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 CENTURYEUROPE

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.

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ForElena and Gabriel, Mikki and Saskia




CONTENTS

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn

The Grammar of Contested Memory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts of Diaspora 13Mary S. Vásquez

Part I The Political and Personal: History, War, and Resistance

Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria: Voice of the Anti-Franco Movement (1939–1975) 33Mary 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 51Maureen Tobin Stanley

Off the Record: Voices of Ordinary Jewish Survivors of the Shoah 75Marion Gerlind

Part II Literature and the Arts

Dancing Out of Bounds: Valeska Gert in Berlin and New York 97Sydney Jane Norton


A Gypsy in Exile: “Home” and “Nostalgia” in Creative Works by the Austrian Romni Ceija Stojka 121Gesa Zinn

Passion and Participation: Motherhood and Exile in the Works of María Teresa León 137María del Mar López-Cabrales

Wife, Whore, Witch: The Portrayal of Violence in the Works of Mercè Rodoreda 155Victoria L. Ketz

The Four Free Walls of Paris: Nivaria Tejera’s Exiles in Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución 181María Hernández-Ojeda

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 201Eva Eppler

Multiculturalism and Citizenship in the United Kingdom: The Case of Female Genital Mutilation 223Anouk Guiné and Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes

Rising above the Bottom of German Society: Reflections on Interviews with Female Roma Refugees from Former Yugoslavia 249Monika Halpaap

List of Contributors 269

Index 275

C O N T E N T Sviii


LIST OF FIGURES

Leave by Joellyn Rock 26

Bird in the Bush by Carla Stetson 52

“Valeska Gert in Canaille (Whore)” (1925). Photograph by Suse Byk. Courtesy Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln 104

Sommer (1992) by Ceija Stojka. Courtesy of Patricia Meier-Rogan 126

Excerpt (1997) by Jayme Christine 138

Mourning “my evening’s joy” (2005). Part of a series of works, Widow’s Weeds, by Janice D. Kmetz 218




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We 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 wouldlike to mention our two thorough research assistants Emily Mowchan andBrianna DeSanto. We kindly appreciate the proofing by Kärin Haidos,Milan Kovacovic, Thomas Stanley, Janelle Wilson, and Eileen Zeitz, whoprovided invaluable suggestions, as well as all others who helped bring thisvolume to fruition. We especially extend our gratitude to reputed artistJoellyn Rock, who coordinated the artwork included in this anthology.




INTRODUCTION

Maureen Tobin Stanley and Gesa Zinn

Female Exiles in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Europe represents aneffort to raise consciousness about the marginalization of exiled women

within one hundred years of European history. Despite their many differ-ences, the women studied in this anthology have at least one thing incommon: they live in exile. They perceive themselves or are perceived as“other” within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe. Exile, immi-gration and transience all constitute an interstitial reality that permeatesevery 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 thesocioeconomic, ideological, ethnic, geographical, and generational gamut.We must stress the paradox of the uniqueness of individual exiles as they, inturn, contribute to the multiplicity and plurality of exile.

A number of historical events of the twentieth century gave rise tomigration, immigration, and exile to and within the European continent.Borders have crumbled, nations have been (re)built, and peoples have beendisplaced. The Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Francoist Regime,Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the fall ofthe Berlin Wall, various revolutions and persecutions, and the formation ofthe European Union (EU) have all been catalysts for displacement.

Today, the EU is a banner for progressive ideals.1 In essence, it hasshaped how human beings in the twentieth century perceive culture, iden-tity, and home. With its ambitious ideals has come the promise of hope fora better way of life that promotes unity by bringing together states and eth-nically, culturally, and economically diverse peoples. This dream, in turn,has resulted in an influx and fluctuation of various populations, some inlight of wars and ethnic strife. For example, between 1988 and 1998 asylumapplications in Spain totaled 81,980; in France 355,470; in the UnitedKingdom, 416,990; and in Germany, 2,119,850. Overall, the EU member


states of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and theUnited Kingdom received 4,050,280 asylum applications within that ten-year span (van Selm 230). Since 1989 and the reemergence of civil warand ethnic conflict—especially in the Balkans—the plight of those displacedby conflict and turmoil has added to the large-scale migrations that includethe displaced as well as those seeking employment and opportunities, bothlegally and illegally.

Women make up an often overlooked portion of uprooted populations.As authors and editors of this book we offer small glimpses into twentieth-and twenty-first-century women’s exilic experiences within Europe, inorder to shed light on gendered exile experiences in general that resultfrom women’s marginality in all of history, not just those stemming fromrecent 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 theseexiles are, how they perceive themselves or how they are perceived byothers, in order to open a dialogue about their lives, their influence on his-tory and culture, and their self-understanding as expressed in their art andwriting, as well as in their public and private lives. These exiled women areexamples of cultural hybrids. The cultural critic Edward Said expressed itthis way: “The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspec-tive, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize culturalhybrids that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” We explorethe trauma of geopolitical exiles that, as cultural hybrids, are transplantedfrom one place to another in the fight for survival; more importantly wewould like to investigate their exile as a mental construct.

Both inner and outer exiles often bring with them the awareness oflinguistic and cultural dislocation, resulting in mourning for lost dimensionsof self, shattered communities, and disrupted traditions. The outcome is arebuilding 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 canbe created within the literary imagination. And, as these women’s experi-ences as well as their literary or artistic production show, home is ultimatelya 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 betterfuture occupies a large space in women’s minds, often in the form of mythsand dreams as they move beyond border living. Yet, as we see in some of theessays, a real “beyond” is not always given, for the past cannot be left behind.

S T A N L E Y A N D Z I N N2


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 toproduce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, insideand outside, inclusion and exclusion.” Like Benedict Anderson and theoristVictor Turner, Bhabha underlines the existence of imaginary homelands inexile experiences. We, too, affirm that the women studied within thisvolume create, write, and articulate new spaces. Their new female realitiesconstitute “home” precisely after the crossing of geographical, spatial, andmental borders. The “beyond,” thus, marks a spatial distance. For EdwardSaid, exile “marks progress” and “promises the future.” This is certainly truefor some of the exiles in our essays, yet not for all. In some cases they yearnfor promise yet do not discernibly progress; others fall victim to despair. Yetall of the women’s exilic experiences contained within our volume describethe very act of going beyond into, as Bhabha articulates, the “unknowable,unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’ which, in the process ofrepetition, becomes disjunct and displaced.”

It follows, then, that exile experiences by women teach us how diversediscontinuities and inequalities are, then and now, and how women—avast section of displaced people—are still in the minority in terms of a writ-ten body of work that addresses their recounting and recollection of theirdislocation. As authors of this book, we invite you to learn more about theexile experiences of women within twentieth- and twenty-first-centuryEurope, for we believe that you will discover, just like feminist scholarHélène Cixous, that exile “is an uncomfortable situation, though it is alsoa magical situation . . . [Exiles can] endure it differently. Some exiles die ofrage, some transform their exile into a country . . . Some exiles can drawjoy from rage” (qtd. in Heitlinger). Exile can be a sign of marginalizationresulting from geographic displacement, or a celebrated interstitial realitybetween borders and identities.

Despite the uniqueness of each individual’s exilic experience, there isone unifying trait among these female exiles: their hybridity. Within thisvolume, we scrutinize, study, and analyze the manner in which they copewith and express their hybrid condition. Although it frequently constitutesa form of geographical displacement, exile is most significant for being astate of mind. The hybridity of exilic reality is precisely what the criticswithin our volume study. Each exiled woman carries her cultural homewithin her, which she brings to her host culture. Not infrequently, theconflict between the old and the new home results in homesickness andnostalgia. Roberta Rubenstein refers to this conflict as a “longing forbelonging.” For Rubenstein “homesickness” is a spatial/geographicalseparation; whereas “nostalgia” constitutes a temporal separation. In other

I N T R O D U C T I O N 3


words, one can return to a space, but not to a previous time when oneoccupied that space. Rubenstein states that “the original home is less anactual place than a site located in memory and fantasy, a psychic spaceinvested with nostalgia for an idealized notion of wholeness. By the time itcan 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 viewof a crystallized moment in time within a particular space.

The French feminist psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva pondersthe possibility of happiness for the displaced individual. Kristeva queries,

Can one be a foreigner and [be] happy? The foreigner calls for a new idea ofhappiness. Between the fugue and the origin: a fragile limit, a temporaryhomeostasis. Posited, present, sometimes certain, that happiness knowsnevertheless that it is passing by . . . The strange happiness of the foreignerconsists in maintaining that fleeing eternity or the perpetual transience. (4)

And, it is within their “fleeing eternity” and “perpetual transience” thatthese women negotiate and create the psychic reality of “home” withinexile. In spite of their marginality, which stems from geographic dis-placement as well as from gender, the female exiles studied within thisanthology seek a sense of belonging. It is our aim to give voice to thedisplaced who long for belonging, whose voices have been silenced orwere silent far too long.

Although all exile experiences are unique, many share common charac-teristics as one will soon discover in reading this volume. Women’s voicesspeak of new beginnings, elation, disappointment, homesickness, nostalgia,pain, and, sometimes, peace. Like a chorus, they echo what was, is, and willbe part of (geo)political, outer and inner exile. Yet, their individual voicesare heard as well. Due to sociohistorical circumstances, some women havebeen silenced on various levels, whereas others have simply not beenequipped to voice their plight. In this collection of essays, scholars fromvarious fields within the United States and Europe bring to light the storiesof 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 orga-nized our volume into three overlapping sections. Mary S. Vásquez’s studyof the permutations of female exile, “The Grammar of Contested Memory:The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts ofDiaspora,” is featured as an overarching introduction to the book. Vásquez



analyzes the underlying structure of gendered exilic writings, that is the“grammar of contested memory.” As an acclaimed authority on twentieth-century 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 experi-ences before studying in detail the writings of Spaniards María TeresaLeón, Carme Riera, and María Zambrano.

The remaining essays are structured as follows. The first section encom-passes essays on “The Political and Personal: History, War, andResistance.” The second section, “Literature and the Arts,” includes essayson literary and artistic figures whose works respond to the struggle betweentotalitarianism and democracy that plagued the twentieth century. Thethird section of the volume addresses cultural expression within exilethrough “Immigration, Integration, and Community in ContemporaryEurope: Culture as Articulated in Language, on the Body and withinSpace.”

The Political and Personal: History, War, and Resistance

The Marxist Dolores Ibárruri, also known as the iconic and legendaryPasionaria, was elected to the Spanish Congress in 1936 during the SpanishRepublic. The onset of the Civil War and the fall of the Republic forcedPasionaria to seek exile in Russia, from where she headed the SpanishCommunist Party. Mary Ann Dellinger “explores the dynamics of Ibárruri’spolitical activism as the voice of resistance.” Dellinger studies twentyspeeches and articles that attest to Ibárruri’s conviction and commitment tothe people of Spain. Through her exilic oratory and writing, Ibárruriproved her undying commitment that resulted in her “iconic stature as theanti-Franco.” Dellinger claims that Ibárruri eluded the existential crisis thatplagues exiled individuals due to a vital fact: that this Spanish woman con-structed her personal identity by assuming the persona of and becomingPasionaria. As Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri incarnated the ideals of theSpanish Republic.

Maureen Tobin Stanley, coeditor of this volume, also studies Spanishfemale exile. It is estimated that 10,000 Spaniards—400 of whom werewomen—were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps with the implicitendorsement of Franco’s regime. Tobin Stanley looks at Neus Català’scompilation of testimonials of over fifty Spanish women active in theFrench Resistance, many of whom were deported to the Nazi concentra-tion camp Ravensbrück (Germany). Tobin Stanley studies aspects of the1931 Spanish Republican Constitution, the United Nation’s 1948



Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1978 SpanishConstitution to show that these women of humble background embracedhumanity politically, personally, and morally. The democratic climate inthe final decades of the twentieth century fostered Català’s efforts to makeknown the dual fight for peace and women’s rights. Tobin Stanley observesthat the female voices recorded by Català are proof of feminist moralpsychologist Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care,” a gendered moral reasoningthat privileges human bonds. These female camp survivors profess theirmoral—and consequently political—commitment to life and fellow humanbeings 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 analyz-ing the importance of social class. As agents and makers of history, ordinarywomen 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 aresult of being female and poor. Far too often the marginalized within priv-ileged middle-class backgrounds have pushed working-class women furthertoward the margins. Gerlind shows how material differences played a signif-icant role in escaping and surviving the Holocaust. By providing excerptsfrom oral history interviews, which serve as audio clips from survivors’complex biographies, Gerlind gives voice to the working poor. She de-stigmatizes a discourse on poverty and manual labor, and challenges domi-nant narratives that limit the impact of the Shoah to a single catastrophicevent, rather than a number of events that include the escalation and long-term consequences of oppression, and suggests that (German) Shoah Studiesshould 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 femalefigures silenced by the dominant discourse. It is imperative to introducethis section on women’s exile literature and the arts with the understand-ing that the authors and artists included carry out a feminist project. Theirwritten or artistic work constructs a space appropriated by the female cre-ator that makes possible the break with preexisting orders and the creationof the new. The British feminist writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) prop-agated that the woman writer must overcome oppression to give voice tosilenced female experiences. In the second half of the twentieth century, asthe French feminist critic Hélène Cixous claims in The Newly Born Woman,“Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politi-cally indebted to all the vileness and compromise and it is not obliged to



reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that canescape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself,where it dreams, where it invents new worlds” (Cixous and ClémentNewly Born 72). It is through writing and artistic expression that femaleexperiences come into being. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacannoted, “lettre” (the written word) is inextricably linked to its homophone“l’être” (being); that is, through writing (and by extension artistic expres-sion) one comes into being. Precisely through artistic expression, femaleauthors and artists eke out a niche for themselves and, therefore, inventnew worlds.

Sydney Norton’s essay on the dancer and performance artist ValeskaGert investigates the effects of inner and outer exile(s) on Gert’s life and artin Berlin until 1938, when Gert went into exile. Intent on breaking downstatic aesthetic structures of nineteenth-century theater, Gert’s grotesquecaricatures of urban type characters were viewed as subversive and cast herin the role of an exile within her own country and culture. Norton dis-cusses Gert’s unconventional life style and socially critical art that wastainted by unforgiving disapproval from the German Jewish exile commu-nity in New York. In addition to providing close readings of Valeska Gert’sdance performances, Norton comments on Gert’s return to Berlin at theend of the Second World War, where, again, Gert was unable to captureaudiences. This dance caricaturist was energized by her experiences of exileand alienation to carry on her creative project. It was not until the 1960sand early 1970s, when German filmmakers were seeking theatrical andfilmic 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 aproductive and influential female artist.

