movies. Although Gert managed to work briefly under contract at Universal Studios and appeared in a film called Rio directed by John Bram, her scenes were cut from the final version of the film because the studio feared that her grotesque performances would alienate American audiences. After attempting—albeit unsuccessfully—to interest the writer Klaus Mann in an idea for a movie, Gert returned to New York, where she performed at the Barbizon-Plaza theater, and a couple of months later at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Some of her most popular dance caricatures of the Weimar years were on the program: To Die; Coloratura; Baby; La Tragédienne française; The Famous Pianist; Vienna Lady, 1890; and Spanish Dance. She suffered extreme financial hardship during these early exile years, and according to her memoirs had difficulty finding even menial jobs. After a medical doctor wrote a letter to the National Refugee Service stating that Gert was severely undernourished, she received $7.50 per week. With this money she was barely able to rent an attic room in Manhattan and purchase groceries (Stein in Peter 81–83). In exile, Gert found herself in a milieu that was in many respects unreceptive to her performance style and intolerant of her status as both foreigner and Jew. The reasons for American intolerance were notably different from the disfavor many Germans demonstrated toward her art during the early 1930s. German bias stemmed, in part, from rising antiSemitism and the desire on the part of ultra-conservative nationalists to eliminate from the cultural purview any artistic presence that exposed inconsistencies of traditional German ideals and customs. American unreceptiveness, on the other hand, stemmed from a cultural and geographical insularity that resulted in a lack of understanding of a form of satire that did not fully embrace mainstream American cultural values or aesthetics. Gert’s

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status as a single female refugee—an artist trying to make it on her own without the support of a husband or an influential American sponsor— further prevented her from integrating into American society. Despite her initial difficulties, Gert established a cultural niche for herself by opening Beggar Bar in fall 1941, a small cabaret on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. She invested five dollars in the dark cellar, repainted it, and recreated a Montparnasse atmosphere by installing colorful light fixtures, paintings, and offering bitters, apple cider, and a nightly peasant soup. Beggar Bar was denied a liquor license, but, nevertheless, became a tremendously popular nightspot for artists, writers, and entertainers who tired of the glitzy dinner club atmosphere popular at the time. The nightly entertainment was unusual and diverse. A young, yet to be discovered, Tennessee Williams waited tables and held poetry readings there. Exiled cabaret performers Kadidja Wedekind and Heinz Watenberg performed German cabaret songs. Aspiring American singers and musical comics presented their new material. But the main attraction was always Gert who would at any moment during the evening spontaneously perform a grotesque dance or sketch, sing a satirical song, or recite a poem (Forbes). Gert continued to have economic concerns, but the Beggar Bar’s success instilled within her a modicum of financial security and newfound self-confidence. The cabaret also functioned as her community away from home. Because she advertised her nightspot in the German immigrant newspaper Aufbau,17 much of her initial audience consisted of émigrés like herself. The National Refugee Service sent her names of exiled cabaret singers, several of whom she hired to perform. As word spread about Beggar Bar, Americans artists, writers, and actors also frequented the club. By today’s standards it is hard to imagine that any of Gert’s numbers, with the exception of, perhaps, her Erotic Grotesques, would cause scandal or suspicion. Regulars at the club, many of whom were experimental artists themselves, both admired and respected her critical performances. But in 1941, the year that the United States entered the Second World War against Germany, numerous Americans considered Gert’s performances to be both antidemocratic and in bad taste. Aside from the satires she had performed in Germany, Gert created new works, which exposed contradictions in the American concept of freedom18 and called into question American patriotism. Particularly during wartime, judgments against Gert were magnified because of her refugee status. Many of Gert’s experiences—her relations with the police, immigration agencies, and neighbors—were tainted by unforgiving disapproval of her unconventional lifestyle, her status as a single female refugee, and her socially critical art form.

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Gert had, however, established friendships and connections with German exiles and artists based in New York. The German Jewish exile painter and filmmaker Hans Richter, who in 1942 became director of City College’s Film Institute, was a regular at Beggar Bar, and was complimentary about both the quality of the cabaret numbers and the décor. Gert also mentions the art dealer Karl Nierendorf, another German Jewish exile, who in 1929 had financed Katakombe (Catacombs), the last politically leftist Berlin cabaret before the Nazis came to power. In 1941, he agreed to invest in the Beggar Bar, helped her obtain her cabaret and restaurant licenses, and offered Gert a combined sum of a thousand dollars to fund her enterprise. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Nierendorf backed out of further financial support, convinced that it was too risky to invest in a cabaret during wartime. Aside from the prominent exiles, Gert hired and befriended refugees to whom she refers on a first name basis in her memoirs. Both Esmerelda (Esme), who proved to be Gert’s trusted friend for many years, and a Berlin performer named Ilse regularly sang chansons at Beggar Bar.19 Despite her above mentioned positive relationships with émigrés, some of Gert’s harshest critics were representatives of the German Jewish exile community, who expressed their dissatisfaction with Gert’s satirical performances and outspokenness in local newspapers. Especially after the U.S. entry into the war, Gert was harshly criticized for demonstrating a lack of courtesy to her host country and tactlessness in her general day-to-day behavior. Many of these exiles earnestly believed that Gert’s satire would negatively affect their own reputations and possibilities for success in the United States. Illustrative of the general close-mindedness toward her performative presence in New York is a threatening letter she received from the editorial board of Aufbau, the same publication in which Gert placed an ad for her cabaret. Written December 29, 1941, three weeks after U.S. entry into the Second World War, the letter warned Gert to stop performing works that could in any way be perceived as an attack on American ideals: Dear Frau Gert: As we hear from the most diverse American circles, you construct the content of your program in such a way that is as tactless as it is tasteless. You make a mockery of this country’s establishments, criticize its concept of freedom, and indulge in countless allusions that you as an immigrant may not do under any circumstances. Also, your parody of the “American Daughter of Revolution in Coney Island” is, to quote the opinion of a very reserved American, “to say the least in extremely bad taste.” Since all of the above qualify to harm the entire immigrant community, we find ourselves forced to communicate to you, that we regret our preparedness to offer you support, and that if you do not change your behavior, we will attack you most severely in our publication.

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Please finally begin to grasp that your person is too insignificant to endanger the entire émigré community during these times of war. Most respectfully, the Aufbau editorial staff. (Peter 85)20

Articulated disapproval by the editorial staff of Aufbau had severe consequences for artists, since the advisory board included high profile and powerful figures such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger. Being attacked by a publication that was widely read by the majority of the exile community minimized her chances of gaining artistic recognition and sponsorship, let alone governmental support for refugee services. Perhaps it was imprudent of Gert to assume that she could implement the same performative alienation strategies in the United States that had impressed European audiences of the 1920s, many of which actively sought alternative art forms. But to expect anything less from Gert than an aggressive, critical, and confrontational representation of modern society was to underestimate her often brutally uncompromising approach to both art and life. It was this unwillingness to dilute her works for the sake of popular consumption that in the 1920s earned her praise from politically motivated artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky,21 and Sergei Eisenstein. Yet, the hallmarks of Gert’s performance art—her mockery of the narrowness of the bourgeois mindset, and her exposure of contradictions in Western dominant ideology— disquieted most American spectators who, during wartime, required an upbeat form of entertainment that would help them perceive themselves as a unified group of likeminded citizens. Gert’s performative critiques were works that forced audiences to question their daily assumptions and actions, and for this reason ran counter to broadbased national efforts to bring together the American people.22 Gert’s confrontational art form prevented her from attaining significant successes beyond the walls of her cabaret. Nevertheless, Beggar Bar remained an exceedingly popular nightspot until 1945, when Gert was forced to close for serving cognac-infused “Beggar Sip,” without an alcohol license. In the summer of 1946 she moved to the small coastal town of Provincetown, MA, where she opened a cabaret called “Valeska’s: Different Food and Different Entertainment.” She kept this establishment open during the summer months, but returned to the city in September, and remained there unemployed until March 1947. Return to Europe (1947–1976) Gert was finally able to return to Europe via Paris in March of 1947 at the age of fifty-five. A year later she moved to Zurich, and while she waited for

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the necessary legal papers for reentry into Germany, she opened a relatively successful cabaret called Café Valeska und ihr Küchenpersonal (Café Valeska and her Kitchen Personnel). In December 1948, she left Zurich for Berlin and within ten months she was able to open a comparable establishment called Bei Valeska (At Valeska’s Place), located in the basement of an opera house on Kant Strasse.23 Here, she and other artists—mostly aspiring actors and students—performed satirical works for their audiences at no charge. But Gert’s social commentaries on the provincialism of postwar Germany, as well as her ingenious but deeply disturbing skits about specific aspects of Nazi Germany were far too blunt for German audiences to appreciate at a time when the majority was unable to come to terms with the atrocities that had taken place in their immediate past. During the 1950s, Gert wrote and performed political verses that confronted the German citizen by exploring problematic mental patterns of former Nazis who attempted to make a comfortable transition into postwar German society. One of her most disturbing skits was her portrait of Ilse Koch, the notoriously ruthless female commander of Buchenwald. Gert appeared on stage as an innocuous elderly lady sitting in a rocking chair doing embroidery, but audiences were soon chilled by the incongruity of the sympathetic image of the kindly grandmother and her horrendous verbal reenactment of her past: Work faster, eyes brighter. March, march, keep your butts moving. You’re in my power, So keep the fire burning. Burn the letters, burn the books, silk scarves over here, over here, they belong to me then I’ll leave you all in peace. Paint this lampshade for me was once the skin of a human being. Now, ten years later, none of it’s true. never hurt anyone was pure pragmatism and goodness, never harmed anyone, not in the least. I knit, crochet, and do embroidery. Why can’t anyone stand me?24

The uncompromising bluntness that sent Weimar audiences into a frenzy would serve as an obstacle to the furthering of Gert’s career in the 1950s

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and early 1960s in Germany, a time when the majority of the West German population was not yet prepared for the ruthless confrontation with self that Gert’s performances demanded. Instead, many West Germans directed their attentions to the Communist threat outside of their geographic borders, preferring to channel their energies against an outside enemy rather than reflect on internal crimes of previous years. Gert was, in many respects, just as much an alien in the conservative, provincial, and unexperimental milieu of postwar Berlin, as she was during her geographical exile in the United States. Some of her performance art of the 1950s and early 1960s dealt with subjects from the recent Nazi past; she also wrote songs and poems that were openly critical of the political inclinations of many postwar West Germans. Like many of the German writers of the late 1940s and 1950s such as Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lens, and other members of Gruppe 47,25 Gert was suspicious of the swiftness with which the average German citizen embraced any political leader who promised economic good fortune for Germany. One of these poems is “Jubil-Jubilar” (Jubilation-Jubilarian).26 Wilhelm, Ebert, Brüning, Hitler, whoever governs will be cheered. When Hitler came along, he was my man. How I loved the brown hurly-burly, and my jubilation came straight from the heart. and now we’re occupied by Russians, by Amis. Yes, it’s difficult, this is true, but I’m still the cheerer that I was. I’m all for justice in everything, Whoever’s bread I eat, his song I’ll sing. If I live in the East, then I’m really there, and you bet I’ll salute Stalin’s beard and chin. If I live in the West as a fine gentleman, then I’ll worship, idolize President Truman. Whether dollar or ruble, I’ll cheer, cheer, cheer!

A description of Gert’s performance of this verse does not exist in literature about the artist. Nevertheless, the verse is rooted in the political cabaret tradition that originated around 1903, in Max Reinhardt’s cabaret Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke). The brief, satirical rhyme became a favorite genre of politicized cabaret performers, who recognized that combining serious political or social concerns with the lightness of humorous verse made their critiques more powerful and far reaching.27 In “Jubil-Jubilar” the audience members are emotionally drawn into the celebratory, spirited

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rhythm of the verse, but suddenly find themselves intellectually confronted with lyrics that question the unreflective jubilation that accompanies political demonstrations, thus exposing the opportunism and hypocrisy that often lie hidden behind outbursts of mass euphoria. With the exception of a handful of Gert’s admirers who recalled Gert’s commanding presence during the Weimar years and of a couple of critics who promoted the entertainment at Bei Valeska (At Valeska’s) and her second Berlin cabaret Die Hexenküche (The Witch’s Kitchen) in local newspapers, Gert was doomed to virtual obscurity during the 1950s and early 1960s. She still performed her cabaret numbers and, as a rule, received positive reviews, but her following remained limited to a surprisingly small group of well-wishers. Nazi censorship and persecution had abruptly curtailed the rich and multifaceted cultural terrain of the Weimar period, turning Germany into little more than a cultural vacuum during the years immediately following the war. As a result, many young Germans tended to look to foreign artists who possessed no affiliation with German culture as models in art and entertainment. Under these circumstances, the majority was indifferent to the tribulations and opinions of returning exiles. Unlike other Jews who were forced to flee or who had lost families in the Holocaust, Gert never received reparations from the German government. The official argument was that Gert’s life had never been endangered by the Nazi regime, since she managed to acquire a British passport in 1936 and was free to leave Germany. Gert, however, assessed the situation differently. The following statement appears in a 1954 Berlin newspaper and reflects her nostalgia and estrangement from a country she had once called home: You ask me why I’ve returned from emigration. I was born in Berlin and I want to die in Berlin. . . . I was here until 1938 and experienced that only some of the German people were National Socialists. I perceived emigration as something temporary and wanted to return as soon as the specter was gone. I believed that the art world would be just as lively as it was after World War I, but I was mistaken. . . . It is . . . simply untrue when one writes the revival of contemporary pantomime originated in France. It comes from Germany. But, of course, the young people know nothing more of me, because I was silenced during the Hitler period. Only Wigman28 is honored as the pioneer of modern dance. This is only partially true. It is just that she was here the entire time. And the older people who watched me and loved me are dead, far away. Those who remain are tired, uninterested or cowardly. . . . There should also be spiritual reparations for exiles, not just financial ones.29

Her words reflect a general bitterness that affected numerous exiled artists and writers who were forced to abandon their artistic milieus at a time

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when they were achieving their greatest success. Gert’s art was an ephemeral one, one that could only be captured in full form at a live performance. Traces of Gert’s performance art exist in photos, short films, memoirs, and poetry, but the powerful intensity of her performative presence can no longer be fully grasped in its entirety. Yet, despite her difficulty in reestablishing herself in Germany after exile, Gert made a miraculous career comeback in 1965 at the age of seventy-three, when Frederico Fellini cast her in the role of the psychic medium called Bhishma in his film Julia and the Spirits. A year later French director Pierre Philippe Bonnard gave her a title role in his short film La Bonne dame, in which a seemingly good-hearted old lady who attends church, drinks coffee, and plays with the children develops the bad habit of murdering and burying her handsome male tenants. In 1968, the same year that La Bonne dame premiered, Gert published her memoirs Ich bin eine Hexe (I Am a Witch), and in 1970 Rainer Maria Fassbinder30 officially recognized her outstanding contributions to German film by presenting her with the German film prize. Two years later, she appeared in his television series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day). Not until the mid-1960s and early 1970s with the advent of the New German Cinema did a generation of young and gifted avant-garde filmmakers begin to critically explore Germany’s past, one that had remained virtually obscured during the 1950s, when both artists and spectators were primarily concerned with reconstructing and solidifying a workable national identity.31 Because the 1950s offered little in the way of tolerance for artistic digression from the above goals, controversial exiled artists like Gert disappeared into virtual oblivion. It is not surprising that a fascination with Gert’s persona would once again resurface during the early 1970s with the work of avant-garde filmmakers such as Rainer Maria Fassbinder and Ulrike Ottinger.32 Fassbinder, who trained and acted in experimental theater in Munich before becoming a filmmaker, was a master at exposing the intricate mechanisms of social and personal power inherent in intimate relationships via detailed and magnified exposure of personal interaction. Like Gert’s performance art, his films and theater are politically uncompromising in their irreverence of social institutions. The films of Ulrike Ottinger share particular commonalities with Gert’s grotesque dance, in their distorted parodies of socially constructed gendered identities and in their preference for bringing the margins of society—freaks, hermaphrodites, drunks, and prostitutes—into center view. It is perhaps due to their common representational approaches that in 1975 Ottinger cast Gert as “the old bird” in her experimental collage Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen (The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors).

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In 1976, at the age of eighty-four, Gert appeared as Aunt Preskovia in Volker Schlöndorff’s33 Der Fangschuss (Coup de Grace). Fascinated by Gert’s colorful narrations of her life experiences during the set breaks, Schlöndorff immediately undertook a new project with Gert, this time a documentary of her life called Nur zum Spass; Nur zum Spiel-Kaleidoskop Valeska Gert (Just for Fun, Just to Play: Kaleidoscope Valeska Gert). This documentary contains valuable footage of a few of her dances from the 1920s and captures the eighty-five-year-old performing Japanische Groteske (Japanese Grotesque), a work she first performed in 1917. Only through the inventiveness of these gifted German filmmakers from the 1970s, who, fifty years after Gert, were seeking theatrical and filmic strategies for exploring the moral paradoxes of the German citizen, were Gert’s extraordinary contributions to dance and film rediscovered. Not until this time did she receive the recognition she deserved. Notes 1. “Als ich auf die Bühne schoß, war ich so übermütig und so sehr erfüllt von dem Trieb, das Publikum aufzurütteln, daß ich wie eine Bombe in diese von den andern geschaffene Atmosphäre der Lieblichkeit hineinplatzte. [. . .] Und dieselben Bewegungen, die ich auf der Probe sanft und anmutig getanzt hatte, übertrieb ich jetzt wild. Mit Riesenschritten stürmte ich quer über das Podium, die Arme schlenkerten wie ein großer Pendel, die Hände spreizten sich, das Gesicht verzerrte sich zu frechen Grimassen. [. . .] Im Publikum war ein Aufruhr. Die einen trampelten vor Begeisterung, die anderen pfiffen vor Wut” (Mein Weg 30). All German to English translations are my own. 2. Max Reinhardt (b. Baden, Austria, 1873–1943) was Germany’s most important stage producer and director during the first third of the twentieth century. He exerted enormous influence on German and international cinema. 3. Pina Bausch (b. Solingen, Germany, 1940) danced at the Folkwang School in Essen under renowned expressionistic choreographer Kurt Jooss. In New York City (1960–1962) she studied classical ballet and modern dance at Julliard with Anthony Tudor, José Limon, Louis Horst, among others. 4. See Dowden (252–63). For further discussion of the incorporation of circus into literature and drama, see Jones. 5. “Den Tod machte ich so: Bewegungslos stehe ich in einem langen, schwarzen Hemd auf grell erleuchtetem Podium. Mein Körper spannt sich langsam,der Kampf beginnt, die Hände ballen sich zur Faust, immer fester, die Schultern krümmen sich, das Gesicht verzerrt sich vor Schmerz und Qual. Schmerz wird unerträglich, der Mund öffnet sich weit zu lautlosem Schrei. Ich biege den Kopf zurück, Schultern, Arme, Hände, der ganze Körper erstarrt. Ich versuche mich zu wehren. Sinnlos. Sekundenlang stehe ich bewegungslow da, eine Säule des Schmerzes. Dann weicht langsam das Leben aus meinem Körper, sehr langsam entspannt er sich. Der Schmerz läßt

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

nach, der Mund wird weicher, Schultern fallen, die Arme werden schlaff, die Hände. Ich fühle die Starre der Menschen im Zuschauerraum, will sie trösten, ein Abglanz vom Leben gleitet in mein Gesicht, schon von sehr weit her erscheint ein Lächeln. Dann versinkt es jäh, die Wangen lassen nach, der Kopf fällt schnell, der Kopf einer Puppe. Aus. Weg. Ich bin gestorben. Totenstille. Niemand im Zuschauerraum wagt zu atmen. Ich bin tot” (Hexe 49). See Bürger (22–26). Russian avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) became famous for his innovative revolutionary films Strike (1925) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925). His theory of montage influenced experimental filmmakers throughout the world. Montage, made possible through the cutting and reordering of raw footage, enabled the creation of a new kind of narrative independent of classical linearity and closure. Filmmaker Walter Ruttman (1887–1941) experimented with geometric forms in motion. His documentaries, particularly Berlin: Symphonie einer Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City) (1927), had a lasting influence on world cinema. “[Im Kino] machte ich durcheinander einen Dauerläufer aus der Wochenschau, einen Trickzeichner, einen kurbelnden Filmoperateur, die komische Alte, die Diva, einen albernen Hackfisch und sture Soldaten. Diese Bewegungen waren flackernd, so daß sie wie verwackelt aussahen” (Hexe 49). For further discussion on Gert’s montages, see Brandstetter. “ich sinke langsam in die Knie, öffne die Beine breit und versinke tief. In jähem Krampf, wie von der Tarantel gestochen, zucke ich in die Höhe. Ich schwinge auf und nieder. Dann entspannt sich der Körper, der Krampf löst sich, immer sanfter werden die Sprünge, immer weicher, die Abstände werden länger, die Erregung ebbt ab, noch eine letzte Zuckung, und ich bin wieder auf der Erde. Was hat man mit mir getan? Man hat meinen Körper ausgenutzt, weil ich Geld haben muß. Miserable Welt! Ich spucke einen verächtlichen Schritt nach rechts und einen nach links, dann latsche ich ab” (Hexe 48). Gert appeared in a total of eight films between 1924 and 1933. She was cast in seven films between 1934 and 1977, one during exile in England, and six in Germany ten years after her return from New York. Anderson published a biography on Gert, a single copy of which presently cannot be located. Helmuth von Krause (1893–1980), a medical student, was married to Gert from 1918 until 1934. Von Krause and Gert did not have a traditional, monogamous marriage, and they lived apart for many years. Nevertheless, von Krause provided financial and emotional support to Gert even after their separation and divorce, and upon her return from exile. Members of Gert’s Kolhkopp ensemble, particularly her collaborator and lover, Aribert Wäscher, often managed the practical aspects of Gert’s career. “Als ich aus Deutschland wegging, war ich allein auf mich gestellt, denn meine drei Männer blieben in Europa. Jeder hatte einen Grund. Weder

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18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

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wußte ich, wie man Geld verdient, noch wie man die richtigen Kontake schließt. Kontakt schließen gehört in Amerika zum Karrieremachen. Natürlich waren in den USA viele Menschen, die mich von der Bühne kannten, aber ich kannte sie nicht. Ich wußte auch nicht, daß es viele Organisationen gibt, von denen prominente Künstler Geld bekamen. Zum Brispiel die New School of Social Research . . . Auch hier verstand ich nicht, meine “Prominenz” ins Spiel zu bringen” (Hexe 97). Aufbau, a Jewish American weekly written in English and German, was established during the Second World War, in order to serve the interests of the immigrant community. The newspaper aimed to help Jewish immigrants successfully assimilate into American life as effortlessly and invisibly as possible. Reference is made in a letter to Valeska Gert from Aufbau regarding a dance called American Daughter of Revolution in Coney Island, in which Gert reveals the paradoxes inherent in the American notion of justice. Other performers or waiters, some recognized and others unknown, who at one time worked at the Beggar Bar included Kadidja Wedekind, Maria Collm, Sonja Wronkow, Dorothy Johnson, Elmo Barnay, Fred Witt, Heinz Watenberg, Erwin Strauss, Judith Malina, and Julian Beck (Hexe 121–50). The letter as seen in this essay is my translation. Author and journalist Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) wrote for the leftist journal Die Weltbühne (The World Stage). He wrote under various pseudonyms including Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, and Theobald Tiger. In 1929, he published a satirical book of illustrations and montages by John Heartfield called Deutschland, Deutschland über alles: Ein Bilderbuch von Kurt Tucholsky und vielen Fotografen. All of his books were burned in Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. American artists of the 1930s and 1940s such as the Andrew Sisters, Shirley Temple, and Judy Garland were tremendously popular entertainers whose songs and movies were both patriotic and pro-American. The entertainer closest to Gert in performative approach was Charlie Chaplin, an actor whom Gert greatly admired. Compared with Gert, however, Chaplin maintained a substantially greater amount of American slapstick, which alleviated the harshness of his social critique. Within a year, Gert was forced to vacate the opera house basement. In 1959 she opened her final Berlin establishment called Die Hexenküche (The Witch’s Kitchen), a cabaret that hosted a variety of young talents, most notably Klaus Kinski. In 1952 she had to vacate the premises again, this time because her taxes suddenly tripled. At this point she left Berlin to retire in Kampen on the island of Sylt. Here too, she opened a cabaret called the Ziegenstall (Goat Stable), which was exceptionally popular with the younger generation of artists and performers. Arbeitet schneller, die Augen heller. Marsch, marsch, schlagt euch auf den Arsch. Ihr seid in meiner Macht,

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Schnell das Feuer angefacht. Verbrennt die Briefe, verbrennt die Bücher, Her damit die seidnen Tücher, Gebt sie mir, mir gehörn sie zu, Dann lass ich euch in Ruh. Bemalt mir diesen Lampenschirm War einst Haut auf Menschenhirn. Jetzt, zehn Jahre später, ist Nichts mehr wahr. Keinem krümmte ich ein Haar. War reinste Sachlichkeit und Güte. Keinem tat ich was, keinem, Nicht die Tüte. Häkle, striche, mach’ Handarbeiten. Warum kann mich niemend leiden? All lyrics taken from the Valeska Gert archive at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. They are also published in the closing pages of Hexe. 25. Gruppe 47 (1947–1967) was a group of German writers who took a stand against the pompous and meaningless rhetoric of the Nazi period by writing as simply, clearly, and honestly as possible. Its goal was to help enlighten and educate the German population in the years immediately following the war, in order to help them make the desired transition to a democratic way of life. Of the forty-five authors who were at one time members of the group were Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki. 26. Jubil-Jubilar Wilhelm, Ebert, Brüning, Hitler, wer regiert wird bejubeliert. Nun kam der Hitler dran, das war mein Mann. Wie liebte ich den braunen Trubel, So recht von Herzen kam mein Jubel. Und jetzt zuletzt sind von Russen, von Amis wir besetzt. Schwer ist’s, das ist wahr, Doch ich bleib’ der Jubler, der ich war. Ich bin für Gerechtigkeit der Dinge, Wem sein Brot ich esse, dem sein Lied ich singe. Wohn ich im Osten, bin ich hin, Seh’ ich Stalins Bart und Kinn. Leb ich im Westen als ein feiner Mann Da bet’ ich eben Truman an. Ob Dollar oder Rubel, Ich jubel’, jubel’, jubel. 27. Theatrical presentations of satirical poems are rooted in developments that occurred in conventional theater as early as the 1890s, when variety show and vaudeville elements were inserted into traditional dramas to appeal to a

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wider audience. The revue-like sequencing of short numbers that included songs, comic monologues, dialogues and skits, dances, pantomimes, puppet shows, and even short films became the ideal cabaret format. According to the social theorist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the contemporary city dwellers craved diversity and variety, phenomena to which they had grown accustomed with the fast pace and fragmentation of everyday urban life. See Jelavich (Berlin Cabaret 2–3, 24–25). See note 6. Article dated 1954 in the Valeska Gert archive at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Issue and page number unknown. Rainer Maria Fassbinder (1946–1982), born in the Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen, was a tremendously gifted and prolific film director and prominent voice for the New German Cinema. His first international success was Ali-Angst essen Seele auf (Ali-Fear Eats the Soul) in 1974. His greatest commercial successes came with his 1978 film Die Ehe von Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), the television series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), and his film adaptation of Effie Briest (1974). Fassbinder made a total of forty-one movies in fourteen years, and also worked as an actor, producer, and cameraman. His death is considered by many to be the end of New German Cinema. The first chapter of Timothy Corrigan’s book on New German Cinema discusses some of the reasons that high quality German films, in particular, failed to flourish between 1945 and 1962 (see especially 1–17). Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942 in Konstanz) began her career as a painter in Paris, but returned to Germany where she directed her first film in 1971. A lesbian, feminist filmmaker, she considers herself an outsider even within avant-garde film circles in Germany. Among her experimental films that explore gender behavior as masquerade are her 1979 film Bildnis einer Trinkerin-Aller Jamais Retour (Portrait of a Woman Drinker—Ticket of No Return) and Freak Orlando (1981). Fillmaker Volker Schlöndorff (b.1939 in Wiesbaden, Germany) established himself as one of the foremost talents of the New German Cinema with his film Der junge Törless (Young Törless; 1966). Since that time he has directed a total of twenty-one films, including the highly acclaimed Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum; 1975) and Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum; 1979).

Works Cited Anderson, Robin. “Valeska Gert.” New Britain 18.4 (1934): 682. Brandstetter, Gabriele. Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Corrigan, Timothy. New German Film: The Displaced Image. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

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Dowden, Steve. “Frank Wedekind.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Wolfgabg D. Elfe and James Hardin. Vol. 118. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. 252–63. Forbes, Virginia. “Café Life in New York: Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar in the Village Is a Unique Night Spot.” The New York Sun. October 26, 1943. Gert, Valeska. Mein Weg. Leipzig: A.F. Devrient 1931. ———. Die Bettlerbar von New York. Berlin: Selbstverlag, 1950. ———. Ich bin eine Hexe. Kaleidoskop meines Lebens. München: Franz Schneekluth Verlag, 1968. ———. “Ich will Menschengestalten tanzen.” Die Zehnte Muse. Ed. Frauke Deißner-Jenssen. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1986. 300–28. Hildebrandt, Fred. Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert. Stuttgart: Walter Hädeke Verlag, 1928. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Jones, Robert A. Art and Entertainment: German Literature and the Circus 1890–1933. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985. Krey, Uwe. Valeska Gert als Vertreterin der neuen Tanzkultur in den zwanziger Jahren. M.A. thesis. Freie Universität, Berlin, 1985. Norton, Sydney J. “Modernity in Motion: The Performance Art of Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert in the Weimar Republic.” Ph.D diss. U of Minnesota, 1998. Peter, Frank-Manuel. Valeska Gert: Tänzerin, Schauspielerin, Kabarettistin. Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1985.

A GYPSY IN EXILE: “HOME” AND “NOSTALGIA” IN CREATIVE WORKS BY THE AUSTRIAN ROMNI CEIJA STOJKA Gesa Zinn

ome” and “nostalgia” in Ceija Stojka’s work belong to her desire to recuperate, repair, and return. As such, her poetry is part of a genre that some have called “exile writing.”1 Although painted rather than written, her art should be considered exilic as well. Both her plastic and poetic works reflect a hybrid present of an individual caught between disparate times and two separate spaces; Stojka is a woman living within a borderland, in a “place that is not a place, and a time that is not a time” (Turner 239), defined by two currents: the dark and the light. And although this binarism appears in her exile painting and poetry as shadow and sunlight, these oppositions should not be viewed as a dichotomy but rather as a paradox. Because of the suffering represented by the darkness, Stojka celebrates the joy of life and vitality of the Roma people as indicated by the sunlight. In the literary field, exile writing defines a genre that encompasses discourses of a desire to recuperate, repair, and return. It is a writing that focuses on moments from another place in another time to which the exile writer continually returns. As a traveler, the exile is no longer in the place departed nor is s/he of a new place (Kaminsky 30), rather she inhabits a place that is “in between.” In the literary imagination, this liminal site can function as home, and it is as such that we encounter it in Ceija Stojka’s recent work: a place where family and friends gather, where music and nature’s gifts (flowers, plants, food) are omnipresent. Stojka, a Holocaust survivor, is the first female Roma in the Germanspeaking world to openly describe Roma life in the concentration camps,

“H

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to write about the Diaspora of her people, and to discuss life as a Romni (a female Roma) during and after the Second World War.2 The Austrian gypsy writer, singer, painter, and poet’s autobiographical texts Wir Leben im Verborgenen (1995) and Reisende auf dieser Welt (1992) describe Stojka’s family life and the life of other Roma prior to, during, and shortly after the Holocaust. Yet, since these memoirs lack the emotional language reserved for discourses of a desire to recuperate, repair, and return, they do not qualify as “exile writing” as would most of her work since the mid-1990s.3 In her “exile painting and poetry,” for example, Stojka casts nostalgic glances at her life prior to the Second World War, hoping to return to the “paradise” she experienced before the “inferno,” the Holocaust. Stojka expresses grief and outrage about the senselessness of this incomprehensible “event,” allowing for two currents within the two genres of her “exile work”: shadow and sunlight. The former is characterized by the use of drab colors, rigid lines, violent and cold public spheres. This current casts a shadow over the sunlight displayed in her second tendency, which contains vibrant colors, soft lines, peaceful and warm private spaces. In highlighting her created/creative “home,” I will show that her nostalgia for an idyllic past and her anger about the senselessness of totalitarian violence form an inseparable duality, a yin and yang. The following poem articulately expresses such duality: Mein erster Atem der erste Sonnenstrahl der erste Tag die erste Nacht der erste Klee der erste Schnee das erste Lächeln mein erster Schrei.4

[My first breath the first sun ray the first day the first night the first clover the first snow the first smile my first cry.]

One can read this poem as a description of the “paradise” she is born into and in which she experiences a sudden pain, the “inferno” or “fall of humanity,” resulting in her scream. One can also see that she counts her life in natural time and natural cycles, which grow larger just as she grows bigger: a ray, a day, a night, a spring, a winter, for earth’s natural settings were “home” to her as a gypsy growing up before the Holocaust. Within nature’s sphere she (re)acts happily (see “the first smile” as the last of the six anaphors). Outside of nature’s nurturing “womb” (as indicated by the break from “the” to “my”), however, she is vulnerable, and expresses anguish. As indicated in this poem, which I use here as an introduction to her work, the world depicted by the poetic voice is feminine: private, peaceful, and full of (sun)light, the yang; the other, outer world, not as

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visible in this poem as in some of her other works which I will discuss below, is rather distant as indicated by metaphors that refer to negatives such as “night,” “snow” and “cry.” This outer world is dark, public, and male, a domain in which war and aggression reign: the yin. Defined in opposition to each other, the yang and the yin are inextricably linked and juxtaposed. In Stojka’s paintings, her subject choices “speak” vividly, especially combined with her choice of vibrant colors. Her preferred hues are yellow, red, green, blue, white, brown, and black. The latter three colors predominate, particularly in her Nazi Camp Series.5 Images of the camps can be seen as the masses of inmates lined up in the Appelplatz or “center court,” as in an untitled painting from 1991, in Ravensbrück from 1993, or as the camp’s inmates perform menial labor under the watch of grim armed guards (Latrine 1993). Furthermore, camp inmates shuffle to the gas chambers in Mächtige Stiefel (1993). In these paintings, the viewer notices not only the endless barbed wire fences, now a symbol for the revocation of the right to freedom, but also the efficiency and machinery of Fascism. The rigidity of this “law and order” is portrayed by Stojka’s straight lines demarcating barracks and fences, separating prisoners from armed SS guards with guns and/or watch dogs. Rigid linear strokes, characteristic of Stojka’s representation of the male public sphere, are also present in her portraits of Nazis, especially in two untitled close-up portraits from 1993, which are part of her Nazi Camp Series (Meier-Rogan 22–23). In one of these portraits, two red and white clad Nazis stand beside each other against a black background. The one on the left raises his left arm for a Nazi salute while the one on the right holds his right arm down. Their legs and feet are pointed in the opposite direction of the arm that points to the ground. Their other arms join hands in unity, pointing down in straight lines. The image of Fascist power, conveyed in the symmetry of soldiers’ bodies moving in formations during actual Nazi party meetings and in the body of individual Nazis in this painting, cannot be overlooked. Some principles of Gestalt theory are visible in Stojka’s vertical lines and the rigid symmetry with which she portrays the Nazis. The Law of Pragnanz, for example; the basic law of this theory “implies that if a perceptual field is disorganized when an organism first experiences it, the organism imposes order on the field in a predictable way. This ‘predictable way’ is in the direction of a ‘good’ Gestalt” (Clark), which means it is regular, simple, and stable (Blosser 43–53). A regular (i.e., rigid and symmetric), simple, and stable order is impressive and powerful, since it signals “control.” Stojka reproduces this “law and order” control in her Nazi Camp Series and thereby mimics the Nazis’ phallic power structure by writing it into the bodies of individual Nazis representative for all. She also

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uses swastikas, which consist of two symmetrical Zs, to replace limbs. In the second portrait of this series, for instance, a swastika even constitutes the whole body of a Nazi German. Needless to say, the Nazis’ pervasive Fascism stands out as does their barbaric nature, embodied in their oversized garish teeth and open mouths. Like their bodies and faces, the Nazis’ mouths and teeth are bloodstained as well. Through the plastic, representational form, Stojka comments on totalitarian ideology. Those responsible for so much spilled blood are themselves bloodstained in Stojka’s visual texts. Similar to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, whose obsessive guilt is evident in the often quoted line “Out, out, damn spot,” Stojka paints blood as an emblem for collective Nazi blame, guilt, and responsibility.6 Thus Stojka’s paintings in this Shadow Collection (re)present the dark side of humanity. As such they point fingers at the culprits, castigating the Nazis’ actions. Her straight lines, which are reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings, are a perfect tool for a social critique of the accumulation of Fascist power displayed in bodily structures and public spheres, because cubism, as indicated by Edith Egger in Kubismus, does not reflect what the eye sees, but rather that which the spirit (Geist) perceives. As Stojka is preoccupied with revealing to the rest of the world the shades of Nazism and the “inferno,” her cubist elements are thus well chosen to express her outrage and anger about the Holocaust in which, among many others, 1.5 million Roma and Sinti perished. Her emotional involvement in putting together the grouping I have termed Nazi Camp Series forces her to revisit the “unconfrontable” in order to ease her pain and to repair. Yet has she become silent in light of such horror, brutality, and inhumanity? It is striking to note that her concentration camp paintings lack titles. This verbal void points to an impossibility of expressing the unspeakable and unthinkable. Thus her ugly past, painted in bleak colors and straight lines, exists directly beside her beautiful and peaceful one, portrayed in her Sunlight Collection with vibrant colors and with slightly curved lines. This collection (re)presents her former, “free,” romantic, and undisturbed nomadic life before the camps. Exile Paintings: Sunlight and Space More than in any other art form, including her autobiographical writings Wir Leben im Verborgenen and Reisende auf dieser Welt, Stojka’s paintings and poetry are an outlet for her thoughts regarding a variety of subjects.7 They range from “freedom,” embodied in the Romni’s life style, to “love” and the loss thereof,8 to the idea that only in numbers can one be strong. Franzi Helmreich writes: “[m]emories and love for life emanate from Ceija Stojka’s pictures and texts” (Meier-Rogan 44). Truly, her pleasant memories are

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about happy places and peaceful times, focusing on the joys of daily existence. Stojka’s art should be viewed as a nostalgic glance into her past, the expression of her longing for a place called “home.” As Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson observe in Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of “Home” in a World of Movement, “[b]eing ‘at home’ and being ‘homeless’ are not matters of movement, of physical space, or of the fluidity of socio-cultural times and places, as such. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment in which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which one finds one’s identity best mediated” (Rapport and Dawson 10). They further elaborate: “‘[h]ome’ [. . .] is ‘where one best knows oneself’—where ‘best’ means ‘most’ even though not always ‘happiest’” (9). Their definition of “home” deconstructs the semantic unit “identity-place,” a notion that assumes that identities are inescapable destinies predetermined by kinship relations, locality, shared culture, and ethnicity; instead, they believe that multiple identification processes are the reason why people can also be “at home” when living in different, changing physical surroundings.9 Although Stojka has been living within the borders of Austria all her life (with the exception of her camp experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen) and identifies closely with her Rom culture and ethnicity, she nevertheless has moved from Austria’s countryside to the city of Vienna, leaving her life on the road for an apartment in Vienna. And she has also exchanged the lifestyle of an itinerant gypsy for that of a settled, middle-class mother, housewife, and artist. In some regards it should not come as a surprise that her present home is very similar to her former one, described in the poem I discussed earlier. Not only is she surrounded by flowers and plants and memorabilia from earlier times, she also creates spaces in which she revisits her beloved countryside with the stroke of a brush. She thus (re)creates the “natural world,” her yin, in which she feels at home. For instance, in her painting entitled “Sommerwiese” (Summer Pasture), she favors the colors black and green; and in her painting “Sommer” (Summer), the color yellow. In “Sommer,” black soil with poppies and the white and yellow flowers as well as the exuberant green trees in the background stand for lushness and fertility. The numerous yellow sunflowers that lift their faces toward the evening sun, while they stand proudly behind the golden pumpkins and behind the swaying branches of a tree, show vitality and warmth. The luscious and rich earth appears as a Garden of Eden, as does the field of sunflowers in the center of the painting. This is paradise before the “inferno,” light before darkness: the “romantic” gypsy life she led as girl, teenager, and young woman. Dirt roads on which her people’s wagons travel are surrounded by sunflower fields, which are also present in the pastures on which her people camp.

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The sunflower is special for Stojka both in her paintings and daily life. In Karin Berger’s film Ceija Stojka, Stojka proudly points out an artificial sunflower and comments: This is my flower, the sunflower. Of course, it has to be here. When I was young, . . . My father gave it to me. Yes, [the flower] is always with me. And its color, right? A piece of nature. One needs that. Nature is important. But this one is not real [she points to a large plastic sunflower]. A beautiful woman gave it to me. Three years ago. And during the winter, this one is [covered] with snow.

The sunflower is the Roma’s flower. As Meier-Rogan points out, it contributes to and represents the laughter and joy of the Roma (44).10

Sommer (1992) by Ceija Stojka. Courtesy of Patricia Meier-Rogan.