The life, art, and poetry of the Roma Ceija Stojka also bear witness toexile 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 locationor a state of mind. Gesa Zinn, coeditor of this volume, studies the repre-sentation of home in recent creative works by this Austrian gypsy writer,singer, painter, and poet. Stojka is a Holocaust survivor and the first femaleRomni in the German-speaking world who describes Romni life in theconcentration camps, writes about the diaspora of her people, and discussesher life as a Romni during and after the Second World War. Zinn exploresStojka’s longing for a world that once was, as well as her construction of aplace that Victor Turner describes as a “place that is not a place, and a timethat is not a time.” For Zinn, Stojka’s longing for an ideal, harmonious pastis a central aspect in the Austrian gypsy’s paintings. As a “lying nostalgia” itpoints to the impossibility of recovering through memory and painting/



writing the “authentic” version of past experiences. Stojka’s desire to recovera 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 theSpanish diaspora following the Civil War. León witnessed the onset ofmodernization during the Spanish Republic (1931–1936) that conferredequality to women and recognized them as citizens. She was a writer of theimportant literary movement Generation of 27 that included poet andplaywright Federico García Lorca. After the fall of the Republic, she wentinto a thirty-seven-year exile, returning to her homeland only afterFrancisco Franco’s death. In “Motherhood and Exile in the Works ofMaría Teresa León,” María del Mar López-Cabrales views María TeresaLeón as “an orphaned woman without a homeland” who paid a high priceto pursue a professional literary career: divorce from her first husband, sep-aration from her children, and exile. Based on a close analysis of León’stexts and letters between León and her family and friends, López-Cabralesargues that estrangement from her children shaped the author’s works. Inher writings, León is drawn to female and child characters who, because ofseparations, forge new “families” that cannot fill the void. In Memoria de lamelancolía, María Teresa León voices the pain of exile and separation fromher own mother and children through the voices of female characters whosuffer similar experiences. As López-Cabrales states, “her voice is lost in an‘I’ (exile) and a ‘you’ (family and Spain) of different voices.” López-Cabrales identifies León as having two exiles: first from her children andsecond from her country.

In the chapter “Wife, Whore, Witch: The Portrayal of Violence in theWorks of Mercè Rodoreda,” Victoria Ketz studies how voicelessness isinextricably linked to loss of mother, mother tongue (lengua materna), andhomeland (madre patria) in three narrative works by the Catalonian MercèRodoreda (1908–1983), who went into exile following the fall of theSpanish 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 cen-tury. Rodoreda’s protagonist-narrators from the novels La plaza delDiamante (Time of the Doves) and La calle de las Camelias (Camellia Street)and the short story “La salamandra” (“Salamander”) are also voiceless. Ketzperceptively discerns that voicelessness gives victimizers license to act vio-lently upon their victims. The characters’ silence renders them powerlessand vulnerable to violence, thus leaving them incapable of protestingagainst it. Ketz analyzes the progression of violence: physical and mentalabuse within marriage in La plaza, gang rape and sequestration in La calle,



and finally, gang rape, dismemberment, and burning at the stake in “La salamandra.” Ketz aptly discerns the tie between language and bodyand 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 Awaitthe Night to Dream of You, Revolution), scrutinizes the constructs ofhome and belonging. As María Hernández-Ojeda notes, the experiencesand writings of this novelist reflect her transatlantic crossings. Tejera’schildhood in her father’s native Canary Islands, Spain, during the SpanishCivil War and the early Francoist dictatorship, her adolescence in Cubaduring the Batista regime, and her adult life in Paris defined her as a writerwhose 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 poeticnovel,” a “testimonial/novel/essay/poem that is an inspirational work ofart with an innovative style and ethical commitment.” Hernández-Ojeda’sreading of Nivaria Tejera’s Espero la noche makes manifest that the Cuban-Canarian writer has created a space of resistance in which she “resistsauthority by trespassing political, national, literary, linguistic, gender andgenre borders” in her life and literature. In her close study of Espero la noche,Hernandez-Ojeda analyzes Nivaria Tejera’s revolutionary nature thatpermeates 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, thebody, 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 ourbodies and what we do to them reflect cultural identity within the space thatwe occupy. Cultural markers—expressed through language and customs—reveal one to be within or without the dominant culture. The manner inwhich immigrants and exiles reminisce and recall the past establishes thecontinuity of identity. As is often the case, the overriding primary culturalidentity is frequently at odds with the secondary culture. For immigrants—and subsequent generations—the tension between the initial “home” andsecondary “home” are made manifest in daily practices, speech patterns,and bodily rituals. The question arises, what elements of her primary cul-ture can and should the immigrant relinquish? One must also contemplate,what elements is the dominant culture forcing the immigrant or migrantpopulations to surrender? Clearly, the new land becomes the displaced



person’s host country. Yet, now she must straddle two spaces and twotimes, thus creating a new “home” within this interstitial psychic reality.Therein lies the paradox: the immigrant is from a place that was, and is notfrom the place where she presently is—at least not yet. Therefore, culturalpractices are negotiated and compromised. The refugee, immigrant, orexile is a hybrid, whose relationship to the mainstream culture as well as herculture of origin is inevitably precarious. This tension results from culturalnegotiation. It affirms and problematizes the concepts of inclusion andexclusion. The identity paradox puts into question precisely how onedefines, first, nationality and, second, cultural identity that originates froma 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 Jewsliving in Great Britain is an investigation into how language use reflects theconcepts of home, culture, memory, and identity. As part of a larger pro-ject establishing the sociolinguistic profile of the Austrian-Jewish Refugeecommunity in London, Eppler uses excerpts of an interview with Dor, herdaughter Viv, and her grandson Nic to analyze the underlying tensionsbetween the family members. These are visible in their choice of wordsand their choice of English and/or German. Dor fled Austria in 1938, andhas since been living in London without calling it her home. Viv, who isbilingual and bicultural, feels very much at home in London, and attemptsto bring up her son Nic as a “proper Englishman.” Dor’s attempts to passon her Austrian history and culture to the following generations interferewith Viv’s goal of educating her son about “English culture.” Their con-flict between mother and daughter is emblematic of immigrant familiescoping with issues relating to alienation, integration, and assimilation on adaily basis.

Similarly, the practice of Female Genital Mutilation by immigrants inGreat Britain is a way of perpetuating cultural identity. In “Multiculturalismand Citizenship in the United Kingdom: The Case of Female GenitalMutilation,” Anouk Guiné and Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes analyzethe manner in which Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) practices chal-lenge Britain’s normative, ethical, and legal framework, a nation that inprinciple is committed to the protection of the basic human rights of theindividual. Moreno and Guiné study the United Kingdom’s limitedmulticulturalist policies that, while promoting cultural diversity and toler-ance, result in a low degree of protection of the individual rights ofwomen and girls, and, therefore, prove unsuccessful in reducing theincidence of FGM practices.



In “Rising above the Bottom of German Society: Reflections onInterviews with Female Roma Refugees from Former Yugoslavia (Berlin2004),” peace worker and theologian Monika Halpaap provides a humani-tarian perspective on the lives and living conditions of recent Romarefugees. Halpaap learned of the numerous obstacles that displaced Romawomen face on a daily basis, including overt and insidious prejudice, pre-carious immigration status, and the inability to be gainfully employed. Themost prominent characteristic that the interviewees made manifest was theirdogged commitment to forge a better life for themselves and, most impor-tantly, for their families in their new home and host country (Berlin,Germany). Halpaap argues that Europe is still under construction and is eagerto become a continent of peace. Through numerous initiatives, NGOs(nongovernmental organizations), partnerships, experiments, and training, itaims to provide peaceful solutions to the globalization of violence. Halpaap’sarticle should be viewed as a beginning, a door that is opening to theperception and treatment of refugees within the EU in our new millennium.

Conclusion

In summary, the Spanish Civil War, Francoist Regime, Nazism, theSecond World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the fall of the BerlinWall, the Cuban Revolution, as well as the influx of new immigrant pop-ulations into the EU provide the background for investigating women’sexile experiences. Various contributors document and discuss the individ-ual and collective circumstances of a diverse group of women in exile onEuropean soil. We are grateful for the contributors’ extensive research,expertise, diligence, and patience in bringing this text to fruition. Aboveall, though, we congratulate and thank them for bringing to our readers’attention a cultural and political phenomenon that will forever be with allof us, regardless of age, gender, national, ethnic, or religious backgrounds.

Exile experiences are plentiful and diverse, especially today withinEurope’s fluid boundaries and borders. We do not claim or aim to representthe entirety of exiled women in one hundred years of European history. Infact, it should be obvious that the essays included herein deal with a samplingof women who have been displaced. It is our humble goal that by presentingthese essays, we can hear a chorus of gendered voices that articulate theirinterstitial reality of border living as well as the desire to construct the psychicspace called home. Hopefully, Female Exiles in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Europe will bring about the emergence of many more women’svoices from the margins, voices that are still to be discovered or recovered,gendered voices that must be heard.



Note

1. One should think of human rights issues such as the abolition of the deathpenalty. Also of note is the recognition of same-sex union in some EUnations.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism. 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

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his Millennium: History of the Last ThousandYears (1995), has written, “If cultures and civilizations are the tectonic

plates of world history, frontiers are the places where they scrape againsteach other and cause convulsive change” (20). One of the prognoses forour new century is that it will bear witness to more displacements, diasporas,migrations, movements of populations both voluntary and unsought, andoften, surely, the mixture of the two, than any other period in recordedhuman history. Such movements inevitably involve borders and frontiers:national, those often arbitrary, and hardly inviolable, lines of politicalfunction, if not creation. Ideological borders, linguistic ones, borders ofcultural norms and expectations. The borders between a before and anafter, 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, thatmany-pronged consideration of boundaries and how we define them,insert ourselves within them, attempt to push them out or even obliteratethem entirely, cross them, and cross back in an ongoing journey along,across, over, through the multiple borders that mark the forms in which welive our lives.

The twentieth century, to be sure, had its own abundant share of dis-placements. The Republican exile following defeat in the Spanish CivilWar of the 1930s. Cuba. Chile. Argentina. Colombia. Nicaragua. ElSalvador. And the economic exile experienced by many who leave, orrotate to and from, Puerto Rico, Mexico. And what of the telling of these


displacements, the rendering of, variously, living away from, living in, andliving between spaces as multiply defined? Of inhabiting borders? I proposeto consider in the present essay the textual recreation, positing, inventionof the experience of a particular kind of displacement, that of exile. I dis-tinguish here between the term exile and the words emigration and immigration.First, emigration and immigration, the movement away from and themovement into, are more general terms, and often more neutral ones,encompassing a variety of possible circumstances and motivations of dis-placement. Furthermore, these terms often, though not necessarily, carry asense of a willed movement, one even sought. Exile, on the other hand, isa 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 ofbanishment, is a severing, and, even if voluntary, even if sought, carries theconnotation of an impetus of some urgency that propels one away, nottoward. I propose to explore selected female-authored texts of re-memo-ration in exile, texts that move in time and space in a conjuring of theexperience of exile and the textual combat that that conjuring involves.

We may think of such navigation in the terms employed by Norma EliaCantú in her imaginative memory text Canícula: Memories of a Girlhood enla frontera (1995), with reference to the acts of rememoration of a Chicanagirl’s growing up on the U.S.–Mexican border: “[T]he stories mirror howwe live in our memories, with our past and our present juxtaposed andbleeding, 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 clashof ways of being and knowing, suggested above by Fernández-Armesto.The contest between the effort to remember and perhaps an equal one toforget. Between past and present, loss and gain, dream and disillusionment.Between memory and its erosion, its self-correction. Between conflictedversions and impulses. These are the terms, or some of them, of a grammarof contested memory. I will view them in these pages through an explo-ration of texts emerging from, or evocative of, the Republican exile of1939 at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. In this context, I willconsider the cases of María Teresa León and María Zambrano, along witha story of exile by Carme Riera. I will include references to insights fromtwo U.S. Latino theorists of exile due to their relevance and applicability towomen writers’ contemplation of the severing that came at the end of thewar for Spain and because of the importance of the Americas in the Spanishexile of 1939.

Eliana Rivero, in a series of articles—“Hispanic Literature in theUnited States: Self-Image and Conflict” (1985), “From Immigrants toEthnics: Cuban Women Writers in the U. S.” (1989), “Cubanos y

M A R Y S . V Á S Q U E Z14


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 whencethey have come, learning to make a path in the new one but with thehomeland often predominant in their thoughts, and the ethnic, the childand grandchild of exile, who possesses a dual identity made up of two verydistinct and often conflicted parts and who must negotiate, on a very indi-vidual basis, a hybrid identity. At a time when ethnic identification hasagain come to be seen often as pejorative and undesirable, particularly bythose so identified, Rivero’s theoretical distinction remains useful as atemporal line of demarcation when one approaches texts of memory.

The primacy of the homeland in first-generation exilic memory is illus-trated by the Spanish exile character in Isabel Allende’s De amor y de sombrawho, as a symbolic gesture of discrepancy, refuses to wear shoes, even inwinter, stubbornly persisting in limiting his footgear to alpargatas, in solidar-ity with the humble people of Spain for whose interests he had fought in thewar. His insistence surely served, too, to mark the certain temporality of anexile that would prove permanent, all the more so because, once the Francodictatorship 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 acharacter in the 1982 “Volver a empezar” (Begin the Beguine; dir. José LuisGarcia), a film that treats the return to Spain and, for a time, to a lost love ofa dying Republican, a successful professor at a California university. Thisprotagonist, 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 thelesson and began to execute the steps of a traditional dance of his nativeChile; a few days later this exile died, having performed once more, albeitin absence, his Chilean identity. One recalls the words of poet RafaelAlberti to the effect that everything was about Spain, that even when itseemed that Spain was not the topic of the exile’s words, it was, always. AndSpanish Republican exile María Teresa León wrote in her memoir, to bediscussed later in this essay, “Lucky are you who carried on your backs thesweet burden of the memory of Spain, those who saved the highest word inour language, the word that has caused so much suffering to those of us whospeak 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 ulti-mately failed Second Spanish Republic are central to a new book by thescholar of Spanish Republican exile Francie Cate-Arries of the College ofWilliam and Mary that adds importantly to the pioneering work done byJosé María Naharro-Calderón of the University of Maryland and the

T H E G R A M M A R O F C O N T E S T E D M E M O R Y 15


Universidad de Alcalá de Henares on the prison camps of southern France.Cate-Arries’s book, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory andRepresentation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–1945 (2004), viewsthe Spanish carcelary experience through a prism of affirmation. When theSpanish Republicans fled by the thousands on foot over the Pyrenees intoFrance in the winter of 1938–1939 after the loss of the Battle of the Ebroin the fall of 1938 had made the Republic’s loss of the war a virtual cer-tainty, the government of the neighboring democracy reacted by placingthese Spaniards in crude camps where many would die of unsanitary con-ditions, of hunger and cold, of their accumulated wounds of body andspirit. Many survivors would go on to form part of the famed FrenchResistance against the Vichy government and Hitler. Spanish Republicanwomen bravely served as couriers in the Resistance. The subject of Cate-Arries’s book is the effort, beginning in the camps themselves, to preservetheir national, ideological, cultural identity. She explores with whatcourage these Spanish Civil War exiles, under the most humiliating of cir-cumstances, faced their new circumstance, affirmed and survived, sought tocraft a new Spanish Republican imaginary in exile. Their efforts took theform of writing, song, performance and laid the base for the permutationsof exile identity, the Spanish exile imaginary, to be lived in later exile bythose who survived.