I would be exaggerating if I claimed the sunflower to be a symbol of the Roma or for the Roma, yet it is without a doubt a leit motif in the Romni culture and for Stojka a metaphor for the idyllic Romni life before the Holocaust. Franzi Helmreich remarks on the flower’s link to remembrance: Memories/the act of remembering and love for life emanate from Ceija Stojka’s paintings and written texts. The sunflower, for example, is the flower of the Roma. She makes the flower laugh—no roses, they are the symbol of mourning. The sky as symbol of freedom has a lot of energy and conveys moods, which the nomads were allowed to experience, outside in nature, their beloved nature. . . . Ceija has experienced a lot, in her real past, the good and the bad. . . . frequently, she portrays her dreams, that won’t disappear. (Qtd. in Meier-Rogan 44)

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In Stojka’s paintings, the Roma are as much part of her pastoral settings with lush pastures, trees, the sun, and the wind as her sunflowers. In her compositions, her people wash, cook, dance, talk, play music, and pet their horses in key positions, precisely where her flowers are situated. Thus, in summer and winter, as nature’s (flower) children, Stojka’s Roma roam the land with their horses and wagons as evident in the Nomad Living Series: Rastplatz, Landleben, Winterquartier, Unser Wagen (Meier-Rogan 9–10). Not unlike her trees, swaying in the wind with their intertwined branches that appear to embrace all (Meier-Rogan 44), her sunflowers, billowing in motion, dance in the field like the Roma at their campsites. Nostalgia and Home Stojka’s memories of her past, it seems, are not unlike stereotypical depictions of gypsy life, in which horses, wagons, colorful gypsy women and gypsy men in darker colors, as well as gypsy music portray the romanticized life of the Roma. It is the fictionalized existence of the carefree gypsies from nineteenth-century German literature, where Zigeunerromantik (the romanticization of gypsy life) was not uncommon.11 One might wonder if Stojka’s retrospective might not be blinded by stereotypical romantic notions about the bohemian life of the nomads (Landfahrer). Without a doubt, Stojka’s memories are tainted by popular notions about the life of the Zigeuner (gypsies). Her look back at her “home,” for instance, is a nostalgic glance at Roma life that focuses on the positive elements of her people as nomads. In her painting entitled “Vor dem Schlafengehen” (Before Bedtime), for example, we see three women sitting inside a caravan wagon (Meier-Rogan 14). It is evening, and the sun sets behind the trees from which a woman holding a bucket appears. In the distance we see Roma men tending their horses. The focus is truly on the three women in this painting. Not only are they situated in the center, but the inside of their wagon is also brightly lit. Peace and female companionship emanate from “Vor dem Schlafengehen,” painting an idealized picture of life in the country. Another painting of the Nomad Living Series within the Sunlight Collection is “Innen” (Inside). This artwork depicts the interior of a wagon, again with the focus on a Romni in the center of the painting. Behind her is a large window, in which a cloudy sky and a colorful pasture can be seen (Meier-Rogan 17). An older Romni and a child with her doll are engaged in conversation on a large bed in front of the window. Although the Romni stand out, they are not the centerpiece of her painting. Many other objects are of importance as well: the portrait of the Virgin Mary in the left hand corner, the mirror and armoire in the right hand corner, the table

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with coffee and milk cans, a pot and tomatoes, surrounded by chairs in the foreground on the left, the colorful rug in the middle, and the wood burning stove with the red teapot, the Dutch oven and the polka-dotted pot in the front on the right. Each is bright and painted with emphasis on detail. As in a van Gogh painting, the perspectives are varied: from up above, straight ahead, and from the front on the right hand side, giving one the impression that a child painted her former home, lovingly remembering many objects, and particularly the kitchen with its many utensils. Stojka’s impressionistic style brings this kitchen to life. Was this, perhaps, the place where she played with other children under the auspices of (grand)mothers, aunts, and sisters? And is her subjective look at the private sphere in “Innen” a gaze at a female space just as her nature paintings with swaying sunflowers and tree branches are visions of a nurturing mother earth? Should the nature she depicts be viewed as a specifically feminine archetype? What becomes even more apparent after the study of the Sunlight Collection is the stark contrast between her portrayal of light, warm, private spaces and dark, cold, public places inhabited by male subjects. Her Nazi Camp Series in particular, with its dark colors and straight, masculine lines, is in opposition to the light colors and curved, feminine lines of her Nomad Living Series. Another painting of the latter category depicts, again, the inside of a wagon. In this untitled painting,12 Stojka remembers the view from the window into the world outside, where chickens roam, and where a path leads to a fenced in yard with a house and trees in the background. Again, from various perspectives, the “child” sees a kitchen table, food, and a stove with polka-dotted pots (Meier-Rogan 12). As in van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arle, lines run toward one point in the painting, denying a “real,” objective view. Instead, we find a subjective look, in Stojka’s case not of a bedroom but of a kitchen. The atmosphere in her very personal domestic portrait is peaceful and comforting, conveying warmth and security, just as in the previous painting. The kitchen as the heart of the “home,” as a child’s and woman’s private, intimate place. This is her “center,” separated, though not closed off, from the world outside. Exile Poetry: Sunlight, Romanticization, and Shadow Although a different genre, the majority of the poems in Stojka’s Sunlight Collection mirror the thematics of her paintings in the same category. In particular, it is the joie de vivre emanating from her light paintings that is also present in these poems, particularly those depicting uninhabited nature. This poetry is, for example, about nature’s life-giving elements (rain, sun); about flowers: the sunflower as well as the chrysanthemum, representing

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life and love; and about nature as a source for strength (Nomad Living Series: “Du redest vom Wind” [You Speak of the Wind] and “Vereint zusammen” [Joined in Unity]). Her native country, Austria, is portrayed as extremely rich in “natural resources,” a nurturing place for Stojka that provides for her, for she “grows and prospers” and becomes “strong and healthy,” as the poetic voice of “I am a root” indicates: Ich bin eine Wurzel aus Österreich eine Wurzel die sich auch nicht umsetzen läßt ich würde woanders ja gar nicht gedeihen ............................... ............................... meine Wurzeln liegen tief ja tief in der Erde und mein Stamm ist kräftig und gesund.

[I am a root from Austria a root that cannot be transplanted no where else would I grow and prosper

my roots are deep yes deep in the ground and my stem is strong and healthy.] (Cited in Meier-Rogan 24)13

Metaphorically, Ceija Stojka is an extension of Austria, a product of its fertile soil, inextricably linked to it by the roots that anchor her. Nowhere else would she be able to thrive, other than in this poeticized homeland. Like mother and child, joined by nature’s pulsating nourishing lifeline—the umbilical cord—Austria imparts to her the sustenance with which to gain strength and vitality. As is evident, Stojka’s poetic voice is undeniably feminine, depicting nature as a feminine archetype, as a warm place and a private sphere: home. Home and Nostalgia What I referred to earlier as Zigeunerromantik (i.e., romanticization of gypsy life) is evident in Stojka’s construction of “home,” which, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, is an imagined construct (7). Although spaces such as the wagon and moments in times such as a season or the period before the war express for Stojka the feeling of home, in her works it is evident that home in not a tangible place. As “home,” Stojka’s “home” is an imaginary place at an imaginary time within a fixed time frame, the period before the Second World War. Stojka’s “home” is her imagined space in which her childhood and life on the road are relived, and where her nostalgia shows a longing for a life lost. This “place that is not a place, and a time that is not

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a time” (Turner 239) is filled with a desire to recuperate loss through art. The void left by Stojka’s displacement is filled with her poetic and artistic reconstruction of home. The result is a liminal site in which the felt absence of her place and her people occupies her imagination, and, thus, becomes a presence. This presence is marked by a longing for a harmonious past that complements, for the most part, painful images of the Holocaust. Roberta Rubenstein writes that nostalgia “fuels a desire not only to retrieve emotionally resonant memories but to ‘fix’ them: to make of the moment something permanent and also to transmute losses it represents into something more consoling.” (33). In Berger’s documentary we witness Stojka’s desire to “fix” these memories. This artist-poet provides a framework for retrieving them during family gatherings at which her children and in-laws talk and sing in Romanes, mixed with German. They congregate around the main dish prepared in a “Reindl” (Dutch oven) similar to the subject of her poem by the same name. As the gathered family in the film professes, the meal is indeed a “Schmauserei” (feast) for the “ganze Hotwollee” (whole gang) prepared by the women in a “geplagtes” (overworked) and “spukendes Reindl” (sputtering Dutch oven). It is obvious that the harmonious past, fixed as memory during these gatherings, becomes part of the present, literally. Stojka, I argue, clings to the Romni custom in which family members gather at the heart(h) of the family for food, drink, music, and talk, since it allows her to bring back some of the moments she cherished as a child. The kitchen becomes an intimate private space in which a sense of home is again created and recreated.

The Poetry of Exile: The True Home Yet as if to blur the boundary so neatly drawn between the cold, dark, public realm and the warm, light, private realm, Stojka’s nostalgic look at the kitchen as home loses its sentimental touch and becomes more sober in this poem in that the perspective—i.e. the poetic voice—is not of a child or of an adult, but that of a “Reindl,” a Dutch oven, as indicated in the second half of the poem beginning with the line “Mitzl never cleans me as nicely/ as Franzl [cleans] his Porsche.” The mentioning of the car (a Porsche) and the idea of a pot spitting at Stojka’s sister Mitzi (Mitzl) undermine the romanticization we have seen in previous texts by Stojka, as does the word blöd (stupid), describing Mitzi’s hair, as well as the fact that Stojka writes in an Austrian dialect. For instance, in first complimenting and then insulting her sister’s hair: “in ihrem schönen, blöden, . . . Haar” (in her beautiful, stupid long hair), Stojka breaks the rhythm of the poem. She also distances

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herself from her previous life as a Romni by deliberately choosing to speak in a mainstream Austrian dialect: A Dutch oven from the mid-twenties was very much badgered and always on the stove. Once a goulash, then a crab and then again tschewabschidschi that was the most beautiful mish mash the poor Dutch oven was always on the stove because the whole gang is coming again. Out of anger the dutch oven spits already onto Mitzl’s apron so that it spatters. Mitzl never cleans me as nicely as Franzl [cleans] his Porsche. I also don’t get put away in a box as I should be. But today we have goulash again and I can spit onto Mitzl’s apron again and onto the frilled hair-band in her beautiful, stupid, long hair. (Meier-Rogan 18)14

It is noteworthy that in this poem we do not have a glorification of the “free” and romantic gypsy life. Instead, the ever-important reindl, uniting Romni family members, is recognized for its hard work, playfully. Unlike much of her other poems, this one stands out for its realistic rather than romanticized description of memorabilia and for the deliberate union of past and present as Stojka, the “Austrian,” comments on part of her former “Romni” life. Rapport and Dawson do not assume that identities are inescapable destinies. Instead, they believe that multiple identification processes are the reason why people can also be “at home” when living in different, changing physical surroundings. “A Reindl” underlines Stojka’s multilayered identity, which is not only at “home” in the past but also in the present, for the language she uses to speak about her past is an Austrian dialect, spoken only by Austrians. Thus, her bilingualism and her biculturalism enable her to be at “home” despite being a “displaced person.” Notably, Stojka’s bilingualism and interculturalism provide a home for her in a setting created by oral poetry or songs in Romanes that she spontaneously improvises. It is for those who know Romanes to analyze the striking examples of nostalgic moments as evident in Karin Berger’s film in which Stojka, on impulse, sings about love, longing, suffering, and mourning. Ignorant of Romanes as well as of Lovara15 culture, all I can ascertain is that with this oral poetry, emotions are relived and painful experiences confronted to help cure emotional suffering. Though Stojka’s lyrics and

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melody thus express her feelings during her performance, they are nevertheless tied to past events and customs when her voice trembles and quivers Romani words across a field, or into a living room, where family members listen attentively to life’s “truths” experienced and relived in Romni fashion. This assuaging of painful memories, as we see in Berger’s film and in Stojka’s creative texts, is routinely built into Stojka’s daily living, providing for imaginative spaces. Because these spaces are filled with life, beauty, and peace in her paintings and poetry that depict lost yet reconstructed Romni life, their contents, as I already stated, are not historically reliable. For this reason, Rubenstein refers to romanticized memories as “lying nostalgia” and argues that nostalgia must be resisted, because it distorts and falsifies memory (16). For Rubenstein, “‘lying nostalgia’ becomes a judgment about the difficulty, in fact the impossibility, of recovering, through either memory or fiction, the ‘authentic’ version of past experiences” (17). I fully agree with Rubenstein’s assessment that romanticized memories distort and falsify, although I do not share her wish to resist them. Remembered/imagined visions of one’s past are always constructed and thus are quite dissimilar to historical documents. Whereas previously scientific research upheld that the brain stored memories, recent developments in neurology have confirmed the extent to which memory constructs materials from the past. The neurological researcher Israel Rosenfield affirms that memories share the constructed nature of all brain events. He writes: “recollection is a kind of perception, . . . and every context will alter the nature of what is revealed” (89). We select the content of memory. Furthermore, we also choose how and when to retrieve it, depending, of course, on our body’s physiological, neurological, and psychological developments. Thus, our representations of reality—be they psychological, neurological, poetic, or artistic—are dynamic and constructed rather than static and mimetic in nature (Schacter 12–13). Nostalgia, by nature, is lying, since the act of remembering distorts and falsifies. Memory cannot be trusted as a factual document, but it is most reliable as an individual’s perception, her (present) recollection of the past. That is to say that memory constitutes one’s reality. The Act of Remembering Stojka chooses to remember inasmuch as she can navigate her retrieval tied to bodily developments described above and to stimuli from one’s environment: outside sources such as a setting, the people surrounding us, topics of conversation, smells, or sounds. Her memory and her history are, like all memory and all history, relational. Her first glances back into her

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past are furtively cast in between mundane activities in the house. Her later glimpses are no longer secret. They are visible looks from the desk of someone who is prepared to delve into her past, someone who makes a conscious and conscientious effort to return to what once was, and especially to what once was peaceful and beautiful. In her apartment, which is filled with memorabilia, including the already mentioned plastic sunflower given to her to remember the everlasting sunshine, an atmosphere is created, conducive to visiting her past and bringing it back to her present. At her desk in the living room, among her many flowers and her precious collection of wall hangings and porcelain figurines, she re/creates a space as close as possible to the “home.” Berger’s documentary shows this space with the Romni artist and poet at work; Stojka paints and writes. In this segment of the film, Stojka recollects and revisits family members who have passed away due to natural causes or were exterminated in the camps. She tells the story of each of them while regarding their photos. The physical stimuli activate and revive Stojka’s memory. And she cherishes each and every photo as it is a story of the Roma, her people. Undeniably, her roots as a Roma are tied to her people’s experience in the camps. That experience is ever-present in her poetry and paintings. As already stated, she prefers painting trees, especially those with branches that sway in the wind. Stojka favors the plant, and especially the metaphorical use of roots in written poetry, as is evident in her poem “I Am a Root from Austria.” Yet while she recalls nature’s loving connections in her creative works, she also recalls humanity’s brutal killings, as signified by a particular branch from Bergen-Belsen in the corners of each of her paintings and drawings, tied to her signature. The Holocaust thus defines her as it defines all its victims. Hidden, yet omnipresent, it casts a shadow over Stojka’s memories about her former happy life in the countryside. Rubenstein describes the dual nature of remembering, a process that revives both fondness and suffering. Most individuals experience [. . .] loss not merely as a separation from someone or something but as an absence that continues to occupy a palpable emotional space—what I term the “presence of absence.” The felt absence of a person or a place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a presence that may come to possess an individual. Nostalgia in this sense is a kind of haunted longing: figures of earlier relationships and the places with which they are associated both remembered and imagined, impinge on a person’s emotional life. . . . The yearning of painful nostalgia is thus closely related to, indeed, a form of mourning, the process whereby an individual gradually works through the intense grief experience when a loved one dies. (5)

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Now sixty years after the Holocaust, Stojka can still recreate the darkness of the Nazi camps; but she also reconstructs the joy of life. Thus Stojka creates a “home” in relation to two primarily positive sites in time: space and memory. She thus lives in a borderland, in which the felt absence of her place and her people occupies her imaginative space as “presence.” Stojka is “here” and “there,” living with her dark and bright memories from another place and another time. From the darkness of Ravensbrück in the Nazi Camp Series and the eternal sunshine of the Nomad Living Series, Austrian poet and painter Ceija Stojka communicates the essence of being a gypsy in exile.

Notes I wish to extend my gratitude to Patricia Meier-Rogan who was instrumental in procuring Ceija Stoika’s “Sommer.” 1. Portions of the material in this essay appeared in a considerably different form in the International Journal of the Humanities 2.2 (2004). 2. See her two texts Wir Leben im Verborgenen and Reisende auf dieser Welt. 3. Besides the texts mentioned in note 2, which were published in 1988 and 1992, Stojka has published the following books: Nachisu kyosei shuyojo to roma: seikansha no taikenki to shogen (1991); Ceija Stojka: Bilder und Texte 1989–1995 (1995); Meine Wahl zu schreiben—ich kann es nicht: Gedichte (Romanes, Deutsch) und Bilder⫽O fallo de sisgiri-me tschischanaf les (2003); Träume ich, dass ich lebe?: Befreit aus Bergen-Belsen (2005). 4. Ceija Stojka. Bilder und Texte: 1989–1995 (27). All translations in this essay are mine. 5. Many of her paintings can be found in Meier-Rogan. 6. I thank my colleague Maureen Tobin Stanley for her comments and insights about this part of my essay. 7. The one exception is her music, which is not part of my discussion in this essay. 8. “Ein Hauch der Liebe hat mich gestreift” (29). 9. There seems to be widespread consensus that people are engaged in multiple identification processes (see also Basch et al.; Bauman and Sunier; Kearny; and Malkki). 10. “Die Sonnenblume, zum Beispiel, ist die Blume der Rom, sie bringt sie zum Lachen—keine Rosen, die sind das Symbol der Traurigkeit” (Ceija Stojka: Bilder und Texte 44). 11. Oesterle (47–63). 12. It is interesting to note that there are comparatively few untitled paintings in Ceija Stojka’s Nomad Living Series, particularly as compared to her Nazi Camp Series. 13. This excerpt is from a poem in her poetic Sunlight Collection (MeierRogen 24).

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14.

A Reindl aus den fünfundzwanziger Jahren war sehr geplagt und immer auf dem Herd. Amal a Gulasch, amal an Hummer und wieder Tschewabdschidschi des war für damals die schönste Schmauserei. Des arme Reindl war immer auf dem Ofen denn schon wieder kummt die ganze Hotwollee. Vor lauter Zurn spuckt scho des Reindl auf der Mitzl ihr Schürzn, daß’ nur so boscht. Mich putzt die Mitzl nie so fein wie der Franzl seinen Porsche. I kumm a net ins Kastl wie sich’s g’hört. Aber heut’ gibt’s wieder a Gulasch und i kann wieder spucken auf der Mitzl ihr Schürzn und auf die Rüsche in ihrem schönen, blöden, langen Haar. 15. Stojka belongs to the Lovara, a subgroup of the Roma known for their singing.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and C. Szanton-Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994. Bauman, Gerd and Thijl Sunier, eds. Post-Migration Ethnicity: Cohesion, Commitments, Comparison. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1995. Berger, Karin. Ceija Stojka. Portrait einer Romni. Österreich: Ventura, 1999. Blosser, Patricia. “Principles of Gestalt Psychology and Their Application to Teaching Junior High School Science.” Science Education 57 (1973): 43–53. Clark, Debbie. “Gestalt Theory.” March 8, 1999. http://chd.gse.gmu.edu/ immersion/knowledgebase/strategies.cognitivism/gestalt/gestalt2.htm. Egger, Edith. “Kubismus.” http://members.1012surfnet.at/edith.egger/ Kubismus.htm. Kaminsky, Amy. Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1993. Kearny, M. “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 547–65. Malkki, Liisa. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 24–44. Meier-Rogan, Patricia. Ceija Stojka. Bilder und Texte: 1989–1995. Vienna: Graphische Kunstanstalt Otto Sares Ges.m.b.H., 1995. Oesterle, Günter. “‘Zigeunerbilder’ als Maske des Romantischen.” In “Zigeunerbilder” in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Ed. Wilhelm Solms and Daniel Strauß. Heidelberg: Dokumentations-und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 1994. 47–63.

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Rapport, Nigel and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of “Home” in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Rosenfield, Israel. The Invention of Memory: A View of the Brain. New York: Basic, 1988. Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fictions. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Schacter, Daniel L. “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status.” In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past. Ed. Daniel L. Schacter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 1–43. Stojka, Ceija. Reisende auf dieser Welt. Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1992. ———. Wir Leben im Verborgenen. Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1995. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.

PASSION AND PARTICIPATION: MOTHERHOOD AND EXILE IN THE WORKS OF MARÍA TERESA LEÓN María del Mar López-Cabrales

I beg you, I can’t anymore! Discourage me, cut the cord that ties me to the womb of my homeland! Fábulas del tiempo amargo, 19621 I find no difference between living and writing Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar, 1968

his essay2 uses the literary works and life of María Teresa León to analyze the relationships among social and political realities, motherhood, and exile, and how they are reproduced in literature. María Teresa León was a young woman at a time in Spain when society valued women as mothers more than intellectuals. León, however, was an intellectual and a mother. Society compelled her to choose between her children and her professional goals and political beliefs, and ultimately forced her into exile. Her decision to accept exile from her children and later her country created life-long feelings of guilt and pains of abandonment. León spent most of her life away from her children and homeland, trying to fill spaces created by the absence of her family. In both her writing and life, she is drawn to children and women who are suffering the same familial separation and abandonment she experienced. She and her characters encounter new “families” and countless “children,” but León is always left unsatisfied, knowing that those whom she found can never replace the sons she left behind in Spain.

T

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To fully appreciate the ways in which León’s professional accomplishments were influenced by her relationships with, and feelings for her children, this essay places her life in the historical and cultural context of Spain around the Second Republic. It begins by briefly analyzing the status and roles of women in Spain before the Second Republic,3 and introduces María Teresa León’s biography. It then examines texts and letters by León, her family, and friends to understand how her devotion as a mother and her experience in exile shaped her writing and professional accomplishments.

Excerpt (1997) by Jayme Christine.

María Teresa León: Writing, Motherhood, and Exile Norms of Spanish society before the Second Republic limited opportunities for women to realize professional goals. Historically, Spanish laws, although relatively progressive during the Second Republic (1931–1936),

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did not treat women as equals to men. Women’s access to education illustrates the patterns of discrimination in Spain prior to the Second Republic. The Krausistas were early advocates for women’s rights in Spain. They created independent schools for women in order to educate women with their new, progressive ideas and, thereby, separate them from the influence of their Church confessors. Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist revolutionary and pedagogue, established the first modern school for both men and women in 1901. In 1915, under the direction of María de Maeztu, the Krausistas founded the Liceo Femenino in Madrid. Many of the women who participated in the Liceo were later leaders in the fight for equal rights. In spite of these advancements and much debate, by 1920, only two percent of the university population was female.4 María Teresa León began to realize her interest in and talent for writing during this period. Inequalities were also evident in Spain’s supposedly progressive literary community before the Second Republic. Until very recently, critics excluded women from membership in the famous Generation of ’27.5 Critics and the actual members of the Generation of ’27 ignored texts by women, and hardly included female characters in their major works. The only member who collaborated with women and completed significant works about women was Federico García Lorca. In fact, he, along with Rafael Alberti, Jacinto Benavente, and Benjamín Janés, collaborated with the group of women who were members of the Liceo Femenino. Women’s involvement in Spain’s literary movement was marginal at best. Women who sought artistic, creative, and professional goals in pre–Second Republic Spain were inhibited by gender bias in the literary world as well as by restrictive societal norms. María Teresa León struggled to become a writer as well as fulfill her duties as a mother, in this social and professional context. León pushed the boundaries of what women were expected and allowed to do. Once the Spanish Civil War started, León was instrumental in moving valuable Spanish works of art from the Prado and Escorial museums out of Spain to save them from being destroyed by the fighting, and she placed her life in danger by participating in a traveling theater group that performed for the Republican soldiers. The tension between family and professional interests emerged early in León’s life. María Teresa León Goyri was born on October 31, 1904, in Logroño, Spain. Growing up in Burgos, León’s father was a colonel in the army.6 Her aunt,7 the first woman in Spain to earn a doctorate in philosophy and letters, taught university classes. In 1920, when she was just sixteen years old, León married Gonzalo de Sebastián with whom she had two children, Gonzalo and Enrique. María Teresa León ultimately studied at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and letters.

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By 1929 it was becoming clear that León’s marriage was faltering.8 She found it impossible to balance her drive to participate in the literary world with her more traditional responsibilities as a wife and mother. As she became more politically active and began to pursue literary goals—she had already published under the pseudonym Isabel Inghirami (D’annunzio’s heroine)—María Teresa León drifted from her husband and children. Around the same time, she met Generation of ’27 poet Rafael Alberti. León and Alberti later fled to Mallorca and under the Second Republic were married in a civil wedding in 1932. The only person from her family who attended the wedding was her mother.9 León later lost legal custody of Gonzalo and Enrique.10 Memories, feelings of guilt, and pain related to her separation from her first family affected María Teresa León’s writings as well as her feelings as a mother and an “exile” throughout her second marriage. María Teresa León was an accomplished professional apart from her unofficial title as wife of the great Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. Free from the conservative atmosphere that characterized the years she lived in Burgos during her first marriage, León took up political struggles to aid the oppressed and the proletariat and began to publish her own writings. León’s political commitments were clear in her early travels to Russia and Latin America, as well as in her active opposition to Fascism and her strong advocacy of the ideals of the Second Republic in Spain. Soon after their marriage, León and Alberti received a grant to study the European theater movement, traveling to Berlin, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Holland. The couple also visited the United States after the Revolution of Asturias to solicit funds to aid victims of the workers’ uprising. María Teresa León was a Communist, the founder of the “Guerrillas of the Theatre” that performed on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to entertain the Republican soldiers, a founder of the Marxist journals Octubre and El Mono Azul, and a prolific writer of prose, poetry, and theater.11 In anticipation of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War, León participated in the Committee of the Defense and Protection of the National Artistic Treasury (Junta de Defensa y Protección del Tesoro Artístico Nacional) that moved works of art from the Prado Museum and the Escorial to safety outside of Spain. After the defeat of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, León and Alberti went into exile, first to France where they lived from 1939 to 1940. They worked as translators and announcers for Latin American broadcasts for the French radio station Paris-Mondial. They then lived in Argentina for twenty-three years. In 1963 they moved to Italy, and on April 27, 1977, León and Alberti returned to Spain after the death of Franco and the restoration of democracy. María Teresa León died on December 13, 1988.

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Throughout their relationship, León was often treated by critics and the press as merely Alberti’s attractive companion. In spite of her accomplishments, an interviewer in Mexico in 1935 referred to her as: “María Teresa León, la escritora española, [. . .] en compañía de su esposo, el famoso poeta Rafael Alberti [. . .]. De buen cuerpo, rubia como el sol en esa región de España donde las mujeres tienen la gentileza, la gracia, la manera de hablar y hasta el tono de voz que la hacen en extremo simpática y agradable” (María Teresa León, the Spanish writer [. . .] who is accompanying her husband, the famous poet Rafael Alberti [. . .]. She has a nice body, and blonde hair like the sun in that region of Spain where the women have such charm, grace, and a manner of speaking that, down to the tone of voice, is so pleasing; Marrast 59). In the same interview, however, María Teresa responded to a question about “female literature in Spain” by reciting a long list of women who were active writers at the time.12 There is a stark contrast between León’s serious discussion of literature by women, and the journalist’s superficial physical description of the author. This incident highlights the discrimination women of this period faced when they addressed serious topics. Ingrained paternalistic tendencies in the press— and even in literary circles—often focused disproportionately on their physical beauty, while ignoring their analyses. Behind this strong, blonde, combative, and smiling woman, as she is described in the majority of the books and critical articles about her, there is a tormented woman. León was a mother without children who suffered a life in exile, one who had to find children (as she explains in Contra viento y marea) in the battles, taking them by the hands in the streets during the Spanish Civil War because they were lost, orphaned, alone, because they were children and victims of the war. In the short story that lends its title to the collection of short stories, Una estrella roja (A Red Star), León presents the story of a little girl caught in the midst of war. She is killed transporting explosives and is buried with a red star (estrella roja).13 In this story, León uses the voice of a mother, “a brave woman,” to tell how her children were born to be servants of the people, but educated to be champions of justice. León expresses the dreams and desires of this woman who hopes for a better future for her children. The death of this girl represents, like in many of her works, the death of the innocents that suffered during the cruel Civil War, “the girl was among the disorder of desires, anguish, hatred . . . the girl dead by chance in the street, like the revolutionaries. The girl covered with a coat of dust” (Una estrella roja 43).14 But the question arises: what about the actual children of the author? What happened to Gonzalo and Enrique during the war and while she was in exile? Information about Gonzalo and Enrique during this period is scarce. León’s memoirs Memoria de la melancolía—written during her exile

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after the Spanish Civil War—is a gallery in which the imprints of many influential people are left on the past and present life of the author. There is no specific mention of her two sons or her first marriage in this book. Did she exclude her first family from the book because her new experience of motherhood in Buenos Aires had erased the memories of the two sons she had when she was only sixteen and nineteen years old? Unlikely. In her memoirs, León talks about herself like the woman who gave birth too soon when she was still playing with dolls, “Nació el primer hijo cuando ella era tan joven que enternecía. . . . el médico se quedó a la cabecera, acariciándole la cabeza. Niño, niño, le balbuceaba mientras ella perdía el conocimiento. Le costó mucho acostumbrarse a que un niño y no una muñeca la esperase en la casa. ¡Quince años! ¡Santo dios y un deber tan alto!” (she was so young when the first child was born that it broke your heart. . . . the doctor stayed at the head of the bed, caressing her head. Baby, baby, she stammered while she lost consciousness. It took time for her to become accustomed to the fact that it was a baby, not a doll that waited for her at home. Fifteen years old! My God, and such a duty; Memoria 35). León also uses the third person to refer to herself in Memoria de la melancolía, and in different occasions says that the narrator follows the blond woman who was an excellent cook and had her baby too soon.15 León’s use of literary devices to talk about her past grows from the pain she continued to suffer as a result of her exile from her family and her past life. In Memoria de la melancolía, León does mention the pains of exile and separation from loved ones—above all her mother and her children. She does so in a way that is common in her narratives, through the voices of other women who have suffered similar experiences. In this way, her voice is lost in an “I” (exile) and a “you” (family and Spain) of different voices. Pero ¿y nuestro destierro? ¿Quién ha comentado nuestro destierro? Aseguran que el español es un ser aclimatable fácilmente. ¿Fácilmente? Diría otra cosa si hubieran entrado en el pozo de nuestra angustia. Con qué rudeza nos han separado de lo que más queríamos. Tú allá y yo aquí. No me llegan tus cartas. Escríbeme. ¿Y los niños? Me dices que los del pueblo no te saludan porque yo . . . Bueno, mándalos a la m[ierda] . . . Estoy bien. . . . ¿Me recordaba mamá antes de morirse? Sí, estoy muy lejos, en América. Estamos bien, aunque se ha muerto el niño . . . No puedo dormir sin ti, amor. ¿Hasta cuándo durará este martirio? . . . A tu hermano le han echado veinte años de cárcel. No te aflijas, dicen que puede haber algún indulto. . . . Crecen los niños, un poco delgaditos, pero crecen. Te llevan esta carta unos amigos, ellos te contarán. No sé escribir, ya lo sabes. Yo pongo la firma. Y firmaban María y Antonia, y Angustias y Carmen y Dolores . . . Yo he visto cartas y cartas con esa letra incierta y me he hundido en ese mar de penas. (Memoria 320–21)

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[About our exile? Who has mentioned our exile? They assured us that the Spanish adapt easily. Easily? It would be different if they had entered into the well of our anguish. With what coarseness they have separated us from those who we love most. You there and me here. Your letters do not arrive. Write to me. And the children? You tell me that the people of the town do not greet you because of me. . . . Well, tell them to go to h(ell) . . . I am fine. . . . Did mother remember me before she died? Yes, I am very far, in America. We are fine, although the baby has died . . . I cannot sleep without you, my love. How long will this torment last? . . . They have sent your brother to jail for twenty years. Don’t let it affect you, they say that there may be a pardon. . . . The children grow, a little skinny, but they grow. Some friends are carrying this letter to you, they will tell you about it. I don’t know how to write, you already know. I sign the letter. And I sign María y Antonia, y Angustias y Carmen y Dolores . . . I have seen letters and letters with that uncertain writing and I have drowned in the sea of sadness.]

León is clearly aware of the effect her intellectual, professional, and personal decisions—leaving her husband and children to be with Alberti and pursue her career—had on the people she loved. She is also aware that she is not the only woman suffering this fate. Social as well as political realities forced many women like her to deal constantly with the pain of being apart, and the guilt of causing others to suffer. Before leaving her first family and Spain, León did dedicate her first book of short stories, Cuentos para soñar (1929), to her eldest son Gonzalo, “whose hands are full of the ink of a schoolboy.” In the book’s introduction, her aunt María Goyri recounts that León is a mother “endowed with the temperament of an artist,” who knows how to “take possession of the heart of the child and make it fly with her stories.” In this book, María Teresa León uses the narrative voice of a mother who is telling stories to her child, and all of the children who like dreaming. This figure of the educator mother is present throughout all of her works. The content of León’s stories is often social, such as when a mother tells her daughter that many children cry because they cannot smile, “they are cold and hungry, and the people pass by them indifferently; not knowing that a book would make them happy” (Cuentos 58). There are also many children who are happy, “they have mothers, books, and toys, but their hearts are hardening, and they pass by the children who are crying without seeing them” (Cuentos 58). Many years later, in a letter written to his mother and collected in the volume María Teresa León, León’s eldest son Gonzalo remembers his mother and her stories: Por circunstancias familiares y por nuestra absurda guerra no viste a tus hijos durante muchos años. A pesar del cariño que siempre nos demostró nuestro

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padre y toda la familia, no nos dábamos cuenta pero nos faltaba algo. No sé a Enrique, era muy pequeño, yo te recordaba como un persistente sueño. Tenía ganas de volver a verte. . . . Quisiera . . . recordarte siempre como la preciosa madre joven que me tenía en su regazo, mientras me leía Cuentos para soñar. (María 78–79) [For family reasons and because of our absurd war you did not see your children for many years. In spite of the affection that our father and all of the family gave us, we could not help but notice that something was missing. I don’t know about Enrique who was very small, but I remember you like a constant dream. I long to see you. . . . I wish . . . to remember you always as the precious young mother who held me in her lap while she read Cuentos para soñar.]

María Teresa León always carried her love for her first children. She suffered the separation produced by two exiles: the one from her first children, and the other from her country. In Memoria de la melancolía, she recounts her escape from Spain with Alberti by vaguely recalling the small, sick child whose arms she had to tear away when she left. At the end of her memoirs she mentions Enrique. While trying to find hope for the future and for new generations, she remembers the hands of her younger son with the hands of hundreds of other male workers. She makes sense of her life because, “I feel the hands of my son Enrique, a worker’s hands, hands of a man who knows so much work that it convinces me that the word ‘Mother’ will last for centuries and centuries” (Memoria 381). In exile in Argentina, León tried to soothe her painful memories of her separation from Gonzalo and Enrique with the birth of her American daughter, Aitana—the daughter that brought her hope. This is mentioned several times in both Alberti’s and León’s memoirs. León said that people in exile would tell her that “when the baby arrives, you will see how it erases the memories” (Memoria 28). But María Teresa could only remember, saying that motherhood could not take away her memories of her last steps in Madrid. She remembers the day that Aitana was born, “one day we left the river, the patio, [. . .] the little town, [. . .] the horses, the mountains of Córdoba and we ran to receive a tiny daughter whom we boldly named: Aitana” (Memoria 28).16 Ever since then, the girl has always been with her.17 Alberti mentioned that “while it was a surprise, the announcement of her arrival, the birth of our daughter was the sweetest gift that could have come in those first years of exile. We were filled with hope and expectations that we shared with our new American friends” (Mateo 149).18 While separated from her family in what can be called her first exile, León found hundreds of other “children.” Each person she met became a part of her, a part of her memories and a part of her life. Maybe because of

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that, after relating the history of the birth of Aitana in Buenos Aires, León says, “I also had a son that was sent to the wind. His name was Josecito” (Memoria 284). This was a five-year-old boy who knocked on her door one day saying, “I am hungry,” and stayed day after day until he suddenly disappeared. She never forgot him. Maternity and education—for mothers as well as for children—are ever-present themes in León’s books. For León, a political feminist and tireless fighter, education was a fundamental element through which society advances. As Torres Nebrera comments, in the thirty-plus articles León wrote for the Diario de Burgos between 1924 and 1928, her profile was already one of a woman who was progressive, a woman who fought to advance the feminist cause—and greeted the presence of María de Maeztu in the ateneo of Burgos (18). The same author explains how María Teresa León told the story of a young woman who was a servant in a wealthy home. Defending rural women and emphasizing the value of equal education, León criticizes the hypocritical society that made the woman prefer killing her own child over suffering criticism for being a single mother. For León, lack of education was often the reason women gave in to paternalistic and discriminatory customs and traditions. Regarding maternity, María Teresa León presents the nation as a mother and its citizens as her children, much of the time victims of injustices. Such is the case of the tears that followed the death of the exile Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, which fills part of Memoria de la melancolía. León writes, “Spain, mother of all of us, each time a name to add to those that we can leave on your floor [. . .] this time death has hit one of your best sons who defended you, mother, until the final moment. Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros illustrious son of yours, mother Spain” (Memoria 50). On occasion, León’s feelings of maternity and her need to help the unprotected spill over to non-humans. An example is the dog Niebla, whom she encountered during the Civil War and who was with Alberti when a bullet passed above his head and struck the tree behind him. Niebla was for them, una maravilla viviente. Por fin, algo no estático e inmovil estaba en la casa . . . herido por un camión de guardias de asalto . . . es una víctima de la represión. ¡qué hermosos los ojitos entre la lana! Lo tengo hoy aún aquí, bajo mi mano. “niebla, tú no comprendes. Sí, no comprendes nuestra ternura que viene de tan lejos y la hemos ido traspasando a todos los perros que se acercaron a nuestra vida.” (Memoria 31) [a living marvel. Finally, something that was neither stationary nor immobile was in the house . . . injured by a truck . . . it is a victim of the repression. Its eyes are so sweet surrounded by fur! I have him here with me, under my

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hand. “Niebla, you do not understand. Yes, you do not understand our tenderness that comes from so far and that we have transferred to all of the dogs that come into our lives.”]

These same feelings arise with the other “children” that the author encounters during the war, during exile, and during the pain left by exile—the emptiness that is filled with people, with the faces that arrived in her house in Buenos Aires and later in Rome. Memories rush over María Teresa. She hurts and complains because the memories follow her, make her look at them, and tear at her core, which is where they reside (Memoria 51). She wrote with her heart; her entire life, in her writing, she is trying to recuperate the past that she feared, that she would forget sooner or later.19 María Teresa León anticipated the future—old age and solitude—and defended the old women who do crazy things to get attention: “A mí me da miedo que llegue un día en que nadie me vea. Sería un purgatorio eso de andar por la calle sin que ninguna mirada se cruzase con la mía. Yo creo que por eso las viejas muy viejas con personalidad se vuelven borrachas o escandalizan a todo el mundo. Sí. Hay que hacer algo, distinguirse” (I am afraid of the day when no one takes me seriously. This would be a purgatory of walking through the streets without having a single gaze cross my own. I think that because of this, the very old women who have personality become drunks or they scandalize everyone. If you have to do something, distinguish yourself; Memoria 44). She keeps returning to these crazy old women in the Trastevere in Rome, medicating and feeding their cats, which, according to the old women, are like children. One of them stopped to talk with María Teresa and, crying, she said that her cat was better than a child, as she dried her eyes and walked away (Memoria 103). It is difficult to understand why Gonzalo’s return to his mother, while she was living in Buenos Aires with Alberti and Aitana, does not appear in any of her texts. In the introduction to a new edition of short stories by León, written by Alberti’s second wife María Asunción Mateo, the latter explains only that Aitana was born in Buenos Aires and that Gonzalo joined them later and became an important doctor. In another source, however, Gonzalo remembers his reunion with his mother in Argentina: Recuerdo cómo estabas esperando en el puerto de Buenos Aires una húmeda mañana de abril [. . .]. Te acompañaban Losada y Rafael. No podría explicar lo que sentí entonces, una mezcla de alegría y de miedo a lo desconocido. Casi éramos unos extraños, sin embargo el encuentro fue muy fácil, tenías talento para resolver cualquier circunstancia que se presentara. ¡Qué cariño, paciencia y dedicación tuviste con él [Alberti], con Aitana y conmigo! (Mateo 78)

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[I remember how you were waiting at the Buenos Aires port on a humid April morning (. . .). Losada and Rafael accompanied you. I cannot explain what I felt, a mixture of happiness and fear of the unknown. Even though we were almost strangers, the reunion was easy, you could resolve any circumstance that faced you. What affection, patience, and dedication you had with him (Alberti), Aitana, and me!]

María Teresa León’s home and life were full of people and animals that she took wherever she went. Once while she and Alberti were in Rome, she wrote a letter to her friend and editor Gonzalo Losada in Buenos Aires. In it, she said that they were vacationing in Antícoli, “that precious little village where we even have a garden. I will take my dogs, the cat, the parrot and the canaries. What a family!” (María 85). Nonetheless, León, now a grandmother,20 could never forget the pain of not seeing her other family, that of her son Gonzalo who remained in Buenos Aires: “La otra [familia], la que anda en dos pies, apenas si la veo. Yo quisiera que mi nieta pasase junto a mí, todos los años algunos meses. Ya sé que es imposible. Nos separa el Atlántico, pero yo no me conformo con que crezca y tenga novio y se case” (The other [family], that walks on two legs, I hardly see. I would like my granddaughter to stay with me for a few months every year. I already know that it is impossible. The Atlantic separates us, but I am not resigned to her growing-up, having boyfriends, and marrying; María 85). It is clear that León’s children, and her separation from them, are integral to understanding her life and accomplishments. Although the eldest of her children, Gonzalo, realized his dream of reuniting with his mother in Buenos Aires after many years, the writer always carried the heartbreaking experience of being separated from her children and her native land. She never became fully accustomed to these separations. In a letter written from Camaiore, Italy, in 1965, León wrote, “Hace muchos años que paso fuera de España las fiestas. Como no he podido acostumbrarme te pido que seas tú la que me desees algo bueno cuando suenen las 12 campanadas en Gobernación” (I have spent many years away from the Spanish celebrations. Seeing as though I cannot become accustomed to this, I ask you to please wish for something good for me when the twelfth bell rings in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid; María 81). An orphaned woman without a homeland, María Teresa León had to wait until 1977 to go back to Spain. When she finally returned, she could no longer recognize anyone. Behind the pressure to remember and rescue her memories through writing, María Teresa León had forgotten everything. She could not even remember her children. Gonzalo wrote in a letter, Madre: [. . .] ¡Qué mala pasada te jugó la vida al final del libreto! Tú, que poseíste una de las inteligencias femeninas más brillantes de España, acentuada

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personalidad, una conversación tan amena, te encuentras con la memoria disgregada, los recuerdos borrados, la mente confusa, disminuidos los sentidos. ¡Qué pena me ha dado ver que no me reconocías! (María 77) [Mother: (. . .) How unfairly life has played you at the end of this book! You, who possessed one of the most brilliant female intellects in Spain, a strong personality, such a pleasant manner, you find yourself with a disintegrated mind, the memories erased, the thoughts confused, the senses diminished. Such sadness it gave me to see that you did not recognize me!]

She not only paid the price of pain and guilt that is left to the abandoner, but also in the end, having yelled to the world not to forget, she was not left with even a crack in which to store her own memories. Another Spanish writer, Benjamín Prado, comments that León was lost on a voyage inside herself that pushed her further and further away from her surroundings and her loved ones. En una ocasión, al visitarla, llevé conmigo un ejemplar de su libro Memoria de la melancolía, por ver si era capaz de escribir en él su nombre, dedicándomelo. Y María Teresa, tomando el libro alborozadamente, comenzó a leer su vida contada en el resumen biográfico de la contraportada: [. . .]. Qué lejos está [. . .] de aquélla que fundara las Guerrillas del Teatro del Ejército del Centro. (María 69) [On one visit, I brought a copy of her book Memoria de la melancolía to see if she was able to sign it for me. And María Teresa, gently taking the book, began to read about her life in the biographical abstract on the back cover. (. . .) How far she is (. . .) from the woman who founded the Guerrillas del Teatro del Ejército del Centro.]

She was far from the days when she wrote these words at the beginning of her Crónica general de la guerra civil (1937), Sólo con el fin de ayudar a la memoria, atareada continuamente en acontecimientos decisivos y trascendentales de nuestra lucha, he recopilado estas crónicas de la guerra civil [. . .]. Creo que la memoria, como el fuego, necesita atizarse, y que bueno es para los desmemoriados que recuerden. (1) [Only with the goal of helping the memory, rushing continually through the decisive and far-reaching events of our struggle, I have compiled these chronicles of the Civil War (. . .). I think that the memory, like fire, needs to be stirred up, so that the people who forget, are forced to remember; emphasis mine.]