Cate-Arries’s book is almost certain to be controversial; some will per-haps see in it a look away from the suffering and death that occurred inthose camps, from the trains departing them for Mauthausen carryingSpanish Republicans, many of whom did not return. Yet the book beginsto write the valuable chapters we need in order to understand the perpet-uation of identity through its reconstruction, the courageous attempts bythese refugees and prisoners to reinscribe their various Spanish Republicanidentities into a vastly altered context in which they had become theOther, as their new destinations, physical and figurative, would be for themstrange, alien, other. To write and retain collective memory, to use theWord with a grammar constant yet new, one to counter the silencing intheir beloved Spain, the imposition of the official story, rewritten to such adegree that the new generation was taught that the Republic had begunthe war. Novelist and former editor of Barcelona’s Lumen publishinghouse Esther Tusquets comments in an interview by Mercedes Mazquiaránde Rodríguez that she was a teenager in her native Barcelona before shebecame 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



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 chil-dren of the haute bourgeoisie, in the lengthy and substantive interview byGeraldine Cleary Nichols in her Escribir, espacio propio, published by theCenter for the Study of Ideologies and Literature at the University ofMinnesota in 1989.

Shirley Mangini, in her much-consulted study Memories of Resistance:Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1995) entitles three of herchapters “War as Memory,” “Prison as Memory,” and “Exile as Memory.”Mangini brings out the vital role of memory texts emerging from the prisonand/or exile experience of Spanish Republican women in making knownthe ideological commitment, ideals, and societal roles of these women alongwith the female experience in a history traditionally authored primarily bymen. 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 campsstudied by Francie Cate-Arries, those who were sent from there to Naziconcentration camps, those who made their way to Mexico and other LatinAmerican countries, and those who paid heavily for their Republican idealsin Francoist Spain. The ironies lived by those Republicans who soughtrefuge 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 tragedythat awaited those in France. The world became a prison for Spaniards whostayed in Spain and for those who went to France. Ironically, it also becamea prison for the French, who had unwittingly made the decision to imprisonthe Spanish behind barbed wire while they themselves were slowly beingencircled by the Nazis. (Mangini 154)

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



Méndez, painter Maruja Mallo, and philosopher and educator MaríaZambrano. Mangini articulates in powerful terms the significance of studyof those women who people her book and de la Fuente’s, as well as innumerous articles and monographs appearing in recent years on a numberof the neglected female figures of Republican exile by such critics asRoberta Johnson, Salvador Oropesa, Janet Pérez, Melissa Stewart, AldaBlanco, Concha Alborg.

[A]ll of the female voices of exile provide us with a unique perspective onthe double apocalypse that befell the anti-Franco population at the end ofthe Spanish civil war. Without them we would consider only the plight ofthe male population. Tragic and massive though it was, that experiencealone would not give us any sense of the female nomads—their resistance todeportation, to prostitution, to demoralization—and their fight against thepersecution that followed them out of Spain and into France in thoseprofoundly tragic years of overlapping wars. (de la Fuente 174)

In 1937 the Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados Españoles (Service ofEvacuation 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 toChile. A second group, the Junta de Ayuda a Refugiados Españoles (Aid toSpanish Refugees, JARE), was founded in 1939. In Mexico, the ComitéTécnico de Ayuda a los Españoles en México (Technical Committee for Aid toSpaniards in Mexico, CTAE) actively facilitated the incorporation intoMexican society of Spanish exiles. The Casa de España established in 1938by President Cárdenas became two years later the important intellectualcenter Colegio de México. (This history is recorded in Mangini 151–54and in Ruiz Funes and Tuñón.) Three ships, the Sinaia, the Ipanema, andthe Mexique, carried Spanish Republican exiles to Mexico in the immedi-ate postwar period. Of these, the best known is probably the Sinaia, surelyin part because it was the first and perhaps also because of the newspaperpublished on board during the crossing.

The story of the Spanish Republican diaspora has been studied minutelyin Palabras del exilio. Final y comienzo: El Sinaia (1982) by Concepción RuizFunes and Enriqueta Tuñón. The authors draw upon data gathered by theCTAE to note that among the 1,599 passengers of the Sinaia there were393 women (Ruiz Funes and Tuñón 18). A facsimile edition of the issuesof the shipboard newspaper printed and distributed by these women andmen was brought out by Mexico City’s UNAM in 1989. The contentsinclude expressions of Republican solidarity—despite the ideologicaldiversity represented among the ship’s passengers—sketches, and manylessons on Mexico, this last an implicit expression of hope that, though



absolutely consistent with Republican pedagogical principles at their best,is astounding in the context of Republican defeat, the lived horrors of thewar just ended, and the expectation by most of an early reintegration intoSpain upon the certain fall of Franco.

The Republican exile women, in Mexico and elsewhere, amid the sor-rows, bitterness, and triumphs, great and small, of their exilic lives, wouldat least always know who they were, their Spanish identity having beenfully formed to adulthood before their need to leave the land of their birth.For the children of exile parents who remained outside the Peninsula, onthe other hand, identity would often prove a vexing dilemma. JosefinaAldecoa’s 1994 novel Mujeres de negro (Women in Black), the second of hernovelistic trilogy on women in the Spanish Civil War—the others beingHistoria de una maestra (Story of a Schoolteacher, 1990) and La fuerza deldestino (The Force of Destiny, 1997)—presents the problematics of child-of-exile self-identification, formulated theoretically by Eliana Rivero, asdiscussed earlier. While the exile Gabriela never wavers in her identifica-tion of herself as a Spaniard and a Republican partisan, her daughter Juanapasses through ambivalence. Through friendships with other children ofSpanish exile in Mexico followed by her university experience in Spain,Juana struggles with conflicting emotions. First there is awakened in her asense of “my need of a past.”2 Soon comes nostalgia for what she cannotsummon in memory except in brief flashes:

I felt nostalgia for the unknown city. The moving exercise of memory by mynew 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 Mexicocontinued 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 universityfriends in Madrid, would feel her familial roots pulling her not so muchinto the past, property, after all, of her parents—or so Juana believes—butinto the absolute immediacy of her new experiences: “A powerful forcedragged 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 ironicreplication of the route of flight of so many Spanish Republicans, thoughnot her mother, planning then a return to Mexico, “my urgent necessity.Returned from exile, I now needed to exile myself again. Exile andreturn and exile.”6 Aldecoa employs the verb desterrar, the loss of one’sland, a rending from it. Juana, exile and child of exile, returns to herancestral home, which is also her own, only to pass to a third terrain



before choosing that other home, site of half her life, both temporally andsymbolically.

As both exile and child of exile, Juana’s experience is akin to that ofGustavo Pérez Firmat, in my view our best theorist of U. S.–Cuban exileexperience. 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 in1961. The narrator’s remembered self, the eleven-year-old boy standing onthe deck of the ship, looking back toward the harbor and the only worldhe has ever known, unable for years to come to grasp the full import of thetruncation that is occurring. In that harbor, standing on the deck, is aneleven-year-old boy looking at him, watching himself move away, as theboy on the deck watches himself stay behind. Pérez Firmat’s narrator willforever carry within both of those boys, each perpetually watching theother, the two the same and irrevocably distinct. And yet the problematicsthrough which Josefina Aldecoa’s character passes are distinctly gendered.As a female exile and child of exile, Juana must separate herself from thepassivity displayed by her mother—this strong, passionate ideologue andteacher—in the face of her husband’s infidelity and return, decide to ter-minate a love affair with a man who allows his mother to condemn Juanain the lowest of terms, and reject a model of female life, that of the somberwomen 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 inthe 1930s, an extensive new book was recently published by the ModernLanguage Association, Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War.Brilliantly assembled by Noel Valis of Yale University, the volume’s essaysplumb many facets of the war, attempting to achieve a balance in therepresentation 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 ever-mounting pressure for a democratic government over the last two decadeshad culminated in the arrival of the Second Republic in free electionsthroughout Spain in April of 1931 and when ideas, literature, film, politi-cal philosophies had poured into Spain, finding there a receptive, creative,and fertile terrain. María Teresa León, the centennial of whose birth was in2003, 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 thewindow. During the very long period during which the prevailing view ofpatriarchal society was that women from non-humble strata of the socialorder, particularly, had as their appropriate space the domestic sphere



alone, this image of the woman at the window, looking out at the worldgoing by, at street life, seeing men go past and even maybe fleetingly seen bysome 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 reclu-sion. Her image of windows flung wide evokes, too, openness to ideas,expansion of inquiry, and the full intention to be part of it. Finally, herwords denote inclusiveness, reciprocity between what came through thewindow and what issued from it. It is hardly accidental, given this image ofthe woman at the window, that Carmen Martín Gaite, one of the foremostnarrative artists of post–Civil War Spain and the first theorist, in Spain, offemale experience of those decades, should entitle her 1982 book of essaysDesde 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 thefront for Republican troops and charged with the transfer of Madrid’s arttreasures from the capital city to greater safety in Valencia, a task that wasbeautifully orchestrated under her direction and movingly conducted, withthe theme held throughout the process that the art works were the patrimonyof 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, how-ever, María Teresa León, still intellectually and culturally active in BuenosAires, passed increasingly into the shadow of the celebrated poet RafaelAlberti, her adored husband, an exceptionally public figure. “Now I amthe tail of the comet,” she wrote in her memoir. “He walks ahead. Rafaelhas never lost his light.”7 Alberti’s multiple infidelities, the move to Romewhen the rise of Juan Perón brought ominous encroachment, and, finally,Alzheimer’s disease resulted in a series of progressive silencings of MaríaTeresa León.

Exile was, then, for María Teresa León, on two continents, a gradualbut advancing retreat, a diminishment, a passing from, and of, the light. Shefought through the gathering fog created by the illness to write her mem-oirs, a richly detailed account of the euphoric period of seemingly endlesspossibilities, when ideas and projects sparkled and crackled everywhere,then the searing loss of so much promise, the sorrows of exile and the joysyet harvested from it, and the combat waged with and through silence inthe artistic enterprise that is this testimonial text.

There is a textual tension throughout Memory of Melancholy, a simulta-neous movement outward and inward. Inward as the author searches thestorehouse of memory with the imperfect instrument she now possesses,and inward, too, as the assault upon memory advances. And outward as thenarrating self, the voice telling the story, engages time and again in textual



skirmishes, the implacable and advancing enemy of forgetfulness and era-sure. Assault, retreat, refortification, counterattack. The re-memorative act,then, always problematized in a testimonial text by selective filter, correc-tive memory, and the complexities of authorial intent, is here furthercomplicated by memory’s erosion, the struggle against which, ironically,energizes the text, imbuing it with greater life. As the shadows gather, hereffort is to yet perceive their lingering outlines, then endow each of thoseoutlines with name, face, body, movement in a particular moment: to “kissthe shadows,” as she writes, to renew intimacy with them, to know themagain and anew. There is much at stake in this testimonial enterprise—therecovery of voice, the resistance to erasure. She remembers viscerally aswell as cerebrally. “Yo pienso con la sangre del corazón” (León 224). Ithink with the heart’s blood. León utilizes the instruments common to allmemorialists: memory, with its imperfections and its lapses, plus intent,which occasions rewritings, self-censure, the correction of one’s livedhistory. Yet for her the basic instrument of memory is as inconstant as anerrant lover; it appears and retreats. When present, it must be courted,cajoled, and heard in every word it is willing to speak. Hence, perhaps, theespecially populous pages of the León memoir, full of names of those pre-sent at a gathering, those involved in an undertaking. Her text names thoseshadows, caresses them, seemingly grateful for the gift of recall of them.This textual courtship of eroded memory is León’s grammar of contestedmemory, an urgent summoning of the ghosts to gather again to becounted, their names to be spoken once more. The contest is one of timein the fight against the accretions of loss.

Memory of Melancholy is a very different text from the memoirs authoredby Rafael Alberti, her husband: the six-part La arboleda perdida (The LostGrove), his own memoirs, which he began to compose in earliest exile, dur-ing the solitary nights spent in the office of the Paris radio station whence hebroadcast for a time in Spanish. The reader notes that, whereas the Leónmemoir does not claim protagonism for its authoring and narrating subject,the Alberti text most definitely does so. The León text moves primarilyaround others from the remembering axis of the self. The Alberti memoir,on the other hand, moves elliptically to fold in others, but always around theself, not only as remembering and organizing consciousness but as centralfigure as well. One may identify in this implicit textual dialogue—Alberticoncluded 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 histown, 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,



that is, recall with loss is also a metaphor for a lived time of fullness andpromise, later lost with the severing from Spain. Tellingly, in León’s titlewhat is remembered is deep sadness, the habit of sorrow that is melancholy. Thegrammar of exile is, of course, a gendered one. One recalls, for example,the considerable discrepancy in the kinds and places of work assigned towomen 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 onenotes that, in the Alberti memoir, it was he who headed up the successfultransfer of art treasures from Madrid to the relative safety of Valencia, whenit is verifiable fact that the person named by the Republican government tocarry out that enterprise, and the person who succeeded in doing so, wasMaría Teresa León.

León experienced in multiple ways, then, the displacement, the loss ofplace that is the removal of the self, with all the internal baggage sacrificedand added, into exile. Place is, of course, far more than the space weoccupy. It is also, and more importantly, the relation established betweenus 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, ourmeasurement of the quality of the light and of human interaction, and, onthe other hand, its role in the formation of our intellect, sensibilities, ideol-ogy: our relation to the world. When Spanish philosopher MaríaZambrano reached from Cuba back through the decades to a rememberedSpanish childhood to write in her Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in HerTwenties, as gracefully translated by Carol Maier (1999), of “the light of awinter day in a crystalline Madrid winter, a light that seems to come fromthe snow on the sierra, bringing the scent of pines, of the thyme that isalways green, of the poor sierra, naked beneath the blue light” (11), sheevoked just that experience of lived place, with its multiplicity and contra-diction, the changing calibration that, in times of peace and circumstancesof option, causes us to stay, leave, return; that generates in us the ongoingmeasurement both of degrees of belonging and of our part in collectivememory, memory’s impulse in us. With the imposition of exile, place in allof its modes must become more urgently portable, the need to preservewhat is left, or what may be lost forever in the life left behind, joined to theimperative—the burden and the responsibility—of collective memory.The Republican exile of 1939 involved for women a particular additionalloss and legacy of exile memory: the hard-won, imperfect, yet very realpossibilities of activity in the public ideological, governmental, and intel-lectual spheres opened to their gender in the years of the Republic.Zambrano, a contemporary of María Teresa León and a Republican exilein Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and, like María Teresa León, Rome,



shared with León both the activism and celebratory hope of theRepublican years and the disillusionments of exile.

A student and disciple of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, fromwhom her thinking later distanced her, Zambrano was one of twentieth-century Spain’s major philosophers and a major European intellectual—and female intellectual. She was also a pioneering woman in Spain and inexile. The land of her birth and formation, to which she was able to returnwhen she was elderly, accompanied Zambrano as a vital presence through-out her exile peregrinations. Her longevity was remarkable, like that of twofellow members of Spain’s Generation of 1927 and 1936, Rosa Chacel andRafael Alberti; Zambrano was, however, little known for several decades.The recipient of numerous honors in Republican Spain, Zambrano wasnot only erased in Spain during the years of the Franco dictatorship butwas, until recent years, neglected in Hispanism outside Spain. LikeLeón, Zambrano was involved in the Republic’s Misiones Pedagógicas orPedagogical Missions, an initiative that, in consonance with the view thatcultural production was the shared legacy of all Spaniards, sent teams ofartists and intellectuals to remote areas of the country in cultural visits thatwould ideally involve the entire town. The philosopher was also active insuch journals as Hora de España and counted significant publications inSpain and Latin America. She was highly considered in Caribbean andRoman intellectual life. In the United States, Roberta Johnson and AldaBlanco are two of those few scholars who have done much to remedy thelack of awareness of Zambrano’s work. The translation of Delirium andDestiny, accompanied by an excellent study authored by Roberta Johnson,who has contributed much to our understanding of the intersections ofphilosophy and literature in twentieth-century Spain, has opened access toZambrano’s thought to many more readers.