In the end, nonconformism is the word that best defines this writer who struggled passionately against the current all of her life, and had to pay with exile, separation from her children, and a life wandering from one place to

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another. “Estoy cansada de no saber dónde morirme. Es la mayor tristeza del emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con los cementerios de los países donde vivimos? Habría que hacer tantas presentaciones de los otros muertos, que no acabaríamos nunca” (I am tired of not knowing where I will die. It is the saddest part of being an emigrant. What do we have to do with the cemeteries in the countries that we live in? There would have to be so many introductions to the other deceased that we would never rest; Memoria 31). In this way, María Teresa León assumed the narrative voice of the suffering and protective mother of a generation of exiles and orphans. Conclusions Themes such as motherhood, family, exile, and abandonment are important to understanding the works of María Teresa León because Spanish society before the Second Republic forced women to either forget or leave aside (not always voluntarily) their personal lives—their families and children—if they wished to dedicate themselves to goals other than marriage. María Teresa León chose to be a part of the intellectual world, but she was never fully able to leave behind the more traditional world of her family and children, and she probably never truly wanted to abandon this role. León’s commitment to write and be active was complicated throughout her life by memories of the family she left behind. Whether in Spain during the Second Republic, or in exile in Buenos Aires and Italy, León struggled to balance her personal pain from being apart from her children, with her strong desire to be active in the literary and political circles that had originally pulled her from her family. León’s attempts to find equilibrium in her life were made even more difficult because of her gender. Though she was an equal to her more famous second husband Rafael Alberti, she faced paternalistic discrimination even among supposedly progressive authors and activists. And in spite of her bold decision to leave her first family to be with Alberti, León always carried with her the expectations early-twentiethcentury Spanish society created for women and mothers, expectations that had been ingrained in her from her earliest days living in conservative Burgos, Spain. The life and works of María Teresa León illustrate the personal and professional price many women had to pay to break with the beliefs and constraints of Spanish society during the early twentieth century. María Teresa León and all of the brave and passionate women of this period— many of whom were condemned to jail21 or exile after the Civil War— deserve to be recognized for their struggles to participate in the literary and political worlds. They aspired to change how women engaged society even though many such as María Teresa León paid dearly with their families.

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Appendix: Literary Works by María Teresa León Novels Contra viento y marea, 1941 El gran amor de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1946 Juego limpio, 1959 Menesteos, marinero de abril, 1965 Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar, gran señora de todos los deberes, 1968 Cervantes. El soldado que nos enseñó a hablar, 1978 Short Stories Cuentos para soñar, 1928 La bella del mal de amor, 1930 Rosa-Fría, patinadora de la luna, 1934 Cuentos de la España actual, 1935 Una estrella roja, 1937 Morirás lejos, 1942 Las peregrinaciones de Teresa, 1950 Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid campeador, 1954 Fábulas del tiempo amargo, 1962 Memoirs Memoria de la melancolía, 1970 Theater Huelga en el Puerto, 1933 La libertad en el tejado, 1989 Scripts La tragedia optimista, 1937 Los ojos más bellos del mundo, 1943 Essays Crónica General de la Guerra Civil, 1939 La historia tiene la palabra, 1944 Other Nuestro hogar de cada día, 1958 Sonríe China, 1958

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Notes 1. All translations are by María del Mar López-Cabrales. 2. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. 3. See López-Cabrales (1999) for more information on Spanish women during this period. 4. See Folguera (1988). 5. Other than prejudice or gender discrimination, why were no women included in the Generation of ’27 when so many women were creating literature and working to improve the country with the same strength, passion, and force as men? Why was María Teresa León, the constant companion of Rafael Alberti who was cited by the poet in his book of memories, La arboleda perdida, as the person most decisive to his work as a writer, excluded from “the greats” of ’27? Why haven’t María Teresa León’s memoirs about the Spanish Civil War and her subsequent exile with Alberti, Memoria de la melancolía, received the continued attention from critics and publishers as her husband’s memoirs? 6. León mentions her mother several times in her Memoria de la melancolía. She is the one who called her to tell her with happiness that the Second Republic had been established and that the Monarchy had been overthrown. In Memoria, León dedicates one complete segment to the love for her mother. León finds a dusty picture of her mother while she is in exile, and explains how difficult it was to relate to her mother because León had not ended up being what her mother wanted: “I felt you considered me your personal failure. Good bye to your dream of having a perfect daughter! At one point I had to choose between you and the world, and I chose the world” (Memoria 112). 7. Her aunt, María Goyri, was married to the reknowned Hispanist Ramón Menendez Pidal, of whom Alberti had pleasant memories in his Arboleda perdida. León relates an anecdote about her aunt’s first day teaching at the university. At the university, María Goyri was preparing for her class, when the Dean arrived and took her to an office and told her that she would be locked in the office until the hour of her class, when he would accompany her to the classroom. She had to teach with him in the classroom with her for the entire semester (Memoria 23). 8. Little has been written about María Teresa León’s life previous to her marriage with Alberti. Research conducted at the Fundación Rafael Alberti in Puerto de Santa María, Spain, in July 2000 yielded little new information about María Teresa León’s first marriage. Official reactions to León may also affect research into her life. For example, in the writer’s hometown of Burgos, the president of the Municipal Commission of Culture, José Sagredo, questioned the appropriateness of awarding the city’s Gold Medal to the writer. Sagredo proposed rescinding the award because of “motives of conscience,” contending that León’s novel Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar gives “a vision of El Cid’s separation from his wife that is much too intimate and contains too much racy description” (Mozo 4). A hostile political

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

atmosphere in León’s hometown may contribute to the shortage of research into her past. There were different notes in the press commenting on María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti’s escaping to Mallorca, saying that it was a repeat of the love story by the artist Chopin and George Sand. In La arboleda perdida, Alberti remembers, “notes appeared in some newspapers and magazines, the most entertaining being one that said, ‘the poet Rafael Alberti repeated the Mallorcan episode from Chopin with a beautiful George Sand from Burgos’ ” (300). Information provided by the Fundación Rafael Alberti, July 2000. See the appendix for a list of the published works of María Teresa León. See Pérez (45–49) for brief analyses of León’s texts. These writers included Mercedes Gaibrois de Ballesteros, Ernestina de Champourcín, Josefina de la Torre, Concha Méndez, Rosa Chacel, María Zambrano, María Martínez Sierra, Victoria Kent, Magda Donato, and Luisa Carnés. See Pérez (49). In Memoria de la melancolía, León describes the story of a boy who sold the newspaper Mundo Obrero, and who had gone from one side of Spain to the other to see the arrival of the first Soviet ship. When the child told her and Alberti: “Greetings, revolutionary comrades,” María Teresa asked him if he had a mother. The boy answered, “No, I have an aunt” (Memoria 49). This sensation of being orphaned, abandoned, and alone, but also being strong in the fight, in the revolutionary cause, was something that the author felt during this tough period of Spanish history, and it shaped León’s writing. For an analysis of the different persons mentioned by the author in the book, see Pochat. Aitana is a bold name because it refers to a Spanish mountain range near Valencia. Aitana Alberti has published several notes in ABC in which she recalls her exciting life with her parents, their travels, their friends and at the same time, their suffering away from their beloved Spain. Aitana used the title “La arboleda compartida” for this series of memories. Rafael Alberti wrote a letter/poem “Carta a Aitana” (1971) to Aitana when he was expecting her visit, “Querida niña Aitana: [. . .] / ¿Eres feliz? Con poco y mucho, Aitana. / Lo eres / porque ya tienes todo lo que quieres / [. . .] te escucho por teléfono. Y me suena / en tu voz la del mar / [. . .]te esperamos / los dos con todo el coro / de babucha, el canario, el buco, el loro / y, tal vez ya en el aire, / te besamos” (Obras 279–80). “Now in Rome, María Teresa started to show signs of the terrible sea of Alzheimer’s disease, which had also affected her mother” (Pochat 138). In Memoria de la melancolía, long before she became a grandmother, María Teresa León mentions, “I am afraid that they will ask me: grandmother, what is life? And I will have to reply: I don’t know . . . I will turn around almost with tears in my eyes feeling embarrassed for being such a useless waste” (328). See chapters III and XIV in Alcalde (1996).

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Works Cited Alberti, Rafael. La arboleda perdida. Libro primero (1902–1917). Barcelona: Seix-Barral, 1981. ———. Obras completas. Tomo III. Poesía 1964–1988. Madrid: Aguilar, 1988. Alcalde, Carmen. Mujeres en el franquismo. Exiliadas, nacionalistas y opositoras. Barcelona: Ediciones Flor del Viento, 1996. Folguera, Pilar, comp. El feminismo en España: Dos siglos de historia. Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias, 1988. Inghirami, Isabel. http://www.escritoras.com/indice/escritora.asp?Ellaleon. León, María Teresa. Cuentos para soñar. Burgos: Editorial Hijos de Santiago Rodríguez, 1928. ———. Crónica general de la guerra civil. Tomo I. Madrid: Ediciones de la Alianza de intelectuales antifascistas, 1937. ———. Contra viento y marea. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Aiape, 1941. ———. Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1968. ———. Rosa-fría, patinadora de la luna. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1975. ———. Una estrella roja. Madrid: Selecciones Austral, 1979. ———. Memoria de la melancolía. Madrid: Bruguera. Libro Amigo, 1982. ———. Fábulas del tiempo amargo y otros relatos. Madrid : Cátedra Letras Hispánicas, 2003. López-Cabrales, María del Mar. “Tras el rastro/rostro oculto de las mujeres de la Generación del 27.” Letras Femeninas (Spring 1999): 173–87. María Teresa León. Junta de Castilla y León: Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1987. Marrast, Robert. Rafael Alberti en México (1935). Santander: Publicaciones la Lista de los Ratones, 1984. Mateo, María Asunción. “Introduction” and “Notes.” In Rosa-fría, patinadora de la luna by María Teresa León. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1990. Mozo Polo, Ángel. “María Teresa León, todavía cuestionada.” Diario de Cádiz, Viernes. 23 de enero de 1998, 4. Pérez, Janet. Contemporary Women Writers of Spain. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. Pochat, María Teresa. “María Teresa León, memoria del recuerdo del exilio.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 473–74 (1989): 135–42. Torres Nebrera, Gregorio. Los espacios de la memoria. (La obra literaria de María Teresa León). Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1996.

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WIFE, WHORE, WITCH: THE PORTRAYAL OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORKS OF MERCÈ RODOREDA Victoria L. Ketz

Introduction In society literature has the important function of registering, transmitting, and even creating ideology. Within the pages of a text, the cultural conventions and practices are scrutinized to either be legitimized and perpetuated, or rejected and rectified. The import of this responsibility weighs on the minds of writers. Françoise Lionnet, a French literary critic, believes, “Women writers are often especially aware of their task as producers of images that both participate in the dominant representations of their culture and simultaneously undermine and subvert those images by offering a re-vision of familiar scripts” (132). The traditional ideology assigned to women of wife, mother, and daughter are subtly undermined in the work of Mercè Rodoreda. Josefina Hess, a Spanish literary critic, acknowledges this demythification process: En las novelas de Rodoreda se observa la presentación de personajes femeninos cuyas existencias están en conflicto con los modelos de madre y esposa propuestos por la sociedad tradicional. Temas como la maternidad, el aborto, la prostitución, el abuso físico y sicológico de la mujer, son presentados con realismo percibiéndose claramente una posición ideológica que intenta romper el silencio e iniciar cambios respecto a la mujer y su rol en la sociedad. (281) [In Rodoreda’s novels one observes the presentation of female characters whose existences are in conflict with the traditional role models of mother and wife proposed by society. Themes such as maternity, abortion, prostitution, physical and psychological abuse of women, are realistically presented

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(while) clearly perceiving an ideological stance that attempts to break the silence and initiate changes with respect to women and their role in society.]

Rodoreda’s characters challenged the norms by which women lived and violated the prescribed behavior, just as Spanish literary critic Elizabeth Rhodes suggests that the author herself did (165).1 In patriarchal society, men assume authority over domestic, social, and political affairs. Thus, when violence and suffering are depicted, they serve to illustrate the injustices and double standards within patriarchy. Yet, domestic violence was not a topic that entered the sphere of public discussion until the 1970s, and only recently is Spain considering laws to protect the rights of the female victims. Violence degrades women and their sexuality, as well as demonstrates patriarchal oppression. Women are victimized by male-dominated social structures that perpetuate their invisibility and silence. In The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, and “The Salamander,” the protagonists are victimized by violence, which includes mental and physical abuse, rape, and dismemberment. In each work the portrayal of the actual violence is attenuated, mimicking an official stance that violence against females does not exist. Thus, the representation of the various forms of violence is so subtle that if a reader were not careful, the abuse would fade into the texture of the narration, and be dismissed as additional description. The narrator does not comment or pass judgment on the male characters’ words or actions, and thus leaves the readers to draw their own conclusions. With respect to violence, Rodoreda relies on various literary tropes to depict it instead of directly presenting it. The fact that Rodoreda does not directly state matters seems to indicate unease about the language. As will be developed in the final section of this chapter, this alienation as it relates to language should be considered as an attempt by Rodoreda to construct a language of marginalization and exile. Types of Abuse Portrayed The English literary critic Emily Detmer has identified many tactics abusers use to control and and dominate their victims. Among those utilized are isolation, intimidation, emotional abuse, economic manipulation, sexual assault, linguistic dominance, and denial of basic needs such as food and sleep (283).2 The tactics are used to create fear and dependence in the victims so they will submit to the will of the abuser. Many of these abusive strategies are present in The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, and “The Salamander.” The portrayal of violence increases as Rodoreda’s production progresses. In The Time of the Doves, there is limited physical and mental abuse. In Camellia Street, chronologically the next work produced, the

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protagonist endures, besides the physical and mental abuse, a gang rape, and sequestering. Finally, in “The Salamander” the violence escalates to rape, lapidation, and finally dismemberment. In The Time of the Doves, Rodoreda portrays domestic violence with a tenuous distinction. This novel narrates the existence of Natalia through her courtship and marriage to the abusive Quimet, and her struggles with her two children to survive the Spanish Civil War and the postwar period until she marries the kind Antoni. During their relationship, Quimet abuses Natalia emotionally, mentally, and physically. The confining tenor of their affiliation is foreshadowed by Natalia’s mentioning of two items during their first meeting at the dance. The first is her long description of the decorations at the dance to include the flowered paper chains that adorn the plaza. The flowers cannot hide what lies beneath them: the chains that will bind Natalia to Quimet. Her marriage is linked to the image of the elastic waistband of her petticoats, which confines her breathing and marks her skin, making her feel “martyred” (16), a word that describes her during her espoused state. Her attempt to escape from Quimet at the end of their first meeting also foreshadows their future marital life. After the dance, Natalia flees from Quimet as if, “all the devils in hell were after me” (19). Yet Quimet later reinterprets this event for his friends as, “she ran like the wind” (19). The wind, which is a natural element, is associated with the female archetype. By detaining her, Quimet has metaphorically conquered her and her nature. This event, described by the two characters, casts a very different light on the scene. Natalia’s perception is negative, whereas Quimet interprets the same event in a seemingly amusing anecdotal fashion. In the relationship that ensues, Natalia’s faithful perception of her “martyred” marital life is at odds with Quimet’s “official version” that will dominate their life together (Glenn, “Plaza” 61). The representation of female victimization encompasses an entire range of suffering throughout their courtship and marriage. For example, one of the first ways Quimet dominates Natalia is by isolating her from anyone who could encourage her to question his authority. This causes Natalia to rely solely on Quimet for validation. He begins by forcing her to sever all ties to her former beau, Pere. This causes an inexplicable sadness in Natalia. She narrates, “I felt a pain that hurt deep inside me, as if in the middle of the peace I’d felt before a little door had opened that was hiding a nest of scorpions and the scorpions had come out and mixed with the pain and made it sting even more and had swarmed through my blood and made it black” (21). As time passes, she stops seeing her friends with the exception of Señora Enriqueta. The couple only socializes with Quimet’s male friends. The isolation intensifies when he insists she quit her job at the pastry shop. When she refuses to accede to his wishes, he accuses her boss

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of lewd behavior and harasses her until she quits. Her seclusion from the rest of the world becomes complete when the street festival returns a year later and they spend the week “cooped up” in their apartment (53). This not only portrays Quimet’s broken promise to Natalia, to dance again at the plaza del Diamante, but it also demonstrates her isolation from the world. The opposition between interior and exterior world are counterpoised as Natalia bitter-sweetly notes, “The streets glittering with joy and me picking up clothes off the floor and folding them and putting them away” (54). In this entire passage, the anaphoric usage of the word “and” not only portrays Natalia trapped in the tedium of marital life, but also implies indirectly that her personal relationship is an unhappy one as the “joy” is confined to the outer world. In their relationship, Quimet imposes his wishes and disregards hers. He dominates her by informing her he will choose her wardrobe (26), by decorating their apartment as he wishes (30), and by making a chair for his exclusive use from which she is forbidden (49). He forces her to ride the motorcycle with him inspite of her fears (45), and later takes their son on it against Natalia’s explicit wishes (73). He shows blatant disregard for her as he awakens her to chatter about his designs for his chair (46). Once Natalia stops working and becomes financially dependent on Quimet, she is expected to seek his approval on all purchases. Hence her autonomous decision to purchase chocolate cups enraged him (44). His overreaction points to his unvarying drive to control Natalia (46). He punishes her by belittling her in front of his friends. His decimation of her self-worth reaches its peak when he devalues her ability to carry a child and give birth by minimizing the delivery and equating it with the parasitic tapeworm he expelled: “Quimet said now we were even because I’d had the kids and he’d had a [tape] worm fifteen yards long” (78). This disparagement is another method he uses to erode her self-confidence and foster dependence. Rare is the instance in which verbal abuse is directly portrayed in the text. Yet this occurs when Quimet is infuriated about a business transaction: “And I had to pay for his bad mood. And when he was in a bad mood he’d start in with ‘Colometa, get a move on,’ ‘Colometa look what a mess you made’ . . .” (53). In this instance, the reader is able to view Quimet’s verbal mistreatment of Natalia. More often, though, Natalia repetitively uses the phrase “Quimet said” to portray the abuse she endures. This phrase seemingly confers authority to the pronouncement, because in her world—ruled by Quimet—Quimet’s will is of utmost importance. In this fashion, she records his blame of their first-born’s colic and poor health (62), and of his criticism of how she is raising their children (64). Natalia’s subjection to Quimet’s will—that is, abuse—annihilates her self-esteem.

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In addition to mental abuse, Natalia endures physical mistreatment, beginning with their courtship. It is then that Quimet establishes his prospective archaic expectations surrounding their impending marriage: “he hit my knee with the edge of his hand and made my leg fly up with surprise and said if I wanted to be his wife I had to start by liking everything he liked” (22). Here, in the text, Quimet demands that Natalia subordinate her identity, refashioning it to fulfill his wishes and the traditional ideals held by society in which women were to be subservient to the male spouse and the family. When Natalia finds this illogical and expresses the inalterability of her individual desires, he belittles and lectures her. Quimet’s comportment reflects that of Western culture in which a woman is to focus her energies in the house, adopting an inferior role. Virginia Woolf denounces that within patriarchy, woman is “so constituted that she never ha[s] a mind or wish of her own, but prefer[s] to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others” (“Professions” 278). Quimet physically imposes his will on Natalia. When she resists Quimet’s mandate to quit her job, he violently loses control. She recalls, “He grabbed my neck and shook my head from side to side” (25). This aggressive male personage views women as “property” and therefore justifies his use of violence on the female body as within his right. The force implemented to make a resistant female “obey” is viewed as an appropriate method of maintaining control. It is even more justified if it is viewed as disciplining one who has overstepped her boundaries. After they are married, the abuse perfectly correlates to Natalia’s voicelessness. As the physical violence escalates, her silence augments. When she shows him a dress she has made, he reacts violently: he jumped up . . . and he threw himself on me . . . I started running down the hall with Quimet behind me . . . he . . . threw me on the floor and pushed me under the bed with his feet and jumped on top of the bed. When I tried to get out he’d slap my head from above. ‘Bad girl!’ he shouted. And no matter where I tried to get out, whack! His hand would hit my head. ‘Bad girl!’ From then on he played that joke a lot. (44)

This event is far from comical and documents some of the abuse the protagonist endures during her marriage. She, ironically, softens the violence by excusing the aggressor’s actions as a “joke.” Yet, this joke is often repeated. By forcing Natalia under the marital bed, Quimet makes patent his sexual dominance. Just as the protagonist submits to his will in everyday life, she must also bear his control over her body in bed. Natalia’s own sexual desire is never registered and is therefore silenced, since Quimet’s assertion of supremacy is all that matters (Mayock 124). Natalia briefly

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articulates the reaction his sexual dominance illicits from her. She states, “And I’d see stars” (49). Euphemistically, she alludes to the violence with which he accosts her during their sexual encounters. Her inability to directly name the torture she undergoes indicates her helplessness in this situation and perpetuates patriarchal society’s directive of silent complicity. Even after Quimet’s death and her remarriage, she fears that he will return and the violence will resume: “he’d show up and wreck everything . . . And how I’d try to follow him around explaining that it was nothing . . . And he’d give me a couple of whacks that’d leave me flattened” (171). This fear of the abuser’s return hounds her for several years.3 As Spanish literary critic Maryellen Bieder notes, Rodoreda’s female characters are paralyzed by a fear that renders them incapable of reacting against the violence: “Paralysis is the principal trope for the protagonist’s feeling of entrapment. It is at once a physical paralysis that impedes her movements, an emotional paralysis that thwarts her self-representation, and a psychic paralysis that blocks her resolve to abandon a destructive relationship” (93). Therefore, after his death, memories of Quimet’s abuse still haunt Natalia. An even more detailed description of the exploitation of male/female relationships and violence is revealed in Camellia Street. This novel narrates the life and loves of the orphaned Cecília who runs away from home and turns to prostitution to survive. As a child, her adoptive parents, Magdalena and Jaume, ingrain in Cecília that improper behavior will elicit corporal punishment. When she escapes the house, Señora Magdalena gives her “such a hard slap that I had a nosebleed all morning. After that they locked me in a lot, but I could always escape” (32). Not only is physical discipline an acceptable castigation for disobedience, but so is immurement. These acts typical of abusive situations have the purpose of breaking the victim’s spirit. This establishes the pattern of physical violence, confinement, and rebellion, which is repeated in most of Cecília’s relationships. Similarly, Cecília’s romantic relationships are characterized by violence and isolation as “punishment.” An example is the jealousy of her first lover Eusebi, who is enraged on finding Cecília flirting with their neighbor, Andrés. Cecília narrates, “[he] kicked my ass so hard I didn’t stop till I reached the bed, and then he came and tore my dress off. I didn’t know if he wanted to make love or murder me, but after standing there thinking with the dress in one hand he suddenly opened the trunk, threw the dress inside, and locked it. Then he dragged the trunk outside and left, yelling that now I’d stay put” (54–55).4 Not only does he corporally punish her, but he also imprisons her in the shack. The fact that he removes her clothes leaves her with no possibility of flight. Cecília’s nakedness in this scene serves to emphasize her imposed helplessness and vulnerability.

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Her next relationship with Cosme also acquires abusive characteristics. Cosme keeps her confined to his small living quarters. Even when she leaves this controlled, asphyxiating space, he spies on her (84). Cosme further governs her by monitoring her attire and forbidding her to wear make-up (80). Cosme’s alternation between kindness and aggression actuates his control over her and creates a bond between them. Sociologist Liz Kelly observes that violence is deemed acceptable by society if the woman’s behavior seems to provoke it (69). When she adorns a new outfit with a red rose in her hair, “without asking his permission” (81) and thus draws the attention of other men, Cosme flies into a jealous rage. The next day he retaliates against her: “he tried to knock me out by throwing me down the stairs and I went tumbling down and fell on my backside. For two years, when the weather changed, the bottom bone of my spine would ache” (82). MacKinnon indicates that since women, until recently, have been perceived as “property,” the disciplining of rebellious females in private was a common practice in society as it was viewed as maintaining control over one’s “property” (43). Cosme’s constant questioning and accusations drive Cecília back to the streets. After two years she flees to Paulina’s house because, “if I went back, I’d be doomed forever, how one day he’d thrown me down the stairs, how just thinking about it made me sick how I was fed up . . .” (85). With this brave act Cecília tries to break the cycle of mental and physical abuse. Nonetheless, she then enters her most violent relationship. Cecília’s relationship with Marc mirrors many of the phases Lenore Walker outlines in The Battered Woman. As a mistress, Cecília has a marginal role in the social economy. A mistress is to be available to satisfy her lover’s needs and in return she receives financial remuneration. Yet the role is marginal since this arrangement is held outside the bounds of the marital contract. Consequently, the mistress has no rights or legal recourse. Marc chooses Cecília because she is socially, sexually, and physically inferior. She becomes the currency for exchange in their relationship. Marc provides housing and financial resources, and Cecília provides her body. Marc’s attitude toward her is evident from the beginning, “We’ll make Cecília over, we’ll dress her and undress her, we’ll make her laugh and make her cry” (90). He treats her as a doll with which he will play and even manipulate to his content. Marc tries to isolate Cecília from others as if she were a toy he could easily place in a closet when he tires of playing. He sets her up in a small apartment with a balcony encaged in glass, and does not take her out. The metaphorical significance of this confinement is that she is being held captive, yet the strictures that bind her are invisible. When she does venture out onto the streets, he reprimands her and uses other recourses to

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keep her in the house. Marc tries to control her actions through depriving her of her sleep, phoning her, and making unexpected nocturnal visits (99). Marc also abuses Cecília mentally and fosters her dependency by threatening to end their relationship and inciting jealousy over his devotion to his wife and children (93). Other forms of mental abuse ensue such as the ringing door bell, the prank phone calls, the movement of knick knacks in the apartment, the game of the crooked doormat, the planting of photographs in the apartment, and the spying on her by the neighbor, the tailor, and the brown car. With all of these strategies, Marc seeks to have Cecília obey him, stay at home and wait for him. Cecília responds rebelliously to his mind games by continuing to leave the house, buying and wearing a provocative pink dress, and dining with the general, an acquaintance she made on one of her outings. When Marc’s attempts to control Cecília fail, he feels he must resort to violence to crush Cecília’s resistance. Marc’s retaliation against Cecília’s disobedience is brutal and foreshadowed by the photograph of the stormy sea, which she interprets to mean death. Cecília, desperate to escape Marc’s abuse, abandons the apartment with Eladi. While she recuperates at Eladi’s apartment, he plies her with alcohol and confiscates her clothes so that she cannot flee (126).5 There Cecília is reduced to an animalistic state in which she has her basic needs met; she eats, sleeps, and drinks. At this time she is being completely controlled. The alcohol inhibits her ability to be rational, while her nakedness keeps her caged. In this state, her vulnerability is exposed, and Cecília becomes the object of the male gaze. Thus, eroticized she is cut off from subjectivity, desire, and action (Dawson 305). The transgression, which begins with gazing, quickly escalates as the men Eladi brings gang rape her (129). Her inebriated state does not allow her to defend herself or record much of what occurs, only that a “shadow” approaches her, and “did what he wanted with me” (129). The sexual act here represented only expresses the males’ desires and the lack of acquiescence by the female. As MacKinnon, a lawyer and feminist activist, points out, “Consent is supposed to be women’s form of control over intercourse, different from but equal to the custom of male initiative. Man proposes, woman disposes” (45). Bieder also observes the interrelationship, which exists between violence to the body and silence, “For the women in Rodoreda’s fiction, control over the body is intimately associated with control over language” (87). Gang raped, Cecília is no longer in command of her body; in an inebriated state, her language—power to reason or protest—is lost. In her study of The Time of the Doves, Ellen Mayock links the black color in the text to the protagonist’s silence, voicelessness, and powerlessness. Mayock extends the silence found in the novel to that of the repression of “voice” during the post–Civil War years. Certainly, Cecília’s raped body could be a metaphor for Catalonia,

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heavily bombarded at the end of the Civil War and mistreated during the early Francoist period. The strain of the continual rape provokes Cecília’s nervous breakdown. She begins to imagine herself in a cemetery where tombs bear her name (130). In this dream world she finds refuge from the violence, but during the hallucinations, she periodically perceives the rape as “day and night, and the cold between my legs and the shadow flitting in one door and out the other” (132). The induced stupor causes her only to register the sensorial values of touch and sight. Because of this repeated assault on her body she slits her wrists to end the horror (132). Yet her attempt to control her life is unsuccessful because Eladi returns Cecília to Marc’s apartment for her final humiliation and justification of his abuse. Thus, Marc uses language as an instrument of power in what Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal has defined as “the fundamental struggle to enforce and strengthen dissymmetrical (unequal) power relations” (18). This scene of the end of their affair encapsulates the mental and physical abuse she has had to endure. As the action progresses, the violence and commotion slowly ebb and what is left is silence, “No one said a word, like the car was full of corpses” (135). When he abandons her on the street, he marks her as a whore by placing the diamond cross around her neck (136). This cross, similar to the one that María Cinta wore and Cecília as a child aspires to have, is symbolic of her concubinary. Not only does Marc take away Cecília’s will to live, but he also further reduces her status as a woman. Marc’s final beating causes her to miscarry the child conceived during the gang rape, and as a result she becomes sterile. Thus, Marc manages to take away from her part of her identity as a woman. Yet the debasement of female protagonists at the hands of male characters representative of patriarchal society reaches its exacerbated peak in Rodoreda’s short narrative work “The Salamander.” The prevalent view held by many critics of this story is that it centers “around a love triangle with the two types of women facing off in a fight over a single man” (Nichols “Sex” 173). Yet, an alternative reading of the text could be proposed, which reveals not a love story, but a violent transgression. In the initial scene of the story, the young girl is walking under the willow tree by the pond. The second line of the story records how the idyllic nature turns into a hostile environment with the appearance of the frogs. The frogs, traditionally associated with fertility and lasciviousness, insistently tug on her undergarment, and serve as alter egos for the men in town who petition favors from the young girl. Unable to express her feelings about these advances, she projects onto the water her emotions and “the water’d grow sadder and sadder, and the trees on the hillside slowly darkened” (3).6 The increasing darkness described foreshadows the impending male aggression,

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as has been seen in the previously mentioned works. The water, which is also a life-giving element, has traditionally been associated with the feminine and in this instance adopts the feelings of the young girl. The image of the shattering of the self often experienced after a rape is evoked when “the water’s mirror shattered into little pieces.” Spanish literary critic Kathleen Glenn sees the water as a symbol of the unconscious and female side of one’s personality (“Muted” 136). The man who shatters the water is not attributed a distinct form, but is referred to as a “shadow,” similar to the portrayal of the rape in Camellia Street. The girl’s running through the woods is not flirtatious cavorting, but an attempt to evade danger, just as Natalia did when fleeing from Quimet. Glenn sees the unemotional tone used in the narration as heightening “the impact of the story and throws into high relief those few occasions when she mentions her fright and anguish” (139). The fear intensifies when the action comes to a standstill: “[e]verything was quiet.” This still-framing technique sets the stage for the rape that is about to occur. The idyllic nature setting established at the beginning of the narration is metamorphosed. The beauty and vitality of the willow are now transformed into an object of incapacitation when her aggressor pins the young woman against the tree: “He planted himself in front of me, with his arms stretched out on both sides so I could not escape. And then, looking into my eyes, he pressed me against the willow and with my hair all disheveled, between him and the willow tree, I bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry out from the pain in my chest and all my bones feeling like they were about to break” (4). If this were a lovers’ tryst, or even a relationship of equals, the young girl’s reaction would be quite different. First, she would not feel the need to escape from the arms of her beloved, nor would she feel pain in her lover’s embrace. Another indicator of violence is her inability to describe the sexual act for what it is; instead it is portrayed as being “pressed.” The inclusion of the description of her hair as “disheveled” is a clear indicator that a rape has occurred.7 The violence is reemphasized by the description of the man’s oral contact with her body, “He put his mouth on my neck, and it burned where he put it” (4). The burning sensation does not convey the passion from a kiss, but shame or even repulsion. The burning feeling thus foreshadows her final demise in the fire for the acts that were committed (Rhodes 170). Male violence continues as the young girl is serially raped. The inclusion of the color “black” when they reencounter each other evokes the aggression. Again, the man restrains the girl: “He held me again against the willow trunk, and put his hand flat over my eyes” (4). Sight is not the only sense of which violence deprives her. The girl loses her sense of hearing and then her voice: “my tongue was frozen with terror, I asked him, ‘And your wife?’ And he told me, ‘You’re my wife. Only you’ ” (4). Her uttered

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words cannot be misconstrued as jealousy or caution, but an attempt to use her voice to dissuade him from the violence by evoking in him a sense of loyalty to his wife and thus liberate the protagonist from his sexual assault. The transgression continues as he seeks her out in other places, such as “stables, under haystacks, in the woods with the roots” (4). The girl’s denial of acquiescence is obvious in the setting of the violence. The violence against the young girl does not cease, even after his wife discovers them; instead, it multiplies. Soon the townspeople join in the harassment of the young girl by ostracizing her, insulting her, stoning her, defacing her home, and nailing dead animals to her door. Their hatred culminates in the final communal violence of the burning of her home and her body at the stake. Even when she is transformed into her animal state, the violence is repeated as the man’s wife once again accosts her, the children again lapidate her, and even the eels appear at the pond replacing the bothersome frogs.8 As suggested by Janet Pérez, the eels’ abuse of the salamander implies the abuse men foist upon the outcast woman (195). The evolution of the men from frogs to eels is easy to understand since she has been forcibly initiated into the adult world as the victim of male sexual aggression. Therefore the lecherous frogs are transformed into animals that more closely resemble the phallus. In this case, the eels dismember her, removing her hand, a symbol of supremacy or power. In her Freudian essay “The Medusa’s Head,” feminist theoretician Hélène Cixous argues that disfiguration and decapitation of female figures by patriarchal males is a displacement of male castration anxiety. Thus, the loss of the hand serves as a punishment or retaliation for the castration the males feel at her thwarting their advances. The circularity of the narration brings us back to the point of departure of the story. Perhaps this is done to show that violence is cyclical or perhaps that if one’s voice is not heard, transgressions will be perpetuated. The violence registered in “The Salamander” is the most extreme of these three texts due to the progressive destruction of the protagonist. First, she is raped and loses her own self-worth. Then, she is ostracized by others and loses her communal identity. Finally, the dismemberment by the eels connotes the destruction of her physical form and loss of corporal identity. This escalating cycle of violence that some victimized women experience does not allow any escape. The Role of Naming The violence toward the protagonists in these stories seems to be activated by their designation in the text. Feminist critic Molly Hite notes that names “both identify and constitute identity” (39). Therefore, when the male characters name the females as “wife,” “whore,” or “witch” they are

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attributing to them the generalized characteristics prescribed for these names. All of these names denote marginalized status and are only associated with women. In The Time of the Doves, Quimet acquires power through language predicting that “by New Year’s I’d be his wife and his queen” (17). Ironically, he uses the word “queen” to describe Natalia’s new position. It implies a power that she will never have, because as his “wife” she is to be seen and not heard. The marriage establishes a new hierarchical relationship in which he is the dominator and she is the subordinate. It is also at this time when Quimet renames her “Colometa,” his little dove, instead of accepting her name, Natalia. Even though she argues angrily, he overrules her as he has already classified her as his “wife.” He then reasserts his decision that she “could only have one name: Colometa” (18). Kathleen Glenn defines this act as “merely the first in a series of acts of aggression against her sense of identity and individuality” (“Muted” 61). Wyers believes that for Natalia “the beginning of her narration is also her silencing” (303). Natalia, by responding to “Colometa,” gives him not only verbal dominance, but also complete sovereignty. His naming her “wife” also redefines the parameters of treatment she receives in Spanish society. She loses her identity as a nubile girl to be viewed only as the “wife” or “second class citizen” in the marital economy. In this case, given Quimet’s archaic views of male spousal domination, he uses the appellation “wife” to justify the domestic violence. In Camellia Street, Cecília is treated as an inferior to other characters because she is a prostitute. During one of their fights, Cosme, the first to label Cecília a prostitute, accuses her, “‘How did you make a living?’ he kept asking. ‘From those blouses? That’s a lie!’” (82). Cosme is not the only one to remark negatively about her profession. Marc also brands her as such when he gives her the diamond cross. Throughout the ages, the position that the prostitute held in Western society has been tenuous, and until the seventeenth century the range of attitudes surrounding the profession ranged from severity to liberality.9 Once bourgeois morality became entrenched in society, an imposed silence surrounded this figure. Victorian morality, religion, and male chauvinism reigned supreme and colored the concept of women. Thus, bourgeois sexual ethics supported by religious teachings, recognized marriage as the only suitable framework for a sexual relationship (McCombs 33). In general, degradation, double standards, sexism, and stern justice have hounded the whore since prostitution violates the one mandate expected of women: that they remain chaste and constant. The prostitute is defined as a woman who offers to sell her body for indiscriminate sexual intercourse. The key word in this definition is “indiscriminate,” which seems to imply that she will do anything, even endure violence, for financial remuneration. Since she sells her body for

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consumption, many believe they have the right to treat her in any fashion they choose. When the couple is caught copulating in “The Salamander,” the wife brands the young girl a “witch.” The labeling of another as a “witch” transfers pressure and attention from the namer to the named (Bovenschen 86). By denominating the girl “witch,” the wife negates the shortcomings in her own relationship with her husband and casts all blame on the girl as seductress. The wife’s use of “witch” is apropos as witches were associated with unbridled female sexual power. Witches have also been feared as they had the power to defy the laws of nature through levitation, psychokinesis, influencing natural phenomena, causing illness, accidents or death, and lycanthropy. The Church in its zealous attempts to eradicate any vestiges of matrilineal society discredited witches by associating them with evil. As German literary critic Silvia Bovenschen states, “the fear and horror that the program of persecution and annihilation of heretics and witches unleashed in the populace served to restore the Church’s power” (96).10 Female power threatened the Church and the patriarchal sovereignty it held in society. The appellation of “witch” changes the status of the girl within the community, and compels the town’s people to ostracize her from it. The protagonist narrates, “the people in the village started looking at me like they didn’t see me, and some of them would cross themselves quickly when I went by. After a while, when they saw me coming they’d go into their houses and lock the doors” (4). The “witch” label also promotes further cruelty against the girl. During the act of burning her at the stake, lycanthropy occurs and the young girl metamorphosizes into a salamander. The transfigurative fire in which the witch is burned also serves as a symbol for purification (Encinar 9). In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault elaborates on the usage of torture on the body as a way of obtaining the truth (97). Thus, any means necessary was permissible as long as a confession from the heretic reinstated the beliefs of the people with an admission of guilt. The event transformed into a spectacle, in which the entire town participated in celebrating their common values. Yet, the young girl does not confess to anything and barely understands what is occurring to her. Even her transformation is incomprehensible to her until someone calls her a “salamander.” Factors that Allow the Abuse Another factor key to these characters’ vulnerability is their status as orphans. As suggested by literary critic Nancy Miller, the choice of a female orphan as a protagonist “offers narrational fringe benefits because social insecurity is complicated by sexual vulnerability: the orphan-heroine

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constitutes a predictive series of blanks to be filled in” (5). In Natalia’s case, although she does have a father, Natalia is “huérfana de madre,” that is she is considered an orphan within the Spanish culture because her mother is deceased. Once he remarries she narrates, “there was nothing left for me to hold onto” (28). Natalia describes her existence in her own home as that of a boarder. With no parental protection, Quimet easily assumes a domineering role in her life. As an orphan, she will be easier to silence as she does not have anyone in whom to confide and alone must confront the injustices perpetrated upon her. In Camellia Street, Cecília’s assailability is linked to her being a foundling. Since her youth, Cecília believes that her orphaned state distinguishes her. For Cecília knowing the identity of her parents would personally fill a void within her as well as give her stature in a society that marginalizes their bastards. Señora Magdalena uses this status to castigate Cecília and shame her into better behavior. Magdalena and Jaume raise her to believe she is inferior to other girls and isolate her in order to protect her from rejection, “it’d be worse in a school with nuns because the girls would catch on right away that no one knew where I came from. And they’d treat me like dogs with puppies that won’t nurse a kitten even if you slip it under their bellies. And then they’d bully me till I left the school” (14). Yet, her caregivers publicly reject her, and Señora Magdalena quickly disavows Cecília as her daughter to others (24). In “The Salamander,” the young orphan girl becomes a target for the men of the town. Left alone after her mother is burned at the stake as a witch, the girl is forced to survive as a field laborer. With no male in her house to protect her or her honor, she is easy prey. The girl is clearly portrayed as an ingénue from the very onset of the story. Her narrative voice, with its lack of comprehension concerning the events occurring around her, indicates this. She seems to be unable to define them, uncertain of what she should say or do. Her life is guided by routine actions without a clear cause. Each time she is confronted with danger or aggression she reacts by stating her inability to move or a desire to defend herself as if she were paralyzed. This becomes patent in the burning scene when they extract her from her home, “they bound my arms and feet and left me with my skirt pulled up . . . . I watched everything through a red downpour” (6–7). The previous restraining when she was raped now evolves into the binding to burn her. Not only are these women vulnerable for being orphans, but their adolescence also constitutes a precarious stage in the development of their concept of self. In The Time of the Doves, Natalia’s lack of maternal influence affects her self-esteem. She has a painful sense of loss of the maternal figure as she states, “My mother had been dead for years and couldn’t give me advice” (16). The realization of her loss of self crystallizes when she stops before the doll shop windows. This store display is important as it

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symbolically encapsulates her lost childhood and is one she will stop by when she has to make any serious decisions about her life. Natalia’s identity loss is so profound that she states, as she gazes into a window, “I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing in the world” (38). Natalia’s thoughts demonstrate her sense of loss about herself and lack of self-worth. As Spanish literary critic Nancy Vosburg has pointed out, mirrors and their reflections are an integral part of Rodoreda’s fiction. These reflective surfaces are used in the three texts to portray the protagonists’ identity crises. This pronouncement, in front of a reflective surface, indicates the need to confirm one’s existence. The beckoning of a reflective self intensifies the solitude Natalia feels in her life, the alienation from a sense of community and her struggle for self-knowledge. The importance that the mirror holds for women has been noted by feminist literary critic Jenijoy LaBelle as a vehicle to “gain insight into the reciprocal interchanges between interiority and exteriority as these create what a woman is to herself and to her culture” (9). These reflections gain prominence when Natalia sets out to recapture her identity. As this process begins, details of Natalia’s appearance are revealed, “I dawdled and wasted time looking at myself in all the shop windows and looked at myself walking by reflected in the windows where everything was dark and shiny. My hair kept getting in my face. I’d cut it myself and washed it and now it wouldn’t stay put” (161). With this identification of the self’s image Natalia has the fortitude to look inside herself and recognize her worth once she is free from Quimet’s terrorization. Thus, she is able to finally retrace her life through the city until she carves the name “Colometa” in the door of her old apartment (196). Instead of this act being viewed as one of perpetuity, it resembles that of shedding an old skin or identity, so that she could assume her new and rightful identity as Señora Natalia. Elizabeth Scarlett views “Colometa” written on the door of her old home with Quimet as an epitaph, thus concluding that stage in her life. When she moves, that space and the name of “Colometa” cease to yield any power over her and Natalia can be “reborn.” She proceeds to the place where it all started, to the plaza de Diamante, to let out her primal scream; thus she assumes control of her life (197). Glenn sees this scream as the liberation of her “psychic confinement” (“Plaza” 65). Cecília’s concept of self is related to her outward appearances. When she sees herself in the mirror she realizes that she has transformed into a young woman, “I looked into the mirror . . . I looked in my own eyes and felt like I wasn’t alone . . . and I couldn’t describe what I felt: that I wasn’t like other people, I was different because all alone, surrounded by towels and the smell of soap outside the mirror was the loveable one and inside the one who loved her” (34–35). Cecília marks the physical changes that occurred in her body, as well as a perceived duality of her being: the exterior person who is

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attractive and loved by others, and the interior person who feels emotion. As in other works by Rodoreda, reflections abound as Cecília stares into store displays and out of café windows. As Marc’s mistress, she is converted into the desirable object for consumption, encased in the window display case that is her glassed in balcony. In this space, Cecília would spend, “hour after hour lying on an ottoman on the glassed-in porch with my back to the street, staring at a frieze on the dining room wall made of little angels and pomegranates sliced in half” (91). The pomegranate symbolically represents the story of Persephone and Hades. Persephone, who is also held captive and raped by Hades, dooms herself to be detained in the underworld by eating pomegranate seeds. This story of entrapment and rape echoes Cecília’s relationship with Marc, which becomes infernal. While she is recuperating at Esteve’s, she catches glimpses of herself in the bathroom mirror and thinks, “that woman didn’t seem like me” (142). This questioning before the mirror points to what Vosburg terms a crisis of identity, “The confrontation with the mirroring surface, characterized by disunity between self and reflected image, allows the author to dramatize and literalize a metaphor of alienation from self and society” (68). Cecília needs to see this doubling to recognize herself and her “other.” The exterior Cecília, the one that attracts men who want to possess the stunning beauty counterposes the interior Cecília with humanity. To view her body as a commodity, she puts on her diamond cross, which marks her as a prostitute. Inch by inch she assesses the value of her wares. Just as the evil queen in “Snow White” asks the mirror to confirm her beauty, this prostitute expects a price quote, “I . . . asked the mirror how much each of my bones was worth. The belly doesn’t count, the breasts are priceless, let’s leave the heart out of it. I had to live until I died. A life has a lot of days in it. I pulled myself up to my full height and told that Cecília in the mirror she’d have to do something if she didn’t want to die in a poorhouse and be buried in a pauper’s grave” (154). She bases her identity on how others perceive her. This responds to what Berger notes, in Ways of Seeing, that women assign themselves an identity based on how men who observe them will expect them to act (47). In “The Salamander,” the young girl’s concept of self is shattered when she is raped and she looks to others to define her. Her return home, after the metamorphosis in an effort to recuperate her identity, is thwarted as her house is burned down. She is then forced to do as the spiders and weave her tale in hope of reconstructing her identity (Rhodes 174). Her return to the rapist’s house seems to be her need to maintain contact with someone who knew her. At his home her inability to comprehend her identity becomes evident, even though I wasn’t dead, there was nothing inside me that was totally alive, and I prayed hard because I didn’t know if I still was a person or only

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a little animal, or if I was half person and half animal. And also I prayed to know where I was, because at times I felt like I was underwater, and when I was underwater I felt like I was on the ground, and I never knew where I really was. (10)

Her disorientation accentuates her alienation. In “The Salamander” the only reflective surface registered is that of the water in the pond. This surface bears the girl’s emotions and witnesses the transgression against her body. Once the girl is raped this surface shatters just as the girl’s identity. She ceases to return to the pond for solace as if she is unable to bear the sight of herself. When she is ostracized by the townspeople and begins to despair, she thinks of the pond, and yearns for the way she used to be before the violence began (6). The pond later becomes a refuge for her as she recuperates from her wounds and becomes accustomed to her new identity. Voicelessness In the texts there are multiple silences at play. Extratextually, we have the author’s own silence on various levels. First, Rodoreda was a woman writer in a time period during which feminine texts were implicitly and explicitly undervalued as a direct result of the author’s gender. Second, she preferred to write in Catalan, a language spoken by a relative minority, thus her texts were inaccessible to the greater public. Third, after the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda, as a supporter of the Republic, was forced into exile to a country whose language she had not mastered.11 Then, there is a period of silence of approximately twenty years, in which she does not produce or publish any works. Textually the silences are just as numerous. First, there is the inability of the characters to vocalize their needs and desires, which is caused by the males’ domination and abuse of these protagonists. Second, there is the narrative voice in which Rodoreda chooses to portray her characters’ stories. She grants control to the women to tell their own story by choosing a first-person narration. Third, through the utilization of rhetorical devices such as anaphora, ellipsis, metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, the violence in the texts is silenced or at least attenuated. The violence that is perpetrated upon these women causes them to slowly lose their voices. The men gain verbal dominance over the women by manipulation until they reduce them to silence. After renaming Natalia as “Colometa” and his “wife,” Quimet systematically silences Natalia as he imposes himself verbally. Her opinions, which she ventures to offer at the beginning of their relationship, have no value and over time she stops

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giving them. When they go out with his friends she feels excluded from their conversations and invisible to them (28). Even while she is suffering the final months of her pregnancy, Quimet tries to shift the attention from her onto him by developing a leg ailment and upon which he fixates so she self-censors her complaints about the discomfort and pains of pregnancy (101). Many times she states that she does not say anything for fear of how he will react. The quintessence of verbal domination in The Time of the Doves occurs in the scene where Quimet insists Natalia has been seeing Pere behind his back. He verbally manipulates her denial to construe it as an admission of guilt. Desperate to please, she agrees to say anything to put an end to the scolding. He further humiliates her by asking her to kneel before him to ask for his forgiveness. Though she refuses, he says he will accept her “mental kneeling” as her wish to be forgiven by him. Her eroded selfesteem results in her acquiescence to Quimet’s tyranny. Hence, she accepts Quimet’s views and designs for her life. While others speak, Natalia’s own speechlessness marks her alienation from her new life. Natalia will be reduced to passively listening to others’ tales. Later when she runs into her old boyfriend, Pere, she avoids him, and averts her gaze when they speak unable to articulate for him “all my secrets and all my pain” (56). When Señora Enriqueta asks Natalia about her sexual experiences, Natalia never answers and instead deflects the conversation to other topics. Her silence on this topic indicates that verbalizing the violence would in fact confirm that she permitted the violence to occur. Natalia seems to be a creature that is subordinate to language as she herself has trouble evoking any words and exists in her own world of thoughts and silence. Wyers has noted this as, “This book, all about words, is about speechlessness communicated in a language that is itself, at the time of its writing, being eradicated” (304). Natalia finds herself trapped by the institution that is supposed to protect and nurture her and her children. Natalia claims that she understands the silence that exists in marital life because it is what engulfed her parents’ relationship: “She and my father spent many years quarreling and many more not even speaking to each other. They’d spend Sunday afternoons sitting in the dining room, not saying a word. When my mother died, the silence got even bigger” (26). The fact that her parents’ marriage, as she witnessed it, was “without words” points to the only possible role of women in the patriarchal world: silence and consequently a lack of communication (Carbonell 20). Her silences are so deep that they echo in the self-estrangement that she perceives in her own body. When Natalia states, “I thought more than I said and I thought things you can’t tell anyone and I didn’t say anything,” she points to her inability to articulate and utilize language to break the silence (200). Her silence announces her powerlessness and passivity.

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Of the three protagonists, only Cecília attempts to voice her objections to the violence and abuse she suffers. Unfortunately for her, the men with whom she associates are not interested in a woman who vocalizes her displeasure. Her confrontations with her lovers lead to physical retribution. In these passive–aggressive relationships, Cecília irritates her lovers by disregarding their “suggestions” to stay home. When Cecília tries to voice her objections about the apartment or her qualms about being spied upon, Marc is condescending toward her and disregards her concerns. She silences her qualms as she fears Marc will consider her insane (105). As time progresses and the mental and physical abuse augments, she becomes insecure and fears articulating anything. Cecília finally reaches a breaking point due to lack of sleep and the accumulation of mental abuse. In her relationships when she is “dumb enough to tell him,” this information gets thrown in her face, so she learns to be more guarded (80). In “The Salamander,” the voice of the young girl is muted from the beginning of the story. What is interesting is that her voice is directly recorded but one time. The literary theoretician Jacques Derridà believes that which is absent is as important as what is present in all narrative processes (145). In this short story, her lack of voice seems to reflect her insignificance to the community in which she lives as she is an orphan and a woman. Her only attempt to communicate is with the rapist, reminding him of his marital obligations hoping to dissuade him from violating her. When this attempt fails, her voice is not recorded again. The young girl only passively notes all the disparaging remarks against her without retorting. When her life is threatened by violence a second time, her attenuated voice is documented indirectly, “I told them I wouldn’t go with them” (6). Even her plaint when they are taking her to be burned is reduced to “I screamed.” No exact utterances are captured because her voice is irrelevant. What is ironic here is that the young girl who has been raped is being punished for an act of which she was the victim. The aggressor on the other hand is relieved of all blame by the fact that the wife applies the moniker of “witch” to the girl. The lawful wife—whose rights and privileges are bestowed upon her by the patriarchal institution of marriage—is the bearer of the “official story,” whereas the victim is humiliated and ostracized from society. Silence is all that is left for Rodoreda’s protagonists as they recognize that language has failed them and communication is impossible (Bieder 82). A tension is established between language and silence. As feminist literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim, Both body language and resonant silence, however, seek to overthrow (or, in the Derridean sense, reenverser) the “hierarchized” sets of binary oppositions

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which thinkers like Cixous and Irigaray see as the basic structures of patriarchal psycholinguistics—“Superior/Inferior, Activity/Passivity, Culture/ Nature, Father/Mother” all of which signify “Man/Woman” and all of which, therefore, degrade women while, by identifying her with the other (the inferior, the passive, the unconscious, the material, the earth), they deprive her of linguistic authority. (518)

If these women do not label or speak of the violence, then it will cease to exist. The naming of violence, however, would acknowledge and validate it. Thus, silence and exile are their fate. The identities of women in a culture are constituted by social roles, cultural practices, and material experiences; yet the linguistic code that constructs much of her identity is dominated by men (Fleckenstein 107). Thus, by choosing a first-person narrative, the female writer provides an open space to rescript experiences. The narrative voice used in The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, and “The Salamander” is a first-person inner monologue. The protagonists narrate in first person to unknown listeners/ narratees some of the thoughts and perceptions of their ordinary life. Absent are references to emotions; as a result, these omissions are more moving than any portrayal of grief or rage (Glenn “Plaza” 66). Wyers notes of Natalia’s limited voice: “She cannot categorize or judge; she does not tell us about her violence but she describes her violent acts. Nor does she reflect on her position as a woman; she simply puts it before us” (307). The subjective point of view also allows the reader to identify the emotions and perceptions of the protagonist. According to Fleckenstein, “A woman’s rhetorical evocation of first person . . . may in and of itself constitute an act of rebellion, and act of selfishness” (113). The exclusion of the male voice in these narratives must fulfill the purpose of restoring the voice and identity of these women. Since the male voice is not registered, then, the emphasis of the stories centers on the mutilated bodies of the women. Language Historically there has been a distinction between the “common” mother tongue or materna lingua that coexisted with the “civilized” male speech or patrius sermo. In Latin, one language was reserved for the male realm of the senate and written texts and the vernacular tongue was used in daily speech. Although this tongue was perceived as “uneducated,” the rise of the vernacular language promoted the concept of “mother nation.” There is no identification in these stories of a “patria” or “fatherland” because throughout the narration, the spatial denominators dissolve as they are mentioned less frequently. The specific spatial markers fade or ebb away

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as the protagonist’s own identity does. All three protagonists revisit their past in an effort not only to find their bearings, but to reconstruct their life and overcome their feelings of “exile” or alienation. For Nichols, there exist two exilic syntagms in Rodoreda’s writing: expulsion and expatriation: For Rodoreda conceived of all adult life as a form of exile, whether lived within or without the borders of one’s native country. Adulthood, particularly womanhood, is the stage that follows expulsion from the garden of childhood; the adolescent is banished and may not return. It is around this universal experience of exile that all of Rodoreda’s novels are structured. In many of her short stories, on the other hand, she deals with a particular historic form of exile, that of the Catalan’s expatriation after the fall of the Republic. The two formulations of the exile experience are complementary. (“Exile” 407)

Although none of the protagonists in these works is exiled, per se, there exists an emphasis on the protagonists’ sense of alienation from their identity, their bodies, and their voices. Rodoreda utilizes many literary tropes to depict the violence and alienation in these works. By utilizing these literary recourses, the violence of the transgression is silenced or attenuated.12 Rodoreda relies on the figurative language to illustrate what she cannot specifically describe. These recourses serve to ironically underscore the presence of certain “unmentionables” in patriarchal discourse. The narrator never interprets or analyzes any of this figurative language, granting these women the right to communicate in their own voice. The usage of these tropes can also be linked to a defamiliarization with language, which indicates the state of alienation felt by the writer, and thus, Rodoreda is able to create a discourse of exile. These tropes have been linked to methods utilized by other exiled writers to create tension, which reflects “the pain and ambivalence of exile” (Laurila 177). Thus through a choice of narrative voice and rhetorical devices, Rodoreda is able to portray the alienation of exile. The violence against women, then, depicts the pain of those “exiled” outside of their bodies. Conclusion The inclusion of violence against women in a literary text crystallizes awareness of gender oppression and brings this problem to the forefront in the social culture. The depiction of repeated abuse, suffered by women, indicates that perhaps patriarchal society is at fault by tolerating and implicitly endorsing these actions. Rodoreda’s protagonists are imprisoned in a social and textual space that silences them. The reduced space

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manages to control the actions and even the thoughts of the characters. An ironic feature of Rodoreda’s narratives is that they follow Showalter’s adaptation of Bakhtin’s concept of the “double voiced discourse” since the protagonists’ muted voices become the dominant ones, whereas the “official” voices of the males are filtered in the text. The voice that emerges from these texts, then, is one of resistance, a resistance to the oppression and abuse that women suffer under patriarchal rule. Women redefine the traditional power relationships by being subversive in the text and in life. According to Foucault, power is not just domination but a network of force relationships with some expected resistance (History of Sexuality 93). Nichols describes these women as triomfadoras because they “impose the shape of their desire on the world around them. In a metaphorical sense, all . . . may be seen . . . [as] women who have seized control of the signifier” (“Writers” 171). In unison, their voices call out to others to end their pain and to hear the female story. The Catalonian author accomplishes what Virginia Woolf envisions in A Room of One’s Own, for Rodoreda is a female writer who is able to overcome the oppression of the patriarchal construct by recording the thoughts and dreams of silenced women.13 Notes 1. I would disagree with Rhodes’s assertion that most of Rodoreda’s women are “willing participants in their own downfall” due to “a perverse but powerful attachment they feel to those who are responsible for destroying them” (181). Fear of violence is what forces these women to submit and remain with their aggressors, as well as the fact that these characters are victims of learned helplessness. 2. Many of these tactics promote the Stockholm syndrome in which the hostage or victim forms an emotional attachment to and dependence on the captor. For a more detailed study of this please consult Detmer’s work. 3. This is also observed multiple times in Camellia Street when Cecília thinks about the possible return of her abusive lovers. 4. It also occurs with a slight variation with the sailor she meets. 5. This is reminiscent of Eusebi’s treatment of her when she lives with him in the shack. 6. Encinar notes that in Rodoreda’s writing flora and fauna are fundamental. Nature adopts the feelings of the characters to express them (6). 7. Alan Dessen in Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpretations has noted that disheveled hair was prescribed in numerous English plays of the Shakespearian time period for female characters, “distraught with madness, shame and extreme grief of the effects of recent violence” (36–37).

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Also Showalter, in “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” presents a rereading of this character’s sensuality and notes, “In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the stage direction that a woman enters with disheveled hair indicates that she might either be mad or the victim of a rape” (700). For the cyclical characteristics please see the insightful study by Rhodes. In Ancient Greece there was a regimented hierarchy of whores in which the highest representative was the highly respected hetaera, a prostitute with an impeccable pedigree. The hetaerae dispensed companionship and pleasure, reserving wives and marriage for the legitimization of children. This “golden age” of prostitution soon fell into decay and the power of the hetaera diminished. As time progressed the prostitute became a figure of dissolve. Only her successor, the courtesan, maintained a small amount of her former influence. Thus the Church intended to eradicate the bond between women and nature. The Marian cult vindicated the docile women of society and the more rebellious received the moniker of “witch.” This duality later evolved into the figure of the mother, the possessor of many virtues, and the prostitute, the assertive woman. Glenn summarizes Rodoreda’s personal marginality: “as a woman, as a Catalan who, moreover, wrote in Catalan, and as an exile who was ostracized by some members of the exile community because of her relationship with Armand Obiols” (“Autobiography” 112). The rhetorical devices most frequently relied upon are anaphora, ellipsis, metaphor, irony, metonymy, and synecdoche. This is by no means an exhaustive study of the rhetorical devices in Rodoreda, but only a few brief examples to reinforce my point. In all the texts there is the anaphoric usage of the verbs “know” and “understand,” which are negated. This denotes the lack of comprehension on the part of the protagonists to what is occurring to them. Also there is the reiterative conjunction of the polysyndeton and conveying the protagonists’ lack of self-assuredness. The detailed descriptions of the rape scenes form ellipses in the text. Bieder notes that Woolf believed female writers could catch “those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex” (88).

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Viking Penguin, 1972.

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Bieder, Maryellen. “Silent Woman: Language in Mercè Rodoreda.” In Voices and Visions: The Words and Works of Mercè Rodoreda. Ed. Kathleen McNerney. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 80–97. Bovenschen, Silvia. “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch, and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of Domination of Nature.” New German Critique 15 (1978): 82–119. Carbonell, Neus. “In the Name of the Mother and the Daughter: The Discourse of Love and Sorrow in Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del Diamant.” In The Garden across the Border: Mercè Rodoreda’s Fiction. Ed. Kathleen McNerney and Nancy Vosburg. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 17–30. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration and Decapitation.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. Russell Ferguson et al. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. 345–56. Dawson, Anthony B. “Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 27.2 (1987): 303–20. Derridà, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatari Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976. Dessen, Allan. Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpretations. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984. Detmer, Emily. “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.3 (1997): 273–94. Encinar, Ángeles. “Mercè Rodoreda: hacia una fantasía liberadora.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 11 (1986): 1–10. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Resistance, Women, and Dismissing the ‘I.’” Rhetoric Review 17.1 (1998): 107–25. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality.” New Literary History 16.3 (1985): 515–43. Glenn, Kathleen. “La plaza del Diamante: The Other Side of the Story.” Letras Femeninas 12.1–2 (1986): 60–68. ———. “Muted Voices in Mercè Rodoreda’s La meva Cristina i altres contes.” Catalan Review 2.2 (1987): 131–42. ———. “The Autobiography of a Nobody: Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies.” In The Garden across the Border: Mercè Rodoreda’s Fiction. Ed. Kathleen McNerney and Nancy Vosburg. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 110–18. Hess, Josefina. “La subjetividad femenina en Aloma, La calle de las Camelias, y La plaza del Diamante de Mercè Rodoreda.” Alba de América 11.20–21 (1993): 281–90. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Kelly, Liz. Surviving Sexual Violence. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

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LaBelle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Laurila, Marketta. “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile.” In International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Anne E. Broen and Maryanne E. Gooze. Westport: Greenwood P, 1995. 177–95. Lionnet, Françoise. “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Gayl Jones, and Bessie Head.” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 132–52. MacKinnon, Catherine A. “Rape: On Coercion and Consent.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 42–58. Mayock, Ellen. “Black and Blue: Silence and Voice in Mercè Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant.” Monographic Review 16 (2002): 120–34. McCombs, Nancy. Earth Spirit, Victim, or Whore? The Prostitute in German Literature, 1880–1925. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Miller, Nancy. The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Nichols, Geraldine Cleary. “Exile, Gender, and Mercè Rodoreda.” MLN 101.2 (1986): 405–17. ———. “Sex and the Single Girl, and Other Mésalliances in Rodoreda and Laforet.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporanea 12.1–2 (1987): 123–40. ———. “Writers, Wantons, Witches: Woman and the Expression of Desire in Rodoreda.” Catalan Review 2.2 (1987): 171–80. Pérez, Janet. “Metamorphosis as a Protest Device in Catalan Feminist Writing: Rodoreda and Oliver.” Catalan Review 2.2 (1987): 181–98. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “The Salamander and the Butterfly.” In The Garden across the Border: Mercè Rodoreda’s Fiction. Ed. Kathleen McNerney and Nancy Vosburg. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 162–87. Rodoreda, Mercè. The Time of the Doves. Trans. David Rosenthal. St. Paul: Greywolf P, 1980. ———. My Christina and Other Stories. Trans. David Rosenthal. St. Paul: Greywolf P, 1984. ———. Camellia Street. Trans. David Rosenthal. St. Paul: Greywolf P, 1993. Scarlett, Elizabeth. “ ‘Vincluada a les flors’: Flower and the Body in Jardí vora el mar and Mirall trencat.” In The Garden across the Border: Mercè Rodoreda’s Fiction. Ed. Kathleen McNerney and Nancy Vosburg. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 73–84. ———. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia and Geoffrey Hartman Parker. New York: Methuen, 1985. 694–710. Vosburg, Nancy. “Reflections: Spaces of Self-Knowledge in Rodoreda’s Fiction.” Voices and Visions: The Words and Works of Mercè Rodoreda. Ed. Kathleen McNerney. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999. 63–79. Walker, Leonore. The Battered Woman. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

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Woolf, Virgina. “Professions for Women.” In The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 276–82. ———. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957. Wyers, Frances. “A Woman’s Voices: Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del Diamant.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 30.3 (1983): 301–09.

THE FOUR FREE WALLS OF PARIS: NIVARIA TEJERA’S EXILES IN ESPERO LA NOCHE PARA SOÑARTE, REVOLUCIÓN María Hernández-Ojeda

Artists have the necessity, right and duty to be revolutionary in their work, to live their complex life in plenitude, their contradictions, in order to create something new. Nivaria Tejera, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución1

ivaria Tejera, who was born in Cuba in 1933, lived her childhood in the Canary Islands, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Her adolescence coincided with the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Later, Tejera worked as a Cultural Attaché to the Cuban Revolution in Paris and Rome. Since 1965, Tejera has been an exile in Paris. This Cuban-Canarian writer’s multiple exiles are revealed in Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. My transatlantic reading of this text will establish Nivaria Tejera’s writing as a space of resistance in which the author subverts authority by trespassing political, national, literary, linguistic, gender, and genre borders. Immediately following the Revolution of 1959, Cuban-Canarian writer Nivaria Tejera took one of the first flights from Paris to Havana in order to work for the new government in Cuba (Saladrigas 37–38). Six years later, the author resigned her position as Cultural Attaché in Rome and moved to Paris, where she presently resides. Her dream of a revolution turned into a nightmare of four free walls of exile, seemingly liberating yet more suffocating than incarceration itself. The expression “four free walls” is taken from Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. The third person-narrator

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describes how the main character “she” is now free inside four free walls: “Sólo que París ya no es una fiesta ni New York una babel de hierro. Se acabó todo. Cuba, el sueño final de la revolución fue soñado” (Only that Paris is no longer a party, neither New York is an iron babel. It is all over. Cuba, the final dream of the Revolution is no longer a dream; Espero 12). Nivaria Tejera’s Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (2002), represents the author’s most direct criticism written about the Castro government. This testimonial novel/essay/poem is an inspirational work of art with innovative style and ethical commitment. The author seeks poetic movements of unconsciousness and destroys the rules of language in an expression of freedom. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explores the mechanisms of poetic discourse: So within this saturated if not already closed socio-symbolic order, poetry— more precisely, poetic language—reminds us of its eternal function: to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it. The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poetic language practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means of its transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution. (81)

Thus, poetic language threatens and challenges authority by entering the socio-symbolic order2 from the realms of the semiotic. Nivaria Tejera’s words, always poetic and subversive, become the only way to liberate a long life of repression. In addition to her literary value, the unique perspective of a woman who worked inside the Cuban Revolution originates a testimonial jewel of the Literature of Displacement and Exile. Cuban critic and writer Madeline Cámara states: Tejera es una de las voces más originales y poderosas en la novelística cubana actual. La novela [. . .] será sin duda la revelación definitiva de una escritura lúcida e innovadora sobre la dictadura castrista y el exilio, cuyos juicios al respecto son los más críticos y profundos que ha formulado un escritor cubano sobre el controvertido tema. (Cámara 13)3 [Tejera is one of the most original and powerful voices in contemporary Cuban narrative. This novel will be the definitive revelation of a lucid and innovative writing about Castro’s dictatorship and exile. The author expresses the most critical and profound judgments offered by a Cuban writer about this controversial topic.]

Besides its testimonial value, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución moves beyond the traditional master novel and questions the repression of all

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regimes that oppose free artistic creation, using a most effective weapon: the poetic word. In fact, all of Nivaria Tejera’s works constitute one single creative force, where exile is the common link. This essay focuses on the political and literary exiles discovered and inhabited by Nivaria Tejera. The author not only denounces her experience in the Cuban Revolution but also uncovers her transoceanic life and work marked by dictators. The reader learns of the author’s political exile as well as her exclusion from the Spanish-speaking literary world. The multiplicity of Nivaria Tejera’s exiles is contested through her word, creating anti-dogmatic literature as a cathartic experience of liberation. A transatlantic reading of Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución will reveal the author’s writing as a plural space of resistance. Understanding the artist’s transatlantic condition is crucial to investigate her life and work. Nivaria Tejera was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1933. Three years later, the family moved to her father’s birthplace in Tenerife, Canary Islands. Saturnino Tejera, journalist and poet, was imprisoned for almost ten years by the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The writer states: En 1944, mi madre, mi hermano y yo nos fuimos de Tenerife, en barco, hacia Cuba. Mi padre pudo hacerlo después como polizón en un carguero, ayudado por José Clavijo, el Cónsul cubano en Tenerife y amigo de él en la época universitaria. Me fui de Canarias con la incertidumbre de dejar atrás a mi padre, sin saber si él podría seguirnos hasta Cuba. (Navarrete) [In 1944, my mother, my brother and I left Tenerife on a boat for Cuba. My father was able to escape later as a stowaway on a freighter, helped by José Clavijo, the Cuban Consul in Tenerife. I left the Canary Islands with the uncertainty to leave my father behind, ignoring if he could follow us to Cuba.]

In 1954, during Fulgencio Batista’s regime, Nivaria Tejera decided to flee to Paris at the age of twenty-one, escaping from another dictatorial system. Inspired by her father’s cultural interest in the city, the author arrived in France where she met André Breton, Samuel Beckett, and Nathalie Sarraute among many other artists who significantly influenced her view of Art and Literature (Weiss 10). Tejera states that the city of Paris became “una especie de desierto pero desierto de libertad en el que empecé a reconstituirme, a crearme a mí misma” (a sort of desert, but a desert of freedom, where I began renovating and creating myself; Navarrete 1). Inspired by these artists, Tejera begins a search for her own poetic aesthetics through literary fragmentation and experimentation. As Cuban critic Pío Serrano states, Nivaria Tejera is close to the generation of 1950s Cuban writers,

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along with authors Cabrera Infante, Arcocha, Montes Huidobro, Casey, and other early exiles (168). Tejera’s exile in Paris coincided with that of other Cuban authors of her time, such as Severo Sarduy and José Triana. Nivaria Tejera has published several poetry books as well as essays and literary articles.4 Her narrative works include El barranco5 (1959) and a trilogy about Cuba and dictatorships: Sonámbulo del sol (1971), Fuir la spirale (1987)6 and Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. El barranco, a short testimonial novel, describes the experience of a young girl who witnesses the imprisonment of her father during the Spanish Civil War. The story is based on the author’s own experience in Tenerife, Canary Islands; her second narrative text Sonámbulo del sol narrates the journey of Sidelfiro, an Afro-Cuban man who wanders the impoverished city of Havana during Fulgencio Batista’s regime. Nivaria Tejera’s third work, Fuir la spirale, formulates the experience of an exile in France, Claudio Tiresias Blecher, creating the most experimental language ever written by the author. Tejera tells her stories from the crossing of several cultural spaces as a result of her political and literary exile, her experiences under the regimes of Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista, and Fidel Castro, as well as the persistent lack of recognition of her literary production. The three different repressive regimes have greatly influenced her perception of the world and the artistic trajectory of this Cuban-Canarian writer. A Never Ending Exile: 1936 to the Present In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, Nivaria Tejera speaks in frank, critical, and desperate words: “Una revolución se acaba con su primer fusilamiento” (Revolutions end with the first execution; Espero 20), referring to the execution of those involved with the previous regime. Tejera reproaches the persecution of homosexuals, artists, intellectuals, and all those who did not conform to the rules of the system, which she witnessed as Cultural Attaché to the Cuban Revolution from 1959 until 1965. The author/narrator states that Fidel Castro is the “Maximum Leader” and “Caudillo disguised as benefactor,” who assumes every charge in power according to “his concept of perpetual command.” In her book, Fidel Castro’s government is a religion perceived from the agnosticism of the artist. Cuban critic Pío Serrano asserts, “Con lucidez desgarradora, la escritura de Nivaria Tejera dibuja el trayecto que va de la ilusión amigada en la muchedumbre a la soledad intolerable de una conciencia crítica en el exilio” (With piercing lucidity, Nivaria Tejera’s text draws the trajectory from the dream befriended in the crowd to the insufferable solitude of a critical consciousness in exile; 166–67). Exile becomes the ever-present theme in all of the author’s creative works.

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Exile means madness and uprooting to Nivaria Tejera. The narrator of Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, a female character with no name and full biographical resemblance to the author, claims that she often suffers “ataques de locura psicodélica” (psychedelic madness attacks; 45). At that point, she can no longer stand being a foreigner: “esa envoltura fragmentadora, esa anonimia” (that fragmented wrapping, that anonymity; 45). Uprooted in Paris, the city she loves and hates, Nivaria floats free like a water lily: alive yet adrift (Espero 64). Her 1965 exile to Paris, where she has lived now for forty years, is the narrative spine of Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. The narrator likens remembrance to stripping ancient layers that encase a mummified body: Pues como una momia egipcia el exilado se envuelve de vendajes, vendajes que en sus múltiples y complejos reburujones (horizontales diagonales o espirales) cobijan, en su cuerpo semimuerto, cada una de las convicciones que le alejarán del país verdugo, convicciones aislantes que a su vez se confunden con las que le unieron al mismo. (158) [Like an Egyptian mummy, the exile is wrapped up in bandages, bandages that, in its multiple and complex layering (horizontal, diagonal and spiral) shelter every single one of the convictions that will keep her away from the executioner country, insulating convictions that could also bind her to it.]

Tejera identifies the exile (herself) as a mummy, a semi-dead body wrapped in different layers of bandages, such as silence and isolation, which she is removing in the own act of writing this book. The Cuban Revolution is revealed as a train that never stops. “She,” the main character, is determined to jump out of the train and leave its dogmas behind, despite the consequences. Terrible angustia de abandonar una revolución, sus dogmas bien perfilados, y escalar sin titubeos el extramuros de su línea de conducta, de sus consignas incesantemente renovadas en vistas a no se sabe qué meta incógnita. Siempre oscilante meta bien calculada: hoy contra unos, mañana contra otros. Afilada línea de fuego esa meta que a priori y como in fraganti hacía de todos nosotros sus irremediables blancos. Tarde o temprano, sus condenados. Detrás de ese tren, cuya carrera me avecinaba de un inextricable exilio que pondría coto al desesperado propósito de huir que me obsesionaba día a día, iba quedando rezagada en su despampanante despotismo, algosa, esponjosa, flotando como un paisaje en la hojarasca, una revolución ideal. (Espero 14–15) [Terrible anguish to abandon a revolution, its well-shaped dogmas, and climb without hesitation outside its line of behavior, its incessantly renewed orders with a view to an unknown goal. Always a well-calculated oscillating goal: today against some, tomorrow against others. A sharp firing line is the

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goal that made all of us, beforehand and red-handed, its irremediable targets. Sooner or later, we are convicted. Behind that train, whose journey approached me to an inextricable exile that would put a stop to the desperate purpose to flee which became my obsession day after day, I was falling behind its stunning despotism, slimy (algae-like), spongy, floating like a dead leaves-landscape, an ideal revolution.]

The leap from that train in 1965 meant her desertion from the Revolution in which many believed; yet Nivaria Tejera was already outside. In fact, the Cuban-Canarian writer had always been an outsider, an exile, as the narrator reveals in Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución when describing her life-long political experiences: “La trilogía Franco/Batista/Castro ha dominado mi vida como una siniestra tela de fondo que la amalgama de viajes, regresos, separaciones, huidas ha ido destiñendo [. . .] Y la poesía, en relieve sobre todo el resto, siempre protectora” (The Franco/Batista/ Castro trilogy has dominated my life like a sinister canvas, faded by the amalgam of journeys, returns, separations and escapes [. . .] and poetry, in relief over all of this, always protecting; 93). Like Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Nivaria Tejera did not fit in the normative space of the political system. Literary critic Ricardo Ortiz states that Reinaldo Arenas “was an artist in exile long before his physical expulsion from Cuba” (104). Ortiz observes that Arenas was not only a Cuban political exile, but before that, he was an outcast in his own island for his homosexuality in a heteronormative society. Tejera was also a dissenting voice before she left her commitment with the Revolution. As shown in Espero la noche, her narrative texts became a testimonial expression of her political transoceanic experiences, beginning in El barranco. Years of broken childhood caused by the imprisonment of Nivaria Tejera’s father inspired the creation of El barranco, a testimonial text of Spanish Civil War literature and the first novel about the 1936 war from a Canary Islander’s perspective. A young girl narrator suffers a dramatic transformation for the loss of her father, hunger, and loneliness. Needless to say, the fictional voice was Nivaria Tejera’s own word. In an interview by Eduardo Chamorro, the author explains the importance of creating El barranco: “La experiencia que para mí representó la guerra puede condensarse en una noción vivísima de lo justo y lo injusto. Mi padre era un intelectual frustrado con todas las de la ley, y él me impulsó, me estimuló [. . .] La escritura se convirtió para mí en la única posibilidad de manifestación de una sensación interior” (My experience of the war can be condensed in the notion of the just and unjust. My father was a frustrated intellectual, and he encouraged me to begin writing. Writing became the only possibility to reveal my inner turmoil; 26). Tejera’s early encounter with the Spanish

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Civil War and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship catalyzed her need to write. In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, “she” the unnamed protagonist recounts that her permanent state of dissatisfaction comes from her father’s imprisonment. Her account is unequivocal: “La niñez, la adolescencia . . . ¡qué memoria del horror le devuelven! Recuerda sólo hechos aislados, incongruentes, y, fantasmagóricos, sus consiguientes secuelas [. . .] Hasta que poco a poco fue descubriendo lo que era: alguien que tenía un problema con la percepción del mundo que le rodeaba” (Childhood, adolescence . . . what memories of horror they return! She only remembers isolated, incongruous and phantasmagoric facts, their subsequent consequences [. . .] Until she discovered what she was, little by little: somebody who had a problem with the perception of her surrounding world; 113–14). Nivaria Tejera’s perception of her surrounding world is attached to the sun. In her second narrative work, Sonámbulo del sol, the main character is poor, a mulatto, and a homosexual, wandering around the sun-drenched city of Havana in the 1950s. Sidelfiro perceives reality through noises, images, sensations, and street talk as flashing fragments. The sun stalks the protagonist, causing a claustrophobic madness in Sidelfiro, as well as a sense of chaos in the reader. That same sun7 symbolizes Fulgencio Batista’s regime, which represents a constant reminder of hunger and injustice for those characters that Sidelfiro came across in his journey. Thus, dictatorships and solar light have an unmistakable connection to Nivaria Tejera. The author lived her experiences of oppression on two islands, Cuba and Tenerife, where the sun’s presence was inescapable. In Sonámbulo del sol, the sun turns spectral: “Pero es cierto que su espectro lo sigue, detrás de los troncos de palmas se multiplica, le cierra el camino” (But it is true that his specter follows him, it multiplies behind the palm trees, it corners him; 25). In this text, the sun rays that suffocated the people of Havana represent the government of Fulgencio Batista asphyxiating its citizens. The oppressive force of the sun in Sonámbulo del sol is analogous to Albert Camus’s The Stranger where the protagonist Mersault narrates: “[. . .] Today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was inhuman and oppressive” (15). Mersault continues making reference to the excessive heat throughout the novel: “We walked on the beach for a long time. By now the sun was overpowering. It shattered into little pieces on the sand and water” (55). Critic Anselm Atkins explains the significance of the sun in The Stranger: The sun and the sea are constant motifs in Camus’s writings [. . .] To the sun-symbol are annexed the father and other authority figures: judges, obnoxious old men, priests, policemen, even God. The sun thus comes to symbolize any external repressive force which lessens freedom. In The

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Stranger [. . .] the sun is nearly always oppressive. [. . .] The sun not only stands over the action as a hostile presence, but even enters into it. (145)

Like in The Stranger, the figure of the sun also represents a symbol of authority for Nivaria Tejera, as shown in Sonámbulo del sol. Away from the Cuban sunshine, the author searched the shade of night in Paris to create freely and subvert, away from scrutiny. The writer awaited the night to dream of her own Revolution. Paris, then, became a necessary continental night space. Perhaps the irony resides in the fact that Nivaria Tejera settled in “The city of lights,” particularly in the capital region “Île de France.” This semantic irony of of the insular nomenclature perfectly reflects Tejera’s exile: she found a sealess “island” within a city that boasts the brightest night-lights. In Paris, the main character of Nivaria Tejera’s next work continues another urban journey. Claudio Tiresias Blecher continues Sidelfiro’s exodus, but instead of Havana, the protagonist of Fuir la spirale penetrates the streets of Paris in an enigmatic and imaginary search. Like Sidelfiro, Claudio Tiresias Blecher is paradoxically alone yet surrounded by hundreds inside an urban space. He is an exile in Paris; his loneliness is intricate. The character’s impossibility to communicate with others is reflected in his observations of other individuals equally imprisoned within the streets of Paris. The third-person narrator describes Claudio Tiresias Blecher’s vision of the pedestrians from his window: “[. . .] Le rythme de la marche de Noirs de Blancs d’Indonésiens, d’Indiens qui soulèvent d’un pied puis de l’autre leur propre poussière de chaque côté du quartier latin” (The rhythm of the march of Blacks, Whites, Indonesians, Indians who lift a foot then another, then other, their own dust in every corner of the Latin Quarter; 10). He is surrounded by foreigners who walk without direction in a foreign land, like him. The flight from “the spiral,” as indicated by the title, represents his attempt to escape from exile through artistic creation. Thus, Tejera’s characters find themselves in an endless search, a journey for freedom. As Tejera states in her 2002 interview, the journey is without a doubt a permanent theme in her work: Viaje y vértigo conjugan para mí un mismo aliento liberador. El tema del viaje en mi universo literario está ligado al vértigo existencial, es decir, a la búsqueda azarosa de una nueva respiración que despeje los círculos concéntricos de la monotonía. Me espanta, me disminuye, me consume y espasma la monotonía [. . .] Forzarme a una distancia es como reinventar la vida, y ese desconocido que el viaje promete ha de traducirse, es claro, en búsqueda poética. (Hernández-Ojeda 47) [Journey and vertigo represent the same breath of freedom to me. The theme of journey in my literary universe is tied to an existential vertigo, that is to say,

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the unforeseeable search of a new breathing that clears those centric circles of monotony (. . .) Forcing myself to a distance is like reinventing life, and the unknown promised by the journey translates, of course, into poetic a search.]

Thus Tejera’s never ending transatlantic journeys cannot escape her writing. The character “she” in Espero la noche endures the same journey of the young girl from the Canary Islands, the Afro-Cuban man of Havana, and the multiple exile in Paris. These protagonists in Tejera’s four narrative texts represent a collective that pierces the empty spaces of exile, thus becoming one. Literary Exiles Nivaria Tejera’s personal experience as a multiple political exile is combined with her literary exile from the Spanish-speaking literary canon. Her literary production has not been fully acknowledged fifty years after her first publication Luces y piedras (1949), and her creative works remain exiled from libraries and bookstores. The author appears on lists of Cuban, Canarian, and French exiled authors, yet her work is vastly unknown on either side of the Atlantic. She is a Spanish-speaking writer whose narrative works were translated into French from the original Spanish so that they might be published.8 One of her texts, Fuir la spirale, has not found a publisher in its original language as Huir la espiral. The trilingual condition of Nivaria Tejera’s works (CubanSpanish, Canarian-Spanish, and French) reflects her contradictory status in the world of literature and problematizes the recognition of her work, as it does not fall into a single national category. In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, the unnamed protagonist “she” uses irony to express her difficulty in finding publishing houses: “He llegado a pensar que la única manera de encontrar editor es atreverse a salir desnuda por 5ta. Avenida” (I have even thought that the only way to find a publisher is to walk naked along 5th Avenue; 83). The author was three times an exile: first in her childhood, when she sailed with her family back to Cuba from the Canary Islands, escaping Franco’s dictatorship in 1944; then, Tejera fled from Fulgencio Batista’s regime to Paris as a young woman in 1954; and finally, the author broke her ties with Castro’s Cuba, after her most direct political involvement as a Cultural Attaché to the Revolution from 1959 to 1965. The reasons for Nivaria Tejera’s exclusion deserve further attention. In his article “Gallery of Cuban Writing,” Rafael Rojas examines the mechanisms of Cuban canonical authority in order to understand the inclusion or exclusion of specific literary works. One of these mechanisms is the “denationalization of the text,” which refers to the process of exiling works of literature from the canon if they do not conform to the national or

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geographical model. Rojas exemplifies the case of the nineteenth-century Cuban-born poet and novelist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, whose poetry has been characterized as “Spanish” rather than “Cuban” because of the long period that she lived and wrote in Spain. The critic adds that her fellow countrywoman, twentieth-century Cuban poet and recipient of the Cervantes Award, Dulce María Loynaz, had her Madrid publications excluded from selected Cuban literary histories. Both Avellaneda’s “Spanish tone” and Loynaz’s Spanish texts coincide with Nivaria Tejera’s hybrid national categorization. Her works have been “denationalized” due to their transatlantic condition, which has become an obstacle for their reception and distribution. Her ambiguous Atlantic identities should represent an advantage to critics and readers as they allow multiple readings from all shores of the Ocean. Tejera’s texts have been published in France, Cuba, and Spain, yet they remain largely unknown. Rafael Rojas relates these mechanisms of exclusion to women’s writing: “A desire to silence or neutralize feminine voices within the metastory of national identity probably motivates these mechanisms of the aesthetic canon” (254). In this light, Roja’s mechanism of “generic excellence” equates the narrative literary genre with masculine gender. Like Avellaneda and Loynaz, Nivaria Tejera is not considered a “novelist” for her lyric style, as she tries to reach “Lo más ajeno al lenguaje coloquial. Y te encuentras, claro, que ya eso no es novela sino poesía [. . .] Y te sientes atrapada” (The farthest from colloquial language. And you realize that it is not a novel anymore, but poetry [. . .] and then you are trapped; Espero 111). Tejera writes poetic narratives, always unclassifiable, which have resulted in a gradual invisibility of her writing. The author’s hybrid national, cultural, and literary identities are not the only reasons for her “exile” from the canon. Nivaria Tejera’s literary trajectory has always been located in a masculine space. In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, the female protagonist voices what could be viewed as the author’s impotence to find herself in a masculine space in which she has no voice: “Imposible escapar a su destino de mujer enclaustrada en una sociedad de hombres entrenados por muchos siglos” (Impossible to escape the fate of a woman enclosed in a society of men trained for centuries; Espero 112). From her earliest publications, Tejera stood out as a female author amid her peers. In 1953, the prestigious literary magazine Orígenes included chapter IX of El barranco. That same issue contained the works of Fayad Jamís, Roberto Fernández Retamar, José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, and Manuel Altolaguirre, among other well-known Cuban writers. Nivaria Tejera was also surrounded by established authors in the first issue of Nueva Revista Cubana, published in 1959. In Lorenzo García Vega’s Antología de la novela cubana, the author was

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selected among the most recognized authors in Cuban literature in 1960. Furthermore, Tejera became the first woman to obtain the Spanish award “Biblioteca Breve Seix Barral” in 1971 with her text Sonámbulo del sol. Finally, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución was a finalist for the Spanish Award “Plaza y Janés” in 1991, although it did not appear in print in Spanish until 2002. Tejera’s literary contemporaries received literary recognition whereas she remained in relative obscurity until recently. Forty years after Lorenzo Vega’s anthology, a section of Espero la noche was included in the anthology Escritoras cubanas: La memoria hechizada (2003). Madeline Cámara, who compiled twelve works by Cuban women writers, considers that these Cuban female authors confront authoritarianism and, in so doing, have created “otra visión de la Patria que se escapa a los dogmas nacionalistas” (another view of the ‘patria’ [fatherland] that escapes the nationalist dogmas; 15). Some of the other authors chosen for this anthology include the notable Cuban writers Gertudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Dulce María Loynaz, Julieta Campos, and Zoe Valdés. Cámara’s inclusion of Nivaria Tejera creates a necessary space for the nearly forgotten exiled author within diverse female voices of Cuban literature; thus, she is vindicated as both a female author and a Cuban writer. Yet Tejera’s identity is hybrid. There is no consensus of Tejera’s national identity as indicated in Peter Bush’s anthology. A chapter of El barranco has been included in the 2003 publication Spain: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Peter Bush and Laura Dillman. Here, Nivaria Tejera was selected to represent the literature of the Canary Islands, as the collection is dedicated to Spanish writers from different regions of the country. Undoubtedly, Tejera’s vital and literary hybridity constitutes her most attractive and complex particularity. The author’s exclusive categorization within one specific Cuban, Canarian, Spanish, or French national or geographical group would limit the possibilities of her work. It is necessary to investigate the reasons and implications of Nivaria Tejera’s omission from the Spanish-speaking literary world, which affected the visibility and distribution of her creative production in drastic ways. Despite renewed interest in her writing, publishers have not reissued the majority of her work. Any attempt to locate a copy of Sonámbulo del sol results in futility. Her artistic and political experiences of isolation created a unique space of resistance, a transatlantic wor(l)d to challenge her never ending exiles. Transatlantic Writing as Spaces of Resistance Writing is both a vital and mortal act to Nivaria Tejera: “cada línea es el resultado de hondas incisiones negras en la piel que extraen tinta a su sangre

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desde una atmósfera sorda que nada parece habitar” (each line is the result of deep black incisions in my skin extracting ink from blood in a deaf atmosphere inhabited by nothing; Espero 50). Every word in Tejera’s texts is felt, internalized, and bled. The author searches to shock the reader with beauty and experimental writing (Weiss 9). French writer Nathalie Sarraute’s use of different textual voices and narrative levels was particularly inspiring for Nivaria Tejera, who states, Cuando leí Tropismes de Sarraute, . . . me preguntaba cómo había sido posible toda esa concretización de la imagen, de la poesía, la palabra, del acto creador vigilante, de la contención en lo que no se debe decir, o sea, aquella plasmación absoluta de la grandeza que en pintura había descubierto en el Louvre. [. . .] [L]uego compré Planetarium, y sentía que era como si me hubieran lanzado en medio de un volcán en erupción. Mi experiencia al conocer a este ser investigador de la escritura fue explosiva y de ello quedó mi necesidad de inventarme mi propia escritura. (Navarrete 3) [When I read Tropismes by Sarraute, . . . I wondered how it was possible to create that concretization of images, of poetry, of word, of the watchful creative act, of contention in what not to say, that is to say, the absolute form of greatness that I had found in the paintings of the Louvre. (. . .) (T)hen I bought Planetarium, and I felt like I was thrown into an erupting volcano. My experience to meet this being, a researcher of writing, was explosive and from this I felt the need to invent my own.