The Zambrano text is a philosophical, ideological, and obliquelypersonal autobiography set within a biography of Spain. Her belovedhomeland is seen as an organic being growing toward the Republican idealand moving through it into failure, though not death, and the carrying ofa tenuous but enduring hope. A major textual strategy deployed byZambrano is the convergence of the communal and the individual, the col-lective and the personal. Zambrano often employs the phrase “the dreamof Spain” as she follows the gestation, fruition, and denial of an idea. Hertext records the voyage of a people and that of a female intellectual andideologue, with both delirium and destiny marking the communal andindividual travel toward the realization of an ideal, as well as the bitterexperience of defeat and exile. The subtitle, A Spaniard in Her Twenties,places the author at the axis of her testimonial text and privileges thoseyears in which her dream and Spain’s moved together.



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 textin the late summer of 1952, in response to financial need, for submission toa French writing competition. When her manuscript did not win, it suf-fered a precarious destiny of its own, according to Johnson, not onlyremaining unpublished but saved several times from Zambrano’s intendeddestruction by her cousin, Rafael Tomero Alarcón (227). It was he whoengineered the book’s publication at last in 1969, in Madrid, after substantialediting by its author, writes Johnson.

It is significant that Zambrano should conceive of the autobiographicalproject as one of intellectual and ideological trajectory. This understandingis consistent with the intellectual passion and ideological intensity of herformation as thinker and partisan, and with her fervent commitment to theRepublican 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 intowhich the lives are inserted for recollection, from which they are summonedup by the re-memorative process. In narrative fiction, exile tales, even thoseauthored by non-exiles, frequently feature a frame, metaphor perhaps of theframe of exile within which their lives move, a frame that conditions all thatthey do. Carme Riera, a Mallorcan writer who is also professor of literatureat the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, is not herself an exile, belonginginstead to the generation of the children of Franco. But her story “Sí, mellamo Helena” (Yes, My Name is Helena) from her 1980 collection Palabrade mujer (Woman’s Word), employs the framing device in a poignantextended metaphor of exile. Protagonist L.F. Sotomayor addresses, amidnumerous disclaimers, an unidentified female interlocutor, giving his writtenauthorization for publication of a story he has written. The accompanyingtale contained within this frame encloses, in its turn, two embedded stories.The outer one of these involves an interview given by Sotomayor to a youngresearcher named Helena. Enclosed within this story is the second embeddedtale—actually the third within the encompassing frame—that is the truecenter of Riera’s narrative: Sotomayor in his flight into exile on the last boatleaving from The Hague, bound for the Americas. Bereft of almost every-thing and carrying the weight of Republican defeat—his defeat—Sotomayormeets Helena, another exiled Republican. They pass together into exile intheir parallel loss and parallel, if unequal, need. When she leaves behind hislove of dependency and desperation, Sotomayor is again bereft.

Night and day I waited for her, alert to the creaking of the garden gate, thenoise of the keys in the lock, the sound of the doorbell. I lay in wait for themailman . . . And the rehearsed words: “I don’t care where you’ve come



from. I love you. Don’t leave me,” repeated millions of times during thoseyears, 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 longingdistant, silent, is surely a metaphor for exile itself.

In one embedded tale, Sotomayor, elderly and failing, awaits each after-noon 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, towhich he has never returned, yet leaves him where he is, their invitation toan imagined flight of return to the shores of home confirming precisely thatreturn’s impossibility, underlining his loss, their addition simultaneously asubtraction. Their absence denies him the sensorial impetus to an imaginedreturn, yet their presence makes the awareness of truncation sharper still. Inthe grammar of exile, return is both a transitive and an intransitive verb.


Leave by Joellyn Rock.


Many Latin Americans have also come to speak and to write a grammarof exile, which has had much to do with the forging of U.S. Latino litera-ture. Second- and third-generation Latinos—or first-generation Latinoswho have come to the United States or the mainland as infants, children,or even young teens—speak often of the experience of negotiating a hybrididentity between two cultural spaces, those of familial origin and of theU.S. mainstream. They tell of inhabiting, and forging an identity within, anin-between space, neither one nor the other but an amalgam of the two.This new space, created of both presence and absence, acceptance andrejection, is above all an intensely personal one; its terms and parametersvary with the individual who has combined and defined them.

In the selected literary expressions of Spanish Diasporas considered inthese pages, exile moves along the borders of loss and recollected celebra-tion, the frontiers of affirmation and denial, rage and longing. Receivingnational spaces are enriched, expelling ones lessened. Past and presentspaces seek to meet in the exile imaginary; memory is not always adequateto the task. In individual and communal exile experience, liminal spacesbecome land masses adrift, as after a cataclysm of origins. Identities past andpresent enter into dialogue, compete, seek their common ground, theshared space that the self can inhabit. Hybridity and polyvalence prevail.Lines are simultaneously linear, elliptical, circular as the self moves throughits re-memorative task, its place of origin and departure lost yet carriedwithin in some reconstructed form rewritten by time and by re-memorativeintentionality. The exile self doubles back to a past altered by a future,inhabits textually a present never dreamed from that past. Its story, irre-ducibly singular, is unavoidably communal. Exile, like love, is alwayssingular, unique. Experienced by the individual, it becomes plural in theconjugation of experience, through the multiple grammar of contestedmemory.

Notes

A lengthier and quite different version of this essay was delivered as the Hispanickeynote address, University of Louisville Twentieth-Century LiteratureConference, February 25, 2005, with the title “Exile Losses, Exile Dreams: TheGrammar of Contested Memory in the Literature of Hispanic Diasporas.”Portions of the María Zambrano material appeared in substantially differentform in a review by this critic published in Arizona Journal of Hispanic CulturalStudies 4 (2000): 326–28.

1. “Bienaventurados los que os llevasteis a cuestas la dulce carga del recuerdo deEspaña, los que salvasteis la palabra más alta de nuestro idioma, esa que tantaspenas costó siempre a los que hablamos español, por la que el español ha



muerto tantas veces, esa ‘¡Libertad!’ que no alcanzaremos nunca” (León228); all translations from the León text are my own.

2. “mi necesidad de pasado” (Aldecoa 116); all translations from the Aldecoatext are my own.

3. “Sentí nostalgia de la ciudad desconocida. El conmovedor ejercicio de lamemoria de mis nuevos amigos iba llenando del pasado que me faltaba”;“Mientras España empezaba a tomar cuerpo en mis ensoñaciones, la presen-cia real de México continuaba afirmándose en mi experiencia diaria”(Aldecoa 117).

4. “mi única, mi verdadera patria” (Aldecoa 117).5. “Una fuerza poderosa me arrastraba al presente. En España estaba ahora mi

verdadera vida” (Aldecoa 143).6. “. . . mi apremiante necesidad. Regresada del destierro, necesitaba ahora

desterrarme de nuevo. Exilio y regreso y exilio” (Aldecoa 203).7. “Ahora yo soy la cola del cometa. El va delante. Rafael no ha perdido nunca

su luz” (León 126).8. “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 delcartero . . . Y las palabras ensayadas: ‘Me da igual de donde vengas. Tequiero. No me dejes’, repetidas millones de veces durante aquellos años, seme pudrieron en la boca porque nunca pude llegar a pronunciarlas” (Riera72–73).

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.



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. NewYork, 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 andConflict.” In International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera. Monographic issue ofRevista 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 theU.S.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. AsunciónHorno 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 ofThe 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 delInstituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1982.

Sinaia. Diario de la primera expedición de republicanos españoles a México. Facsimileedition. 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. CarolMaier. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.





PART I

THE POLITICAL AND PERSONAL:

HISTORY, WAR, AND RESISTANCE




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

Throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), one woman stood asultimate spokesperson for the Spanish Republic, her voice booming

across battlefields and commanding the rear guard, while boosting publicmorale with her radio speeches. In 1936 she had resolved, “No pasarán”(They shall not pass; “¡No pasarán!”),1 and Madrid resisted the onslaught ofNationalist troops. She rallied women with the reminder that “Más vale serviudas de héroes que mujeres de cobardes” (it is preferable to be the widowof a hero than the wife of a coward; Pasionaria y los siete enanitos) and theytook up the work of the men in the factories, the fields, and the defense ofthe capital. She reminded her supporters, “El pueblo español prefieremorir” (Better to die on your feet than live on your knees; Pasionaria y lossiete enanitos) and they kept on fighting against the Fascist war machine. Butby the end of 1938, it was clear that the Loyalists needed nothing lessthan a miracle to defeat their enemy. On November 1, on the verge ofdefeat, Dolores Ibárruri, known as Pasionaria,2 delivered her final address“Hasta pronto, hermanos”—“Farewell, Brothers”—to the then departingInternational Brigades. Six months later she herself would be forced to fleethe Peninsula, passing the Pyrenees to France and later to the Soviet Unionwhere she would remain until 1977.

In spite of the geopolitical parameters of Pasionaria’s banishment andthrough the continuous publication of her speeches by internationalCommunist parties, her weekly articles in the underground Spanish press,and above all her broadcasts through Radio Independiente España (La Pirenaica),


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 thedeath of the dictator in 1975 and was denied a reissued passport by theelected Spanish authorities until two years later for fear of a Communist-ledinsurrection against the new and fragile democracy.

This essay explores the dynamics of Ibárruri’s political activism as thevoice of the Resistance, a role she fervently played throughout the longyears of her exile. I will show how Ibárruri manifested her unyielding com-mitment to the social and political issues of Spain through her writing andher oratory, cementing her iconic stature as the anti-Franco among theSpanish working classes, and—perhaps most significantly—eluding theinherent existential crisis of the exiled individual by never questioning herpersonal identity as Pasionaria or her allegiance to Spain.

The Spanish Diaspora of 1939

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 is frequently represented as a mereellipsis in the annals of European history, overshadowed by Hitler’s inva-sion of Poland and Mussolini’s sweep to the East. Yet the exile of half amillion Spaniards (Rubio)3 represents a unique phenomenon not onlywithin the context of Spanish history, but also within the chronicles ofexile as social experience due to: (1) its political nature, (2) its demographicmagnitude, and (3) its representation of the Spanish Republic as far asterritory, society, and professions (Sánchez Vázquez 1).

Obviously, the motivating force behind the exodus was rooted in thedefeat 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 theevents of 1939. Although many of the banished would abandon their polit-ical commitment in order to dedicate themselves to the reconstruction oftheir lives in the country where they had found refuge, others refused toresign themselves to the new reality, rejecting both a Fascist Spain and theirnew status as a “foreigner.” Divided principally across ideological lines andgeographical zones, they considered themselves relocated Spaniards whosecircumstance 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 longand bloody battle within a war yet to be won through the mobilization ofthe clandestine Marxist community still living in Spain, principally man-aged and financed by the Komintern.4 The Socialists and Anarchists, for themost part, found asylum in the Americas, intentionally distancing themselves

M A R Y A N N D E L L I N G E R34


from the Communists, the former reestablishing the Second SpanishRepublic in Mexico, which continued to be fully functional throughoutthe decade of the 1940s.

It is important to understand, however, that it is as much the demograph-ical diversity of the exiled Spain as ideological differences that characterize thisepisode within Western history. Unlike other mass exiles, the banishedSpaniards did not pertain to one sole sector determined by a common condi-tion, be it economic, intellectual, or religious conviction, but rather groupingsof individuals from across the social spectrum. Therefore, it is necessary toconsider the magnitude of the Spanish Diaspora of 1939 not only in numeri-cal terms, but also in light of its demographic configuration as well as its geo-graphical dispersion across four continents. Each and every Spanish provincesuffered a quantitative diminishment in its population, losing citizens from themiddle and upper social classes, agricultural workers, industrial laborers, andintellectuals. Indeed, it was an exact replica of the Second Spanish Republicthat fled the Peninsula at the conclusion of the armed conflict; hence, thecultural contributions of the exiled Spanish community within their adoptedlands were as diverse as they were copious. F. Fernández Alborz notes: “Unacultura no es sólo el libro que se escribe, el cuadro que se pinta, la esculturaque se modela, la música que se compone, el fenómeno que se investiga, laclase 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 bookthat is written, the picture that is painted, the sculpture that is molded, themusic that is composed, the phenomenon that is investigated, the class that istaught. It is also the field that is plowed, the house that is built, the iron that isforged, the motor put in motion; qtd. by Caudet “Dialogizar el exilio” 31).

Indeed, as the Axis advanced during the first years of the Second WorldWar and the ensuing Allied casualties took their toll on the work forces,the contributions of the exiled Spanish laborers in Europe—especially inFrance and the Soviet Union—became vital to the stabilization of nationaleconomies and the war effort itself. At the same time, the loss of the laborforce within Franco’s Spain as a result of the war and the massive exodus,along with the shortage of everything necessary for basic survival, inducedmany of those who remained behind to seek hope in the impendingRevolution promised by the PCE (Partido Comunista de España)5 in theirbiweekly underground papers, Mundo Obrero and Nuestra Bandera, and theradio 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 victoryundoubtedly signified a setback for Dolores Ibárruri, but like so many of

D O L O R E S I B Á R R U R I , P A S I O N A R I A 35


her political comrades, she was never to assume defeat. Sentenced to deathin absentia on the criminal conviction of rebelión7 and in a civil trial to fifteenyears of exile, loss of Spanish nationality, and repossession of all her property(“Cargas”), she fled to Moscow and was reunited with her children, Rubénand Amaya, who had been airlifted to the Soviet capital in 1935 along withthe children of other Communist leaders.

Most of her work during the first decade of her exile in Moscowinvolved the organization of the Spanish workers and the education, care,and political formation of the youth; in other words, she was charged withthe integration of the Spanish exiled community within Soviet society asbest benefited the Party. Trinidad Revolto Cervello recalls:

Allí decidimos casarnos Sebastián Piera y yo, tras requerir la opinión dePasionaria, que trabajaba en el Instituto Marx-Engels, puesto que tal decisiónpodría condicionar nuestro traslado a España. Pasionaria nos recalcó que nuestradisciplina revolucionaria debía supeditar siempre nuestras convenienciaspersonales a las directivas del Partido. (Qtd. by Rodrigo 86)

[Sebastián Piera and I decided to get married there, and we sought the adviceof Pasionaria whose decision could determine our return to Spain. Pasionariastressed to us that in the spirit of revolutionary discipline, our personal benefitsshould always be subordinated to the directives of the Party.]

At the same time, Ibárruri served on the Executive Committee of theInternational Communist Party and was afforded special privileges befittinga Party dignitary, including an apartment near the Kremlin and a dacha in thecountryside outside the Soviet capital. By all accounts, she was never com-fortable with the special treatment she received, living a simple life in herapartment, and foregoing lavish social events. She especially enjoyed work-ing from her office in Komintern headquarters, where she “was able to followthe events happening far away in Spain on a daily basis” (Memorias 26).