The language in Tropismes moved Tejera to challenge conventional writing in her own work. As indicated by critic Valerie Minogue, Sarraute uses her own consciousness as primary matter. By exposing language through images and inarticulate analogies, Sarraute compels the reader to participate at the same level as the writer, using her/his own movements of consciousness and, thus, avoiding being a mere spectator (Minogue 2). Thus, Nivaria Tejera’s texts require significant participation from the reader, especially Fuir la spirale, which, like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, represents an example of “scriptible” text.9 In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, there is no traditional plot or action. Unlike a conventional narrative, the reader becomes a visitor of an Expressionist Art Gallery, reading different “paintings” throughout the text. Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución is not a novel, but a collection of paintings in words. Instead of a paintbrush and watercolor, Nivaria Tejera uses a pen to draw a literary text. Her narrative outline consists of monologues, descriptions, a dialogue with a writer friend, an encounter with Cuban exiles in the Rastro10 of Madrid, a walk in Paris with another friend, Giorgio Pirandello, the grandson of “the inventor of truth,” and much background music. These are real images that become expressionist

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compositions when written by the author. Tejera needs to extract her inner world and searches the poetic discourse in the intensity of the senses. Perhaps as a hint to the reader, the character reveals the impact of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: “Se sienta a mirarlos y el cerebro se le vacía” (Her brain empties at their sight; 64). However, the process of writing becomes a desperate fight that leaves the author exhausted: “No soporto ya que sigan ahí dentro [los personajes] utilizando mi lengua y mi silencio [. . .] El problema es que cuando finalmente los sacas fuera te quedas como muerto, con un cansancio en los músculos” (I cannot stand having them [characters] in there, using my language and my silence [. . .] The problem is that, when you finally take them out, you feel dead, with sore muscles; 99). Writing is a necessary act of liberation, yet it becomes a rigorous task with the choice of every single word. In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, the attentive reader joins the multiple identities of the narrator/(“I”)-character/(“she”)author/(Nivaria) in the painful process to write the text s/he is reading. The reader learns that this text “lo llevará adelante como una ficción puesto que las tramas y los personajes le aburren y que los problemas que le interesan de la escritura no caben en una estructura formal. Aparte de que las reglas están hechas para violarlas” (will be carried out as fiction, because plots and characters are boring and she is only interested in questions of writing that don’t fit into formal structures. Besides, rules are made to be broken; 13). Divided in nonlinear sections instead of chapters, Tejera’s text is an everlasting work that demands a reader who participates in the creative process of the narrative. Nivaria Tejera continuously searches for a different voice, another language to conform to her own particular expression. Her transatlantic experiences represent different discoveries that influenced her interpretation of art. In her initial stage, the author reveals her interest in Cuban writer José Lezama Lima: “Durante los primeros años de la década de los cincuenta me dediqué a interpretar a Lezama” (During the first years of the fifties I was dedicated to interpret Lezama; Chamorro). Later, during her first stay in Paris, the author was significantly impacted by the French surrealist artists following her experiences with the repressive regimes of Francisco Franco and Fulgencio Batista. In her interview with Antonio Álvarez de la Rosa, the author explains, Fue un contacto automático, porque mi vida anterior me había preparado para ello. En el año 54 los surrealistas estaban en pleno auge. Aún se reunían en los cafés, uno sabía dónde, a veces en la rue Blanche, en Pigalle, otras por Opéra. Acudía a esas reuniones y automáticamente [. . .] me sentí compenetrada con esa manera convulsiva de comunicar. Era siempre la imagen, la pregunta brusca, la respuesta aguda, inesperada, colectiva, la interpretación colectiva. (3)

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[It was an automatic contact, because my previous life prepared me for it. 1954 was the heyday of surrealists. They still gathered in cafes, one would know where, sometimes in rue Blanche, in Pigalle, others by Opéra. I went to those meetings automatically (. . .), I felt connected with that convulsive way of communicating. It was always the image, the question, the ingenious, unexpected, collective response.]

Experimenting, then, became a necessary outlet that allowed the author to achieve her personal expression through poetry and destruction of literary genres. Tejera’s diverse influences and experiences produced writing that transcends traditional narrative due to its transatlantic dimensions, while it confronts the repressive power that dictatorships generate on the artist. By breaking literary rules, the writer destabilizes the experiences of a past filled with norms and, thus, creates a space of resistance. Nivaria Tejera’s writing belongs to a heterogeneous epistemological space that articulates the multiplicity of her voice. Literary critic Julio Ortega writes, La crítica transatlántica busca exceder los marcos de lectura nacional, que suelen ser resignados [. . .] Pero, justamente, en la perspectiva “pos-nacional” (donde lo nacional es una pluralidad no dictaminada por el Estado) las diferencias de la cultura se hacen más sensibles de cara a la homogenización. Para liberar los textos de los cánones normativos, la perspectiva intercultural permite ver mejor la fuerza procesal de las obras que desbordan modelos, autoridades y tradiciones. (3) [Transatlantic criticism seeks to exceed the frames of national reading (. . .) Precisely in this “post/nacional” perspective (where the national is a plurality not dictated by the State) cultural differences become more sensitive in relation to homogeneity. In order to free these texts from normative canons, intercultural perspective allows one to see clearly the operating strength of those works that surpass models, authorities and traditions.]

Nivaria Tejera’s literary style draws on her transatlantic experience. And it is precisely her personal expression that allowed her to confront patriarchal authority, experienced throughout her life. In Espero la noche the author rebels against order, power, and autocracy through her poetic irreverent word. This work has multiple readings when viewed as a transatlantic crossing, understanding “crossing” as a space of intersection, an act of traversing. From this position, the reader, too, can focus on the complex interactions of writing rather than the essential categorization of the text and, with Tejera, “crosses” cultural, national, and literary Atlantic borderlands defended by the national patriarchal canon. In transgressing these borders, the author resists spaces that otherwise would become, once again, prisons.

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Nivaria Tejera’s writing is created through her plural national identity, political experiences, literary rebellion, gender and genre crossings, and the plurilingual condition of her texts. The author’s literary production deconstructs national boundaries through its heterogeneity, which questions political and literary hegemonic models. The writer’s hybrid status affected her visibility in the Spanish-speaking literary world and became an obstacle for her recognition, instead of revealing the uniqueness of the author. Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución must be viewed as the continuation and culmination of this Cuban-Canarian writer’s literary production, where exile is the common thread. Hence, writing for Nivaria Tejera comprises the only inhabited space where the author is, finally, not an exile. Notes 1. My translation. All quotes from Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (I Await the Night to Dream of You, Revolution) throughout the essay are my own translation from its original text in Spanish. 2. One of the most important contributions of Julia Kristeva to the field of theory is her description and delineation of the semiotic and symbolic order. The semiotic order is associated with the pre-Oedipal space, where language is not repressed or conformed by society. It is related to the mother’s body. The symbolic order is an Oedipal stage. It is the space of grammar and syntax, where the semiotic is regulated. 3. See Madeline Cámara. Escritoras cubanas: La memoria hechizada. Cámara’s anthology of Cuban women writers includes a section of Nivaria Tejera’s Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, among other authors such as Gertudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Dulce María Loynaz, Julieta Campos, and Zoe Valdés. 4. Her first poetry texts were published in Cuba: Luces y piedras (1949), Luz de lágrima (1951) and La gruta (1952), and Alba en el niño hidrópico (1953). Other poetic texts include La barrera fluídica o París escarabajo (1976), Innumerables voces (1964), Rueda del exiliado (1983), Y Martelar (1983), París Scarabée (1994). 5. El barranco (The Ravine) was first published as a book in France, by the editorial Lettres Nouvelles in 1958, and later translated into Italian and Czech. In Spanish, El barranco has three different editions: in 1959 it was one of the first books published by the new Cuban government, and 1982 and 1989, two Canarian editions. This text will be reedited once more in the Canary Islands in 2004. 6. Sleepwalker in the Sun and Fleeing the Spiral are the English titles of these texts. My translation. 7. Whereas the Sun is everpresent in Sonámbulo del sol, the night has the same impact on another important Cuban text: Tres tristes tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which also received the Award “Biblioteca Breve Seix Barral” in 1964. Several critics have pointed out the connection between both works.

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8. Le ravin, Series Les Lettres Nouvelles, Paris, 1958; Sonámbule du soleil, Les Lettres Nouvelles, Denoel, París, 1970; Fuir la spirale, Actes Sud, Paris, 1987; J’attends le nuit pour te rêver, Revolution, L’Harmattan, París, 1997. 9. In his book S/Z, Roland Barthes defines the role of the reader: “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4). Barthes explains the difference between a text “lisible” and “scriptible.” The first one is created to be read or “consumed,” whereas the the text “scriptible” is created to be written or “produced.” 10. Flea Market, weekly event on Sundays.

Works Cited Álvarez de la Rosa, Antonio. “Siempre he vivido en el presente.” La Opinión: Revista Semanal de Ciencia y Cultura 203 (2004): 2–4. Atkins, Anselm. “The Role of Fate in The Stranger.” In Readings on Albert Camus. Ed. Derek C. Maus. San Diego: Greenhaven P, 2001. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Cámara, Madeline. La memoria hechizada. Barcelona: Icaria, 2003. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Chamorro, Eduardo. “Nivaria Tejera: Que cada cual descomponga la escritura como quiera.” Triunfo (1972): n.pag. García Vega, Lorenzo. Antología de la novela cubana. La Habana: Dirección General de Cultura, 1960. Hernández-Ojeda, María. “Entrevista a Nivaria Tejera.” Hispamérica 97 (2004): 43–48. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Minogue, Valerie. Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1981. Navarrete, William. “Entrevista a Nivaria Tejera.” El Ateje. February 4, 2002. http:www.elateje.com/0102/entrevistas010201.htm. Ortega, Julio. “Nuestras Americas.” Insula: Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas 667–68 (2002): 1–4. Ortiz, Ricardo. “Reinaldo Arenas’s Last Writing.” In Borders, Exiles, Diasporas. Ed. Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 92–111. Rojas, Rafael. “Gallery of Cuban Writing.” In Cuba, The Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity. Ed. Damián J. Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. 240–59. Saladrigas, Robert. “Monólogo con Nivaria Tejera.” Arte y Letras (1972): 37–38. Sarraute, Nathalie. Tropismes. París: Denoël, 1939. Serrano, Pío. “El sueño como exorcismo.” Encuentro (1999): 165–68. Tejera, Nivaria. Luces y piedras. La Habana, 1949. ———. Luz de lágrima. Cienfuegos: Imprenta Casas, 1951. ———. La gruta. La Habana: Ucar García, 1952. ———. “El barranco.” Orígenes 35 (1954): 56–61.

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———. “Nathalie Sarraute: Un primitivo de la vanguardia.” Nueva Revista Cubana 1 (1959). ———. Innumerables voces. La Habana: Serie Cuadernos Unión. UNEAC, 1964. ———. Sonámbulo del sol. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1972. ———. La barrera fluídica o París escarabajo. Zaragoza: Editorial Litho Arte, 1976. ———. Rueda del exiliado. Lisboa: Cooperativa de Artes Gráficas, 1983. ———. Y Martelar. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: CE Pinto, 1983. ———. Fuir la spirale. Trans. Jean Marie-Saint Lu. Paris: Actes Sud, 1987. ———. El barranco. Viceconsejería de Cultura y Deportes. Islas Canarias: Gobierno de Canarias, 1989. ———. Paris scarabée. Trans. Nicole Laurent-Catrice. Plombiéres-les-Dijon: Ulysse Fin de Siècle, 1995. ———. Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2002. ———. “Children Can Wait.” Trans. Carol Maier. In Spain: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ed. Peter Bush and Lisa Dillman. Berkeley: Whereabouts, 2003. 219–35. Weiss, Jason. “Descifrar el exilio. Entrevista a Nivaria Tejera.” Quimera 183 (1999): 8–13.

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PART III IMMIGRATION, INTEGRATION, AND COMMUNITY IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: CULTURE AS ARTICULATED IN LANGUAGE, ON THE BODY, AND WITHIN SPACE

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HOW TO EAT WÜRSTEL: TWO GENERATIONS OF FEMALE SHOAH EXILES IN LONDON Eva Eppler

Introduction This essay aims to explain the tension observed during the oral history collection between two generations of female Austrian Shoah exiles in London. It hypothesizes that the loss of the mother tongue and of cultural norms can lead to conflicts within a mother–daughter relationship. Based on a detailed linguistic analysis of interviews with three generations of “ordinary” Viennese Holocaust exiles on topics such as ethnic persecution, the migration experience, displacement, and life in exile, it analyzes the reasons for the mother choosing to remain a voice from the margins of British society, whereas her daughter and grandson are assimilated into the host culture and language. The two main factors identified as causing tension between mother and daughter in this interview are language maintenance/shift and the loss of cultural norms (of food consumption) within two/three generations.1 Dor was one of the approximately 14,000 Austrian Jews who fled ethnic persecution following the Anschluss2 of Austria to the German Reich on March 12, 1938. Between the beginning of May 1938 and the end of 1941, approximately 30,000 Jews left Austria for the United Kingdom. Dor, then, aged twenty, managed to obtain a visa as a domestic servant in 1939. She came from a middle-class background and had good secondary schooling. She read English and French before emigrating, but lacked oral production skills in these languages. During her working life in London she managed a shop with her husband. Dor was a central figure of the Austrian Jewish refugee community. She organized annual reunions of the “Austrian Centre,” an organization around which much of Austrian refugees’ social,

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cultural, and political life revolved in the early days of immigration. Dor actively encouraged meetings between the researcher and her family and friends. At the time of data collection, Dor was seventy-four years of age. Her daughter Viv, who was in her late forties, was born in the United Kingdom and worked as an office administrator. Viv’s son Nic was a teenager in his third year in secondary school. This study focuses on the ninety-minute interview with Dor and her daughter for the following reasons: 1. The interview provides particularly rich and informative accounts of the central female informant’s (Dor) life in exile in twentiethcentury Europe. 2. Dor’s daughter Viv joins the main informant and the researcher approximately forty-five minutes into the interview and gives her own perspective as a second-generation émigré on many of the topics previously explored with Dor. 3. The data give rise to the hypothesis that the tension between mother and daughter exists predominantly because of linguistic and cultural alienation between the generations. That is, the generation conflicts occur mainly because of language and culture loss. Food and food consumption in particular cause friction between the generations, which illustrates the relevance of culture for identity building. Before proceeding to the main section of this essay, the terminology must be defined. I will use Culture both in its restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage (Bourdieu 1979), and with reference to socially acquired or learnt behaviors, knowledge, beliefs, values, and customs. “A society’s culture is whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (Goodenough 1957). Culture loss thus is the loss of knowledge, beliefs and behavioral norms that allow an individual to operate in a social network or society in an acceptable manner. This definition implies that an individual’s behavior can become unacceptable in a certain cultural context, if cultural systems are not transmitted from generation to generation. Assimilation is the adjustment of individuals, groups, or a people to another culture. With particular reference to the German Jewish refugee community in the United Kingdom, Mallet and Grenville stress that the process of integration is not a clear-cut one. Individuals can furthermore place themselves on a continuum of assimilation, and the process of assimilation is not irreversible, that it, it can be counteracted by culture revival. Processes of assimilation and acculturation are almost inevitably accompanied by Language shift, that is, the process by which one language

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displaces another in the linguistic repertoire of an individual or community. On an individual basis, it refers to a redistribution of a speaker’s patterns of language use in different domains over time; that is, it is associated with a reduction in functions and domains of use. When a language is reduced in its function, speakers become less proficient in it; they become semi-speakers or passive bilinguals. Language shift and loss are influenced by individuals’ attitudes toward the two languages and cultures. As Mallet and Grenville (235) state, “feelings and attitudes towards both the new and the old language are closely tied up with the individual’s sense of identity . . . and their degree of integration into their adopted country.” Language shift is almost always accompanied by the use of language contact phenomena, that is, linguistic phenomena that only occur in situations of language contact. Two language contact phenomena that illustrate language shift in the speech of my informants are borrowing and code-switching. Linguistic borrowing is the introduction into language A of words and set expressions of language B. It can often be explained by investigating the points at which a given vocabulary is inadequate in the cultural environment in which contact occurs. Code-mixing is defined as the juxtaposition of longer stretches from two languages in one utterance. In the sections that follow, I will present and analyze extracts from the oral histories of Dor and Viv, representatives of the first and second generation of Austrian Shoah exiles in London. The analysis will be carried out within the linguistic framework of Discourse and Conversation Analysis. I will focus on lexical, semantic, and structural properties of the utterances, study how they are produced (e.g., with hesitations, pauses, self-corrections, and the like) and linked (conversation analysis). Special attention will be paid to which concepts are expressed with signifiers (words) from both languages and to language contact phenomena. Language will be taken as a discursive signifying system in which the speaking subject makes and unmakes itself in the course of telling its story. Further, I will compare the speech of first- and second-generation female exiles to show that linguistic and cultural factors emerge from the data as main causes for the observed tension between the displaced mother and the assimilated daughter. The First Generation In this section I will present and analyze extracts of the oral history of Dor from emigration to the 1990s and supplement them with historical background information. The Jewish population of Vienna was already exposed to a considerable amount of anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. After the Anschluss in 1938, anti-Semitism started to play a much more significant role as a political

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rather than as a social factor. Initially, however, anti-Jewish regulations were not implemented systematically but often in contradictory ways: periods of violence and draconian measures were followed by periods of relative calm. Immediately after the Anschluss, hundreds of Jews were arrested, but released soon afterward, arrested again and sent to German concentration camps. In March 1938 thousands of Austrian Jews were set free from Dachau on condition that they would leave the country within a fortnight. These and the other Jews, for whom the Reichskristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) had made it brutally obvious that there was no future for them in Austria, sought the help of various “refugee” organizations to obtain visas. Between May 1938 and November 1941, two-third of the approximately 206,000 Austrian Jews left Austria, between 27,293 and 30,850 of them for Great Britain. The main informant (Dor) on whom this essay is based was one of them. Extract 1 Eva wann haben sie Wien verlassen? [when did you leave Vienna?] Dor ich hab(e) neununddreissig  . . . [I left in nineteen thirty-nine] Dor but I (//) ich hab(e) sehr schoene Zeiten gehabt. [But I(//) I had had very good times in Vienna] Dor ich war sehr happy so  . . . [I was very happy]

Extract 1 is predominantly in German; it, however, contains elements from English. This is not the norm among the German-speaking refugees in London but quite common among those who mainly socialize in refugee circles. That is, they use a mixed (German/English) code as a mode of everyday interaction. This kind of linguistic behavior has been interpreted by Myers-Scotton to express the dual cultural identities of the speakers. From a linguistic point of view it is interesting to analyze the kind of elements Dor borrows from English. They are, on the one hand, elements that link discourse and explain the causal connections between utterances, such as but and because. We will see that Dor frequently uses English discourse markers and conjunctions in her narratives. The but in this context is particularly interesting. It marks an upcoming unit of speech as a contrasting action. The anti-Semitism or “bad times” Dor experienced are not explicitly mentioned, but she implicitly contrasts them with the “good times” she had. In other passages of the interview Dor specifies what she means by “good times”: spending time with her family and friends and going out (to the theater, cinema, and other venues). The other type of

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elements Dor borrows in extract 1 is keywords, such as happy and memory. Both element types are essential in constructing oral history and show that Dor needs both her languages to convey it. This supports Myers-Scotton’s interpretation of code-mixing as a discursive strategy that expresses a dual cultural identity. The extract presented so far frames not only Dor’s narrative but also her life in exile. All narrative is based on memory (Kristeva 54), and in retirement Dor and her friends can relish the memory of the schöne Zeiten (good times) they had had as adolescents in Vienna and reassemble their identities out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile (Said 179). The British authorities and the relief organizations created by the Jewish community in Britain did not necessarily facilitate the immigration of Austrians to Britain, for legitimate reasons: the relief organizations had given notice to the British government in 1933 that no Jews from Germany would become a public charge. After the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich it became obvious that the Jewish guarantee could no longer hold good for the Austrian Jews who also sought refuge in the United Kingdom. Precisely for this reason, visas3 were imposed on new refugees from May 21, 1938, onward. Dor was admitted into the United Kingdom on a so-called domestic permit, that is, she was expected to seek employment as a domestic servant. Once in the United Kingdom, most Austrian Jewish refugees—like the German Jewish refugees before them— settled in northwest London. This part of the city is and has always been populated by affluent, well-educated, middle-class people and many artists. This is interesting from ethnic, social, and linguistic points of view: both German and Austrian Jewish refugees did not settle in the traditional Jewish settlement areas of London, that is, the working-class East End of the city where Yiddish was spoken, but in gentile, cultured, middle-class Hampstead where—due to the influx of a growing number of German-speaking exiles4—German soon became the lingua franca. In the interview, Dor describes her reason for settling in Hampstead. Extract 2 Dor , aber hier in Hampstead # xxx # auf der Strasse # man hat nur Deutsch gesprochen. [but here in Hampstead # xxx # in the street # people only spoke German] Eva

wann war das ungefähr? [when was that, roughly?]

Dor

das war nach dem Krieg # und auch jetzt # wenn ich gehe xxx Stimmen höre  . . . [that was after the war # and even nowadays # when I walk and hear voices  . . .]

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es ist ja more eine bohemian [//] so # you know. [it is more of a bohemian district (//) right # you know.]

Dor deswegen sind wir doch alle hier -. ^ weil es war nicht so typisch Englisch. [that’s why we are all here -. ^ because it wasn’t typically English.] Dor

da waren so, you know, continental Geschäfte und das Essen  . . . [there were, you know, continental shops and the food  . . .]

The fact that her mother tongue was the lingua franca in Hampstead seems to strongly influence Dor’s decision to live there. Like the vast majority of Viennese Jewish refugees, Dor does not speak Yiddish, as they all came from assimilated backgrounds. Dor then lists other cultural reasons for choosing this particular area of London; for example, that it was more bohemian. As a shopkeeper, Dor clearly cannot associate herself with artistic, hedonistic, and decadent individuals. Dor’s choice of the English borrowing in an otherwise predominantly German context, however, testifies to her subtle command of her host culture language. She borrows the English word bohemian because only this signifier has a meaning that is appropriate in this context, that is, “a gipsy of society, one who either cuts himself off, or is by his habits cut off, from society” (Oxford English Dictionary). German böhmisch does not signify this. By carefully choosing a shade of meaning only present in one language, Dor not only illustrates her linguistic competence, but also an acute awareness of her social and cultural status in the United Kingdom, that is, as a foreigner, an outsider, an individual at the margins of her host country’s society. The word bohemian furthermore has social-class connotations that distance her from the working-class English Jews in the East End, working-class Austrians, and working-class English gentiles. After reinforcing that the bohemian character of Hampstead is the very reason why the majority of refugees settled there, Dor highlights the sociocultural contrast with the majority culture by explicitly formulating because it was not typically English. The third factor for choosing to live in Hampstead was the availability of continental shops and food. Apart from the discourse markers you know, this is the second key-adjective Dor chooses to borrow from the English language in extract 2. The British have a special term to refer to the “rest of Europe,” and that is continental. This statement again indicates Dor’s acute awareness of the cultural differences between her home and host culture and her competence in her host language English. In extract 2, food is introduced as a cultural component to one’s identity that is relevant to Dor. The relevance of food and the culture of food consumption for identity building will be discussed in more detail later.

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Settled in northwest London, an area that is neither typically English and English-speaking, nor Jewish and Yiddish-speaking like London’s East End, but bohemian, continental, and German-speaking, Dor socially embeds herself in continental surroundings: her family and friends are predominantly Austrian (see extracts 3 and 4). Dor’s parents and sister were fortunate enough to survive concentration camps and joined her and her young family in London after the Second World War (see extract 3). By choosing to settle in a cultural and linguistic enclave that resembles home at least in terms of the language, the shops, and the food, Dor and her fellow Jewish refugees diminish the effects of displacement and life in exile. They create a home away from home. Dor, however, is also aware of the drawbacks of this choice: she did not integrate into British society and learn the English language as fully as she might have done otherwise. She may have acquired dual identity, yet there is a price she has to pay for it. In spite of the central role she plays in the Austrian Jewish refugee community, for British people she remains a displaced female exile at the margins of their society, a foreigner. In the fist line of extract 3, she admits–in an aside (see [//] . . . [/-])—that this may have been a mistake. Extract 3 Dor und ich hab(e) [//] vielleicht ist das der Fehler [/-] ich hab(e) lauter österreichische Freunde, [And I have (//) maybe that’s the mistake (/-) all my friends are Austrians,] , hardly any Engländer -. because mein Mann war auch ein Wiener. [Hardly any English people because my husband was Viennese too.] and mein-0* Eltern sind nach dem Krieg gekommen. [and my parents came after the war.] ja ja # and # meine Schwester [//] wenn meine Eltern nicht gekommen wären, [yes yes # and # my sister if my parents hadn’t come,] waer(e) 0sie sofort zurueck -. weil sie hat nie gehoert xxx zum Austrian Centre xxx. [she would have returned immediately because she never belonged to the AC.] haben wir doch auch nur Deutsch gesprochen. [in the home domain we only spoke German.] das einzige # mit meiner Tochter # mit meinem Enkerl muss ich Englisch sprechen. [the only thing # with my daughter # with my grandson I have to speak English.]

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Extract 3 starts with Dor reflecting on having hardly any English friends. She tries to explain this with her family circumstances: her husband was Viennese, and so were her parents and her sister. In this context, Dor also stresses the importance of organizational support for the Jewish refugees: in her mind the Austrian Centre5 was important enough as a social, cultural, and political factor to influence her sister’s decision to re-migrate to Vienna. The only “exception” to Dor’s German-speaking extended family was her daughter and later on her grandson, with whom she had to converse in her non-native language English. In line 2 of extract 3, Dor refers to the English as Engländer although this German word is otherwise entirely surrounded by English words. “Genuinely English people” (see line 1, extract 4) remain the cultural Other for Dor. In extract 4, she acknowledges that she could have socialized with English people, but did not want to, for a fairly comprehensive list of cultural reasons. Extract 4 Dor aber wir waren nie mit richtigen Engländer zusammen, nicht? [but we never mingled with genuinely English people, no?] Dor man hätte können # man hat nicht wollen. [we could have # we did not want to.] Dor because man fühlt sich mit den eigenen Leuten wohler. [because one feels more at ease with one’s own people] Dor you know, wir haben die selbe # ahm nicht nur die Sprache, die selbe mentality. [You know, we have the same # not only the language, the same mentality.] Dor we enjoy [//] wir gehen gerne ins Kaffeehaus # noch immer. [We enjoy [//] we enjoy going to the coffee house # still.] Dor you know, wir sitzen da für Stunden  . . . [You know, we sit there for hours] (Activities: joint laughter Dor and Eva) Dor wir haben different [//] die selben idea-en eigentlich # wie wir sie als Kinder gehabt haben. [we have different (//) the same ideas, really, #which we had as children.] Dor so # man hat nicht so viel in common mit den Englaendern. [so # one does not have so much in common with the English.]

Extract 4 is an interesting development of Dor’s previous deliberations. In the first utterance she repeats that she never socialized with genuinely English

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people. The motivation for this withdrawal, however, becomes more general than her immediate family (see extract 3). Dor extends her family to the linguistic, cultural, and ideological group with which she associates herself: She withdrew, “because one feels more at ease with one’s own people.” What constitutes the cultural one’s own according to Dor is the language, the mentality, the beliefs (idea-en) and shared customs and behaviors. The only illustrating example for shared customs/behaviors Dor gives in extract 4 again relates to the culture of food consumption: spending hours in coffee houses with friends. Viennese Kaffeehauskultur involves meeting friends and acquaintances in a public space, that is, a coffee house, at a (roughly) prearranged time and staying there for hours talking to friends, reading the paper, and drinking coffee. The English “High Tea,” by contrast, is by invitation only, frequently takes place at family homes, and is strictly limited in time by the onset of dinner/supper. Note furthermore that the rendition of Kaffeehauskultur triggers shared laughter of cultural understanding between the interviewer and the interviewee. Dor then seems to return to cultural differences between her fellow Austrians and English people and produces a false start. She refocuses and highlights the cultural similarities with “her own people” instead. After drawing attention to the continuity in an individual’s development, she returns to the previously abandoned sentence and concludes this narrative sequence with the main point she wishes to make: one does not have so much in common with the English. In sum, Dor perceives the language, mentality, beliefs, and customs to be different between the English and the Austrians and, as these fundamental building blocks of culture are not shared, Dor finds it difficult to identify with her host-culture. Even half a century after emigration, one’s own is still Austria and home is still Vienna (see extract 3). From a linguistic point of view, the English borrowings in Dor’s predominantly German narrative are consistently discourse markers, such as you know, conjunctions such as because, and keywords (nouns and adjectives) such as mentality, the morphologically integrated idea-en, different, and in common. In extract 5, the base language changes to English due to the fact that Dor’s daughter Viv has arrived. We gather evidence for what Dor revealed at the end of extract 3, that is, that she has to speak English with her daughter. Viv understands German, but refuses to speak it in her mother’s company, for she is embarrassed by her mistakes. Apart from conceding to her daughter’s language choice (English), Dor knows for certain where home is, even half a century after emigration. Extract 5 Eva xxx it always depends on how far you identify with the country where you are living.

210 Viv Dor Viv Dor

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obviously none of you lot did identify, did you? no. you still talk of home as Austria. ja.

(Activities: Dor laughing) Dor Dor Viv Dor Viv Dor Viv

it’s true. when [/] when we say, we go home, we don’t mean  . . . which is [/] is really quite sad. yes # but we all do. I know # but you /. she [Viv] can’t understand but xxx. no I don’t understand it.

Dor’s minimal responses and laughter underline the message content. She even confirms it in German, “ja, home, the place to which we properly belong and in which our affections centre, is still Austria” and to paraphrase “yes, it may be sad, but we all feel that way, and it is you, Viv, who does not understand.” I have already highlighted in several examples that the English remain the cultural Other for Dor. Note that in the last utterance in extract 5, Dor uses the third-person pronoun to refer to her daughter Viv, who is actually sitting opposite her. For Dor, Viv also seems to be the cultural Other as mother and daughter have taken diametrically opposed roads on the intersection of language and culture contact. The tension between the first- and second-generation female exiles seems to exist, among other reasons, because mother and daughter have taken refuge in different symbolic orders (language and culture). Both Dor and Viv are threatened and challenged; Dor by ethnic persecution, the migration experience, displacement, and life in exile; Viv by being regarded as an outsider, an “enemy alien” child (see the next section). An important reason for which the conflicts within this particular mother–daughter relationship occur is that, in the face of these threats and challenges, the two women draw on the resources of different languages and cultures in order to stabilize and maintain boundaries as well as to create a concept of home for themselves. Dor emphatically roots herself in the German language and Austrian culture, whereas Viv opts for the English language and British culture. In combination with language shift, cultural differences also cause alienation and conflicts in other refugee families (Berghahn; The Jewish Women’s History Group; Mallet and Grenville). Many first-generation refugees still regard the German language (as well as German and Austrian literature) as superior to English. The second generation, on the other hand, has a less positive attitude toward the German language (and German art in general).

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The Second (and Third) Generation Dor’s daughter Viv, the second-generation Viennese immigrant in this study, describes herself as follows. Extract 6 Viv I am the only English child of # of a foreign family.

In this section I will demonstrate why Viv should consider herself (as well as be considered) the “English child of a foreign family.” I will start by looking at the way this utterance is produced. The hesitation pause, the repetition of of and the unusual word order indicate production difficulties. These kinds of linguistic phenomena are frequently associated with states of emotional agitation, unease, stress. The production of this utterance, thus, appears to indicate that Viv is ill-at-ease regarding her foreign origins. Extract 7 again displays various language production difficulties such as pauses, tags (you know, sort of ), and false starts, which point toward the speaker’s emotional unease. Extract 7 furthermore provides evidence of Viv’s embarrassment at her place of work when her family background is revealed and introduces one of Viv’s major preoccupations: the ability to speak “good English.”6 This insistence is rooted in mainstream British culture. The following extracts reveal Viv’s fear and certainty that her sociolinguistic heritage is at odds with the dominant culture and the language she has embraced. Extract 7 Viv when you used to ring me at work  . . . Viv , you know # (be)cause here again # it was a very [/-] you know # sort of # very well spoken English people there . Viv and they said uhm “Viv a foreign lady is on the phone for you.” Viv xxx it’s my mother!

At a place where Viv is perceived as a “native” English person who fits in with very well spoken English people, she is reminded by a colleague that her mother is identified by her accent as foreign. Viv is caught in the conflict between affiliation to her mother and acceptance by her peers. As a result, she feels hurt and experiences anxiety. In order to better understand Viv’s emotional difficulties with her foreign origins, we must consider the historical background. Viv was born at the beginning of the Second World War at which time the British government invoked the Alien’s Act. Home Office tribunals interviewed and allocated refugees to three categories of “enemy aliens,” two of which were to be interned. Although few people were interned for more than six

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months, there was a general consensus among the informants of my larger study: they felt deeply humiliated by these measures. Once the United Kingdom had entered the Second World War, the incentive for many refugees to speak English, both in public and within Austrian circles, became particularly strong. German was, after all, the language of the enemy.7 Publications by Jewish refugee organizations advised German-speaking Jewish refugees to not speak German in public.8 Nonetheless, this policy had little effect on those who sought refuge in Hampstead. The next generation, that grew up surrounded by German at home and in the community, was faced with the mistrust of mainstream British society, and was particularly sensitive to the language issue. One of Mallet and Grenville’s second-generation exiles, for example, states, “I was terrified my parents spoke German in the street, especially during the war. I would sort of crawl away—‘I don’t belong to them’ sort of thing” (237). Therefore, Viv’s conflict is common within the second generation precisely during the war and the postwar years. I have also anticipated that it was Viv who initiated the shift from German to English in her family. Dor speaks to Viv’s insistence and her own resistance to the language change within the home domain. Extract 8 Dor aber sie [Viv] hat sie [die Grosseltern] gezwungen, dass sie Englisch lernen. [but she (Viv) forced them (her grandparents) to learn English.] Dor sie hat immer gesagt ” you are in England # you have to speak English .” [she always said, “you are in England # you have to speak English.”] Dor so haben sie [die Grosseltern] müssen [*] Englisch lernen. [so they (the grandparents) had to learn English.] Dor aber dadurch hat sie # wie sie noch zuhaus(e) war # nur Deutsch gesprochen. [but therefore she only spoke German when she still lived at home.] Dor hat sie müssen [*] verstehen. [she had to undertand.] Dor hat sie müssen [*] sprechen, ob sie wollen hat oder nicht. [she had to speak (German), whether she wanted to or not.]

Dor’s parents seem to have had little choice but to learn English. Equally, Viv seems to have had little choice but to process and produce German at home. Note that Dor uses müssen (must) four times in a word-order position that is pragmatically/rhetorical motivated, that is, to further stress the must. Dor seems to derive considerable satisfaction from the fact that Viv

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was obligated to understand and speak German at home. Thus, with her parents’ help, she managed to pass her mother tongue onto the next generation, in spite of the next generation’s reluctance and resistance. We know from Dor that Viv feels embarrassed speaking German in front of her mother. Extract 9 Dor aber sie spricht noch immmer # wenn ich nicht dabei bin. [she [Viv] still speaks German # when I’m not there.] Dor sie schämt sich -. sie glaubt, sie macht Fehler  . . . [she feels embarrassed she thinks she makes mistakes]

Clearly, Viv does not embrace German as her mother tongue and, thus, must deal with the psychological ramifications. As Kristeva observes, the abandonment of a native tongue is a symbolic matricide (Kristeva 244). Viv has not resolved her conflict and, as a result, is incapable of identifying with her mother, her mother tongue, and the culture they represent. Therefore, Viv’s language production difficulties and dis-fluencies (detected earlier) reveal unease regarding her origins. As might indicate with Dor and her descendents, language shift to English is complete by the third generation of German and Austrian Shoah exiles in the United Kingdom. This particular case is accelerated when compared with other refugee communities and can best be explained by the fact that German, my informant’s mother tongue, was deemed the language of the enemy by the host society. Extract 10 Dor aber [//] und mein Enkerl hat in der Schule [Deutsch] gelernt. [but (//) and my grandson learnt German at school.] Dor er kann sich verständigen -? [he can make himself understood] Dor aber ich mein # ich hätt(e) lieber gehabt, wenn er besser Deutsch gekonnt hätt(e). [but I mean # I would have liked him to speak better German.]

The informants’ first-hand accounts of their lives in exile and the analysis so far have shown that Dor never felt at home in the United Kingdom and mainly socialized with fellow refugees from Vienna. She lives a life at the margins of British society, preferably socializing with fellow refugees and speaking German interspersed with elements from her second language. Her daughter, on the other hand, feels uneasy about her “foreign” family background, believes that living in England requires a certain

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amount of assimilation and acculturation, both linguistically and culturally. She imposes this on the previous generations and takes it a step further in her own life and in her son’s (Nic) upbringing and education. Viv wants Nic to be a well-mannered and well-spoken Englishman who has mastered “good English.” This rapid linguistic and cultural change does not happen without friction between the generations. The next section highlights the fact that the third generation is caught in the cultural conflict between his Austrian grandmother and his English mother. Der Würstelstand/The Hot Dog Stand The domain affected by language and culture contact in this extract has already surfaced twice (extracts 2 and 4) in the data presented so far: food, or rather the culture of food consumption. For Viv very good English and very good (English table) manners are of utmost importance due to the fact that she believes them to be part of the socially recognized British cultural norms. Her son Nic, that is, the third generation, is caught in the language and culture conflict between his mother and his grandmother on return from his trip to Austria precisely because of the manner in which he consumed a Würstel9 in his grandmother’s country of origin, where Dor had taken him on holiday to convey her cultural and linguistic heritage. All three generations are present during this part of the interview. Extract 11 Dor we went, you know [//] we went to Salzburg and the(re) [?] (de)n Würstelstand. [We went, you know (//) we went to Salzburg and there the hot-dog stand. Dor so I said ”/. Dor  “Nicolas you have to eat it with der Hand, because das schmeckt ganz anders.” [Nicolas you have to eat it with the fingers, because that tastes very differently.] Dor das muss man mit der Hand essen, es schmeckt ganz anders. [one has to eat it (the sausage) with one’s fingers, it tastes very differently.] Dor so wie er nach Haus gekommen is(t), hat er (e)s in die Hand genommen. [so when he came back home, he ate it (the sausage) with his fingers.] Dor sagt die Vivien “what are you doing?” [Vivien says, “what are you doing?”]

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Dor sagt er, “es schmeckt ganz anders.” [He (Nic) says, “it tastes very differently”] (Activities: EVA and Dor laughing) Viv xxx tragedy xxx you know xxx. Viv you know, all the things I was trying to do xxx good manners.

The base language of the conversation had already shifted to English when the narrative about the Würstelstand is recounted and the first German word in it, the place-name Salzburg, cannot really be avoided, as it sets the scene for the narrative. For the second German borrowing in this narrative, that is, Würstelstand, only American English has a term that roughly covers the concept: the hot dog stand. For Dor, however, this term does not appropriately express the reality pertaining to her associations with Würstelstand and she, therefore, borrows the German lexical item. A Würstelstand is a fast food kiosk where Würstel sausages are sold, usually with different kinds of bread and mustard. People eat Würstel at the Würstelstand as if standing at a bar. Visiting the Würstelstand means much more than simply having a snack, eating sausage, and drinking beer. Würstelstände are also places of communication. They are open until late in the night or even early in the morning. The practice of experiencing Würstelstand culture permeates all socioeconomic strata. It is not an indicator of class, for it is part of the popular culture. In other words, people from all walks of life share in this Austrian experience and visit this public venue (http://www.univie.ac.at/Very-Vienna/magazin/artikel/37/ siebenundddreissig.html). Note must be made of the similarities between the Würstelstände and Viennese coffee houses (see extract 4), which are in stark contrast with fish and chip shops, the English fast food place. At fish and chip shops, one leaves the shop as soon as the meal is prepared and consumes it in the privacy of one’s home; at Würstelstände and Viennese coffee houses one stays to consume the purchased goods in company. Borrowing the term Würstelstand may also be intended as an indicator for the other cultural in-group member in the audience (Eva). At this particular venue, there is only one culturally appropriate way of consuming the item of food under discussion, that is, Würstel, and that is with der Hand (with one’s fingers). For cultural in-group members any other way of consuming sausages at a Wüstelstand, for example, with plastic or wooden knives and forks, is culturally marked. Eating Würstel with one’s fingers is a cultural behavior that, as a symbol, assumes its meaning in relationship to other symbols that constitute the cultural experience of going to a Würstelstand. Other culture traits connected with the larger pattern of the Würstelstand are standing, drinking beer, and conversing with the proprietor

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and other customers. Dor’s borrowing the Austrian term Würstelstand, thus, functions as a “proper-name allusion,” that is, an allusion that presupposes “familiarity with esoteric sources” and is “recognised by a small minority of receivers only” (Leppihalme 3). The full meaning of this word is culturally determined and can only be understood if its use evokes the referent and some characteristic features linked to it. The receiver familiar with this cultural practise in the setting under discussion is Eva. As at the end of extract 5, Dor thus indirectly divides her audience into cultural and linguistic in- and out-group members: herself and EVA form the “us/we,” her daughter (Viv) the cultural Other or the “they,” and her grandson (Nic) is drawn between the two. The topic and the first two borrowings in extract 11, that is, Salzburg and Würstelstand, consequently trigger frequent intra-sentential code-mixing. The explanation/reason why it is important for Dor to stick to the Austrian way of consuming a particular food is already given in an almost entirely German clause with the exception of the English conjunction because das schmeckt ganz anders (that tastes completely differently). With the English conjunction “because,” Dor is literally trying to reconnect her grandson Nic with the elementary taste for the flavors of food from her own cultural background (Bourdieu 1984). Dor obviously enjoys telling this particular part of the story and repeats the entire previous utterance, which also constitutes the peak of the narrative, translated entirely into German, and she does not bother to switch back to English for the next transition in the narrative. By adhering to her language choice, Dor may not exclude Viv from her audience, but most probably Nic. As if to heighten the language and culture conflict between herself and her daughter, Dor reverts to English to quote Viv’s shocked reaction to her son’s newly acquired Austrian manners. Gumperz analyzed code-switched direct quotations and found that it is the contrast between “we” and “they” codes that is important in this construction type. Dor quotes her own daughter in English. Nic, on the other hand, who has just been taught an Austrian culture trait, is quoted in German. By choosing to represent her daughter in the “they” code, Dor highlights the fact that her daughter embraces different cultural norms and excludes her from the cultural in-group. Conversely, Viv interprets her mother’s acculturation exercises with her son as unwelcome interference with her own educational goals: to eliminate any foreign customs and behaviors that may be revived in the family and to raise her son as a well-spoken and well-mannered Englishman. Another issue that may come into play is that, in this case, a (national) cultural practice of food consumption may be misinterpreted as a social-class issue by Viv. If interpreted as a marker of social class, eating sausage with one’s fingers may be interpreted as working-class behavior.

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What Viv, the cultural out-group member, may not be aware of is that certain cultural norms of food consumption, that is, how to eat Würstel at a kiosk, cut across social-class boundaries in her mother’s culture. Dor unmistakably provokes conflict with her daughter by actively counteracting culture and language loss across generations, and by attempting to revive her own culture of food consumption in the third generation. The tension between the two generations of female Viennese exiles emerges due to the cultural gap, caused by culture loss, between mother and daughter. “One of Your Own” After extract 11, in which realities pertaining to one culture remain alien to the next generation of immigrants, and thus cause considerable friction between mother and daughter, I would like to end this essay on a more conciliatory note by quoting an abstract in which Viv almost (!) acknowledges her own linguistic and cultural roots. As mentioned in the introduction, the process of assimilation is a process, and linguistic and cultural traditions are not completely lost in one generation. Extract 12 illustrates that Viv does feel an affinity with people of her own linguistic, cultural, and ethnic background. Extract 12 Viv at work # somebody rang up and I knew immediately he was from # Vienna. Viv and they can’t tell from me # on the phone, who I am. Viv and I know exactly, who they are, you see? Viv you feel [//] and you feel an affinity. Viv you wanna say “look, don’t worry . . .” Viv you know, you can hear, you know, it’s one of your own.

Note first of all that Viv’s emotional/psychological involvement with the topic—possibly caused by her uneasy cultural and linguistic identity—again results in considerable production difficulties (hesitations pauses, trailing off, tags, and retracings; cf. extracts 6 and 7). In this rather gingerly way Viv discloses in extract 12 that she immediately recognizes people from her mother’s hometown, even on the telephone, but her own language use does not reveal her Austrian heritage and hybrid identity. Viv acknowledges feeling an affinity with the Viennese callers, but does not come forward with her own cultural and linguistic background. Although she desires to comfort them by saying “look, don’t worry,” she cannot bring herself to actually verbalize it. She does, however, consider Viennese people as her own kind.

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Mourning “my evening’s joy” (2005), part of a series of works, Widow’s Weeds, by Janice D. Kmetz.

Conclusion This essay has shown the ways in which language shift and culture loss of the second- and third-generation Austrian Jewish refugees living in the United Kingdom can lead to conflicts within mother–daughter relationships. This particular study is based on only one representative of each generation of Viennese Jewish refugees in London, but the analysis is supported by other interviews from my corpus and independent research (Berghahn; The Jewish Women’s History Group; Mallet and Grenville). The representative of the first generation of female exiles in this essay is based on Dor, who does not mind living in the margins of her hostculture and society. She is certainly displaced geographically; however, socially, culturally, and linguistically, she lives in an Austrian enclave in

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northwest London, within a community that should be considered a home away from home. The linguistic exceptions within this Germanspeaking domain are her daughter and her grandson. The daughter (Viv) does not understand her mother’s continued attachment to her home country, culture, and language—which is maintained by memory and language use—and feels uneasy about her foreign roots. Viv raises her son, the third generation, to become a well-mannered and well-spoken Englishman who, as such, must speak “proper English.” Thus, language shift from German to English and loss of Austrian cultural traditions are virtually complete within three generations. This accelerated shift leaves a linguistic and cultural gap between the generations. The essay furthermore has shown the symbolic value of cultural traditions that manifest themselves in seemingly insignificant social practices. As we have seen, how to eat Würstel—and all that it symbolizes—can trigger an escalation of the cultural conflict between the generations. The discourse and conversation approach (with which the analysis of the conversation extracts was carried out) reveals that the insistence on cultural identity rooted in language and everyday customs creates tension between first- and second-generation immigrants. Austrian-born Dor feels more at home living in Hamstead, UK, with her unassimilated existence than her daughter Viv who has assimilated to the dominant culture, and considers herself “the English child of a foreign family.” The dual language use for Dor connotes a “we” and “they” code (Gumperz 1982) that indicates cultural in- and out-group membership. Consequently, her daughter Viv is identified as the cultural Other. The analysis thus indicates that living a life at the margins of the host culture—but at the center of the exiles’ community—does not lead to alienation for a first-generation immigrant, but strongly impacts the linguistic and cultural generational gap and causes cultural identity to be put into question in the second generation. Appendix: Transcription Conventions ... ” [//] xxx ^ , [/-] #

trailing off quotation follows retracing unintelligible speech quick uptake self-completion false start pause

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Notes 1. The study is part of a larger project “Language Use of German-speaking Jewish Refugees in London” (working title, Eppler). 2. Anschluss literally means “annexation.” Austria, however, was integrated into the German Reich following a plebiscite in which the majority of the Austrian population had voted in favor of the Anschluss. 3. The criterion for the granting of a visa was whether or not an applicant was likely to be an asset to the United Kingdom. The principle of pre-selection of potential immigrants to Great Britain in the country of origin led to a highly restrictive immigration policy that divided applicants into desirable and undesirable ones. Among the “undesirable” refugees were “small shopkeepers, retail traders, artisans, agents and middlemen, whose livelihood depends on commission and, therefore, on trade activity, and minor musicians and commercial artists of all kinds” (Muchitsch 14). 4. Only one of my forty-eight informants spoke Yiddish. This is representative of the German and Austrian Jewish refugee community in the United Kingdom as a whole. Yiddish was not spoken because the vast majority of Shoah exiles in Britain came from assimilated backgrounds. 5. The Austrian Centre was founded in 1939 to provide social, educational, and cultural services for refugees from Austria. It had a youth organization called “Young Austria” of which Dor was a member, and an umbrella organization called Free Austria Movement (FAM), which was founded in December 1941 with the aim of bringing about a united political front of all Austrian anti-Fascist groups in exile. Many of FAM’s leading members were Communists, and therefore some refugees were reluctant to join the Austrian Centre. Stefan Holland’s (Mallet and Grenville 116) assessment that the Austrian Centre fulfilled a social rather than a political function for many members seems accurate to me. The Austrian Centre even had its own theater, the Laterndl, which staged many popular performances during the war years but was dissolved in 1945. So was the Austrian Centre itself. 6. In the British context this refers to Standard British English, as coded in dictionaries and grammar books, spoken with “Received Pronunciation,” the accent used in private education institutions such as Eaton; that is, a form of speech that is recognized as the standard and taught to non-native speakers. 7. Being able to conduct internment interviews in the host country language, that is, English, naturally helped not being classified as an enemy alien. 8. “Sprechen Sie nicht Deutsch auf der Straße, in Verkehrsmitteln oder sonst in der Öffentlichkeit, wie z.B. in Restaurants. Sprechen Sie lieber stockend Englisch als fliessend Deutsch- und sprechen Sie nicht laut.” (Ratgeber des German Jewish Aid Committee für ankommende Flüchtlinge [Please do not speak German in the streets, on public transportation or anywhere else in public, as for example in restaurants. You should speak broken English rather than fluent German. And do not speak loudly]; cited in Muchitsch 33). 9. Würstel is an umbrella term for different types of sausages. The equivalent term in German spoken in Germany is Würstchen.

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Works Cited Berghahn, Marion. German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation. London: Macmillan P, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Eppler, Eva. “Language Interaction in Exile Literature: Jakov Lind’s Cosmopolitan Style.” Writing after Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind. Ed. Edward Timms, Andrea Hammel, and Silke Hassler. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2001. 158–76. Goodenough, Ward. “Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics.” In Report on the Seventh Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study. Ed. P.L. Garvin. Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, no. 9. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP, 1957. Gumperz, John J. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Jewish Women’s History Group, The. You’d Prefer Me Not to Mention It . . . The Lives of Four Jewish Daughters of Refugees. London: Calverts North Star P, 1983. Kristeva, Julia. Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other P, 2000. Leppihalme, Ritva. Culture Bumps. Clavedon: Multilingual Matters, 1997. Mallet, Marian and Anthony Grenville, ed. Changing Countries. The Experience and Achievement of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain, from 1933 to Today. London: Libris, 2002. Muchitsch, Wolfgang. Österreicher im Exil. Grossbritannien 1938–1945. Vienna: Bundesverlag, 1992. Myers-Scotton, Carol. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books, 2001.

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MULTICULTURALISM AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: THE CASE OF FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION Anouk Guiné and Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes

Introduction At the end of the Second World War, the role of immigrant labor became essential for the growth, restructuring, and rationalization of the production processes of the most advanced economies of Western Europe. Following the oil shocks of the 1970s, although all European countries that had relied on foreign workers in previous decades declared their borders closed to further labor immigration, and some even initiated programs aimed at encouraging return migration, the numbers of foreign nationals residing in Western European countries considerably increased in the 1980s and 1990s. This was to a large extent a consequence of the processes of family reunification resulting from the maturation of the migration cycles initiated during the period of constant economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain; Cornelius et al.). One of the most striking consequences of the migratory processes affecting European countries has been the considerable change in the ethnic composition of their populations. The newly imported diversity has been reflected primarily in the development of ethnic minority communities clearly identified by their national origins, languages, and religions, as well as by their different ways of conducting their everyday lives. The policies developed by Western European governments to respond to this growing diversity were determined by each country’s specific “philosophy of integration.” These “philosophies” are based on country-specific notions of citizenship, pluralism, equality, public order, and tolerance,

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which constitute “a set of consensual ideas and linguistic terms held across party political lines that can be analysed into its respective normative and explanatory goals and assumptions” (Favell). According to Favel, these normative systems have as a main objective the definition of a common framework of reference (the basic rules of the game), whose aim is to “achieve stability and legitimacy by rebuilding communal bonds of civility and tolerance—a moral social order—across the conflicts and divisions caused by the plurality of values and individual interests.” While most of the culturally determined attitudes and behaviors of the immigrant populations have been perfectly compatible with the norms and values of the receiving societies, certain practices common among some of the newly arrived groups, such as polygamy, early or forced marriages, or female genital mutilation, have openly clashed with the ethical, normative, and legal frameworks of their liberal democratic host societies. With respect to these practices, the authorities of the receiving countries have had to face a complex trade-off between their obligation to protect the basic rights of the individual, and their will not to alienate the newly arrived populations by repressing their traditional cultural practices. In this essay, we focus on one example of such confrontations of value systems, namely the practices included under the heading of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). These practices constitute an interesting case study for analyzing the policies toward diversity, because they represent a clear challenge to liberal foundations based on the principle of equality of all individuals before the law, and on the protection of basic human rights. FGM poses the problem of the limits of both cultural difference and cultural collective rights (Poulter). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), FGM practices are “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons.”1 These practices are mainly performed on girls between the ages of four and thirteen, either in unsanitary conditions or in hospitals. The immediate health-related complications of FGM may include “haemorrhage, pain, shock, tetanus, sepsis, urine retention, injury to adjacent tissue, ulceration of the genital region and death” (Momoh Female Genital Mutilation).2 Before or after marriage or prenatally, most women with infibulation go through a reversal procedure known as “deinfibulation” or “reversal”3 in order to allow penetration and delivery. This process is often followed by a “re-infibulation” after childbirth. Finally, FGM doubles the risk of the mother’s death in childbirth and increases three- or four-fold the risk of stillbirth. In spite of being considered unacceptable from a medical, ethical, and legal point of view in Western countries, and increasingly in Africa—where

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numerous African women’s groups, African women leaders, and governments are fighting against these practices—FGM is still approved by many African communities. Among these groups, FGM is thought to condition the social well-being of the girls, to contribute to the affirmation of feminine social identity, and favor access to marriage, womanhood, virginity, maternity, purity, faithfulness, and the beautification of the body.4 However, some members of these groups, though holding that the tradition is “wrong,” still maintain it because they do not want their daughters to lose the custom (APPG), and because they see it as a form of “defense” in societies in which they feel discriminated against. In this way, FGM reinforces membership and the sense of ethnic belonging within the host society. Among the European Union (EU) member states, the United Kingdom and France are the countries that host the largest immigrant communities originating from societies where FGM is traditionally practiced, and the United Kingdom is the country that receives most women coming from these societies (Osborn and Boseley). According to the British Medical Association (BMA), the communities most exposed to FGM in the United Kingdom come from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen (BMA Female Genital Mutilation). The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) adds Djibouti, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria to the list (RCM). Communities from Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Zaire are also exposed to FGM in the United Kingdom (Read). For obvious reasons—FGM is an underground practice due to its illegality—obtaining precise data on the number of women who have undergone some form of genital mutilation in Europe is an impossible task. Most of the evidence regarding these practices comes from key informants and organizations, which, because of their direct involvement with minority ethnic communities, have privileged access to the groups affected by FGM practices. Officials estimate that more than 74,000 women currently living in the United Kingdom have undergone some form of FGM, and that approximately 6,000 girls under sixteen are annually at risk of being exposed to these practices despite their legal banning in Britain since 1985 (Department of Education and Skills). The main destination where girls living in the United Kingdom are taken to undergo FGM appears to be Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.5 In the United Kingdom, the issue of FGM inflicted upon girls abroad remains controversial, and has been a serious cause of concern for public authorities. The main objective of this essay is to analyze the ways in which British authorities have faced the challenges FGM practices pose to their normative, ethical, and legal frameworks, which are, at least in principle, committed to the protection of the basic human rights of the individual. We will

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review the discourses and practices that have characterized the British “philosophy of integration” vis-à-vis the immigrant populations living in Britain, and in particular toward the cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity introduced into British society by their presence. The general framework of health policies toward ethnic minority groups will be used as an example of British multiculturalist policies. After defining the policy environment in which responses to FGM practices have been designed, we will analyze the implementation of those policies, paying particular attention to the roles played by the different actors involved. The concluding section will point out the overall failure of the British approach in preventing FGM practices. We will see how British multiculturalist policies, characterized by a combination of “respect” for minority ethnic cultures and the legal banning of FGM practices, has resulted in a weak degree of enforcement of the legislation and therefore in a low level of protection of girls’ individual right to freedom from violence. The United Kingdom: Unresponsive Multiculturalism The evolution of the migratory processes affecting the United Kingdom roughly followed the general pattern traditionally described for the most advanced economies of Western Europe (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain; Cornelius et al.). With the arrival and settling of large numbers of migrants from the former British Empire, the ethnic composition of the population of the United Kingdom changed quite radically in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the Census more than 4.6 million people with ethnic minority origins lived in the United Kingdom in 2001, representing 7.9 percent of the total population.6 The share of ethnic minority populations was the highest in England, with some 97 percent of all nonwhite British populations living in this region, and ethnic minority groups representing some 9 percent of its total population. Most of those groups had migrated to the United Kingdom from New Commonwealth countries and held British citizenship, entitling them to settle in the United Kingdom and to enjoy the full set of civic, political, and social rights granted to citizens of that state. The largest group were those from the Indian subcontinent (Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis), followed by those coming from African Commonwealth countries and the West Indies. Nevertheless, other immigrant groups, including Chinese, Turks, Arabs, and Somalis, have also gained considerable importance in more recent years. Although it is very difficult to determine which populations may be most exposed to FGM practices today, both British authorities and NGOs working directly with ethnic minority women agree in their assessment

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that the Sudanese, and even more so the Somalis, are among the most seriously exposed groups in the United Kingdom. Approximately 100,000 people coming from Somalia and Sudan currently live in the United Kingdom, three-quarters of them in the London area. Half of this population is under thirty, and most have arrived as refugees within the past ten years. This data gives us an indication of the potential importance of FGM practices among groups that are relatively recent arrivals in the United Kingdom and constitute a fairly young population, in the process of forming families and having children in Britain. Multiculturalism: Discourses and Practices Britain recognized the ethnic diversity of its populations earlier than any other country in Western Europe. The home secretary stated as early as 1966: I do not think that we need in this country a melting pot, which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotypical Englishman . . . I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. (Qtd. in Joppke)

This statement expresses the three main traits that have defined British policy toward diversity over the past decades: measures to fight discrimination, equal opportunity policies, and official recognition of cultural diversity within the United Kingdom. Emphasis on the existence of ethnic cleavages within the British population comes, to a certain extent, at the expense of the recognition of other divisions, such as gender or class, and this results in a certain precedence accorded to the protection of ethnic groups’ collective rights over the rights of individuals (Nazroo). Some authors have stressed that this precedence of collective over individual rights is all the more detrimental to women since their communities of origin are often strongly structured along patriarchal lines (Fraser; Guiné “Multiculturalisme”; Ivekovic; Nash and Marre; Okin et al.; Sahgal and Yuval-Davis; Spensky and Kennedy-Dubourdieu; Yuval-Davis). According to the British group Women Against Fundamentalisms (WAF): A consensus on multiculturalism has been established across the political spectrum, and it has become the pivotal aspect of the British state’s relationship with minority communities, particularly in schools, social services and the law [. . .] many women who are trying to take control of their own lives and bodies [. . .] face the added obstacle of multicultural policies adopted by the police, social services or the legal system. These institutions usually

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approach such women with caution. They intervene as little as possible in cultures that are ‘different,’ choosing to be guided by the ‘authentic’ interpretations of culture and tradition offered by the community leaders. In the name of tolerance, they fail to help women assert the legal and human rights which are taken for granted by women in the majority community. (WAF)

The origins of the official “recognition” of the cultural and ethnic diversity of the British population may be traced back to the basic structures characterizing the creation of the political system of the United Kingdom (as constituted by several territories with strong differential traits: Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland), and the British Empire (in which citizenship was based on subject-hood to a common monarch, rather than on a common nationality) (Soysal). The introduction of questions about ethnicity in the Census and other official statistical apparatuses reflected an acceptance of the division of the British population along ethnic lines. The gathering of information using ethnicity as a variable also allowed for analysis of the situation of the different “ethnic minority” populations, and for the design and implementation of policies aimed at preventing inequalities and discrimination on ethnic grounds. In the health domain as a specific policy area, British authorities initially embraced a “color-blind” approach, which assumed that minority ethnic groups could benefit from mainstream services to the same extent as the white majority population, provided that a policy of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity was strictly enforced. This policy remained unchallenged for a significant period, despite accumulating evidence of the existence of discrimination and inequalities affecting those groups (Acheson; Cohen; Kelleher and Hillier; Smaje). The picture started to change in the early 1980s when, in a context of increasing political salience of the issue of health inequalities within the British population, the campaigns and mobilization of ethnic groups concerned with specific health problems particularly prevalent among ethnic minority groups—among them rickets, sickle cell, and anemia—contributed to growing awareness of minorities’ disadvantaged health position7 (Townsend, Black, et al.). The reforms of the National Health Service’s structure and operation, as conceived by the conservative government of the time (introduction of quasi-markets, development of a contract culture), left little room for the introduction of a fully developed and coherent set of policies to address the health inequalities affecting minority ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the official discourse about ethnic health inequalities changed significantly; the minister of health was quoted as saying that addressing the special needs arising from the presence of an ethnically diverse population was a question of “considering different ways of providing existing services” (Department

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of Health Ethnic Minority Health). In his annual report on the state of the public health for 1991, the British chief medical officer devoted an entire chapter to the issue of the health of ethnic minorities, as well as to the situation of political refugees living in the United Kingdom, stating that “the NHS must address the particular needs of the black and ethnic minorities living in this country, and take positive steps to eliminate discrimination” (Department of Health On the State of the Public Health). This report followed the directives set by the “Patient’s Charter” and the White Paper “The Health of the Nation,” official documents published months earlier, in which the government had also identified blacks and ethnic minorities as groups with specific needs to be addressed by health authorities. These documents stressed that special consideration should be given to those groups’ privacy and dignity, with particular attention to respecting their religious and cultural beliefs. The NHS executive instructed health services to begin collecting data on ethnic minority patients admitted to hospitals starting in January 1995, with the objective of generating a more reliable database on morbidity and patterns of utilization of health services by these groups (Chandra). Despite declarations by health authorities and public officials recognizing the multicultural character of British society, and commitments to improving the services provided to minority ethnic groups (Bahl), most NHS bodies did not change the core of their mainstream practices and services to take into account the experience of such groups. Most measures taken were in a process-oriented vein and most directly concerned the managerial level; designed and implemented by individual regional or district health authorities, local governments, and third-sector organizations, they brought little substantial change in terms of service delivery. To quote the authors of a report on the commissioning and purchasing of health care services for ethnic minorities: “the evidence of this study is that insufficient thought had been given by senior NHS managers about the implementation issues” (Department of Health Responding to Diversity). This evidence supported those who argued that changes in the delivery of health care to ethnic minority groups had been fairly superficial, and represented nothing more than window dressing with regard to earlier policy failures, in response to increasing ethnic mobilization (Ahmad and Atkin; NAHA). FGM as a Policy Issue in Britain Two interrelated events greatly contributed to place the issue of FGM on the British political agenda. First, the publication of the 1980 report “Female Circumcision, Excision and Infibulation: The Facts and Proposals for Change” on FGM practices in the United Kingdom and internationally,

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promoted by the Minority Rights Group (MRG);8 and second, the raising of the issue of FGM in Parliament by Member of Parliament (MP) Lord Kennet. The international context also contributed to the publication of the 1980 report and to the political process leading up to the passage of the Prohibition of Circumcision Act 1985. In 1979, the first WHO seminar on FGM took place in Khartoum, Sudan. In 1979, the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women took place. In 1980, FGM was discussed at the Platform for Action of the UN World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief was issued in 1981. In 1984, the Inter-African Committee on Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children and its twenty-seven national committees were established, marking a strengthened African commitment to deal with FGM. Finally, the UN working group on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, composed of experts designated by the sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of minorities (UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO, and representatives of concerned NGOs) was established in 1984. The first draft of the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, finally passed in 1985, declared FGM practices illegal, except when considered necessary for the physical health of women (mainly in cases of pre-cancer and cancer). After intense pressure from the Health Department and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), who sought to defend their freedom to practice medical female circumcision, the justification of the act on grounds of mental health (due to congenital abnormalities) was also added to the final text, and its illegality for reasons of “custom or ritual” was maintained (Gerphagnon; Sochart). In general terms, the British government framed its response to FGM as a measure of child protection, since FGM is mainly performed on children who are unable to give consent. It approached the problem with a strategy of interagency cooperation. The current main source of guidance, directed toward authorities in the health, education, and social services sectors, as well as the police, the judiciary, and third-sector organizations working in this field, is the manual “Working Together to Safeguard Children,” jointly drafted by the Departments of Health, Education, Labour, and the Home Office in 1999. Only a small portion of the guidelines in this document is dedicated to FGM. It is stated that under Section 47 of the 1989 Children’s Act, a local authority “can exercise” its investigative powers if it believes that a girl is likely to become a victim of FGM. This section also insists on the fact that when a risk of FGM is present,

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local agencies should intervene in cooperation with the Area Child Protection Committee (ACPC),9 the agency responsible for developing prevention strategies through community education and coordinating training activities for health professionals. Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, undersecretary of state for the Department of Health, declared in the House of Lords on March 23, 2000, that education is central to eradicating FGM in the United Kingdom and that his department would continue to fund relevant voluntary organizations. Moreover, the Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998 also empowers the Courts to prohibit parents from taking their daughters outside the United Kingdom to have the operation performed. The Department of Health, the BMA, the Conference of Medical Royal Colleges, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Nursing, and the National Association of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, all developed protocols and guidelines for health professionals on how to deal with FGM practices. In its protocol on this issue, the BMA recommends that doctors treat patients with a “culturally sensitive” and “non-judgemental attitude”; that they provide psychosocial support, advise, educate, and raise awareness concerning the rights of children and the existing legislative mechanisms of protection; and finally, that they contact the appropriate social services, in particular the ACPC, if, in their assessment, a girl is at risk of undergoing FGM (BMA Guidance for Doctors). Special clinics were also set up to tend to women who have undergone FGM practices. Thus, in 1993, Dr. H. Gordon, a gynecologist and FGM specialist, established an African Well Woman clinic at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, Middlesex, with funding from the Department of Health, with the aim of providing midwifery, obstetric, and gynecological care to infibulated women. Similar centers were created in 1997 at the Central Middlesex Hospital10 (North West London), Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Trust11 (South West London), and Liverpool Women’s Hospital (Momoh “Female Genital Mutilation”). Also, a community-based clinic called African Women’s Health Clinic opened in 1999 as part of the Community Health Project in Leytonstone, Waltham Forest (North East London).12 A clinic at the St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington (West London) opened on International Women’s Day on March 8, 2002.13 Finally, an African Women’s Clinic “for women who have undergone FGM” was also started in 2002 at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson & Obstetric Hospital in London. Some hospitals do not have an African Well Women’s clinic but have adopted a written policy on obstetric care for women who have experienced FGM, as is the case, for example, at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (formerly the Greenwich Hospital NHS Trust).14 According to Comfort Momoh, the editor of the book Female Genital Mutilation,15 the

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role of an FGM specialist midwife should be . . . to increase professional and public awareness of FGM [. . .]; to form a network link with the local communities, local statutory and voluntary organisations [. . .]; to form a relationship based on caring and trust with both professionals, women and communities that practise FGM [. . .]; to have a lead in the development of local policies/protocols which can be adapted to individual needs [. . .]; to provide support, information, advice and care for the communities that practice FGM. (Momoh Female Genital Mutilation)

In May 2000, the U.K. All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health (APPG)—a group of parliamentarians desirous of establishing a dialogue between parliamentarians, civil servants, and NGOs16—conducted parliamentary hearings on FGM practices with the participation of health, education, and social services authorities as well as national and international NGOs. As Harding argues17 this initiative was motivated by the lack of a comprehensive source of advice, information and training for governments, local authorities and other NGOs; its objective was to “develop and implement appropriate legislation, with due consultation with community based organizations and other groups working in the field (. . .) to encourage governments to increase investment in activities geared to the elimination of FGM.” As we shall see in the next section, the APPG called on the government both to make changes in the law and to promote the prevention of FGM. Finally, within the framework of the general British policy on gender equality, the Women’s National Commission (WNC) set up an FGM working group whose purpose is to gather all the concerned individuals and organizations working against FGM18 in order to influence government policy and devise a national strategy against FGM. A Policy Failure? The following quote from Dr. Gordon’s statement reflects the British attitude toward FGM, and toward those who break the law governing FGM practices: “FGM is not conventional child abuse. The parents who put their children through this procedure honestly believe that they are doing the right thing, with 600 years of tradition behind them. I would rather see it stamped out through education than through prosecution.”19 The British stance toward FGM, expressed at parliamentary, humanitarian, and medical levels, has been to educate parents, prosecute doctors,20 and help traditional circumcisors living in the United Kingdom to change activities. Indeed, although the 1985 law stipulates a fine or a prison sentence of six months

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to five years for those practicing FGM, no arrest has taken place under the 1985 law and only two doctors have been expelled from the General Medical Council (in 1993 and 2000), for having practiced FGM. Some African women’s organizations based in the United Kingdom are also currently working for the rehabilitation of traditional circumcisors in London, Liverpool, and Cardiff.21 Several aspects of the British institutional framework have been identified as obstacles to the process of eradication of FGM. In the first place, the justification of FGM on mental health grounds constitutes a loophole in the law. Since the mental health of the girls and women concerned is thought by many to depend largely on their being “circumcised,” it is easy for a patient to justify the need for this “operation” on “mental health” grounds. This exception to prohibition, to some extent, negates the original intentions of the 1985 act and may help to explain the fact that FGM practices have continued to be performed in British private hospitals (Lords Hansard). A second factor that weakens the British position against FGM has to do with to the impact of the Law in the 1980s upon some organizations representing Somali women’s rights (Guiné “Mutilación”). The U.K.-based nonprofit organization London Black Women’s Health Action Project (LBWHAP), as well as the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and Lord Kennet, opposed prohibition on grounds of custom or ritual as “racist.” Established in 1982 by Shamis Dirir in East End London, first known as the Somali Women’s Association, and currently called Black Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), LBWHAP—today one of the main grass roots community organizations working for the prevention of FGM in the United Kingdom—organizes its campaigns against FGM around the notion of “blackness” as a way of fighting against what it considered in the 1980s to be the government’s “discriminatory” approach. LBWHAP holds that “female circumcision” cannot be called child abuse at all and “must be understood and located in the overall context of black struggle,” with two objectives: “to counter state control and repression and criminalization of issues of female sexuality,” and “to counter the image of black people as performing ‘barbaric’ primitive practices” (LBWHAP). LBWHAP works against FGM within a “holistic” perspective since it considers FGM “within a wider health, cultural, social and economic context,” given its efforts to favor, more generally, the integration of Somali men and women in the health, legal, housing, and work domains. From the moment the 1985 law came under discussion, the organization mobilized the Somali community against it, denouncing the absence of dialogue with the affected communities during the process of the law’s passage as well as the lack of funds allocated to prevention programs. For LBWHAP, the

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enforcement of the law could only lead to reinforcing the clandestine character of FGM practices, attributing to them an aura of resistance to domination and repression,22 while transforming otherwise “protective parents” into “potential criminals.” The categorization of the 1985 law as “racist” by LBWHAP and other groups may have led to an ethnic withdrawal, with a negative impact on FGM prevention. In addition to the previously mentioned factors and according to the recommendations made by the APPG in 2000, the manual “Working Together to Safeguard Children” should, in future editions, specify requirements for ACPCs to include FGM within their local procedures and policies for child protection; a Supplementary Guidance to “Working Together to Safeguard Children” should be developed on FGM along similar lines to the “Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution” Supplementary Guidance; the new U.K. Sex and Relationship Education Guidance makes clear that each school should have staff members to deal with child protection issues, but it makes no reference to FGM; the government should provide funding to develop women’s leadership and literacy skills to enhance their ability to speak confidently on issues concerning their health and well-being; the government should require health professionals and other relevant authorities, under the law, to report incidents of FGM, develop information and media campaigns targeting specific grassroots community groups and professionals to promote awareness of the Act, and coordinate interagency research involving the immigration service, refugee councils, and health and education (APPG). Concerning government funding, according to a former Women’s Equality Officer who worked for a London Council, “It is difficult for women’s voluntary sector organisations to get funding for any work which is not direct service provision. In other words, it is difficult for organisations to get funding for strategic work. There needs to be support for ethnic minority women’s organisations to tackle the issue and to work strategically.”23 During the Parliamentary Hearings on FGM, C. McCafferty stated that “We should not be afraid to address this issue in the UK.” Indeed, the hesitation, fear, and apathy of local authorities to interfere with FGM practices may have contributed to their perpetuation (Guiné, “Etat, droits des individus et droits culturels”). The reasons for these reactions are both cultural and political. For example, according to a Policy Development and Review Officer in a London Council: There has been reluctance on the part of the Council to raise the issue of FGM on the political agenda. I believe there is reluctance because it is seen as a divisive issue, one on which the minority ethnic community or sectors of that community are divided. Put simply, there are no votes for politicians

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in raising this matter. There is not sufficient awareness on the part of Councillors in general and not sufficient numbers of women Councillors with the appropriate level of awareness of the human rights dimension of the issue to prompt the local Council to change.24

A survey of how English and Welsh local educational and social service authorities deal with FGM, carried out in 1998 for FORWARD, revealed that very few local authorities have a good knowledge of the African communities that may practice FGM within their jurisdiction, and that they fear being accused of lack of respect or racism by the affected ethnic groups (Read). As a consequence, very few cases of FGM have been reported and the relevant local authorities often prove powerless. A health visitor25 who works in a London hospital26 tried to explain the reasons for the scarce intervention by the social services and the police: Unless you’ve got hard evidence you can’t really do anything. Nobody tells you they’re going to do FGM [. . .] Social services can’t intervene unless they’ve got some evidence. So all we can do is primary prevention, trying to educate about the dangers [. . .] You get to the stage of prosecution [. . .] The case is closed unless the child felt that she’s been abused, and again, what happens after this, the child is looking at the prosecution of her family and she’s going to be blamed, her father might reject her, she might have to go into care. So they won’t say. This is why there is no prosecution and no intervention, because unless somebody wants help, you can’t give it.

According to Hadiyah Ahmed of the African Women’s Welfare Group (North London), interviewed by Uta Ruge, not only the anti-racist, racial equality, and minority rights workers, but also the health professionals and the social services “don’t quite want to take the issue of FGM on board themselves [. . .] They just don’t want to face it. They hide from it rather than attacking us openly” (Ruge). As a consequence, only poor monitoring schemes have been set up to identify circumcisors and girls potentially at risk. Similarly, the lack of adequate material to train health and education professionals on how to prevent those practices is quite apparent. According to the health visitor:27 About circumcisors [. . .] The resources aren’t there to really set up perfect monitoring systems. Often they’ve got the warning and are monitored for a few months or a year, then they stop monitoring them because they’re not doing it. At the moment you stop monitoring they go right back to it. So the question is, do you monitor them for a lifetime? And even when you’re monitoring them, they still find ways [. . .] I’m not aware that we’ve identified anybody or progressed in any cases in this light. But should there be a case, would the British government be prepared to put the money in to

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follow this through? [. . .] I assure you FGM is not within the government targets of priorities that they want to address.

The British case shows that a specific law against FGM does not necessarily imply prosecution or penalties for the parents, practitioners, and other professionals who fail to protect the individual rights of the girls concerned. It also shows that identifying the “needs” of ethnic minorities is senseless if it avoids recognizing and dealing with the particular needs of the girls who, within these minority groups, are the first victims of patriarchal and oppressive customs. The debate remains open about the appropriateness of taking more active steps to prosecute parents and FGM practitioners. According to Linda WeilCuriel,28 even though British initiatives have been generally positive, they cannot be effective, since prevention is not accompanied by any penalty for lack of compliance with the legislation. Some U.K.-based African NGOs would like to see a more preventive strategy implemented, with “circumcisors” being retrained in new skills rather than being sent to jail. However, according to Shamis Dirir, development coordinator at BWHFS,29 “I think sending to jail is a fine strategy, because if I educate a circumcisor and counsel for a year or two, and she still does it, the only way she can understand is to go to jail. After jail, she should be rehabilitated, but I think that no mother should have her children taken away from her and go to jail.” The conclusions of the APPG Report published in November 2000 acknowledged the failure of the 1985 Act, since that normative framework seems to have been unable to stop FGM practices from being performed on British ethnic minority girls, either in the United Kingdom or abroad. A survey conducted shortly after the publication of that Report among NGOs working in the field of FGM, local health and education authorities, social service departments, and refugee councils revealed that only forty-six percent of the respondents were aware of the existence of the 1985 Law; twenty-five percent expressed fears of being perceived as “culturally insensitive” if they were to try to bring the issue of FGM to the surface; and only eighty percent expressed the same concern in the rest of Europe. Following the guidelines provided by the APPG, Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, presented a Private Member’s Bill aimed at amending the 1985 legislation. This text, discussed and finally passed in 2003, introduced significant changes in the handling of FGM in Britain. Among these is the fact that the term FGM is introduced in the very title of the Law, abandoning terms such as “female circumcision,” criticized by some grassroots organizations specializing in FGM issues. This new law gives extraterritorial effect to the prohibition of FGM practices, even if they are performed in countries where those practices are not illegal; it punishes those U.K. citizens and

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residents who perform, facilitate, or incite FGM; raises the maximum penalty from five to fourteen years of prison; and calls upon the health authorities to report on any case of FGM that comes to their attention. The hope of NGOs working against FGM after the passing of this law lies in raising awareness about this problem, and in ensuring greater commitment by British public administrations to preventing these practices, in particular to adopting an integrated approach combining domestic and international policy (RWRP). According to Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, director of FORWARD, interviewed in 2003 by the psychologist Haseena Lockhat, by opting for a new law, the government prioritizes the judiciary. Kwateng-Kluvitse thinks it is the easy way out that consisted of taking the APPG recommendations into account, instead of adopting a national prevention program that would be far more expensive (Lockhat 100). The UK-based organization Womankind International produced a background and position paper, endorsed by the BWHFS, insisting on the fears of many ethnic communities and health experts that if legislation is not accompanied by awareness-raising about the new law, the concerned African communities might be criminalized and families might be kept apart for not being aware of it and its penalties. In a manner similar to the impact of the 1985 Act on some African organizations in the United Kingdom, many members of the concerned ethnic groups “feel excluded from the discussions and decision-making about what they perceive as a ‘private’ community issue. Feedback from these groups suggests this legislative change will not be a successful tool to encourage people to abandon the practice” (RWRP). Some other reactions against the new Female Genital Mutilation Act were quite violent. For instance, in 2004, at Urban 75 forums, under the title “Protest against Racist Blunkett FGM Act,” could be read: “That Racist Blunkett passed a law which will jail people for 14 years for arranging the Sunna Circumcision of their daughters abroad. Not only does RACIST Babylon not allow free Sunna Circumcision of girls on the NHS, the Fascists will jail parents for taking their daughters overseas to practise their religious rights.”30 The fact that the issue of FGM is now dealt with at the Women’s National Commission (WNC) may be quite positive for a better awareness raising and for the implementing of an effective national prevention strategy. Indeed, according to Sarah McCullough, national director of the Agency for Culture and Change Management:31 There is no such strategy on FGM and at moment there is very little information on who is doing what and where. There are various agencies or individuals working on FGM issues around the country but we are not aware of them. Their views or good practice strategies in operation are not being

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shared or included in the current campaigns or plans. By knowing who is doing what and where it may help us to find out the gaps leading to developing the necessary work in these areas.

Similarly, according to Grace Evans, policy development and review officer at Greenwich Council,32 “There is in Britain, broadly speaking, a culture of political correctness and cultural liberalism which fails to see that within some minority ethnic communities there are practices which run counter to fundamental human rights: one such practice is FGM.” Conclusions In the United Kingdom, the multiculturalist model of integration was designed with the objective of recognizing the cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary British society, articulating mechanisms for the protection of ethnic minorities’ collective rights. Though that policy framework resulted in a relatively high level of protection of group interests, a tradeoff takes place between collective and individual rights, and especially women’s rights, regarding certain cultural practices brought to the host society by the ethnic minority groups. In this context, British authorities display a relatively hesitant position in addressing the consequences of that trade-off. Their lack of determination results in a weak defense of individual rights as evidenced by the poor degree of effective protection of the girls and women exposed to FGM. Paradoxically, although Britain is the first European country to pass anti-discrimination and equal opportunities legislation, and is one of the first to elaborate a law explicitly aimed at preventing FGM practices within its territory, it has left a relatively large gap in its legislation by allowing the continuation of those practices when justified on physical or mental health grounds. Interagency cooperation programs aimed at preventing FGM prove relatively successful when it comes to designing and implementing information and education campaigns, but the reluctance and fear of the local authorities to denounce the FGM practices of the ethnic groups residing in their areas, and the inhibitions of the judiciary in prosecuting cases where the 1985 law has been clearly violated, seem to have resulted in an overall failure of the British policies to prevent FGM practices. The recourse of the U.K. courts to enforce legislation and to deter new potential cases could prove effective against FGM. The initiative of the APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health) may have opened the door for a change in the legislation in 2003, with the aim of finding more effective strategies of prevention. It also remains to be seen whether the Department of

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International Development’s gender and development policies, directed toward developing countries,33 and characterized by the desire to understand local cultures and implement participatory strategies, could be also adopted in the United Kingdom and contribute to a more successful prevention of FGM. This essay has analysed the way British cultural relativism has determined the policies designed and implemented to discourage parents from sexually mutilating their daughters. The struggle against FGM should be considered an integral part of the objective of protecting the bodily integrity and dignity of young girls and women, and therefore must be deemed a human rights issue. Let us hope in particular that the British government will be equal to the new challenge currently awaiting not only itself, but also the U.K.-based African women’s grassroots organizations: the targeting of religious and community leaders who mostly defend traditional practices and take advantage of British multicultural policies to keep these customs alive. According to Shamis Dirir, development coordinator at Black Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), the abandoning of FGM by the Somali community depends mainly on religious leaders: Our target for the next conference is religious leaders. We have a lot, they are not doing enough themselves. Some of the Somali religious leaders say we have to totally eradicate, then, some say Sunna (first type) has to be done [. . .] Some others are not saying anything. We never have had a conference with them in England, but we’re going to. We send them letters, they come to meetings, but they don’t come out and talk.34

The gendered dimension of citizenship cannot be dissociated from its multicultural dimension. The “universalism” of citizenship has proved to be de facto exclusively masculine. Is multicultural citizenship also doomed to be constructed along patriarchal lines? Is the identity dimension of ethnicity incompatible with women’s interests as individuals? To John Rex’s observation that “the notion of multi-culturalism comes to mean [. . .] anti-racism” (Rex), one could add that it has also come to mean sexism. Not only are group identity and cultural and ethnic recognition detrimental to class interests, they also produce an androcentric multiculturalism that deeply contradicts the principle of equality between men and women before the law. By ethnicizing itself even more in the host society, the collective identity of the minority group affirms itself through the strengthening of its own cultural traditions, and this is very likely to run counter to the individual rights of women. If British multicultural policies content themselves with fighting racism and enhancing ethnic identity, they favor the minority group—almost always represented by men—and its racialization, to the detriment of class

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and gender inequalities. As evident in the trail-blazing British model, multiculturalism in its current guise cannot be fully democratic unless it seriously faces the problems of social justice existing within the specific ethnic groups. Glossary of Acronyms ACPC Area Child Protection Committee BMA British Medical Association BWHFS Black Women’s Health and Family Support CRE Commission for Racial Equality FGM Female Genital Mutilation LBWHAP London Black Women’s Health Action Project MP Member of the British Parliament MRG Minority Rights Group NGO Nongovernmental Organization NHS National Health Service RCM Royal College of Midwives RCOG Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNICEF United Nation Children’s Fund WAF Women Against Fundamentalisms WHO World Health Organization WNC Women’s National Commission Notes For their help and support, we especially acknowledge Lord Kennet; Martine Spensky, Full Professor in Gender Studies and British Studies, Blaise Pascal University (Clermont-Ferrand, France); Shamis Dirir, Development Coordinator at Black Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS; Tower Hamlets, London); Faduma Haji Hussein, Gynecologist and Lay Health Advisor, Jennifer Bourne, Outreach Nurse and Leyla Hussein, Interpreter, African Women’s Health Clinic (Leytonstone, Waltham Forest, London); Comfort Momoh, FGM Specialist Midwife at the African Well Woman Clinic, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital (London), Gillian Romano-Critchley, Senior Ethics Advisor, British Medical Association; Jayshree Boot, former Women’s Equality Advisor, Chief Executive’s Department, Waltham Forest; Isabelle Gillette-Faye, Sociologist and Director of the Group for the Abolition of Female Genital Mutilation (GAMS, Paris) and Marie-Hélène Franjou, Pediatrician and President of the Group for the Abolition of Female Genital Mutilation (GAMS, Paris); Khady Koita, President of the European network for the prevention of FGM; Linda Weil-Curiel, Human Rights Lawyer and President of the Committee for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilations (CAMS, Paris), Adriana Kaplan

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Marcusan, Anthropologist, Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), Estela Rodriguez, member of the research group “Comunicación y Construcción de Género,” University Ramón Llull, Barcelona, and Jim Cohen, Associate Professor in Political Science, Paris 8 University. 1. At the first British conference on FGM in 1989 it was decided that the expression “female circumcision” should be avoided and replaced by “female genital mutilation” (Dorkenoo and Hedley). That choice was accepted and confirmed in 1991 by fifteen Eastern and Western African countries during a United Nations Human Rights department meeting. However, some African grass root organizations based in the United Kingdom would prefer to use the expression “Female Genital Cutting” rather than “Female Genital Mutilation” (APPG). The expression “female circumcision” is considered misleading by many activists, for it reminds one of the much less dangerous practice of male circumcision, whose causes and consequences cannot be compared with those that are related to the genital cutting of girls. However, the terms “(female) circumcision,” “cut,” “operation,” “Sunna,” or the expression “to be closed” continue to be used at the community level, since they are the ones that many ethnic groups normally use. The WHO distinguishes three types of FGM practices: “circumcision: excision of the prepuce, with or without excision of part or all of the clitoris” (or Sunna); “excision: excision of the clitoris with partial or total excision of the labia minora,” and “infibulation: excision of part or all of the external genitalia and stitching/narrowing of the vaginal opening.” 2. The intermediate complications can be “delayed wound healing, scarring/ keloid formation; pelvic infection; epidermoid cysts/abcesses and neuromata.” The long-term complications are “haematocolpos: vaginal closure due to scarring can lead to the impaired flow of menstrual blood and dysmenorrhoea; recurrent urinary tract infection; childbirth trauma-tear during delivery; painful coitus; infertility; psychological trauma (flashbacks, anxiety, depression).” In the case of infibulated women, “penetration can sometimes take as long as six months or even longer . . . Lack of sexual pleasure response can be a significant problem” (Momoh Female Genital Mutilation). 3. According to Comfort Momoh, FGM specialist midwife at Guy’s and St. Thomas Hospital (London), de-infibulation is performed “antenatally under adequate analgesia and is best carried out at 20 weeks gestation (mid trimester) by the lead consultant. By carrying out the procedure at this time, it will ensure healing and allow access to the vaginal orifice and the urethra during labour. It also ensures complete healing prior to labour. Some women prefer to have this procedure done during labour or the 2nd stage as they stated they do not want to suffer two separate pains; that is, deinfibulation and labour” (Momoh Female Genital Mutilation). 4. In some African societies, FGM is associated with light, and is even called “purification” (Jonckers). 5. Telephone interview by A. Guiné with a Somali woman living in London and working in a prenatal clinic, June 2004.