The Komintern, like the PCE before them, took full advantage of herunwavering loyalty to the Party, recognizing the power of the affectivebond she shared with the working masses. She traveled extensively andcontinued to take her message of Revolution and impassioned oratory styleto 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 news-paper articles and the transcripts of her speeches along with two autobi-ographies, El único camino and Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977: Mefaltaba España. During her years in Moscow, she also authored two tomes,Historia del Partido Comunista de España and Guerra y Revolución en España,



1936–39, both subsidized by the Soviet Communist Party. After she hadreturned 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 beapproached 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 committhe same errors of history as those who have tried to analyze her within theframework of the male politician who rises to power. Yet Pasionaria’s polit-icization did emanate from her consciousness of the repressive situation ofwomen. (42)

It would be erroneous to attribute Pasionaria with a feminism correspond-ing to a later era or suggest that she totally rejected woman’s role as care-taker and homemaker. Indeed, whereas the story of Dolores Ibárruri iscertainly nothing less than extraordinary within the Spanish experience, ithas also been grossly distorted. There is no doubt that her concern for thesocial position of Spanish women served as an impetus for her involvementin politics, but it was the plight of the Spanish worker that launched herpolitical career. As Ibárruri states in the documentary film directed byAndrés Linares and Luis Sánchez, “Yo soy el producto de una familia demineros. Mi padre, minero; mi madre, minera; mis hermanos, mineros; mimarido, minero; y yo, comunista; como consecuencia de toda esa mineríaacumulada” (I am the product of a mining family. My father, a miner; mymother, a miner; my brothers, miners; my husband, a miner; and me, I’ma Communist, as a consequence of all that accumulated mining; Dolores).Though she never denied equal rights for working women within and out-side the home, “[. . .] the ‘woman question’ was irrelevant until after classliberation” (Enders and Radcliff 230). The female population constitutedpart of the larger social community, but did not represent an exclusiveentity in and of itself as far as her political activity was concerned. It is truethat Ibárruri directed scores of articles and speeches to her fellow country-women, but it was toward the emancipation of the working class that allher energies were directed.

At the same time, it is important to remember that the Leftist image ofPasionaria as consoling mother, educator, and moral guide does not contradictestablished social parameters of the Spanish patriarchy, but rather conformsto them. There can be little doubt that she enjoyed unconditional supportof the Party because she personified the values considered “feminine,” notonly as reflected in her role as biological and spiritual mother, but also withregard to her physical appearance and, most importantly, her attitude



toward the role of women, which could not be considered radical, even bythe norms of the era. It is true that her earliest articles often centered onwomen’s right to work and equal pay, parity in the home, as well as child-care, but her resounding silence on the issue of female suffrage and tacitrejection of abortion rights throughout her life—even when it was legal-ized by the democratic government—must make one consider her views ofwomen’s role as conservative, especially when compared with the truefeminist 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 byfirst leaving her husband and later taking on a lover—much to the dismayof Party officials—Dolores was careful to deemphasize any feminine sexu-ality in her physical appearance and demeanor. She always wore black andtied her hair in a tight bun at the base of her neck. Her speeches were inter-laced with references to woman’s abnegation of self, and she proudlyaccepted the nickname Madre Dolores given to her during the Civil War. As Mangini underscores in her study, Margarita Nelken, the writer andCommunist militant, although formally educated and far more eloquentthan Dolores, never enjoyed the same favor afforded Pasionaria within theParty, probably due to Nelken’s published feminist writing and also per-haps—albeit to a lesser extent—“her fashionable wardrobe of short skirtsand plunging necklines, which was criticized publicly on several occasions”(Mangini 30–31).

Pasionaria’s commitment to Spain and the Spanish people emanatedexclusively from her Marxist ideology, which identified her as both awoman and a politician. There exists no public document composed byIbárruri void of references to Marxism, not only because of the inseparabil-ity of Ibárruri—historical woman/mythical Pasionaria—and Communism,but because it was the education of her followers that defined her missionand guided her expression. The populist discourse of her essays and speecheswas carefully structured to indoctrinate and persuade the people as a socialcollective, although on different occasions she would address specific sectorsof the population; women represented but one sector, as did Basques,Catalonians, and Spanish youth, among many others.

Ibárruri, however, established new parameters of populist discoursewithin a Spanish context and defined by the Spanish Civil War that hadrecently ended. In her addresses, she never recognizes the impact of theexile on the situation inside Spain, nor does she view the dispersion ofSpaniards around the world as a problem: “Por donde quiera que nosencontremos, . . . nos sentimos indoblegablemente españoles” (Whereverwe may find ourselves . . . we continue to be Spaniards; “Alocución del 30 de abril 1972” 1).



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 howthrough her newspaper articles in Mundo Obrero and Nuestra Bandera, pub-lications circulated clandestinely by the PCE during the dictatorship, aswell as her broadcasts on Radio España Independiente (La Pirenaica), she wasable to maintain her affective bond with Spaniards still in Spain and withthe exiled community throughout Europe, thereby strengthening herimage as a political leader and consoling Mater magna of the workingmasses: 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 differentphases, corresponding to the two periods of the Franco dictatorship; thepost–Civil War period and the Cold War. The pact between Spain and theUnited States in 1953 and the consequent installation of U.S. military baseson the Peninsula changed the political horizon considerably, with Francoreceiving international recognition as the Spanish head of state and hisnation’s admittance to the United Nations; events that would force Ibárruriand the Communist Party to reevaluate their political strategy. Until thatturning point, however, the Spanish Communists continued to believe thatFranco’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 inthe exterior as well as the organization of the guerrilla movement withinthe Peninsula.

Lo hemos dicho ayer y lo repetimos hoy y mañana y siempre que seanecesario. El pueblo español no vertió su sangre inútilmente, defendiendo lalegalidad constitucional; defendiendo su régimen elegido en el libre juego dela práctica democrática, para aceptar hoy, resignadamente al régimen falangistaimpuesta 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 aslong as necessary. The Spanish people did not futilely spill their blooddefending constitutional legality and in defense of the system electedthrough democratic process, just to resign itself today to accept thePhalangist regime, which has been imposed by German bayonets.]

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



that followed had converted Spain into a “nation of women” (RomeuAlfaro 15–16), and for this reason, many of Pasionaria’s speeches during thefirst 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 demirar frente a frente el dolor. No podemos olvidar porque olvidar estraicionar. Si olvidamos el pasado, traicionaríamos el recuerdo de los que hancaído con gloria en los campos de batalla, de todos los que han caído conhonor y dignidad en las cárceles y campos de concentración. No podemosolvidar, porque olvidar sería un crimen, olvidar sería dejar las manos libres alos 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 whohave lived the sufferings of our homeland, are not afraid to come face-to-face with anguish. We cannot forget, because forgetting is betrayal. If weforget the past, we betray the memory of those who have fallen in glory onthe battlefield, of those who have fallen with honor and dignity in prisonsand concentration camps. We cannot forget, because forgetting would be acrime, forgetting would be surrendering to those who are thinking and eventalking about new wars of aggression.]

Interjections recounting the Resistance of Madrid in 1937 along with reit-erated references to the human casualties in the battles fought—and ofcourse, in Guernica—propose that the war has not yet finished and that theRepublic can still be victorious; but only through the regrouping ofLoyalists. Pasionaria’s speeches and essays of this first period are methodi-cally outlined, composed, and delivered/published, with careful attentionto the events occurring throughout Europe, and in coordination with theorganization of the guerrilla. But it is the meticulous outlining of bothpurpose and method against the background of the Civil War, and atten-tion to literary devices that she brought to her writing—albeit secondary toits demagogic structure—that make her writing quite extraordinary withinthe 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 exileaffording her the ideal venue with access to the biggest audience she wouldever address. She spoke of Revolution with words of encouragement andunwavering will, detailing what actions needed to be taken in order toregain Spain from its Fascist oppressor. On July 18, 1945, the Spanish stillreeling from the throes of the postwar famine, she reminded her fellowcountrymen: “Un pueblo que quiere ser libre, un gobierno que quiere



defender la independencia de su país, pelea con armas o sin ellas, con pan osin pan, por fuerte y poderoso que sea el enemigo que le ataca” (A peoplethat wants to be free, a government that wants to defend its country’s inde-pendence, fights with arms or without them, with bread or without it, nomatter how strong and powerful the enemy that attacks it; “¡18 de Julio de1936! Aniversario de una gran lucha” 2).

As already noted, Dolores remained informed on the day-to-day hap-penings within Franco’s Spain, so her radio addresses were predominantlya call to arms and justification for the renewed sacrifice of blood, and sheused her broadcasts to instigate other problems for the regime and itsfriends. In 1943, for example, she instructed potato farmers to plant onlyenough for their families and communities (“Las patatas tempraneras”) andrice growers to hide their harvests so that the authorities could not buythem at an unfair price (“Defiende tu cosecha”). Similarly, and perhapsmost significantly, she used her broadcasts to relay directives to the guerilla,addressing specific groups according to region and describing the types ofattacks needed, such as the blowing up of supply trains on the border or thecutting of crucial communication lines. As would be expected, she habituallyurged all Spaniards to aid the guerrilla in any way possible.

This is not to say that Dolores forgot the role of Spanish women in thenew warfront. In fact, one of her first editorials on La Pirenaica wasaddressed to Spanish mothers, whom she instructed to keep close watch onwhat their children were learning at school at the hands of their Phalange9

teachers:

Cada madre, cuando los chicos vuelven de la escuela, debe preguntarles quees lo que el maestro les ha dicho, y de que se ha hablado en la escuela. Y lasmadres, con esas palabras que ellas saben hacer llegar tan directamente alcorazón de sus hijos, pueden destruir en un momento, la obra nefasta de losllamados educadores fascistas. (“¡Madres!” 1–2)

[When their children return from school, every mother should ask themwhat 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 theirchildren’s hearts—can destroy the abject work of the so-called Phalangeeducators in just one moment.]

Her radio speeches, more than any other of her activities while in exile, notonly strengthened the ties between Pasionaria and her followers throughher broadcasts, but they also allowed her to take part in the day-to-dayproblems in Spain, “as if we were there”: “Pero los que hemos tenido unaradio, Radio España Independiente en la que constantemente hemosestado hablando a España, trabajando cara a España, no seremos extraños,hemos recibido los informes y las noticias de España y toda nuestra actividad



está ligada a nuestro país” (Those of us who have had the radio, RadioEspaña, through which we have had constant contact with Spain, workingfor Spain, will not be strangers [upon our return] because we have alwaysreceived information and news from Spain, and the sole purpose of all ouractivity here has always been to benefit our country; qtd. by Carabantesand Cimorra 61).

Although most of her speeches and articles corresponding to the firstyears of her exile concerned the Second World War, her focus remainedfirmly on Spain. There are abundant references to the Allies whom shenever forgave for the “No Intervention”10 Policy of 1936, but in whoseefforts to abolish Fascism in Europe she saw the possibility of a future rev-olution against Franco. As would be expected, she was deeply worriedabout the relationship between the Spanish dictator and the Axis leaders inEurope, Hitler and Mussolini, but only as these pertained to the repercus-sions for Spain. First, last, and foremost in her discourse is Spain: “Y antesque Varsovia está Guernica; antes que Amsterdam están Madrid y Barcelona;antes que el martirio de Lídice está Nules. Precediendo al dolor y la ruinade Europa, están la ruina y el dolor de España” (And before Warsaw isGuernica; before Amsterdam is Madrid and Barcelona; before the martyr-dom of Lídice is the martyrdom of Nules. Preceding the pain and ruin ofEurope 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 theagreement between Spain and the United States, but also with the death ofStalin, who had always been her role model as a Communist leader, “espejoen el que se reflejaba su propia actuación política” (the mirror in which herown political performance was reflected; Cruz 178). Khrushchev’s 1956revelations about the atrocities committed by Stalin troubled Pasionaria andworsened her already chronic insomnia (Ibárruri qtd. by Cruz 186). Indeed,from that point forward, she rarely mentioned his name again, except inretrospective 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 toreassess not only her own role as concerned the situation inside Spain, butalso her vision for the nation’s future, having to now consider the interna-tional recognition of Franco’s regime and, consequently, the improbabilityof popular support in favor of the armed revolution the Communists hadplanned. She focused her attention on what she believed would be animminent end of the dictatorship and her return to Spain. Toward that



end, she crafted the “National Reconciliation” plan, adopted by the PCEin 1956. Her essays and speeches of this period, therefore, center on politicaltopics of the day both within the Peninsula and internationally.

During this second part of her exile, her radio addresses were key inkeeping alive within Spain the revolutionary image of Pasionaria; on onehand, because the diffusion of La Pirenaica within the Peninsula hadincreased considerably and, on the other, because the imposing vigor of hercommunication continued to attract both followers and adversaries. Everytime there was a major event in the news, Ibárruri took to the airwaves.Nevertheless, the “National Reconciliation” policy remained the focalpoint of both her radio addresses and her newspaper articles, as she calledfor the resolution of Leftist ideological differences and lingering resent-ments through the consolidation of anti-Franco forces at all levels: “Al cabode 30 años de separación, los caminos de la democracia española, aún dis-tintos entre sí, comienzan a converger en un punto concreto: en la necesi-dad de cerrar el paréntesis de la dictadura y de establecer un régimendemocrático, y en el que sea posible la convivencia civil y el libre juego detodas las fuerzas políticas y sociales” (After thirty years of separation, theroads 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 democraticregime; one in which civil coexistence and free movement of all politicaland social forces are a reality; REI July 26, 1966 1–2).

The call to arms emblematic of Pasionaria’s writings during the first partof her exile has now been replaced with the appeal for national unity,although the references to the Civil War and denouncements of Franco’sregime remain constant. In fact until Dolores returned to Spain, the warwould continue to be the key reference point in all her speeches and arti-cles. Now, however, she reiterated that the war “es ya historia” (was history;REI July 26, 1966 2), as she looked forward to mending proverbial fencesthrough “national reconciliation.”

The Voice of Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria

The voice of Dolores Ibárruri, as writer/speaker, clearly represents thewoman Pasionaria who considered herself neither exiled from Spain norrepatriated in the Soviet Union, but simply a Spaniard who had temporar-ily relocated as a result of the war. She explained to Carabantes andCimorra: “Es decir, que [la Unión Soviética] no es un país en el cualechamos raíces para decir ‘nos quedamos aquí.’ Estamos aquí porque la vidanos lanzó en ese impetuoso movimiento desgraciadamente de derrota, de laRepública. Por lo demás, estaríamos en España” (In other words, [the



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 unfortu-nate 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 orignominy, not because it symbolized defeat, but rather because defeat wasthe result of having fought. In 1974, when the imminent end of thedictatorship seemed possible only through Franco’s death, Ibárruri wrote:

Pero aún doliéndonos el largo exilio, que a veces ha hecho decir, como a unamigo portugués, emigrante como nosotros: “esto da volontade de morir,” nonos arrepentimos del camino emprendido, porque tenemos el legítimoorgullo, el orgullo revolucionario, de haber luchado por una causa justa y laseguridad de que el mañana democrático ha comenzado a amanecer ya hoysobre 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 tofollow, because we are genuinely proud of our revolutionary spirit; proud ofhaving fought for a just cause and the assurance that a new democratictomorrow has begun to dawn on our country.]