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6. With migratory flows coming mainly from the Commonwealth, the concept of “immigrant” was deprived of many of its connotations (boundaries of exclusion and inclusion defined by nationality), and the racial/ethnic categorization became the most important marker for the identification of the newly arrived populations in the United Kingdom. As an example of the differences between data on immigration and on ethnicity, we can mention how— whereas many immigrants are included under the category “white” (Turks, nationals of EU countries, Eastern Europe, or the Old Commonwealth)—a majority of those included under the category “ethnic minority” were born in the United Kingdom, and therefore are not immigrants. 7. The publication of the final report of the Research Working Group on inequalities in health, the so-called Black Report, pointing at the existence of important class differences in health status within different groups of the British population (including minority ethnic groups), represented a fundamental milestone in the fight to place the issue of health inequalities on the British political agenda (Townsend, Black, et al.). 8. This report was edited by Scilla McLean who was then in charge of the research section of the MRG. In 1981, after this publication, Efua Dorkenoo, who was then a Ghanean nurse, founded the Women’s Action Group on Female Excision and Infibulation (WAGFEI) under the patronage of the MRG. WAGFEI later became what is currently known as the Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWARD). FORWARD is a nongovernmental organization that mainly focuses on research, information, and awareness training of professionals about FGM in the United Kingdom and Africa. 9. For more information on the ACPCs, one can consult http://www. acpc.gov.uk/roles.htm. 10. There are differences of social class and cultural affiliation among patients attending these clinics. Northwick Park Hospital is mainly attended by refugees from the Somali educated middle-class, whereas the Central Middlesex Hospital is mainly attended by Somali women from more deprived groups (Leye et al.). 11. The African Well Woman clinic of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Trust is run by Comfort Momoh, FGM specialist midwife, member of the Core Group of the Female Circumcision Strategy Group of Black Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), and member of “Optimum Health Services,” a multidisciplinary and multiagency working group on FGM for the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, and Lewisham (L,S&L) (Forward). 12. Letter from Jennifer Bourne, outreach nurse at the African Women’s Health Clinic in Waltham Forest (North East London) to A. Guiné, September 2003. According to J. Bourne, their services are to be mainstreamed, and because many of the women attend from outside the area of Waltham Forest, it cannot be funded by the local primary Care Trust. She added that they have high numbers of women coming through the service

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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and that they now have links with Whipps Cross Hospital (Waltham Forest) for reversals (de-infibulations). Interview with J. Bourne by A. Guiné, April 2002, London. Letter from Grace Evans, Policy Development and Review Officer, Greenwich Council, to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002. “This unique book will assist those who care for women and girls who have had, or are at risk of having female genital mutilation. It focuses on caring for both physical and mental needs of the vulnerable or suffering and maintains an understanding, holistic and objective approach to the current situation.” Its contributors are Janice Rymer, Hary Gordon, Nahid Toubia, J. Dunkley-Bent, Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, Els Leye, Marwa Ahmed, Sarah McCulloch, and Sadiya Mohammad. Within the initiatives developed by this group chaired by Christine McCafferty, some MPs carried out participating observation in projects to prevent FGM practices, and national and international NGOs were invited to participate in hearings with MPs at the British Parliament (Indriso). Quoted from letter addressed by F. Harding (coordinator of the Parliamentary Hearings, Commonwealth Institute) to E. Leye (responsible for “Networking in Europe for the Prevention of FGM”), April 11, 2000. For example, according to the minutes sent by Sue Green to A. Guiné concerning the meeting of April 2, 2003, the following persons were in attendance: Anne Weyman, Sue Green, and Kristi Gooden, WNC; Adwoa Kluvitse, FORWARD; Asma’u Joda, Women Living Under Muslim Laws; Sarah McCulloch, Agency for Culture and Change Management, Sheffield; Gill Frances, National Children’s Bureau; Eleheh Rambarzini, Helen Murshali, Refugee Council; Genevieve Painter, WomanKind Worldwide; Louise Douglas, Home Office (Responsibility for the Private Members Bill); Shamis Dirir, Zewdi Abadi, Black Women’s Health and Family Support; Liz McKean, Amnesty International, UK and Pauline Main, Churches Together in England. Interview with Dr. Gordon by J. Jones (2000). Baroness Rendell, patron of LBWHAP and prime mover behind the crossparty parliamentary inquiry into FGM developed in 2000, declared herself “convinced that some UK health professionals are still carrying out the operation on request,” and stated that she “would like to see some prosecutions under the 1985 Act” (Jones). Interview with a Somali woman by A. Guiné, 2002, London. As it occurred in the 1940s in Sudan, when the British colonial government outlawed FGM without considering the local culture and traditions (Bibbings). Letter by a former Women’s Equality Officer for a London Council, to A. Guiné, October 2002. Letter by a Policy Development and Review Officer in a London Council, to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002. Only a registered nurse can become a health visitor after a one-year, fulltime course and two years part time. The course includes psychology,

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26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

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physiology, normal and abnormal development, social policy, sociology, and epidemiology. The health visitor visits every family with a baby from the time the child is born, then consecutively ten days after birth, six weeks, eight months, eighteen months, three years and possibly four and a half, up to five years. The school nurse goes in from five to sixteen years. Interview with a health visitor by A. Guiné, April 2002, London. Ibid. Quoted from letter by L. Weil-Curiel (lawyer at the Commission pour l’Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles or CAMS, Paris) to A. Guiné, May 22, 2000. Interview with Shamis Dirir, director of the Black Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), by A. Guiné, February 2002, London. http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-69502.html. Note from Sarah McCullough to Sue Greene, February 20, 2003, as attachment to the meeting minutes of the WNC’s FGM working group, sent by Sue Green to A. Guiné, February 26, 2003. Letter from Grace Evans to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002. Among other initiatives, the DFID has recently committed £200,000 for two projects to be implemented in Nigeria and Gambia to prevent FGM, with the direct involvement of the British NGO Forward (Commons Hansard). Interview with S. Dirir by A. Guiné, February 2002, London.

Works Cited Acheson, Donald. Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health. London: The Stationery Office, 1998. Ahmad, Wagar Ihsan-Ullah and Karl Atkin. Race and Health in Contemporary Britain. Buckingham: Open UP, 1996. APPG. Parliamentary Hearings on FGM Report. London, 2000. Bahl, Veena. “The Development of a Black and Ethnic Minority Health Policy at the Department of Health.” Innovation in Social Sciences Research 6.1 (1993). Baldwin-Edwards, Martin and Martin A. Schain. The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe. London: Cass, 1994. Bibbings, L.S. “Female Circumcision: Mutilation or Modification?” In Law and Body Politics. Regulating the Female Body. Ed. Jo Bridgeman and Susan Millns. Dartmouth: Aldershot, 1995. BMA. Guidance for Doctors Approached by Victims of Female Genital Mutilation. London: British Medical Association, 1996. ———. Female Genital Mutilation. Caring for Patients and Child Protection. Guidance from the British Medical Association. London: British Medical Association, 2001. Chandra, Jeff. Facing up to Difference. A Toolkit for Creating Culturally Competent Health Services for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities. London: King’s Fund, 1996.

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Cohen, Steve. From Ill Treatment to No Treatment. Manchester: Manchester Law Centre, 1983. Commons Hansard. “Female Circumcision.” Parliamentary debate, May 8. London: The Stationary Office, 2000. Cornelius, Wayne, Philip Martin, and James Hollifield. Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Department of Education and Skills. “Local Authority Social Services Letter (2004) 4. Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.” London, 2004. Department of Health. Ethnic Minority Health. A Report of a Management Seminar. London: Department of Health, 1988. ———. On the State of the Public Health for the year 1991, London: Department of Health, 1992. ———. Responding to Diversity. A Study of Commissioning Issues and Good Practice in Purchasing Minority Ethnic Health. London: The Office of Public Management, 1996. Dorkenoo, Efua and Rodney Hedley. Child Protection and Female Genital Mutilation. Advice for Health, Education and Social Work Professionals. London: FORWARD, 1992. Favell, Adrian. Philosophies of Integration. Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. London: Macmillan, 1998. FORWARD. The Way Forward. Female Genital Mutilation in the UK. A Report of the Proceedings of the Inter-Agency/Non Governmental Organisations’ Forum. London: FORWARD, 1997. Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. London: Routledge, 1997. GAMS. Journée technique d’information sur les mutilations génitales féminines (Actes) (February 15). Paris: Groupe pour l’Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles (GAMS), 1996. Gerphagnon, H. “La loi anglaise sur l’excision du 16 juillet 1985.” Droit et Cultures 21 (1991). Gordon, H. “The Management of Health Related Complications of FGM.” In The Way Forward: A Report of the Proceedings of the Inter-Agency/Non Governmental Organisations’ Forum. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the UK. London: FORWARD, 1997. Guiné, Anouk. “Mutilación Genital Femenina y Ley en Gran Bretaña,” Symposium: The Challenge of Difference: Articulating Gender, Race and Class, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil, April 9–12, 2000. CD-ROM, Institute of Latin American Studies, U of London, School of Advanced Study, 2000. ———. “Etat, droits des individus et droits culturels: l’excision en GrandeBretagne aujourd’hui.” In Citoyenneté(s). Perspectives Internationales. Ed. Martine Spensky. Clermont-Ferrand: Centre de Recherches sur les Civilisations Etrangères dans le Monde Contemporain (CRCEMC), Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003. ———. “Multiculturalisme et genre: entre sphère publique et privée.” Cahiers du Genre / GERS (ex GEDISST) 38 (2005).

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Indriso, Cynthia. “A Glimpse of Post-Cairo Opinion in Brussels: Facts or Fiction?” Journal of the Society for International Development 42.1 (1999). Ivekovic, Rada. Le Sexe de la Nation. Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2003. Jonckers, J. “L’excision, épreuve douloureuse et statut social.” Corps, Accords, Désaccords. Bruxelles: Centre de Formation permanente et de Recherche dans les Milieux d’Accueil du Jeune Enfant (FRAJE), 1994. Jones, Judy. “Concern Mounts over Female Genital Mutilation.” British Medical Journal 321 (July 29, 2000): 262. Joppke, Christian. “Multiculturalism and Immigration: A Comparison of the United States, Germany, and Britain.” EUI Working Paper, no. 95/1, Florence, 1995. Kelleher, David and S.M. Hillier. Researching Cultural Differences in Health. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. LBWHAP (London Black Women’s Health Action Project). “Does Female Circumcision Constitute Child Abuse?” Report on the First National Conference on Female Genital Mutilation. London: FORWARD, 1989. Leye, E. de, Bruyn, M., and Meuwese, S. Proceedings of the Expert Meeting on Female Genital Mutilation. Ghent, Belgium, 1998. Lockhat, Haseena. Female Genital Mutilation. Treating the Tears. Middlesex: Middlesex UP, 2004. Lords Hansard. “Female Circumcision,” March 23, Parliamentary Debate. London: The Stationary Office, 2000. Momoh, Comfort. “Female Genital Mutilation: The Struggle Continues.” Practice Nursing 10.2 (1999): 31–33. ———. Female Genital Mutilation also Known as Female Circumcision. Information for Health Care Professionals. London: Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Trust, 2000. ———. Female Genital Mutilation. Abingdon: Radcliff Publishing, 2005. Nash, Mary and Diana Marre, eds. Multiculturalismos y género. Perspectivas interdisciplinarias. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2001. National Association of Health Authorities. Actions Not Words. A Strategy to Improve Health Services for Black and Minority Ethnic Groups. London: National Association of Health Authorities, 1988. Nazroo, James. “The Health of Britain’s Ethnic Minorities: Findings from a National Survey.” London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997. Okin, Susan Moller et al. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Osborn, Andrew and Sarah Boseley. “EU May Ban Aid to States that Allow Female Circumcision.” The Guardian (November 30, 2000). Poulter, Sebastian. Ethnicity, Law, and Human Rights: The English Experience. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. RCM. “Female Genital Mutilation (Female Circumcision).” Position Paper, no. 21. London: The Royal College of Midwives, 1998. RCOG. Female Circumcision (Female Genital Mutilation). London: The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 1997. Read, Deborah. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? The Report of a Survey into InterAgency Policies and Procedures Relating to FGM in England and Wales.” London: FORWARD, 1998.

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Rex, John. Race and Ethnicity. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986. Ruge, U. “Female Genital Mutilation and the Position of African Refugee Women in Britain.” Women against Fundamentalisms Journal 3 (1992). RWRP (Refugee Women’s Resource Project). “African Communities in the UK May Be Unaware of Legislation Criminalizing Returns to Country of Origin for FGM.” Women’s Asylum News 35 (August 2003). Sahgal, Gita and Nira Yuval-Davis. “Refuser les ordres sacrés.” Femmes sous Lois Musulmanes / Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), Dossier 9–10 (December1991). Smaje, Chris. Health, Race and Ethnicity: Making Sense of the Evidence. London: King’s Fund Institute, 1995. Sochart, E. “Legislating against Female Circumcision: Social Reform or Placebo Politics.” Strathclyde Papers on Government and Politics 54 (1987). Soysal, Yasemin. Limits of Citizenship. Migrants and Post-National Membership in Europe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Spensky, Martine and Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu. Universalisme, particularisme et citoyenneté dans les îles britanniques. Paris: Harmattan, 2000. Townsend, Peter, Douglas Black, et al. Inequalities in Health: The Black Report. London and New York: Penguin, 1992. WAF (Women Against Fundamentalisms). “The Meaning of Multiculturalism.” http://waf.gn.apc.org/. Yuval-Davis, Nira. “Fundamentalism, Multiculturalism and Women in Britain.” In “Race,” Culture and Difference. Ed. James Donald and Ali Rattansi. London: Newberry Park/Sage, 1992. 278–92.

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RISING ABOVE THE BOTTOM OF GERMAN SOCIETY: REFLECTIONS ON INTERVIEWS WITH FEMALE ROMA REFUGEES FROM FORMER YUGOSLAVIA Monika Halpaap

s a peace worker I worked with refugee Roma1 women in Berlin in the summer of 2004. The following essay is the product of my internship that finalized my graduate degree in Peace Studies. From my work with this group of female refugees from former Yugoslavia, I learned of the numerous obstacles that they face on a daily basis (ranging from overt and insidious prejudice, to a precarious immigration status, to the inability to be gainfully employed). The most prominent characteristic that my interviewees made manifest to me was their dogged commitment to forge a better life for themselves and, most importantly, for their families in their new home and host country (Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany). This essay should be viewed as a beginning, a door that is opening in our new millennium to the perception and treatment of refugees within the European Union.

A

A Humanitarian Perspective: Peace Worker and Theologian Between October 2003 and October 2004, I participated in the first course for peace workers in Bolzano, Italy, under the tutelage of the Department of Professional Training, University of Bolzano, with financial support from the European Social Fund. Within a Europe that is still under construction and is eager to become a continent of peace, numerous initiatives, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), partnerships, experiments, experiences, and training aim to build a Europe of peace, to give peaceful answers to the globalization of violence.

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The one-year training course prepared me and other university graduates from different universities for work in various fields of conflict since a peace worker is a humanitarian operator whose intercultural and communication skills may be applied in critical situations in order to decrease tension and promote dialogue. The course focused on five areas: promotion of peace, intercultural cooperation, conflict transformation, management of humanitarian and emergency aid, and international law. As future peace workers, we were trained to work in the context of civilian interventions or peace operations with the goal of promoting peace through conflict prevention and transformation. Such conflicts might be interpersonal, local, or international in character. My particular final project was a five-week internship in Berlin, Germany: a hands-on social research project aimed at gathering information on the intercultural conflict scenario involving Roma refugee women in Berlin. My goal was to become aware of the clients’ emotional and practical needs, and to ascertain the social, governmental, as well as personal support provided to them. Peace work entails discerning, on the one hand, when and where individual consulting or training in intergroup mediation suffices and, on the other hand, when hard political work of monitoring and enforcing is necessary to sustain the implementation of human rights. As an individual trained to foster peace in disparate conflict-stricken settings, I believe in the fundamentally equal value of all human life and understand diversity as an opportunity and not a threat. So, beyond all diversity, the question is how can I help one particular Roma woman, her refugee family, her peers, and/or her group as a whole? In each situation I face, I must discover the clients’ practical needs, the obstacles they face, and the threats to their psychological and physical well-being. I must address what I am capable of doing, given professional boundaries and legal limitations, and what duties and responsibilities fall under the various governmental levels (local, regional, or national). Ultimately, it is my job to reconcile a client’s personal situation with the political reality. My week of interviews with ten Roma refugee women, which I conducted in collaboration with Irene Canetti, a fellow student in my program, and Gesa Zinn from the University of Minnesota, provided me with much insight. As a peace worker it is not uncommon to integrate the promotion of peace and another profession. My personal engagement for peace emerges from and relates closely to my training in theology. As a Lutheran pastor, my position demands, for instance, an attentiveness to the relations between individuals or institutions and marginal groups in society, such as ethnic minorities. Furthermore, I give assistance by mediation if conflict situations in family or other relations are threatening to escalate.

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One of my first tasks at the very beginning of my theological studies was a draft on the biblical verse: “[God says] I have set before you life and death; blessing and curse, for you to choose life and stay alive” (Deut. 30:19). Throughout my career, these words have prompted me to maintain the vision of peace, the concrete utopia of a culture of peace in the world as a whole. It is within this context, as a peace worker and theologian, that I present to you the results of my on-going dialogue with female Roma refugees in Berlin, whose hope for a better life spurred them on in overcoming numerous obstacles. Recent Historical Events and Personal Histories Historical developments since 1989, including the Yugoslav Wars, provide the background for understanding my interviewees’ collective and personal histories as Roma refugees. In 1989, the Cold War between the East and West, and, on a smaller scale, between the Western European countries and the formerly Communist East Bloc countries, ended. In 1992, after the founding of the European Union (EU), the latter started the continued opening of its borders, especially toward East and South eastern European states. Thus in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, migration movements from east to west have taken place and immigration laws as well as integration and antidiscrimination legislation have been implemented in many EU countries. Such is the case, for example, in the Federal Republic of Germany, a country which, like many others, is coping with migration of non-nationals into their land, among them minority groups like the Roma, gypsy refugees from wartorn former Yugoslavia. They came to Berlin as a result of the Yugoslav wars, a series of bloody conflicts between 1991 and 2001, resulting in approximately 300,000 deaths, with millions more driven from their homes. Many key individual participants were later charged with war crimes due to their involvement in genocidal activities. As a result of the war in Bosnia, whose conclusion was officially recognized by the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, tens of thousands of Roma were living in refugee camps or in overcrowded hut settlements in Serbia and Montenegro. According to Miroslav Jovanovic, president of the Roma Democratic Forum, before the NATO bombing in 2001, approximately 150,000 Roma resided in Kosovo. All but a few thousand fled (Mitric n.p.). According to estimates, about 10,000 Roma left Ni,, the second largest city in former Yugoslavia, during the l990s. After the 1999 NATO campaign against Serbia, approximately 1,000 Roma from Kosovo settled in Ni, (Filopoviw 274). Other reasons for the Roma flight from their home country

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can be found in their country’s poor recognition of civil rights and the possibility of military conscription. Due to the war and its aftereffects, the economic situation in Serbia further deteriorated, as did the Roma’s standard of living. Many, for example, were living in conditions so abject that survival became a daily struggle. As one Roma woman remembers, “Frequently, the children had nothing to eat. But here in Germany children never go hungry, no matter how little one has. Many [Roma] people came here to Berlin since they had no longer any accommodations in Serbia. Or everything had been stolen.” Discrimination against the Roma escalated in Yugoslavia during the late 1990s. A young Roma refugee living in Berlin learned of the threat to her people’s safety in former Yugoslavia from relatives who returned to their home country after having lived in Germany for some time. She recounts the racist graffiti that greeted school children as they approached their place of learning: “‘When the Roma kids come, we are going to kill them. [signed] Serbs.’” Her following statement shows her belief that the former Yugoslavia is no longer safe for Roma children: “Before the war there were problems being a Roma in Serbia, because we are Roma—we are not Serbs! But I myself had no problem with that at school. But now a different time has come. And the Rom and their children notice that.” In support of this belief, the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) asks that the German government not repatriate Roma refugees due to the potential danger to their well-being. This association appeals to the German government and to European institutions especially to deal with human rights violations against Roma peoples in East European countries. Needless to say, many German organizations and associations are concerned about the problems the Roma face in contemporary Serbia, one reason why the women I interviewed were able to remain in Germany for such a long time; yet, after the official end of the Yugoslav Wars in 2001, they cannot be considered asylum seekers, and their presence in Germany is uncertain. During my five-week internship with them, which was concluded with a two-week-long interview process of ten Roma women who volunteered to be interviewed,2 I discovered that the Roma had been productive members of their community when they left Serbia. Now in their host country, they continue to be hardworking individuals, eager to support their families, protect their children, educate themselves, look toward the future, and be a part of a larger community within the city of Berlin. Note must be made that I do not view these women as subjects; the perspective I offer is a human one. My efforts are simply to provide a glimpse into the lives of these women who must face hardship and adversity on a daily basis in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Their lives are

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plagued by prejudice, and often they are insulted with racial epithets and stereotypes simply for being part of an ethnic minority that has been marginalized throughout European history. Stereotypes are a generalized false perception of a larger group. The result is always the alienation of both the collective and the individual pertaining to the group. In presenting to you what I believe to be an accurate portrait of these Roma women, it is my hope to challenge and perhaps shatter the stereotype of the gypsy as a menacing and untrustworthy collective Zigeuner (the German derogatory term for gypsy) and to call attention to the dehumanization they face and the obstacles they must overcome. Roma in Germany Currently, two main Roma groups exist in the Federal Republic of Germany. The first group consists of approximately 70,000 Roma, including the subgroup of the Sinti, who are German citizens and recognized as a historically developed ethnic minority in Germany, similar to the Sorbs, Friesans, and Danes, who are German nationals. The number of all ethnic minorities in Germany is estimated at 240,000 or 0.3 percent of the German population (Klein 16). Many of the Roma who are currently German nationals came to Germany from southeastern European countries between 1850 and 1920. As declared by the Council of Europe in l995, the Convention for the Protection of Minorities applies to the aforementioned groups of German national ethnic minorities. The second group consists of non-citizen ethnic minorities residing in Germany. Many Roma who are not German citizens are from the former Yugoslavia. The first influx of this group entered the Federal Republic of Germany as guest workers in the 1960s and early 1970s of the twentieth century. As non-citizens, many have a residence and a work permit (Hermes 4), and on the whole, do not differ greatly from the mainstream population. That is, they work, study, and lead similar lives to those of the general German and non-German population. Quite different, however, is the situation for the more recent influx of Roma who arrived in Germany as refugees. Unlike the Roma who are recognized as a traditional German ethnic minority, the Serbian (Macedonian, Romanian, and other East European) Roma refugees’ status is ambivalent for these populations have been termed “new minorities.” The “new minorities” constitute approximately 5.4 million foreigners—in particular Turks and people from former Yugoslavia—who are living in Germany (Statistical Yearbook for the Federal Republic of Germany 65). These Roma are neither automatically granted minority status and minority rights nor do they have the particular protection customarily granted to asylum seekers.

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Known as Duldung, their status can be described as a temporary but renewable stay of deportation, usually on humanitarian or practical grounds (Green x). Because these refugee Roma are not considered to be asylum seekers, their deportation is only suspended. Conditions that could defer deportation might include threat of torture upon returning to the country of origin, one’s physical or mental illnesses, the illness of a family member, or one’s involvement in a training or qualification measure recognized by the state. As a group that is geduldet3 or tolerated, they are permitted to stay within the Federal Republic within a defined geographical area until the conditions delaying deportation are removed. As I learned from my interviews, if the Roma women refugees from Serbia participate in educational training courses, their temporary permission to remain may be extended to the end of the training period. Their permission card, which is not a residence permit, is not a legal claim to immigrate. It merely allows the permit holder to stay within the Federal Republic of Germany until s/he is notified to return to the country of origin. The legal term for this process is expulsion. Thus several days before permission cards (which are valid for a maximum of six months) expire, one must request an extension. The application, of course, does not guarantee the extension. At present, for the Roma, the temporary permission slip only delays expulsion. My Interviewees’ Legal Status In summer 2004, as a peace worker in training, I researched aspects of Roma and Sinti women’s lives in Germany and interviewed a group of ten Roma women who were able to receive such a permission slip that had been renewed numerous times. As refugees from former Yugoslavia, they fled Serbia when their town and homes had been bombed by NATO troops and had now been residing in Germany for the greater part of a decade. As was previously mentioned, a distinction exists between German national Roma who are officially recognized as an ethnic minority and the recent Roma refugees, the “new minority” Roma refugees, whose presence is “tolerated” (geduldet) in the Federal Republic of Germany. Their particular status is—among other factors—the result of the Berlin and Belgrade governments signing a repatriation agreement in the autumn of 2002 after the last of the Yugoslav Wars officially ended. This “reciprocal agreement . . . regulates the return and acceptance of people with an unregulated residence permit. It applies to some 50,000 Yugoslav citizens who are esteemed to reside illegally in Germany” (CEELI). According to CEELI (American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative),

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since 2002, numerous Roma singles and families have been repatriated to Serbia-Montenegro. For the moment deportation of my interviewees is merely suspended. Hence, although they do not wish to return to their country of origin given today’s conditions, and desire permanence in their new homeland, they live in a state of limbo. As exiles, they find themselves “in between” Serbia and Germany, the past and the present. Moreover, the Roma refugee’s freedom of movement within the country is limited. The temporary permission card, unlike a residence permit that allows for freedom of movement, confines the cardholder to a specific geographic area—that is, jurisdiction—until the return to the country of origin. Such immobility surprises many new arrivals in Germany. S., a middle-aged woman who owned a flat and a car and held a job as an engineer when she was in Serbia, is surprised by the restrictions imposed on her and laments, “But you didn’t know in advance that [you would be confined to a small area]. When I came here, I read that in my temporary permission papers.” Since family members are not necessarily living within the same city, the chance to visit them is limited. This is especially the case since these Roma can hardly afford to travel long distances via public transportation; an unauthorized visit, which some of the women have undertaken in the past, is thus rare, adding to the isolation they already experience as outsiders. Yet, I learned that regardless of their limited freedom of movement, along with their inability to work for lack of permits, my Roma interviewees do everything possible to renew their temporary permission cards as a means to avoid expulsion. Every six months (and at times more frequently) they have their status of application reviewed. For many who have been in Germany since the middle or late 1990s this visit to the Ausländeramt (Department of Foreigners) has almost become routine, yet still causes high levels of anxiety and fear. Unless governmental laws are rewritten, and the social and economic conditions under which they live change so that they are able to receive a work permit so as not to rely on social welfare, Roma everywhere will continue to live on the fringes of society due to their ethnic origin and legal status. As Zigeuner they continue living at the bottom of society; as M. and V. insist, “Wherever we go, we have no rights. It does not matter if it is Germany, our country [Serbia], or America, we are always aliens, foreigners.” N., a middle-aged Roma, adds, “There is no place for us Roma. People are not interested in us. So what hope is there for us in Serbia or elsewhere?” Clearly, these women recognize that, as a group, they are marginalized. Identities and Identification The Roma women I interviewed talked at length about how much they feel tied to their home town and region in former Yugoslavia4 where their

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families had been living for generations (some families even longer than most Serbian inhabitants). They still call their former dwelling place “home” (after eight or more years in exile), and especially if some members of their family continue living there or have repatriated. When these Roma women speak about their “being at home” or their “feeling at home,” they use two words: domovina (where I live, where I have my house) and otajbina (where I have my roots). Despite their affinity for one place and despite their Serbian citizenship, many do not identify with the Serbs. For instance, reiterating the sentiment expressed by her peer previously in this essay, S. said to me, “We are not Serbs. We are Roma.” At this moment in the interview, others nodded in approval. Notwithstanding the labels of “foreigners” or “aliens,” and the discrimination, persecution, and hardships they suffered in Serbia, these Roma women nevertheless refer to Ni,, a Serbian town of approximately 300,000 inhabitants, as their otajbina. Germany is their domovina, yet their children’s otajbina, and thus worth the fight to stay. Germany is where these women have their physical residence and has become the homeland of their children. In other words, they view their host country as conferring on their children a sense of belonging. Within the Federal Republic, the majority of Germans know little of the background of the Serbian Roma, and even less about their “home” situation. In fact, many Germans view the Roma through the prism of the Zigeuner stereotype and still identify all types of Roma as nomads who travel the countryside and move from one place to another, crossing borders, living free of responsibility, beyond the limitations of rules and laws. Yet in fact, the majority of European Roma are not nomads and never were. They have lived and are living at fixed locations as recognized—yet not always respected—minorities and citizens. My interviewees stressed that only a relatively small group of Roma lead a perpetually nomadic life style. Little did the Roma I interviewed know the magnitude of their adjustment to the new environment. The majority of them had previously been living in the city of Ni,, the second largest city in the Republic of Serbia. Presently residing in metropolitan Berlin, the daily routine of my interviewees includes visits to the supermarket, walks, and bus or train rides with their children to school. Frequently, they also visit the social welfare office, a physician, family members, and friends in the vicinity. Such a routine appears to bring challenges to at least one Roma with whom I spoke, for D. commented that, “A man finds his way around more easily, because he is a man. A mother’s place is always at home.” Thus the environment demands many adjustments, not least of them in the change of acquired gender roles. The Roma’s traditional customs assign responsibilities at home to a Roma woman and responsibilities outside the home to a Rom (a Roma man), for the culture is steeped in patriarchal tradition. In Rom

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culture, the wife is, traditionally, subordinate to her husband and his family. She must also obey her mother-in-law’s orders. This situation does not change before she herself has a daughter-in-law. Such social hierarchy is partially the result of the beliefs and rules regarding decency and a sense of honor, for a Roma woman must always be attentive not to bring disgrace to her family members. The customs and liberties of the new environment are in direct conflict with the traditional Roma way of life. Hence, their gender roles have evolved and transformed the personal dynamic within the domestic sphere. The traditional hierarchy with the domovina has been disrupted by exile. The displacement from former Yugoslavia has physically alienated Roma from family and has—to an extent—liberated them from the rigid family structure and constructions. Nevertheless, these women I interviewed might celebrate their newfound mobility, but fondly preserve their home culture as best they can. Yet did these women that we interviewed expect such changes? Did they know that their lives would be different before coming to Germany? These are some questions in which I was very interested. I wanted to know, for example, what they expected from the country they chose as their “new home.” When I asked, I received the following response: “That’s Germany” we thought. Germany has always meant a lot to us in Serbia. Yes, I was aware that I would have to go to the police upon my arrival, but [I] didn’t know that people would be aggressive towards us. I thought they would be nice. Germany . . . People [were] only saying good things about Germany. “Germany is good” and so on. They mentioned beautiful things.

The disparity between their idealized place and the harsh reality they had to face was evident. There was no one to greet them in this good country, no one who offered them a job in this mythified land of plenty, and few who spoke their language (Romanes, Serbian) or showed an interest in them. Many of the Roma refugees were disappointed when they realized that Germany (i.e., Berlin) was such a large and cold place that turned its back on them, and let them fend for themselves. “I didn’t know it would be so hard,” commented one of the interviewees. No other Roma woman in the group of interviewees objected. The general consensus was that the Roma’s “new home” was not what they had expected. The interviewees voiced that they felt unwelcome. They felt that Germans hardly listen to or look at them due to widespread prejudices against the Zigeuner (cigane). The Roma are unsure about their future. They cannot feel integrated into German society. As S. recapitulates: “Nothing works, if you don’t know where your place is. We do not know if we shall be

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in Germany or Serbia? That’s [exactly] the problem. We are neither here nor there.” S.’s verbalization of “neither here nor there” eloquently articulates the Roma’s emotional state of mind, legal uncertainty, lack of belonging, and sense of impermanence under the present circumstances. Needless to say, one’s self-worth suffers under such conditions. Those Roma who had once been engineers, teachers, and nurses lose faith in themselves, since they feel thwarted at every turn. Although they are eager to work, the law prohibits that a refugee with Duldung status obtain a job. Says D., a young, energetic Roma, “How can we live if we don’t work? It should be accepted that we seek employment.” The women from Ni, are disillusioned at the present and potential future. I, too, am disappointed; as a German, a theologian, and a peace worker, I find it difficult to accept that in contemporary Germany, there are young, willing people without the right to earn money, and teenagers who are not allowed to study or to learn a profession due to their “exceptional leave to remain” or their Duldung legal status. As a result, young Roma women spend most of their time at home, either alone or with others, looking after their children, keeping their houses neat and tidy, and going for short walks, to pass the time. It is not surprising then to discover their disappointment and resentment. M., mother of two, articulates her frustration: “My children. My household. Sometimes I wash the dishes again, although they are clean. I must do something. Every day I go to the doctor, do the cooking. Sit down. Visitors. Every day we have them. And my parents do the same. Visit friends and family. Because you have no work, you have to stay at home all the time.” Discrimination and Alienation It is estimated that one million Roma living outside European member states have not been recognized as a national minority. As a result of this lack of legal classification, it is difficult for them to attain financial autonomy. Approximately eighty percent of the Roma in East and Central European countries are said to be unemployed (Borowiec 1). Most Roma in former Yugoslavia and other parts of the former East bloc countries have been poor, unemployed, and have had to endure substandard living accommodations and discrimination. According to research by Margarita Assenova, the painful process of economic transformation has exacerbated poverty and unemployment among the Roma in former East bloc states, where the rise of criminality and immigration to Western Europe has made the mistreatment of this minority an international concern (1). Few have succeeded in escaping the vicious cycle of poverty, marked by all of the descriptors just mentioned. Needless to say, the Roma are a particularly

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vulnerable group, which is why the Roma women in Germany are so affected when their human dignity is violated from two sides: (a) by the xenophobic climate and anti-ziganistic prejudices within parts of the German population, and (b) by the hostility and discrimination from other ethnic and cultural groups within Germany. As for the former, foreigners are, generally speaking, regarded with reservation and suspicion, since they are suspected to take jobs away from local people, and to live at the expense of the “respectable” tax-paying Germans. Paradoxically, both mitigating and incriminating as this may seem, as it concerns German xenophobia, the Roma are not singled out. Xenophobia is a universal phenomenon. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), migrants are frequently “targeted as the scapegoats for all manner of domestic problems facing societies today, particularly unemployment, crime, drugs, even terrorism” (IOM 1). As the UN Special Reporter of the Commission of Human rights on the Human Rights of Migrants, Gabriela Rodríguez Pizarro, indicates, “A sense of alienation is part of being a migrant. This is especially true in the case of the many migrants who are undocumented or in an irregular situation” (2). Moreover, the Roma also face discrimination and hostility from other ethnic and cultural groups, particularly in a Berlin school whose name my interviewees wished not be published. At this school, over eighty percent of the children are of non-German descent. According to the Roma women, their children are afraid to go to school for they fear being mistreated by “the Russians, the Arabs, and the Albanians.” N. describes a scenario at this particular German inner-city school: At a school in my neighbourhood, for example, there are children from Albania. Our friend’s daughter attends that school. She used to wear a necklace with a cross, and therefore the Albanians attacked her, yelling: “Why do you wear this? That’s shit!” And also Arabs confronted us. And Turks. Albanian people and our Serbian people have been at war, intense war. And therefore this girl is afraid to go to school.

The fear with which Roma children live daily is a hindrance. It blocks their participation in school and hampers their motivation to do their best. Even exceptional teachers are not always successful in dealing with intercultural problems. The Roma children and their families are therefore frequently alone in their attempts to cope with daily intercultural tension and conflicts. It becomes evident from many of the examples above that to be “at the bottom of society” means living with fear. This fear is not a type of paranoia, but an ever-present reality for many Roma refugee women and their

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families who came to Germany from former Yugoslavia. Indeed, it contributes to the frustration experienced by Roma women that thwarts their attempts to master their lives in exile. They feel stifled for the following reasons: for having to reconcile their idealized notion of exile with the reality of living in a host country; for a liminal legal status; for being separated and alienated as a result of being subjected to restrictions regarding work and mobility within the country; for enduring prejudices and discriminatory behavior; for being isolated from the rest of the population due to their inability to effectively communicate in German; and for the constant threat of expulsion from the Federal Republic. In spite of the interviewees’ frustration with the realities encountered in Germany, they did not succumb to resignation or despair. Instead, I noticed a strong sense of survival among the Roma refugee women. This, I believe, is fueled by their love for their children. It is for them that they left their country of origin (and, often, their extended family) to start a new life. They hoped that exile would provide for them a life in safety and with medical care, without food shortages, and with a good educational system. For their children’s sake, the Roma women aspire to remain in Germany despite being homesick for family members and the life they left behind. V. clearly explains, “Our extended family lives in Serbia. My children want to see Grandma and Grandpa. I’d like to go there and be together with them. But that’s impossible. My children were born here. Here, they have it all. But if they go to Serbia they have nothing. They have no money to buy anything. For the children it is better here.” The children represent the future of the Roma. A modern education, as indicated by D., is the key to bettering the status of her children. Specifically, D. refers to the basic education that leads to literacy, but also to computer skills, which she believes will open the door to a better life. D. states, “My son [who is six-years-old] got a small computer from his grandma. He knows already several letters.” After I asked if she would buy a small computer for her daughter, D. answered: “Yes, I will. . . . Simply to make sure she knows it.” Her answer shows us that she considers computer skills to be important for both her son and her daughter, and that she is concerned about their education. As I mentioned before, children play an important role in the lives of the Roma. Roma women particularly are strongly motivated to make the best of being “at the bottom of German society.” Their struggle for the right to reside in Germany and to have their children raised in a secure environment cannot be underestimated; they have left behind a social safety net provided by kinship structures and beliefs that support families economically and emotionally, which is lacking in Germany. Their extended family (parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles) provides strong support for these women. After

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marrying, the family circle widens and includes their partner’s family as well as their own and the offspring. Family is the first contact if they need help and the last reliable resource apart from some authorities or institutions to which they can turn for help. Although the alienation from extended family signifies a lack of support network, the geographic separation allows for change and freedom. The Roma I interviewed appeared to have gained some independence from the customs, rules, and regulations that govern traditional Roma life. Perhaps growing up in Communist Yugoslavia has changed them; maybe many of their traditions were shaken and/or destroyed by war; and, last but not least, maybe the metropolitan environment in Berlin demanded that these young women adapt. As one interviewee clearly stated, “In Serbia, Roma women don’t have as many rights as here.” Rights and Freedom In their communications with government officials in Berlin, the Roma women I interviewed proclaim to be more active and successful than their husbands, especially in their contact with public administration officials in Berlin. V., for instance, remarks: “I think women are more diplomatic. They talk and react. That’s just like it was in Serbia.” My interviewees are well informed, especially regarding their rights and the benefits they can receive from the social welfare office. D. affirms, “Here in Berlin the foreigner’s law is much better than in other cities. Here you have more rights [and] possibilities.” The interpretation and application of laws depends on the local government as well as institutions, and on the goodwill and social consciousness of government employees. Berlin and its government employees provide—on the whole—less stressful conditions for Roma refugees than other German states. These women were indeed very actively engaged in learning and in facing challenges. I learned that there are three signs indicating that a Roma woman has adapted to her new environment: (1) she is motivated to start a learning process; (2) she sees herself as a progressive woman; and (3) she is prepared to fight for her family’s and her own rights of residence, work, and welfare. Learning, Mediation, Integration At present, in Berlin and other German cities, qualification modules have been developed to train and educate Roma mediators in the areas of public health and school. Those chosen to participate in qualification modules take part in German-language courses and are trained to mediate between officials and clients, teachers and parents, and pupils of different cultures.

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The Roma would be ideal candidates to become valuable promoters of mutual understanding and conflict management, since for centuries Roma in southeastern Europe have experienced living in multiethnic, multireligious and multilingual communities. The Regional Center for Foreigners’ Concerns (RAA) in Berlin thus saw a chance to react to the “ethnicization” of conflicts and the social exclusion of minorities with projects that involve Roma. Since 2003, the center has been offering a variety of programs for Roma participants aimed at establishing the position of intercultural school mediator. Many of these school mediators are multilingual (Serbian/ Romanes/German), and use multilingualism to help mediate conflicts through understanding. The focus of their hands-on work lies in accompanying children on their way to school, in class, in the schoolyard, and occasionally on excursions. They also motivate Roma parents to stay in close contact with their children’s teachers, and they occasionally join them during their conferences with their children’s school teachers. These mediators liaise between the children, the school, and the families. My interviewees were involved as intercultural school mediators as part of an initiative that resulted from a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study mandated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2000.5 This study indicated that attending a conventional school is frequently too overwhelming and challenging for children of ethnic minorities. In contemporary Germany’s everyday culture, marginal right-wing extremism can be observed. A propensity to violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia is particularly manifest among east German youths. Due to the inhospitable and frankly potentially threatening environment in which young non-ethnic Germans find themselves, many Roma children find it difficult to adjust to a “normal” daily routine at a German school. When there has been a report of an intercultural conflict, the Roma women as school mediators intervene. The following dispute involving a Roma girl who had been physically attacked in school is revealing. After discussions in the family to find out why sixteen-year-old M. was so frightened, M. recounted to me: “They attacked me because of the cross. The whole school had heard about it, also the teachers. But they are not interested if children are beaten or whatever. My parents said ‘We are Serbian Roma. That causes problems. So you will not go to school anymore.’” Intercultural mediation at school conducted by these women who are familiar with problems their people encounter in German culture(s), and with social competence in both worlds (Roma and German), not only bridges the gap and promotes mutual understanding, but also optimizes the educational chances for Roma and engages them in life-long learning processes. Without intervention, the young Roma girl might have never returned to school, which

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would have cemented her fate as an uneducated, marginalized woman with few possibilities. The collaboration between school, families, and well-trained mediators is of extreme importance, for it is necessary to inform Roma families about the opportunities for conflict management in school yards and classrooms. Furthermore, the number of school mediators needs to be extended to have an effect on society as a whole. The importance of cultural mediation training for German society and for the Roma families with school children should not be underestimated; training for the participants is important too, especially if they hold only temporary permission to stay in the country, since the Roma refugee women who take part in the training module for intercultural school mediation have their expulsion from Germany suspended for the duration of their training. Hence, this situation is beneficial to all involved. The arrangement engages the Roma in learning, temporarily protects them from returning to the country of origin (where their wellbeing could be jeopardized), empowers them, and integrates them into the society in which they live. Progressive Women Traditional Roma culture is patriarchal and clearly defines gender roles. Thus, for a Roma living within a traditional domestic structure, training in the intercultural field may be uncommon and perhaps difficult to accept. Yet the women I interviewed adhered to the traditional model less than I had expected. What is certain is that the lives that these Roma have forged for themselves are in stark contrast to the more conservative roles prescribed within their culture. When I referred to them as “progressive women,” one young Roma smiled. She seemed proud to be different from her parents, who were also living in Berlin. Although her parents thought ill of the term “progressive,” this young woman viewed it as having a positive connotation. It was a tribute to her ability to adjust to a new environment, and to satisfactorily negotiate the cultural expectations of her family and those of urban German culture. When I further pressed the group of interviewees, V., a proud young mother of two children, explained her idea of a “progressive woman”: “As time comes, you change . . . [These are] new times and new generations. As singles we don’t go to the disco, for instance. But if you are married, everything is quite different. Now I go [to the disco] together with my husband. Why not?” Traditional Roma would never go to a disco, not even accompanied by their husbands, nor would a single woman be in public with a man unless engaged or soon to be engaged to be married.

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The private sphere is a traditional Roma’s domain. Public space had been the territory reserved for men. Yet because of the new existence forged in Berlin, the public–private, male–female dichotomy has permutated. These Roma refugees are not confined to the home. Their mobility has permitted them to play an active role within schools and public organizations, but has also permitted them the freedom to enjoy public spaces. Given the rigidly defined gender roles within Roma culture, to identify as “modern women,” Roma women recognize that their roles have evolved. Many are self-confident and free to act on their own accord without discarding the traditional family network essential to Roma culture. Prepared to Fight Such “modern women” are, for the most part, the ones I had the opportunity to meet and interview. I felt that they were ready to defend their family’s privilege of residence and work, for the children’s welfare, for personal integrity, and for a life without fear. My interviewees have the energy and commitment to continue creating an existence with dignity for themselves and their people. On a daily basis, they work toward reaching their goals and achieving their dreams of a better life. Their everyday existence is part of an emancipatory process; it constitutes the struggle to rise in society. We must ask ourselves who of the Roma women could have the courage and energy to stand up for themselves and face adversity? Perhaps the young ones might dare to stand up to those individuals who are disrespectful toward them and display racist behavior. Yet it might take a few more years of confidence-building and learning to develop an appropriate response as is evident from the following example in which a young, single Roma encounters an elderly German woman who unexpectedly shouted a racist epithet: “There was a woman of about seventy years. It was hard for her to walk. She came up to me, and I thought she wanted to ask me something. But [instead] she said to me: ‘Go home, you Zigeuner!’” It is significant to note the unexpectedness of the racial insult, the epithet itself, the age of the enunciator, and V.’s reaction. The insult was verbalized without any provocation; V. and the elderly woman happened to be on the street at the same time. The senior’s age is notable for it indicates that prejudices are deeply ingrained and have a long history in Germany. The insult itself, Zigeuner, again stems from the fear of the “other” that led to tragedy of unfathomable proportions in the twentieth century. Furthermore, the persistent fear of the “other” is a constant reminder that prejudice and discrimination must change. Perhaps V.’s reaction is key to how change will take place. V. did not internalize the hatred evinced by the elderly woman. She dismissed it as absurd. I would like to add that the distrust and fear

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voiced by the senior is unfounded, yet in line with the xenophobic tendencies that have plagued German history. Today’s im/migrant and refugee situation in Germany is fortunately forcing German society to face its multiethnic and multicultural reality. It is the progressive people (be they German, German national minorities, or recent refugees), like the women I interviewed, who can boldly evolve with changing times. Conclusion In closing, I would suggest that those who receive training, who learn, who struggle yet maintain their self-respect, and who speak up and stand up for their rights are the ones who will rise in society. As exiles adapting to their host country and effectively coping with adversity, they have a chance to succeed. I hope and believe that will power, self-confidence, and cultural knowledge will help young women like V. create a new “home”—both as domovina and otajbina—for themselves6 in the Federal Republic of Germany. In spite of the challenges they face (poverty, discrimination, uncertain legal status, and the language barrier), these Roma interviewees do not wish to return to their country of origin. While preserving their own cultural identity, these strong women that I worked with are eager to become integrated into twenty-first-century German society, and, by extension, the EU. When concluding my interviews, I inquired how they believed their lives would continue and what efforts they would put forth in order to rise above their present situation. The response was, “What can you do? You fight. You have to fight!” I am confident that the resilient Roma I interviewed, along with many of their fellow female Roma refugees from Serbia, will continue to meet the challenges facing them with dignity and perseverance. Notes 1. The term Roma has two meanings: (1) the entire group and (2) one female. The term Rom refers to one male. 2. Permission to interview ten Roma women was given by the NGO as well as by individual Roma themselves. One of the women, whose name I leave unmentioned to protect her identity, served as a translator between Romanes and German and Serbian and German. All interviews were conducted in German and translated into English by Dr. Zinn and myself. 3. This term is the adjectival form of the noun Duldung. 4. According to its constitution (1974), Yugoslavia was a federal republic consisting of the “socialist republics” Bosnia-Herzegowina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (plus the autonomous republics of Kosovo and Wojwodina) and Slovenia. There were three official languages

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(Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian) and three main religious denominations (Orthodox, Muslim, Roman Catholic). Yugoslavia was headed by Marshal Tito as state supreme commander of the armed forces for life. It was intended that after his death—he died in 1980—the presidency should circulate among the Yugoslavian republics in a defined order. But this, in fact, failed, and a series of wars began as the republics struggled for independence. Even international intervention was provoked— for example, the NATO bombing of Serbia. In 2002, an agreement was reached in negotiations, and reconstruction of former Yugoslavian provinces could begin. 5. By order of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris) comparing tests were done within the framework of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in early 2000; 265,000 students from 32 countries participated. The study showed that (1) in Germany—more than in other countries—achievements at school are closely linked to a student’s social background; and (2) children of foreigners are often severely handicapped by missing language competence (Aktuell 64). 6. It might not be “new” but it was home, since they left wartorn Serbia when they were very young.

Works Cited Aktuell 2003. Fakten-Rankings-Analysen. Dortmund: Harenberg Lexikon Verlag, 2002. Assenova, Margarita. “New Freedoms, Old Problems: Eastern Europe Has Struggled to Overcome the Heritage of Political Repression and Marxist Economics.” World and I 14 (November 1999): 1. Borowiec, Andrew. “EU Seeks to Embrace Gypsies? Countries to ‘Bridge Abyss’ Isolating Nomads.” The Washington Times. March 20, 2005: 1. CEELI (American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative), Washington, DC. www.abaceeli.org. Filopoviw, Marijana: “A Story of Cooperation: Improving Living Conditions for Roma in Ni,.” In Managing Hatred and Distrust, The Prognosis for Post-Conflict Settlement in Multiethnic Communities in the Former Yugoslavia. Ed. Nenad Dimitrijevic and Petra Kovács. Budapest: Open Society Institute, 2004. 271–81. Green, Simon. The Politics of Exclusion. Institutions and Immigration Policy in Contemporary Germany. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2004. Hermes, Annelore. Sinti und Roma. Bozen: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 2002. International Organization for Migration (IOM). “Working Far from Home— Migration and Discrimination.” Report on World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, August 31–September 7, 2001. www.un.org/WAR/ e.kit/indigenous. Klein, Eckart, “Traditional and New Minorities in Germany: Different Degrees of Protection.” In Rethinking Non-Discrimination and Minority Rights. Ed. Martin Scheinin and Reetta Toivanen. Turku, Finland: Institute for Human Rights/Åbo Akademi U, 2004. 15–23.

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Mitric, Joan McQueeny. “Kosovo’s Forgotten Refugees.” www.motherjones. com/news/feature/2001/03/serbrefugees.html Rodríguez Pizarro, Gabriela. “Working Far from Home—Migration and Discrimination.” In Report on World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, August 31–September 7, 2001. www.un.org/WAR/e.kit/indigenous. Statistical Yearbook for the Federal Republic of Germany. Wiesbaden: Bundesamt, 2003.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Ann Dellinger is Associate Professor of Spanish at the Virginia Military Institute. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University, inspiring a career change from teacher training to language and cultural studies. Having lived and worked in Spain for eighteen years, she is interested in peninsular topics, particularly those corresponding to the Civil War and Franco eras. She has coauthored several language textbooks for collegelevel learners of Spanish as a second language and Sendas literarias (2nd ed.), a secondary program for heritage speakers. Other publications include articles on pedagogical issues, Spanish women essayists of the 1939 Spanish Diaspora, and García Lorca, as well as numerous ancillary texts for Spanishlanguage learners. Her current project centers on unpublished poetry and testimony written by political prisoners of the Franco regime. Eva Eppler is Senior Lecturer of Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton, London. She received her Ph.D. from University College London in 2004 and her M.Phil. from Vienna University in 1993. She was born in Vienna to a mother of rural Austrian descent and a father of Polish Jewish descent. Eva Eppler emigrated to London in 1995 because, in Austrian Jewish refugee writer Jakov Lind’s words, “The cultural mix of London lets you live.” Eva Eppler has published extensively on bilingual language use and intercultural issues, including Jakov Lind. Her research interests revolve around verbal and visual representations of multiculturalism. She is currently working on a book entitled Emigranto. Marion Gerlind has a Ph.D. in German with a Minor in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She received her M.A. in German from San Francisco State University in 1998. Her interdisciplinary dissertation focuses on women and the Shoah (Holocaust) with a special emphasis on oral histories of working-class and rural Jewish survivors from Germany and Poland. As a second-generation Gentile German originally from Hamburg, her writing also reflects on her positionality in Shoah Studies. Her essay “Holding the Tension of Personal (Op)Positions”

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appeared in Socialist Studies Bulletin 73 (Spring 2004); previous publications in German are concerned with women’s empowerment and the breaking of silence: Sirenen (Sirens), 1990, and Sprachgewaltige Frauen (Speak out Powerful Women), 1992. She enjoys both research and teaching in German cultural studies, especially women’s and Afro-German literature, poetry, and feminist linguistics. Anouk Guiné was Assistant Professor of English Studies at Blaise Pascal University, France, from 1999 to 2003. She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from this university in 2005, and her M.A. from Paris 8 University in 1994. She was born in Biarritz (France) in 1967. She studied Political Sciences in Trieste from 1989 to 1991. She lived in Peru (Lima) for three years, where she studied “Gender and Development” and worked as a gender consultant in several NGOs. She was a teacher in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) from 1996 to 1998. She is fluent in French, Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese. In 2004 she published her first volume of poetry (Voz Nuda / Voie Nue) in Spanish and French. Her research interests include multiculturalism, women’s rights, “race,” ethnicity, and migrations. Monika Halpaap is a protestant theologian who was born in Hamburg, Germany, but who has lived in northern Italy for the last ten years. She works part time in her profession as protestant pastor. Recently, she finished additional vocational training as a peace worker at the University of Bolzano, Italy, as part of a pilot project that was carried out in collaboration with local, national, and European bodies. This newly created profession aims to promote peace in the ambience of civil crisis intervention (mediation) and crisis prevention/working on conflicts of international range. She is currently preparing herself for hands-on work in the area of sociocultural mediation in international missions. María Hernández-Ojeda is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Hunter CollegeCUNY. Born and raised in the Canary Islands, Spain, she received her B.A. (Filología Inglesa) from Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She obtained her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Florida State University. María Hernández-Ojeda has published articles on Cuban-Canarian literature, particularly the narrative works of Cuban author Nivaria Tejera. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century (Pen)insular literatures and cultures of Spain. She also studies the literary and cultural relationship between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean from a Transatlantic perspective. She is currently working on a book entitled Heterotopic Islands: Life and Works of Cuban-Canarian Writer Nivaria Tejera. Victoria L. Ketz is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chairperson of Foreign Languages at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. She received her

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Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Columbia University in 1999, her M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Ohio State University in 1988, and her B.S. in Microbiology from Ohio State University in 1986. Born in Madrid, Spain, she grew up in Europe, Africa, and the United States. Her research interests include: contemporary theater, narrative, film, and literary theory. Ketz has published articles on pedagogy, and twentiethcentury writers such as Valle-Inclán, Pérez de Ayala, and Unamuno. Her current book project examines the portrayal of violence by female authors in Contemporary Peninsular Literature. María del Mar López-Cabrales is Associate Professor of Spanish. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in Philosophy and Humanities from the Universidad de Cádiz, Spain. Her research focuses on intersection of literature and culture in Latin America and Spain. She is particularly interested in women’s writing as a “space” in which women create social discourses and communicate with each other. Her publications include the books La pluma y la represión: Ecritoras contemporáneas argentinas (2000) and Palabras de mujeres. Escritoras españolas contemporáneas (2000), as well as articles and interviews in Letras Femeninas, Revista Iberoamericana, Confluencia, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes in Spain and Latin America. She is presently serving a two-year term as Secretary of the Asociación de Literatura Femenina Hispánica. She will be publishing a book of interviews on contemporary Cuban female writers in 2006. Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2003, where his thesis, a comparative analysis of health policies toward populations of immigrant origin in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, received the prize for the best Political Science dissertation. He also holds an M.S. in Social Policy and Planning from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the Juan March Institute in Madrid. Himself a result of the migratory waves that arrived in Catalonia from other regions of Spain in previous decades in search of a better life, his interest in migration processes has led him to spend time in multicultural metropolitan sites such as London and Paris in search of keys to understanding the complex mechanisms that operate in the incorporation of populations of different origins in their affluent receiving societies. His research interests are currently focused on the study of antidiscrimination policies in West European societies. Sydney Jane Norton is Exhibitions Researcher in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum. She also teaches German and Cultural Studies at Webster University. At the

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museum, she is currently conducting research for The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian, and Swiss Drawings from Saint Louis (1946–2005), a 2007 exhibition that focuses on a selection of outstanding contemporary German drawings from local collections. Sydney received her M.A. in German literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her Ph.D. in German Cultural Studies from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Her publications include articles on performance art from the Weimar Republic, German and Swiss artists’ colonies, and the history of the literary salon. She is a dance and visual arts critic for publications in the St. Louis area and writes a monthly arts column for Sauce Magazine. Maureen Tobin Stanley is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2000 and her M.A. from Loyola University in Chicago in 1994. She was born in Torejón de Ardoz (Madrid) and has straddled the Atlantic all her life. Her mother is Madrilenian and her father a New Yorker. She grew up in Madrid, Zaragoza, and Louisiana. Being bilingual and bicultural, she considers herself a cultural hybrid. Tobin Stanley has published articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish female authors such as Adelaida García Morales, Montserrat Roig, and Mercè Rodoreda. Her research interests include film, narrative, feminism, and psychoanalysis. In her current research project, she studies reflections of the Holocaust in various genres from Spain as an attempt to recover collective memory and exorcise the totalitarian past. Mary S. Vásquez is Professor of Spanish at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina. As an acclaimed authority on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Hispanic literature (literature of the Spanish Civil War, postwar writers, narrative under Franco, Spanish women writers, as well as on U.S. Latino literature), film studies, and exile studies, she has edited or coedited five books and authored more than fifty articles and book chapters. Presently, the Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses/Destino and the Universidad de Murcia, respectively, have accepted two of her latest books for publication. She has received numerous academic and professional honors, including a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently she was awarded the prestigious Joel O. Conarroe Endowed Professorship at Davidson College. As editors of Female Exiles, Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn are most honored to feature her essay “The Grammar of Contested Memory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts of Diaspora” in this anthology. Gesa Zinn is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She received her Ph.D. from the University of

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Minnesota. Born and raised in Kiel, Germany, she finished her primary and secondary schooling in the Federal Republic of Germany before moving to the United States where she has lived on the West Coast, in the South, and in the Midwest. Gesa Zinn has published articles on pedagogy, culture, film, and literature, including the work of the woman filmmaker, writer, and critic Helke Sander and the Turkish-German writer Zafer Senoçak. Her research interests include women’s films, feminism, multiculturalism, and the Roma and Sinti. She is currently working on a book entitled Female, Urban and Exiled: Gypsies in Twenty-first Century Germany.

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INDEX

(Please note that page numbers in Italics indicate endnotes.) African Women’s Health Clinic, 231, 242 African Women’s Welfare Group, 235 Ahmed, Hadiyah, 235 Alberti, Aitana, 152 Alberti, Rafael exile identity and, 15 flight from Spain, 140, 144, 152 Generation of ’27 and, 24, 139 La arboleda perdida, 22–23, 151 León and, 21, 140–41, 143–45, 146–47, 149 Lorca and, 139 Zambrano and, 24 Alborg, Concha, 18 Aldecoa, Josefina, 17, 19–20 Alfonso, Manuel, 54 All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development, and Reproductive Health (APPG), 225, 232, 234, 236–37, 238, 241 Allende, Isabel, 15 Alltagsgeschichten, 76 Alted, Alicia, 66 Altolaguirre, Manuel, 190 Álvarez de la Rosa, Antonio, 193–94 Amat-Piniella, Joaquim, 54 Amical Association, 53, 70 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 3, 129 Anderson, Robin, 105, 116 Anschluss, 201, 203–4, 205, 230 anti-Semitism, 51, 76, 79, 83, 86–87, 105, 107, 203–4, 262

Aragon, 58, 71 Arcocha, 184 Arenas, Reinaldo, 186 Arendt, Hannah, 51, 54–55, 59, 60 Argentina, 13, 140, 144, 146 Arrieta, Regina, 62 assimilation, 10, 90, 117, 202–3, 214, 217 Atkins, Anselm, 187 Auf bau, 108–10, 117 Auschwitz, 59, 82, 84, 125 Austrian Centre, 201, 208, 220 avant-garde movement, 98–101, 105, 114, 119 Bal, Mieke, 163 Barcelona, 16, 28, 42, 58 Bargueño, Ramón, 54 Bas, Josefa, 59 Basques, 38, 58, 71 Batista, Fulgencio, 9, 181, 183–84, 186, 187, 189, 193 Batiste, Francesc, 54 Bausch, Pina, 99, 115 Beckett, Samuel, 183 Beggar Bar, 108–10, 117 Belgium, 2, 58, 67, 140 Berber, Anita, 97 Bergen-Belsen, 59, 84, 125, 133 Berger, John, 170 Berger, Karin, 126, 130, 131–33 Berlin Wall, fall of Communism and, 46 displacement and, 1, 11

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INDEX

Bhabha, Homi, 3 Bildung, 81 Blanco, Alda, 18, 24 Blascos, Carmen and Emiliana, 62 Boix, Francesc, 54, 60 Böll, Heinrich, 112, 118 Bonnard, Pierre Philippe, 114 Border Theory, 13 Borràs, Josep, 54 borrowing, 203, 206, 209, 215–16 Bovenschen, Silvia, 167 Bram, John, 107 Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 106, 110 Breton, André, 183 British Medical Association (BMA), 225, 231 Buatell, Carmen, 62, 64, 65 Buchenwald, 59, 111 Bueno Ester, Alfonsina Bueno, 62, 65 Bush, Peter, 191 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 184, 195 Cámara, Madeline, 182, 191 Campoamor, Clara, 38 Campos, Julieta, 191, 195 Camus, Albert, 187 Canary Islands, 9, 181, 183–84, 186, 189, 191 Canetti, Irene, 250 Cantú, Norma Elia, 14 Carabantes, Andrés, 42, 43–44 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 18 Carrió, Jacint, 54 Casadella, Lola, 62 Castro, Fidel, 182, 184, 186, 189 Català, Neus, 5–6, 51–70 deportation of Spaniards to Nazi camps and, 57–60 female voices and, 53–54, 61–64 gendered moral and political thought and, 67–70 human rights and, 56–57 recovery of the past and, 54–56 Regarding Resistance and Deportation, 63, 69 solidarity and, 64–66

women’s rights and, 66 Catalonia, 38, 53, 58–60, 71, 162 Catalonian Association of Former Political Prisoners, 61 Cate-Arries, Francie, 15–16, 17 Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire, 16 Cavalcante, Alberto, 105 Cervello, Trinidad Revolto, 36 Chacel, Rosa, 17, 24 Chile, 13, 15, 18 Cimorra, Eusebio, 42, 43–44 Cixous, Hélène, 3, 6, 165, 174 Claver, Pilar, 64 Clement, Grace, 67, 68 Clwyd, Ann, 236 Cochran, Mary, 99 code-switching, 203, 216 Colombia, 13 Comellas, Francesc, 54 Comité Técnico de Ayuda a los Españoles en México (CTAE), 18 Communist Party exile of, 34–35 FAM and, 220 Ibárruri and, 37–38, 39, 42, 45 International, 36, 48 León and, 140 Soviet, 37 Spanish, 5, 33–34, 39 See also Komintern Companys, Lluís, 59 concentration camps Doba and, 85 Dor and, 204, 207 effect on families, 77 internment of Spaniards in, 5, 51–52, 53, 55 Romni life in, 7, 121 Stojka and, 124 study of survivors’ stories, 59–60, 61, 63 women and, 17, 40, 81 contested memory, 4–5, 13–27 Cuba, 9, 11, 13, 14–15, 20, 23, 181–95

INDEX

Cuban Revolution, 11, 181–83, 184–85 Dachau, 59, 204 Dawson, Andrew, 125, 131 de Déu Amill, Joan, 54 dehumanization, 6, 53, 55, 61, 63, 69, 253 Mujeres de la posguerra, 17 Delgado, Patricia González-Posada, 47 Delirium and Destiny (Zambrano), 23, 24 Dellinger, Mary Ann, 5, 269 democracy art and literature and, 5 Català and, 6, 55, 69 Franco and, 52–53, 59, 61, 140 human rights and, 68 Ibárruri on, 39, 43, 44 La Marseillaise and, 65 normative systems and, 224 postwar Germany and, 118 Republican Constitution and, 56–57 social justice and, 240 Spain and, 16, 17, 20, 34, 46, 55–57 women’s rights and, 38, 61, 63 “Des Partisans,” 64–65 Detmer, Emily, 156 Dirir, Shamis, 233, 236, 239 dual identity, 15, 207 Dubai, 225 Duplàa, Christina, 53, 62 Egger, Edith, 124 Eisenstein, Sergei, 101, 110, 116 El Salvador, 13 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 66, 68 emigration Dor and, 201, 203, 209 exile vs., 14 Franco-era Spanish refugees and, 59 Gert and, 113 Holocaust survivors and, 76–77, 78–79, 81, 83, 86, 88 Escuer, Joan, 54

277

Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (Tejera), 9, 181–95 “ethic of care,” 6, 53, 63, 67–69 “ethic of justice,” 67 ethnics, 14–15 European Union (EU) displacement and, 1, 11, 251 immigrants and, 225, 242, 251 same-sex unions and, 12 exile communities, 7, 36, 39, 109–10, 177 grammar of, 23, 26–27 Expressionism, 98, 99, 100, 192 Falckenberg, Otto, 98 Fascism Austria and, 220 Català and, 53, 54–55, 57–59, 62–63 Franco and, 8 Griffin on, 71 Ibárruri and, 40–42, 44, 46 León and, 140 Spanish democracy and, 53 Spanish diaspora and, 34 Spanish resistance to, 33, 39, 40–41, 62 Stojka and, 123–24 survivors’ stories and, 61–66 Fassbinder, Rainer Maria, 114, 119 Fellini, Frederico, 114 female genital mutilation, 10, 223–40, 241, 243 feminist theory: from margin to center (hooks), 80 Fernández Alborz, F., 35 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 13, 14 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 110 Fleckenstein, Kristie, 174 Flossembürg, 59 Formica, Mercedes, 17 Foucault, Michel, 167, 176 Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWARD), 235, 237, 242

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INDEX

France anti-Fascism in, 62, 65 Ibárruri and, 33 immigrants and, 1–2, 55, 225 León and, 140 pantomime and, 113 prison camps and, 16 Spanish refugees and, 16–18, 34–35, 58–60 Tejera and, 183–84, 190, 195 women’s rights and, 67 Franco, Francisco 1978 Constitution and, 57 Allies and, 42 De amor y de sombras and, 15 death, 46, 140 displacement and, 1, 8, 11 female voices of exile and, 17–19 Hitler and, 61 human rights and, 63 Ibárruri and, 5, 34, 35, 41, 44–47 international recognition of, 42 literature under, 5 loss of labor force, 35 “National Reconciliation” and, 42–43 deportation of citizens to Nazi concentration camps, 5, 51, 57–58, 59 rebuilding of Spain and, 39 Serrano and, 54–55 Tejera and, 181, 183–84, 187, 189, 193 Republicans and, 17 war criminals and, 48 Zambrano and, 24 Free Austria Movement (FAM), 220 French Resistance, 5, 16, 51, 59–60, 61, 62–63, 64, 69 Fuente, Inmaculada de la, 17–18 Garbo, Greta, 105 García Lorca, Federico, 8, 139 García Vega, Lorenzo, 190, 191 Generalitat, 59

Generation of 1927, 8, 24, 139, 140, 151 Generation of 1936, 24 Gerlind, Marion, 6, 269 Gert, Valeska, 7, 97–115, 116–19 Beggar Bar and, 108–10, 117 Bei Valeska, 111, 113 Café Valeska und ihr Küchenpersonal, 111 Canaille, 103, 104 Die Amme, 102 Die Dirne, 102 Die Hexenküche, 113, 117 Erotic Grotesques, 102, 108 exile (1938–1949), 105–10 Humility, 100 life in Berlin (1892–1938), 97–105 return to Europe (1947–1976), 110–15 To Die, 100–1, 107 To Love, 100 Gilbert, Sandra, 173 Gilligan, Carol, 6, 53, 63, 67 Glenn, Kathleen, 164, 166, 169, 177 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 190, 191 González de Boix, Concha, 55 González, Sabina, 69 Gordon, Hary, 231, 232, 243 Goyri, María, 143, 151 Grenville, Anthony, 202, 203, 212 Grosz, George, 106 Gruppe 47, 112, 118 Gubar, Susan, 173 Guernica, 40, 42, 46 Guerrillas of the Theatre, 140 Gurometa, Graciosa, 62 gypsies, 7, 122, 125, 131, 134, 251, 253 Zigeunerromantik, 127, 129 Harding, F., 232 Helmreich, Franzi, 124, 126 Hess, Josefina, 155

INDEX

Hidalgo de Cisneros, Ignacio, 145 Hilberg, Raul, 75 Hildebrandt, Fred, 100 Hitler, Adolf, 16, 34, 42, 61, 87, 105, 113 Holländer, Friedrich, 106 Holocaust displacement and, 1, 11 gender and, 77, 78 Gert and, 113 moral psychology and, 63 social class and, 6, 80 Stojka and, 121–22, 124, 126, 130, 133–34 UDHR and, 56–57 Vienna and, 201 home community and, 2–4 Dor and, 207, 209–15 EU and, 1 exile and, 19–20, 60, 130–32, 256–58 immigration and, 9–11 literary imagination and, 7–8 nostalgia and, 127–28, 129–30 Stojka and, 121–22, 125 Tejera on, 9 homeland exile and, 3, 8, 15, 24 Ibárruri on justice and, 60 Kristeva on, 63 language and, 19 León and, 147 refugee survivors and, 69, 255 solidarity and, 64–66 Stojka and, 129 voicelessness and, 8 Hook, Sara, 99 hooks, bell, 80, 89 feminist theory: from margin to center, 80 Huidobro, Montes, 184 human rights documentation of, 56–57

279

Franco and, 57–58, 61–63, 64, 68–69 Germany and, 250, 252, 259 Republican Spain and, 46, 52–53, 55 UK and, 10, 224, 225, 228, 235, 238–39 See also Universal Declaration of Human Rights hybrid identity, 15, 27, 217 Hyman, Paula, 83, 90 Ibárruri, Dolores Communist Party and, 37–38, 39, 42, 45 democracy and, 39, 43, 44 exile, 35–36 Fascism and, 40–42, 44, 46 France and, 33 Franco and, 5, 34, 35, 41, 44–47 homeland and, 40, 44 national reconciliation and, 42–43 rebuilding of Spain and, 39–42 REI and, 33, 35, 39–42, 43, 48 resistance, 5 Spanish Civil War and, 33, 38, 62 Spanish diaspora and, 34–35 voice, 43–46 World War II and, 42 writings (1939–1977), 36–43 identity cultural, 9–10, 16, 204–5, 219, 265 dual, 15, 207 exile, 15–16 hybrid, 15, 27, 217 immigration, 9–11 exile vs., 14 Gert and, 108 historical events affecting, 1 Holocaust and, 75, 76, 77, 88, 202, 205 Spanish immigration to France, 58 International Brigades, 33, 65 Israel, 79

280

INDEX

Jamís, Fayad, 190 Johnson, Roberta, 18, 24–25 Jooss, Kurt, 115 Jovanovic, Miroslav, 251 Junta de Ayuda a Refugiados Españoles, 18 Junta de Defensa y Protección del Tesoro Artístico Nacional, 140 Kaplan, Marion, 80, 88, 89 Kelly, Liz, 161 Kent, Victoria, 17 Ketz, Victoria, 8–9, 270–71 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 100 Klüger, Ruth, 80–81 Koch, Ilse, 111 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 67, 72 Komintern, 34, 36, 48 See also Communist Party Krause, Helmuth von, 106, 116 Kristallnacht, 76, 204 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 60, 63, 66, 182, 195, 213 Kwateng-Kluvitse, Adwoa, 237 La Belle, Jenijoy, 169 Lacan, Jacques, 7 Laforet, Carmen, 17 La Pirenaica. See Radio España Independiente language shift, 202–3, 210, 213, 218–19 borrowing, 203, 206, 209, 215–16 code-switching, 203, 216 Lejárraga, María de la O, 38 Lens, Siegfried, 112 León, María Teresa, 5, 14, 17, 137–49 Alberti and, 21, 140–41, 143–45, 146–47, 149 children, 141–44, 147 Crónica general de la guerra civil, 148 Cuentos para sonar, 143–44 exile and, 21, 22–23, 25 essays, 150

family vs. profession and, 139–40 flight from Spain, 140 future and, 146 maternity and, 145–46 memoirs, 150 Memoria de la melancolía, 8, 20–22, 141–42, 144–46 novels, 150 preservation of Spanish works of art, 139 Republic and, 20–21, 23–24 return to Spain, 147–49 scripts, 150 short stories, 150 Spanish diaspora and, 8, 15 theatre, 150 Zambrano and, 23–24, 25 Lerman, Rose, 76–77, 81–84, 88, 89, 90 Lezama Lima, José, 190, 193 Liceo Femenino, 139 Linares, Andrés, 37 Lionnet, Françoise, 155 Llaneza, Celia, 62, 69 London Black Women’s Health Action Project (LBWHAP), 233–34, 243 Lorca, Federico García, 8, 139 Lorenz, Dagmar, 78 Losada, Gonzalo, 147 Loynaz, Dulce María, 190, 191 Lubitsch, Ernst, 107 MacKinnon, Catherine, 161, 162 Maeztu, María de, 139, 145 Maier, Carol, 23 Mallet, Marian, 202, 203, 212 Mallo, Maruja, 18 Mangini, Shirley, 17–18, 37, 38 Mann, Heinrich, 98 Mann, Klaus, 107 Mann, Thomas, 106, 110 Marcó, Lluís, 54 marriage abuse and, 8 forced, 224

INDEX

laws regarding, 106, 177 patriarchy and, 173 Republican Constitution and, 63 “Marseillaise, La,” 64–66 Martín Gaite, Carmen, 17, 21 Martínez-Robles, Felipe, 54 Marxism, 34, 38, 40, 46, 89, 140 Massaguer, Lope, 54 Matute, Ana María, 17 Mauthausen, 16, 54, 59–60 Mayans, Marcial, 54 Maynes, Mary Jo, 76, 82 McCafferty, Christine, 234, 243 McCullough, Sarah, 237 Medio, Dolores, 17 Meier-Rogan, Patricia, 126, 134 Memoria de la melancholía (León), 8, 20–22, 141–42, 144–46 memory collective, 16, 23, 47, 61 exile and, 15, 23 Méndez, Concha, 17–18 Mexico, 13, 17–19, 23, 35, 141 Migrants of Identity (Rapport and Dawson), 125 Miller, Nancy, 167 Milton, Sybil, 81 Minogue, Valerie, 192 Mistral, Silvia, 17 Moissi, Maria, 97–98 Momoh, Comfort, 231–32, 241, 242 Montero, Segunda, 62 Montseny, Federica, 17 Mora, Constancia de la, 17 Moscow, 36, 48 Mussolini, Benito, 34, 42 Naharro-Calderón, José María, 15 National Federation of Deportees, Prisoners, Resistants, and Patriots, 65 National Reconciliation policy, 42–43 National Refugee Service, 107, 108 Nazism Austria and, 81

281

Barceló and, 55 Català and, 63 censorship and, 113 deportation of Spaniards to Nazi camps, 57–60 displacement and, 1, 11 Franco and, 5, 54 French Resistance and, 63, 65, 69 Gert and, 109, 111–12, 113 Gruppe 47 and, 118 Holocaust and, 75, 78 Poland and, 79, 83 Spanish exiles and, 5, 17, 51–52, 53 Stojka and, 123–24, 128, 134 Tucholsky and, 117 Nelken, Margarita, 38 Neruda, Pablo, 18 Neuengamme, 59 Newly Born Woman, The (Cixous), 6–7 Next Year in Cuba (Pérez Firmat), 20 Nicaragua, 13 Nierendorf, Karl, 109 Noddings, Nel, 66, 68–69 Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Education, 68 Nolde, Emil, 100 Norton, Sydney, 7, 271–72 Núñez Targa, Mercé, 53, 54 Okin, Susan Moller, 66, 67 Oropesa, Salvador, 18 Ortega y Gasset, José, 24 Ortega, Julio, 194 Ottinger, Ulrike, 114, 119 Pabst, G.W., 105 Palabra de mujer (Riera), 25 Palencia, Isabel de, 17 Pasionaria See Ibárruri, Dolores patriarchy, 20, 37, 102, 156, 159–60, 163, 165, 167, 172–74, 175–76, 194, 227, 236, 239, 256, 263 PCE (Partido Comunista de España), 35, 36, 39, 43, 47, 48

282

INDEX

Peachum, Polly, 105 Pérez, Janet, 18, 165 Pérez, Rita, 66 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 20 Next Year in Cuba, 20 Perón, Juan, 21 Phalange, 39, 41, 45–46, 48 Phillips, Anne, 66, 68, 73 Picasso, Pablo, 124 Poland, 34, 76, 78–79, 83–85, 90 polygamy, 224 Prado, Benjamín, 148 Prado museum, 139, 140 Puerto Rico, 13, 23 Radio España Independiente (REI), 33, 35, 39–42, 43, 48 Ramos Bello, Victoria, 47 Rapport, Nigel, 125, 131 Ravensbrück, 5, 52, 53, 59, 65, 69, 123, 125, 134 Reinhardt, Max, 98, 99, 112, 115 Schall und Rauch, 112 reparations, 113 Republican exile, 13–15, 17–19, 23, 34, 59 Retamar, Roberto Fernández, 190 Rhodes, Elizabeth, 156, 176, 177 Richter, Hans, 109 Riera, Carme, 5, 14, 25 Palabra de mujer, 25 Rimbaud, Arthur, 51 Ringelheim, Joan, 78, 89 Rivero, Eliana, 14–15, 19 Rodoreda, Mercè, 8, 17, 70, 155–76 Camellia Street, factors allowing abuse in works, 167–71 La calle de las Camelias (Camellia Street), 8, 156, 160, 164, 166, 168, 174 La plaza del Diamante (Time of the Doves), 8, 156, 162, 166, 172, 174

“La salamandra” (“Salamander”), 8–9, 156–57, 163, 165, 167, 170–71, 173–74 language and, 174–75 role of naming, 165–67 types of abuse portrayed in works, 156–65 voicelessness and, 171–74 Roig, Montserrat, 53–54, 60, 70 Rojas, Rafael, 189–90 Roma groups, 7, 122, 124, 126, 130–33 Rosenfield, Israel, 132 Rotspanier, 59 Rottluff, Karl Schmidt, 100 Royal College of Midwives (RCM), 225 Rubenstein, Roberta, 3–4, 130, 132, 133 Ruddick, Sara, 66, 68 Ruge, Uta, 235 Ruiz Funes, Concepción, 18 Ruiz Ibárruri, Amaya, 47 Russia, 5, 67, 75–76, 79, 90, 101, 140, 259 Ruttman, Walter, 101, 116 Sachhetto, Rita, 97 Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, 59 Salisachs, Mercedes, 17 Salvat, Josep, 54 Sánchez, Luis, 37 Sarduy, Severo, 184 Sarraute, Nathalie, 183, 192 Schlöndorff, Volker, 115, 119 Nur zum Spass, 115 Sebastián, Gonzalo de, 139 Second Republic, 20, 23, 138–40, 149, 151 Semprún, Jorge, 54 Serrano i Blanquer, David, 53, 54 Serrano, Pío, 183, 184 Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 60 Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles, 18

INDEX

sexism, 78, 166, 239 Shoah Studies, 6, 78 silence Boix and, 60 Gert and, 113 language and, 174–75 León and, 21 Republican testimony and, 61 Rodoreda and, 8, 156, 162–66, 171–74 Rojas and, 190 Tejera and, 185 voicelessness, 171–74 women and, 4, 6, 53–54 Sinca, Amadeu, 54 SKIF (Sotsyalistisher kinder farband), 84 Society for Threatened Peoples, 252 song, 16, 64–66, 84, 99, 108, 112, 131 Soviet Union, 33, 34–37, 43–44, 46–47, 58, 79, 140, 152 Spanish Civil War Allied “No Intervention” policy and, 48 Cate-Arries and, 16 displacement and, 1, 11, 16 Ibárruri and, 33, 38, 62 León and, 21, 139, 140–42, 151 Republican exile following, 13, 14 Rodoreda and, 171 Spanish democracy and, 53 Tejera and, 9, 183–84, 186 Time of the Doves and, 157 Tusquets and, 16 women and, 18, 19 World War II and, 58 Spanish Constitution (1978), 6, 56–57, 64, 66, 69 Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire (Cate-Arries), 16 Spanish diaspora, 13–27, 34–35, 54, 122 Allende and, 15 Cantú and, 14 Cate-Arries and, 15–16 de la Fuente and, 17–18

283

León and, 8, 20–23 Mangini and, 17 Palabras del exilo and, 18 Pérez Firmat and, 20 Rivero and, 14–15, 19 Tusquets and, 16–17 Zambrano and, 23–25 Stalin, Joseph, 42, 112 Steedman, Carolyn, 82 Stein, Adolf, 105 Stein, Mathilda Wertham, 77, 86–88 Stewart, Melissa, 18 Stojka, Ceija, 121–34 act of remembering and, 132–34 exile and, 7, 124–27 Gestalt and, 123–24 Law of Pragnanz, 123 Mächtige Stiefel, 123 Nazi Camp Series, 123–24, 128, 134 Nomad Living Series, 127–29, 134 nostalgia and home in works, 127–28, 129–30 poetry, 128–29, 130–32 Ravensbrück, 123 Reisende auf dieser Welt, 122, 124 Shadow Collection, 124 “Sommerwiese,” 125 sunlight and space in works, 124–27 Sunlight Collection, 124, 127–28 Van Gogh and, 128 Wir Leben im Verborgenen, 122, 124 Strindberg, August, 98 Sunstein, Cass, 67 Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, 77, 79 Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War, 20 Tejera, Nivaria, 9, 181–95 Álvarez de la Rosa and, 193–94 Cámara on, 182–83 Camus and, 187 Castro government and, 181–82 early life, 183–84, 186–87

284

INDEX

Tejera, Nivaria—continued Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (Tejera), 9, 181–95 exile (1936-present), 184–89 Fuir la spirale, 184, 188, 189, 192 literary exile, 189–91 Luces y piedras, 189 Ortega on, 194 Rojas on, 190 Sarraute and, 192 Sonámbulo del sol, 184, 187–88, 191, 195 sun in works, 187–88 writing as spaces of resistance, 191–95 Tobin Stanley, Maureen, 5–6, 272 Tomero Alarcón, Rafael, 25 Torres Nebrera, Gregorio, 145 totalitarianism, 5, 51–52, 54–55, 61, 63, 65, 83, 122, 124 Triana, José, 184 Tristany, Joan G., 61 Tucholsky, Kurt, 110, 117 Tuñon, Enriqueta, 18 Turner, Victor, 3, 7 Tusquets, Esther, 16–17 United Kingdom Area Child Protection Committee (ACPC), 230 Children’s Act, 230 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 233 Criminal Justice Act, 230 Women’s National Committee (WNC), 232, 237 United Nations, 39, 56, 230, 241, 259 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 6, 56–57, 64, 66, 68–69, 71 Valdés, Zoe, 191, 195 Valis, Noel, 20 Van Gogh, Vincent, 128, 193 Vichy government, 16, 59, 60 Vicuña, Vitorio, 62

Vilanova, Francesc, 59, 72 Vitier, Cintio, 190 voice gendered, 78 Holocaust survivors and, 53–54, 61, 62 language and, 174–75 Spanish exiles and, 18, 22 women exiles and, 4, 8–9 working poor and, 75–77 written word and, 6 voicelessness, 159, 162, 171–74, 190 Vosburg, Nancy, 169, 170 Walker, Lenore, 161 Wanger, Walter, 107 Watenberg, Heinz, 108, 117 Wedekind, Frank, 98, 99 Wedekind, Kadidja, 108, 117 Weil-Curiel, Linda, 236 Weimar Republic, 75, 97, 98, 100–1, 105–7, 111–13 Wiesenthal, Simon, 61 Williams, Tennessee, 108 Womankind International, 237 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 159, 176, 177 working class, 6, 34, 37, 45, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 205–6, 216 World Health Organization (WHO), 224, 230, 241 World War II displacement and, 1, 11, 122 European economies and, 35 Franco and, 61 Ibárruri and, 42 Spanish Civil War and, 58, 61 UK entry into, 212 U.S. entry into, 108, 109 YAF (Yidishe arbiter froyen), 84 Yiddish, 205–7, 220 Zambrano, María, 5, 14, 17–18, 23–25 Delirium and Destiny, 23, 24 Zinn, Gesa, 7, 250, 272–73 Zweig, Stefan, 105