Indeed, a careful reading of Ibárruri’s work written during her exile, sug-gests an underlying sentiment on the part of the author, surging from bothher love for her homeland and her disdain for Franco. It is the implicationof a contest, a mano a mano, or dispute, far more personal than ideological,between Dolores and the dictator; one in which Franco himself obviouslydid 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 notonly of the possibility that she might die in exile, but even the chance thatshe might die without witnessing the downfall of the dictator.

So many exiles dream of their homecoming to the land in which theywere born, however, it was an implacable determination to return tri-umphantly that drove Pasionaria. Any other alternative was not acceptableto 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 lasegunda República—o a volver a España tolerados y vivir en ella humillados,como sombras del pasado, sentados alrededor de la camilla, sin ningún pesoni influencia en la vida pública, evocando en la intimidad familiar los díasde triunfo y de apogeo de la República de 1931. (“La unidad de la claseobrera” 70)



[. . .a reactionary solution that would obligate Republican leaders to eitherresign themselves to die in exile—like the last Mohicans of the SecondRepublic—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 orinfluence in public life, remembering the triumphant days and the apex ofthe Republic in 1931 within the confines of family life.]

Thanks to her iron will, strengthened by her hate for Franco and the systemhe represented, along with her profound sense of political and maternalresponsibility on behalf of the Spanish people, the mythical Communistleader never lost faith in her future return to Spain. This determination toreturn to the Peninsula only in conjunction with her role as a politicalleader in a post-Franco Spain remains a constant in all her writing through-out the years of her exile, and is revealed in the isotopes of her discourse.

Although various isotopes change in Ibárruri’s discourse in accordancewith the change of Party policy, many remain consistent throughout herwriting. From the beginning of her exile until her return to Spain, shefavors certain words to describe Franco and his regime, especially vileza(vileness) and its adjectival derivative vil (vile), to describe the dictatorwithin his two historical roles of wartime general and dictator as well asthe Phalangist political organization. What is most intriguing about thisphenomenon is not the definition of these words themselves, or Ibárruri’srejection of possible synonyms, but rather their onomatopoeic function.Pasionaria’s writing reveals her predilection for words with strong andviolent phonemes to denounce her enemies.

The significance of this practice not only applies to her oratory, but alsoto her articles, considering that the unskilled reader—representative of theSpanish working class of the era—often reads aloud in order to ensurecomprehension. The reading aloud of Ibárruri’s text permitted the ono-matopoeic effect to underscore the infamy associated with the anti-people.Similarly, the repetition of the pronoun we not only distinguished the peoplefrom the anti-people over and over again, but also served to remindPasionaria’s reader/listener of her continued participation in their politicalstruggle and her omnipresence in Spanish life in spite of the distance thatseparated her from the Peninsula.

On the other hand, the isotopes serpiente (snake) and víbora (viper), herpreferred choice of nouns in reference to Franco, correlate extratextuallyto the Republican iconography of the Civil War in which a serpent wasconsistently used to picture the enemy. The image of a snake was also inharmony with the idea of vileness, of course, but Dolores seems to consci-entiously choose derogatory sibilants in order to invoke the image of thesnake that silently slithers through the grass stalking his unsuspecting prey



in order to establish the antithetical people/anti-people relationship. Otherisotopes favoring the alliteration of the “s” sound include ensañarse (to treatbrutally), sinuoso (sinuous), and miseria (misery) as well as a marked prefer-ence 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 ofreality, especially as concerns her interpretation of the Civil War. WhenFranco died, she wrote: “Como el despertar de una angustiosa pesadilla,nuestro pueblo ha conocido la muerte de Franco. Francisco Franco, prin-cipal responsable de tantos crímenes, de tantas depredaciones, de tantoslutos, de tantos dolores, ha muerto. Que la tierra le sea leve” (As one awakesfrom an anguishing nightmare, so have our people known the death ofFranco. Francisco Franco, personally responsible for so many crimes, somuch deprivation, so much loss of life, so much pain, has died. May theEarth be gentle with him; “La hora de la democracia” 1). The evocation ofGuernica, and the omitted reference to Paracuellos, the memory of theEbro, but the exclusion of the Alcázar in Toledo,11 as well as the violationof human rights against the Spanish clergy on the part of Republicans—notto mention the injustices committed within the Soviet Bloc—all are part ofPasionaria’s selective memory, although all have been exposed with thedemocratization of Spain and the definitive failure of Communism toregain power after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in spite of its attempt topresent 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 nowconsidered 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, butrather her perseverance, represented by her voice that echoed from herexile, attracting some and repulsing others, but always firm in her oppositionto the enemy and her omnipresence.

Conclusions

Dolores Ibárruri died fifty years after her expatriation from Spain as a resultof the Nationalist victory and the Franco dictatorship. Whereas the mem-ory of other figures of her era are now only relegated to a brief biographi-cal description in history textbooks, the myth around Dolores Ibárruri,Pasionaria, continues to reinforce her undeniable authority as an iconicfigure of the anti-Franco movement.

The analysis of Ibárruri’s literary production, more notable for its quan-tity than its quality, whose Marxist authority has been disaccredited by the



fall of Soviet Communism as well as the failure of European Communism,and whose anachronism has buried it in the back shelves of the SpanishNational Library and the historical archives of the PCE, leads one to con-clude that Pasionaria’s is a body of work now rendered irrelevant.Lamentably, however, through this process of disremembering, the signif-icance of her production in the making of the Pasionaria myth has also beenlost; a legend that owes little to her literary skills and the impermanence ofher written word, but everything to her commitment to speak out and beheard by followers and adversaries alike.

What has not been lost, and perhaps never will, is the image of the tallfemale figure, dressed in black with a tightly rolled bun at the nape of herneck and her fist raised in defiance of the regime she so distained, etched inthe collective memory of the Spanish people. Her message brought hopeduring the darkest years of Franco regime, and her unfaltering commitmentto her political ideals served to transform her pseudonym in metonymy.Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, disdained by millions and adored by as manyothers, earned her place in the annals of Spain’s twentieth century throughthe same abnegation she demanded of others, reflected above all else by thethirty-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 unbarredaccess to their historical archives and in particular to Victoria Ramos Bello andPatricia González-Posada Delgado whose help in this project, as in many others,was invaluable. Thanks also to Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri for her time and allowingme access to her mother’s personal library. Travel was funded in part by aVirginia 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 referredto as “la/La Pasionaria.” Whereas this can be attributed in part to the oraltradition associated with her story, the pejorative use of the definite articlehas consistently been a practice among her political adversaries and critics.During my interview with Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri, Pasionaria’s daughter, shestressed that her mother should not be referred to as “La Pasionaria,” butrather as “Pasionaria” or “Dolores” as Ibárruri herself chose to be called(Ruiz). References to Pasionaria and Dolores in this essay are not intended tosuggest personal bias, but are in accordance with the request made by RuizIbárruri.

3. The exact number of Spanish exiles remains unconfirmed. Caudet challengesRubio’s figure of a half a million, hypothesizing that the actual number in1939 was probably between 200,000 and 300,000 (86). Nonetheless, it is



important to remember that the exodus began at the beginning of the warin 1936 and continued throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

4. The Komintern was the International Communist Party.5. 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 officiallyrecognized in 1977, barely a month before Ibárruri’s return to Spain.

6. Radio España Independiente (REI). REI’s radio broadcasts were transmittedfrom Budapest and were received in Spain as well as other neighboringcountries. REI was financed and directed by the Komintern and, therefore,its broadcasts were propagandistic in nature.

7. Rebelión (rebellion) or Auxilio a la rebelión (aiding the rebellion) were thecharges the Franco regime used to convict those enemies they consideredwar criminals.

8. REI was first broadcast from Moscow, and later from Budapest. To give theimpression that the broadcasts were being emitted from the Pyrenees—suggesting the closing in of anti-Franco forces—it was nicknamed LaPirenaica from its inception.

9. The Phalange—la falange—was the only political party permitted by theFranco regime. As such it is the true example of pure Fascism as it existedin Spain.

10. Through the “No Intervention” Policy, the Allies agreed to remain neutralin the Spanish Civil War.

11. Approximately 1,500 Nationalist prisoners-of-war were slaughtered inParacuellos under the direction of Santiago Carrillo. In the defense of theAlcázar de Toledo, Republican troops were victorious at a cost of numer-ous Nationalist casualties, including cadets from the School of Infantryhoused 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.



———. “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:

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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,

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¡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 enel mitin por la defensa de Madrid.” Pasionaria y los siete enanitos. Manuel VázquezMontalbán. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Planeta, 1995. 402–07.

———. “¡No pasarán! Llamamiento pronunciado en nombre del PartidoComunista ante los micrófonos del Ministerio de Gobernación el 19 de julio de1936.” Pasionaria y los siete enanitos. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. 2nd ed.Barcelona: Planeta, 1995. 398–99.

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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

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, completed in 1949 and published in1951, Hannah Arendt recalls a joke that came about after the conclusion

of the Second World War: “An anti-Semite claimed that the Jews hadcaused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why thebicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other” (Arendt 5). The jokedocumented by Arendt highlights the irrationality inherent in totalitarianism.In fact, we could state that the selection of the victim is arbitrary andabsurd. The comedic example utilized by Arendt in no way makes light ofthe massacre of millions of human beings; rather, as the author claims,“The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat implies that the scape-goat might have been anyone else as well. It upholds the perfect innocenceof the victim” (Arendt 5).

Although the Jews were clearly the collective scapegoat for the Naziregime, they were not by any means the only victims. In this essay I will becovering an understudied phenomenon that is beginning to receive schol-arly attention: Spaniards in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Itis estimated that more than 10,000 Spaniards were interned in Nazi campswith the implicit endorsement of Francisco Franco’s regime. I will specificallyaddress the case of female Spaniards who fought in the French Resistance,


many of whom were deported to Ravensbrück, a concentration campprimarily for women. Approximately 400 female Spaniards were impris-oned by the Nazis. The aspect I will focus on is the gendered perspective ofsurvivors 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, Catalàpublished her collection of interviews for the first time in 1984, nine yearsafter the death of Franco and six years after the new democratic constitu-tion. The contemporary democratic political framework should be viewedas a catalyst that spurred the retrospective, namely the return to the past toidentify and applaud the origins of human rights within a twentieth-century Spanish context. The collected testimonies bear witness to thefight against a totalitarian force, but above all, symbolize a celebration ofhuman rights as well as a bright past and future.

M A U R E E N T O B I N S T A N L E Y52

Bird in the Bush by Carla Stetson.


The female testimonials as a collective referenced herein profess a keyfact: that Fascism was viewed as a pause in Spain’s democratic history.Instead of viewing the Republic (1931–1936) as an anomaly, it must beviewed as a beginning, a thread that was interrupted by the Spanish CivilWar (1936–1939) and ensuing Francoist regime (1939–1975), and whichwas resumed in 1978 with the creation of the new Constitution. Since thelatter occurrence and the subsequent formation of the European Union,Spain is a democratic, plurinational, pluriethnic country that defends humanrights. I will attempt to show that these women of humble backgroundsembraced humanity politically, personally, and morally, and, thus, arguethat the female voices recorded by Català are proof of moral psychologistCarol Gilligan’s “ethic of care,”1 a gendered moral reasoning founded onhuman bonds. In essence, Català and her interviewees profess theirmoral—and consequently political—commitment to life and fellow humanbeings 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 beenimprisoned in Nazi camps. Thanks to the efforts of the feminist Catalonianwriter Montserrat Roig, this historical reality came to light. Roig, who hadbeen compiling her tome Els catalans als camps nazis (Catalonians in NaziCamps, published in 1977), learned of the presence of female Spaniards inthe camps at an ex-deportee reunion of the Amical Association2 in Paris onthe thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps. As David Serrano iBlanquer claims, in Les dones als camps nazis (Women in Nazi Camps), sev-eral of the female ex-deportees who knew of Roig’s book project “wishedto inform her that as of yet she had only heard male voices: that there hadbeen Republican women in Nazi camps” (15).3 In 1980, Mercè NúñezTarga published her memoirs El carretó dels gossos: Una catalana a Ravensbrück(The Wagon of the Dogs: A Catalonian Woman in Ravensbrück).4 At aconference in 1981, Roig insisted that a book on Spanish women in thecamps must be written (Serrano 16). Català’s text was printed in 1984.Fourteen years later, a scholarly essay on Català written by Christina Dupláaappeared in Letras Peninsulares. In 2003, David Serrano i Blanquer’s Les donesals camps nazis appeared in print.

The silence enshrouding the Spanish concentration camp experience,compounded with the issue of gender, forced the female camp survivors tolive a double exile: outer exile and an “especially and incredibly difficultinner exile”; these Spanish female deportees were “aware that if anyonecontinued exerting authority over the word regarding deportation, itwould primarily be the male sex” (Serrano i Blanquer 17).5

N E U S C A T A L À 53


Several Spanish male survivors have published testimonial and memori-alistic accounts of their camp experiences: Manuel Alfonso (1998), Joan deDéu Amill (1995), Ramon Bargueño (1999), Francesc Batiste (1999), JosepBorràs (1989), Jacint Carrió (2001), Francesc Comellas (2001), Joan Escuer(2003), Lluís Marcó (1998), Felipe Martínez-Robles (1999), LopeMassaguer (1997), Marcial Mayans (1999), Josep Salvat (1975) and AmadeuSinca (1980) (Serrano i Blanquer 20). To this list we could add the fiction-alized accounts of male survivors Joaquim Amat-Piniella (K.L. Reich) andJorge Semprún (Le Grand voyage, L’écriture ou la vie). Francesc Boix’sphotographic memoir of his experience at Mauthausen should also beincluded. Therefore, the female voices documented by Català, like MercèNúñez Targa’s autobiographical account and Montserrat Roig’s 500-pageresearch tome that gave voice to the silenced, are significant as testamentsto the gendered efforts and experience that tune into a collective of femalevoices 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 iBlanquer insists that the recovery of the past must be viewed within thecontext of the hegemonic structures following the Civil War:

The Francoist dictatorship is the direct perpetrator, just as its collaboratorsare accomplices through action or omission, of the fate of each and everyone of these women forced to flee in 1939. It is a unique case of a govern-ment, albeit fascist, that does not insist upon the return of its citizens, noteven to take reprisals against them within its own territory. Furthermore, itis a unique case of a government that allows another State, Germany in this case, to take on this repression. The generation of the diaspora, byignoring the immediate fate of compatriots and neglecting liability, punitivein this case, . . . accentuates the degree of accountability . . . of an entiresystem. (30–31)7

Serrano’s comment is an explicit indictment of the Francoist regime, whosecollaboration with Nazi Germany eliminated republicanism and, more con-cretely, Republicans from Spanish history. The goal of totalitarian govern-ments is total domination; coexistence is impossible (Arendt xi–xii). In otherwords, totalitarian governments promote the annihilation or elimination ofthose 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).



The belief in violence as both a means and an end is irrefutably menacing.Of course, within a totalitarian system, domination is asserted through vio-lence; but pointless violence is also essential to exerting complete controlover subjects. The result is order that has stemmed from fear. The violencecreates sacrificial victims, whose elimination is purported to restore socialorder. Those not victimized applaud the otherness of the sacrificed ones;thus, those spared can feel safe for being dissimilar to them. Yet, as evidentin the testimonials compiled by Català, the women who took a stand againstFascism felt a connection with their peers. The overriding emotion is thehuman connection. Secundina Barceló states that she kept silent duringinterrogation and torture and that “deep inside I felt great satisfaction andpride of having had the moral and physical strength to withstand the Nazibeast . . . I knew that I had fulfilled my duty and that no one else had falleninto the hands of the Nazis because of me” (Català 97; my emphasis).8 Thedriving force within Barceló was her moral commitment to her peers.

Precisely because of the sense of solidarity, Català’s interviewees cele-brated the Republican (i.e., democratic) cause (that defended humanrights) and presented opposition to the dehumanizing forces. Havingserved as a liaison in the Resistance, Concha González de Boix speaks ofher duty, solidarity, and sense of collective efforts. She claims to have ful-filled her duty not for glory, fame, or heroism, but rather to defeat Fascism.She states that her contribution to the “liberation of the country wasmodest, and consisted of teamwork, well directed by capable leaders, aswell as of the ability to balance daring with meticulousness . . . We all wentthrough difficult times and delicate situations, in which our lives were atstake, but the love of freedom was immeasurable and the camaraderie ourreason to live” (Català 245).9 The highest priority, hence, constitutes thebonds with and duty to others. Her individual efforts were a part of acollective force that aimed to benefit all.

It goes without saying that Fascism is diametrically opposed to theconcept 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 theFascist, the Nazi or the nacional, the answer would be: “we few matter, forwe are the sons of the great nation”;10 whereas one who upholds humanrights would claim “we all matter.” It is precisely this tenet of assigningvalue to all human beings and feeling a sense of solidarity with all thatcharacterizes the testimonials within Català’s collection.

Although Fascism (in its diverse and permutated forms) is viewed asabhorrent, the totalitarians are not demonized, vilified, or dehumanized. Inspite of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the flight into France, Nazioccupation, and the struggle to survive in a concentration camp, thesesurvivors, who lived to tell their tale, to remember and reconstruct Spain’s



legitimate democratic past and Spanish Republicans’ insistence on preservingdemocracy (i.e., rights for all), are recovering a history that was lost duringFranco’s nearly forty-year rule and are salvaging the collective democraticmemory from oblivion.

Documenting Human Rights

For our purposes, three documents attest to the propagation and protectionof human rights in Spain: the 1931 Spanish Republican Constitution, the1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1978 Spanish Constitution. ThePreliminary Title of the 1931 Republican Constitution states, “Spain is ademocratic Republic of workers of all classes, that is organized in a regime ofFreedom and Justice; The powers of all its branches emanate from thepeople” (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 doc-uments as well include freedom, justice, peace, equality, solidarity with otherpeoples, and government as a reflection of the will of the citizens.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was cre-ated by the United Nations precisely as a result of the Holocaust, because“disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous actswhich 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 [myemphasis] [are] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in theworld . . . [Human] rights should be protected by the rule of law . . . [The]peoples of the United Nations have . . . reaffirmed their faith in fundamentalhuman rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person . . . and havedetermined to promote social progress and better standards of life.

Article 10.2 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution (SC) affirms that its guide-lines regarding fundamental rights and freedoms are in accordance with theUDHR. The Preamble of the 1978 Constitution reads as follows:

The Spanish Nation, wishing to establish justice, freedom and security andpromote the good of its constituents . . . proclaims its will to: Guaranteedemocratic co-existence . . . in accordance with fair economic and socialorder; Consolidate a State of Law that insures the rule of law as an expressionof the will of the people; Protect all Spaniards and peoples of Spain by exercis-ing their human rights . . . ; Promote cultural and economic progress to insurea suitable quality of life for all; Establish a democratic and advanced society; and



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

All three uphold peace, freedom, and equality, but it is the UDHR and the1978 Constitution that promote progress and dignity and refer specificallyto a collective human bond as indicated by the term “human family” in theUDHR as well as by the final statement of the Constitutional Preamble,which calls for “peaceful relations and effective cooperation among all thepeoples of the Earth.”

The concept that individual rights are the basis for collective, that issocial, well-being is further expressed in Article 1 of the UDHR (“Allhuman beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They areendowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one anotherin a spirit of brotherhood”) as well as in Article 10.1 of the 1978 SC (“Thedignity of the person, the inherent inviolable rights, the free developmentof personality, the respect of the law and the rights of others are thefoundations of political order and social peace”).13 Clearly the familialbond (“brotherhood”) takes on not only a political but also a moral conno-tation. The ties to an equal are indissoluble for they foster not only personalwell-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 1931Constitution, 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 andrights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language,religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birthor other status.” In a parallel fashion, the 1978 Constitution stipulates that allSpaniards 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 con-cept of human rights that was the foundation for the Republic; they werereaffirmed following the Holocaust in the UDHR, and were reinstituted inSpain in 1978 with the inauguration of a democratic State. It is with the 1978Constitution that Francoist Fascism and its vestiges came to an undeniableand definite conclusion.

Deportation of Spaniards to Nazi Camps

The deportation of Spaniards to Nazi camps, during the first years ofFranco’s regime, should be considered within the context of human rights,



and how the rights as described in the Republican Constitution weresystematically stripped. The trajectory is as follows. The Spanish Civil War(1936–1939) concluded with the fall of the Republic and the victory of thenacionales, leading to the nearly forty-year Fascist dictatorship of GeneralFrancisco Franco. The defeat of the Republic and the rise to power of theFrancoist Fascist regime following the Civil War in spring of 1939 consti-tuted a victory for Fascism in Western Europe and a prelude to the SecondWorld War that commenced in the autumn of that year. Once theRepublic’s defeat was evident in January and February of 1939, masses ofSpanish refugees crossed the border into France. France was a logicaldestination of refuge for many reasons: first due to the geographic proxim-ity. Many of the exiles originated in the Basque Country, Catalonia andAragon.18 Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, is a mere 150 kilometersfrom the French border. Furthermore, as decreed by the French constitu-tion 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 completionof the nationalists’ northern campaign, and 25,000 once Aragon was occu-pied (35–36). Children were evacuated to the United Kingdom, Belgium,and the Soviet Union.19 It is imperative to note that the safety of childrenwas promulgated in the Republican Constitution (Art. 43) in accordancewith the Geneva Declaration. But the massive retreat in January andFebruary of 1939, after the fall of Catalonia, constituted an exodus. ByMarch of that year it is calculated that half a million Spaniards had soughtasylum, 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. Inspite of the official policy of asylum, the French right-wing thought ill ofthe Republican neighbors from the south. In fact, newspapers at thattime labeled the refugees as the “torrent of ugliness,” “carnivorous beasts of the Internacional,” “the foreign swarm,” “bottom-dwellers and thedregs of prisons,” and “the dregs of world anarchy” (Dreyfus-Armand48–49).20 These denigrating epithets are strikingly not dissimilar to thosethat appeared in postwar Spanish newspapers referring to the masses of exilesas “beasts,” “hordes,” and “flocks” (Emmanuelle Salgas in Vilanova 94).21

The Republican Spaniards were neglected by their home of origin and dis-dained by the nation of refuge. Under the Republican Constitution, thoseborn of a Spanish parent in or outside of Spain, those born on Spanish soilof foreign parents, and those born in Spain of unknown parents (meaningorphans) are all Spanish citizens (Art. 23) to whom correspond the protec-tion of the State. Even orphans, according to the 1931 Constitution, wereunder the charge of the Republic. Article 31 affirms that the residence of all



Spaniards and foreign residents in Spain is inviolable. Yet the postwar situationrendered these Spaniards not only homeless, but political orphans.

The French camps for the Spanish refugees were barely able to meet thebasic needs (food, shelter, and hygiene) of these human beings, thus, theywere living in subhuman conditions (Dreyfus-Armand 61). The Frenchgovernment, reluctant to assimilate close to 500,000 refugees, providedthem with four options: to join labor companies, to emigrate to anothercountry, to enlist (i.e., the Foreign Legion), or to repatriate (Dreyfus-Armand 71; Roig 15; Vilanova 83–85). The final option was unappealinggiven the persecution of Republicans in Francoist Spain. In the first year ofFranco’s regime approximately 200,000 individuals came to be imprisonedand sent to labor camps. Between 1939 and 1944 there were 192,684executions in Spain (Fontana xiii). Therefore, during the Nazi occupationand the French Vichy government, many Republican Spanish exilesparticipated in the French Resistance. As Arendt claims, “the Spanishrefugees felt they fought against Franco when they helped the Frenchagainst Vichy” (Arendt 283). When interviewed by Català, Josefa Basattests to this fact: “For me, just as for many refugees from Catalonia and allof Spain, the fight continued, and the fight against Nazi-fascism meant topursue the same enemy that had taken root in our home, rising up againstthe legal and democratic state, [in other words] the branch of fascism calledFrancoism” (100).22

A communiqué dated June 1940 stated that Republican Spaniards inFrance were enemies of the Reich and a threat to public safety. According toFrancesc Vilanova, the “Rotspanier” (Spanish reds), suffered “a double anti-German condition: prisoners of war and political enemies” (Vilanova 107).23

An agreement was established between Madrid and the Nazi occupying forcethat high-ranking Republican exiles would be extradited. Once returned toSpain, they were executed, such as Lluís Companys, ex-president of theGeneralitat (Catalonian government) (Dreyfus-Armand 144). By Septemberof 1940, it was decided that Republican combatants would be deported toNazi camps. Article 29 of the 1931 Republican Constitution states that “Noone shall be arrested or imprisoned without cause of a crime.”24 Nonetheless,7,200 Spaniards were interned in Mauthausen alone, 5,000 of whom per-ished. It is estimated that 10,000 Spaniards were sent to Nazi camps. Yet, thisfigure cannot be considered exact, given that many prisoners, arrested anddeported in France, were labeled as French. The number of Spaniards whowere interned in camps due to their involvement in the Resistance is difficultto assess since they were dispersed throughout the “concentrationary” uni-verse, especially in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossembürg,Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, and Auschwitz(Dreyfus-Armand 122).



The idea that civilian refugees could be deported was deemed incom-prehensible to the Catalonian camp survivors interviewed by MontserratRoig. In her 500-page report Els catalans als camps nazis (1977), Roig studiesthe case of the 2,000 civilians shipped from Angulema to Mauthausen.Finding no proof (only oral testimony) of the internment of Spanish civilianrefugees, she labeled it a “legend.” Recent research, through the retrievaland study of correspondence between the German and Spanish ministries ofForeign Affairs dated 1940 and 1941, has proven Madrid’s indifference tothese 2,000 civilians and their subsequent deportation, thus, demonstratingthat the investigation of testimony provides the missing pieces in history.25

Before Roig interviewed the Spanish minister of Foreign Affairs RamónSerrano Suñer in the late 1970s, the survivors she interviewed claimed thatSerrano Suñer had washed his hands of them, stating that, as Republicans,they were not Spaniards and they had no country. Roig had incredulouslypondered how it was possible that 2,000 civilian refugees had been deportedto a Nazi concentration camp if they had not had a chance to participate inthe French Resistance, and, further, were not Jews (Roig 15).

Roig’s query reinforces the concept that when the point of violence isviolence itself, anyone can become a victim. Without a homeland, theSpanish refugees had no rights and no legal recourse. Criminals have rightsand protection under the law but refugees are “in between”; their intersti-tial reality defies legal characterization. These Spanish refugees in Francewere truly orphaned. In Strangers to Ourselves, the feminist psychoanalystand linguist Julia Kristeva states that “the foreigner has lost his mother” (5).The exiled and deported are orphaned. They are unwanted by the land oforigin and not accepted by the secondary “home.” This was certainly thecase of the Spaniards exiled in France, living in subhuman refugee campsand repudiated by the Vichy government. Once the Nazi occupying forceswere 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 geo-graphically located within a certain jurisdiction one must abide by the lawsand also be protected by the laws (Arendt 280). But deportation (or transferto camps) abolished asylum, that is, deportees were not protected by laws.They were outside of the law. As Arendt states, they were outlaws (Arendt280). Without legal status, they became expendable.

The human lives of these civilian refugees were disposable. Sadly, thispathetic reality, of the 2,000 civilians who were deported to Mauthausenfor lack of protection under any jurisdiction, did not even become part ofthe official transcript of the Nuremburg trials. While testifying, the onlyCatalonian witness, Francesc Boix, was silenced by the French Republicdelegate, and, thus, this collective history was also muted.



Women, War, and Politics

The female testimonies shed light on a suppressed past, and prove that thefight against Fascism and dehumanization was not lost. Historiography isessential to the construction of national identity that is founded on collectivememory. The alliance between Franco and Hitler was suppressed duringFrancoist Spain following the fall of the Axis powers in the Second WorldWar. By giving voice to her interviewees, Català highlights that thesewomen fought against a worldview that blatantly disregarded human rights.In many cases, the interviewees stated their moral and political beliefs interms of a personal relationship. This way of looking at the world, accord-ing to leading thinkers in moral psychology, ethics, and political thought,is gendered. Their gendered view is closely aligned with enlightenmentideals such as the “rights of man and citizen,” which in the twentiethcentury evolved to be human rights. Therefore, these resistants and sur-vivors denounce totalitarianism and uphold democracy as an ideal politicaland personal worldview.

The study of Republican testimony is relatively recent due to theimposed silence of the repressive Francoist dictatorship that ended in 1975.Neus Català compiled fifty-nine testimonials of Spanish Republicanwomen for two reasons: to avoid new wars by sharing the barbaric conse-quences of conflict and bloodshed, and to make known the experience ofSpanish female prisoners who had fought in the French Resistance.Collecting and analyzing cultural sources of the female experience is a wayof combating historical amnesia. As Català herself insists, “We Spanishwomen were involved in the fight in a thousand and one ways. We werenot simply auxiliaries, we were combatants” (Català 28).26

If Franco’s victory is to be considered a prelude to the Second WorldWar, symbolizing the triumph of Fascism and the defeat of human rights,Català’s collection proves that even during the reign of Fascism, the fightfor universal human rights persisted. Català’s collection of female testimo-nials is proof of the recovery and reconstruction of democratic (female)memory, a retrospective whose objective is to shed light on human expe-rience 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. Myintention to carry out justice was always in the hopes of preventing a res-urrection of the atrocities of the Shoah” (qtd. in Serrano i Blanquer 12).27

As Joan G. Tristany of the Catalonian Association of Former PoliticalPrisoners affirms specifically regarding Catalonian women in the camps, “itis imperative to recognize the importance of the role women played in thelong, hard and difficult fight against the terror that signified all forms of



fascism” (Serrano i Blanquer 14).28 Català herself articulates, “We do notvindicate the truth as a privilege, rather for justice and the reconstitution ofa piece of history that began in 1936, out of respect for our dead [femalecomrades], [and] to make amends (to indemnify) to so many forgottenwomen” (Català 47).29 Christina Dupláa reminds us that one of the mostvaluable aspects of Català’s compilation is the gendered reality that permeatesthe work (175).

During the Spanish Civil War, a singular icon personified the Republic:Dolores Ibárruri, known as Pasionaria. The interviewee Graciosa Gurometafound inspiration in this female role model and applied her fervor to theanti-Fascist fight in France: “Yes dark, poorly dressed and almost barefootfighters, with hardly any weapons, in a proportion of two against ahundred, defeated the prideful lords of war, the gods of the skull andbones . . . Here was fulfilled what a great female figure, not only of Spainbut of the world, Dolores Ibárruri, stated during our war: ‘They shall notpass!’” (Català 253).30

The historical role played by women must be noted. Lola Casadellafought on the front line. Segunda Montero was a female combatant whoseparticipation during the liberation of Paris in August of 1944 led to herdeath. The efforts of Alfonsina Bueno Ester were recognized by theAmerican, British, and French military (Català 144). Celia Llaneza wasawarded the War Cross. Carmen Buatell was the first woman to be tor-tured by the Gestapo in Marseille in October of 1941 for her role as aresistant. Català writes “All those in her group were recognized as resistantsexcept Carmen. [Why?] Because she was a Spanish Republican woman?Has everything possible been done to correct such an injustice?” (Català136).31 Regina Arrieta sardonically claims, “After all we are just ‘auxil-liaries.’ For them [i.e., men], the honors; for us women, oblivion” (Català88).32 Català also incorporates two male voices—that of CommanderRubio and that of the guerrilla chief Vitorio Vicuña—whose testimonyspeaks to the role of female participation. At first blush, it seems peculiar toinclude these masculine voices among the female testimonies, yet uponcloser scrutiny Català’s purpose becomes apparent. If one of the goals of thevolume is to complete History—which is vastly composed of male heroesand masculine acts of heroism—then the author aspires to communicatethe role of Spanish women in the fight against Fascism. The testimony pro-vided by these two accepted and established leaders of the FrenchResistance confers authority onto the remainder of the work, onto thefemale voices that had not been collectively recognized until the publicationof De la resistencia. Vicuña speaks to the role of Spanish women who receivedthe War Cross, Carmen and Emiliana Blascos among them (Català 410).Commander Rubio comments on the general participation of Spanish



women in the Resistance and stresses the great importance of their role(Català 369).

Català’s Regarding Resistance and Deportation, then, not only denouncespast Fascism, values human rights, and raises consciousness surrounding therole of women, but it also aspires to prevent totalitarianism and dehuman-ization in the future. Kristeva claims, “We all know the foreigner who sur-vives with a tearful face turned toward the lost homeland, melancholy loverof a vanished space, he cannot in fact, get over his having abandoned aperiod of time, the lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never beable to recover” (10). Yet, when these women gave their testimony, theyknew Spain was democratic—as had been their hope when they becamerefugees after the fall of the Republic or partook in the French Resistanceagainst the Nazi occupants. No, they could not turn back the clock duringthe time of the Republic, but they were alive to witness the continuationof 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 generalstate of well-being for all as seen in equality in the workforce (Art. 40), pro-tection for all workers (Art. 46), and the care for the sickly and elderly, aswell as for children and pregnant and new mothers (Art. 43). In the 1978Constitution, 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 thepeoples 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 ofCarol Gilligan’s ethic of care, a morality based on the importance of eachindividual’s needs? The initial studies in moral psychology, which cameabout precisely because of the Holocaust, are based on a lofty, impersonal,and abstract concept: justice. Yet both Gilligan’s different moral voice andtruly 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 theFrench refugee camps or Nazi concentration camps, Català’s female inter-viewees were secure in their value as human beings whose rights had beenguaranteed and protected under the Spanish Republican Constitutionbefore they were nullified or suspended, respectively, by the Francoistregime and the Nazi occupation. What becomes clear in the testimonials isthat the worldview maintained by these brave women is not that of “us”and “them,” but rather that of “we all.” Their solidarity is evident inmyriad forms: the treatment of each other, the rapport they share, the terms



“comrade” and “sister,” and the hymns they sing in unison, such as “LaMarseillaise” and “Des Partisans.” It is precisely the collective bond thatempowers 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 . . . Contrenous, de la tyrannie, . . . Aux armes citoyens!” (Let’s go, children of thehomeland . . . Tyranny is against us . . . To arms, citizens!). In essence, thesong articulates that in solidarity (as a collective) we fight against tyranny.The French national hymn, known as “La Marseillaise,” came about afterthe French Revolution. The Spanish version “La marsellesa” refers to, ofcourse, the ideals of the French Revolution: “liberté,” “fraternité,” “egalité.”Each of these key principles is expressed by those interviewed by Català aswell as in the 1931 Republican Constitution, the UDHR, and the 1978SC. The notion of “fraternité” (brotherhood, sisterhood) I will refer to assolidarity, for it is the bond between equals and the fight against the oppres-sor that motivated Català. The women interviewed express a bond withtheir fellow survivors, with those not fortunate enough to survive, withtheir compatriots on the other side of the Pyrenees, with others who alsofought 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, rep-resenting human rights and the fight against a tyrannical hegemony. Manyof Català’s interviewees attest to the fact that these two songs were sungfrequently as an act of resistance and proof of solidarity. Carmen Buatellrecounts that upon being transferred to Reims and deboarding the traincar, she, along with other female prisoners, began singing “La Marseillaise”in order to prove their quality as resistants (Català 128). Pilar Claver relaysthat the hymn “Des Partisans” was common: “‘Ami, si tu tombes, un autreami sort de l’ombre et prend ta place’” (Friend, if you fall, another friendwill step out of the shadows to take your place; Català 165). Both the “LaMarseillaise” and “Des Partisans” are popular chants that communicate anesprit de corps, a collective struggle against repression. Curiously, these songsare quite bloody and violent, yet the references to them in Català’s collec-tion lack the gore of battlefields. The allusions to these hymns within thetestimonials focus on solidarity, not vengeance that leads to violence. Forthese women, the fight against Fascism connotes standing up for one’srights.

Although in the late eighteenth century, the tyranny referenced in theoriginal version of “La Marseillaise” referred to Louis XVI and his enlightened



despotism, by the early twentieth century the tyranny constituted totalitar-ianism in its diverse permutations: Nazism, Francoism, and Fascism. Just as“La Marseillaise” has eternally commemorated the eighteenth-centurypopular movement that founded the values of equality and democracy, andhas emblematized the fight against tyranny, “Des Partisans” has come tostand for the underground resistance of the people against a totalitarianforce.33 “Des Partisans” became known as the “Marseillaise of theResistance.” Furthermore, this hymn has been adopted by the NationalFederation of Deportees, Prisoners, Resistants, and Patriots (http://www.fndirp.asso.fr/chantpartisans.htm). In Ravensbrück, the inmates were fromvarious homelands, yet those who broke into song chanted “enfants de lapatrie” (children of the homeland); this universal homeland is portrayed asone that protects and nurtures.

Singing was a form of resistance, as were the songs themselves. But theprotest and fight carried out by these women varied, from participation inthe Resistance, to combat, to sabotage. The gendered fight was rooted inan affinity for peers, regardless of gender, age, nationality, or beliefs.Alfonsina Bueno Ester recounts how an interrogating Nazi agent “did notunderstand how we Spaniards could defend France after so many punish-ments we had experienced since the atrocities of that country. ‘It’s under-standable 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 Fascismand in their belief in freedom and solidarity.

Their resistance took many forms. Català harbored French andSpaniards who were called to Germany as forced laborers, prepared falsedocumentation for ex-combatants that arrived from the InternationalBrigades, received and manufactured explosive devices, obtained weapons,and acted as a liaison (as did many women), thus running the risk ofbeing discovered and tortured (Català 30). The first act of rebellion inRavensbrück consisted of screaming a resounding “No!” in unison as anobjection to the abject conditions (i.e., room capacity for 100 when therewere 500 inmates). As a result, the Kapos and Aufseherinnen35 began beat-ing the prisoners closest to them, while the masses of women advancedagainst the captors (40). Carmen Buatell describes a mutiny in which theprisoners threw their shoes at the guards (128). Buatell also relates themanner in which inmates came to the rescue of a group of fellow prisonersbeing beaten by several guards. The bellowing roar of their indignation wasso immense that “it frightened the SS guards such that they ceased beating”(133).36 Català also notes that although the prisoners were forced to workin munitions factories, they sabotaged ten million howitzers. Català aptlylikens this example of female resistance to the Odyssey’s Penelope whosabotaged her enemies triumph by weaving by day and unweaving the



tapestry by night. Rita Pérez explains the impetus for collective efforts,“We did what had to be done: combat fascism, because fascism has to befought wherever it might be found. Since the war was won, fascism did nottake root in Europe” (327).37

Català’s interviewees imagined themselves as linked to their peers, theircompatriots, and their fellow human beings who fought against a tyranni-cal hegemony. As such they are all, as noted in “La Marseillaise,” “enfantsde 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 womenconsidered themselves children of the fatherland. But, I will state the viewof one’s country as “madre patria” or mother homeland, a not uncommonexpression in Castilian. This terminology reveals the political ethicdescribed by feminist scholars Nel Noddings, Anne Phillips, Susan MollerOkin, Sara Ruddick, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, a politics in which theindividual must be nurtured to contribute to the greater good. This is pre-cisely the political standpoint evident in the Republican Constitution, theUDHR, and the 1978 SC.

The Rights of Woman38

The moral and political ideology professed by Català’s interviewees high-lights precisely the fact that humanity, human bonds, supercede all otherduties. Kristeva notes that there is a conflict between the “rights of man”and the “rights of the citizen” and claims that the quality of humanityshould supercede that of citizenship. These are humble women with strongconvictions. The ideas they communicate are not based on the study ofjurisprudence or the Republican Constitution as a lofty political document.Rather, their knowledge of the rights and privileges granted them as indi-viduals and women is based on the experience of having had a say in theirgovernance and having acted as and been treated as equals.

Alicia Alted, in her article “The 1939 Spanish Republican Exile fromthe Women’s Point of View,” summarizes the role of women during andafter the Civil War. In fact, when the military rose up against the legitimateRepublican government and civil war broke out, women bore arms andfought in the war as part of the Republican Popular Militia. The quality ofrevolution of the masses that characterized the beginning of the warprompted women who were spurred on by the egalitarian discourse of theRepublic to take an active role on the battle field alongside their malecompatriots and comrades. Although these women enlisted in battalionsand militia corps and fought as equals against the nacionales’ military insur-gents, by October 1936 (just months after the military uprising), a decree



reorganizing the militias mandated that women were to take on onlyauxiliary functions at the front or to resume the wartime roles reserved forthe 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 thatwomen were needed in “special services,” that is, they acted as spies, gun-runners, and liaisons, relaying information or goods as needed. Furthermore,women were responsible for the evacuation and development of provi-sional schools for the masses of displaced children. Women also organizedand accompanied the children of the war on collective expeditions/transportsto Russia, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and England (2). These actionsare reflections of maternal thinking and maternal politics. So with theirnewly gained freedoms and privileges, Republican women as a whole didtheir part, not only during the fratricidal conflict, but also in its aftermath.Precisely because they had internalized the dignity granted to all under theConstitution, they could fight for the collective cause.

Gendered Moral and Political Thought

In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan qualifies a tendency or standard inwomen’s moral judgment as based in “an ethic of nurturance, responsibility,and care” (Gilligan 159–60). As Cass Sunstein observes in Feminism andPolitical Theory, the initial studies on moral psychology carried out byLawrence Kohlberg that linked moral reasoning to concepts of socialjustice and subsequently to political thought are based on distinctly malestandards (Sunstein 2–3). In other words, political and ethical norms(founded on justice) are male-biased and have been skewed according tosex. While most people use both orientations—justice or care—some ofthe time, “one orientation dominates moral thinking and . . . the directionof dominance is gender linked. Recent research [Lyons 1983; Gilligan andWiggans 1986] shows that . . . [m]en and women distribute themselvesbimodally on the justice and care ends of the scale” (Flanagan and Jackson39). Grace Clement in Care, Autonomy and Justice: Feminism and the Ethic ofCare distinguishes the two ethics accordingly:

(1) the ethic of justice takes an abstract approach, while the ethic of care takesa contextual approach; (2) the ethic of justice begins with an assumption ofhuman separateness, while the ethic of care begins with an assumption ofhuman connectedness; and (3) the ethic of justice has some form of equalityas a priority, while the ethic of care has the maintenance of relationships as apriority. (11)

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



of justice (Okin 15), and states that justice has been overrated as the basis ofmoral reasoning due to an “overly . . . abstract male bias in moral philoso-phy. Justice itself . . . should be at least supplemented, if not supplanted, byan ethic of caring, in which one’s responsibility to care for those close toone takes priority over or entirely replaces what have generally beenregarded as obligations to [an abstract] broader range of people” (Okin 33).

Nurturing moral reasoning based on care for a specific individual cangeneralize to caring for an entire group or all humanity. I affirm that theoriginal personal context in which the ethic of care is evident can developa reasoning that is universizable.39 Yet there are certain political lines ofthought that aim at inclusion and meeting the needs of dependent individ-uals. Such could be said for democracy and socialism, where the basicneeds are met for all, where all have adequate living conditions, medicalcare, education—including higher education—and can work toward self-actualization; both Sara Ruddick (214) and Grace Clement (89) argue like-wise. Perhaps we should view this nurturing stance within politics not asgender-specific, but rather as mindset that originates with human bonds, atendency that is preponderantly feminine and specifically maternal.

The political scholar Anne Phillips, in Democracy and Difference, questionsthe concept of “fraternity” delineated in the Declaration of Rights of Manand Citizen and, thus, indicates the irony of a document that purportsrights for man—meaning literally, men—yet keeps silent on the other halfof humanity (Phillips 28). In Català’s collection, the women do have a truesense of solidarity. I purposefully avoid the gendered terms fraternity orsorority. The non-gendered Spanish term “hermandad” could be translatedas siblinghood: a familial, affective bond with an equal or peer.40 Let usrecall that the UDHR refers to brotherhood and the human family as abasis for human rights. It is precisely this bond of equals, of solidarity, thatpermits 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 bondthat begins with the particular is generalized to the universal. Again let usreiterate the underlying tenet: every human being matters.

Feminist ethics theoreticians Sara Ruddick and Jean Bethke Elshtainhave proposed that mothering provides the foundation for “a new politicsof compassion that would reconstruct the political sphere” (Phillips 82).Similarly, Nel Noddings, in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics andEducation, states: “The experience of mothering . . . generates a more gen-erous and less interest-regarding set of values. Mothers do not put theirown interests first, for they can never forget the vulnerability of the humanchild. Women thus bring to politics a kind of morality and civic virtue thatcan displace . . . selfish materialism” (Phillips 82). Noddings proposes that



what makes an action morally sound is an intrinsic, underlying ethicaltenet: that life, in the abstract, is valuable and that specific individual livesare unconditionally worthy of respect (1–2).

The testimonials of Català’s interviewees bear witness to the ethic ofcare on a personal and political level. Celia Llaneza, who was awarded theWar Cross, explicitly links her duty to her homeland with her duty to herdaughter: “I left Asturias (in 1937), I came to France and did not want tostay because I considered that war continued in Spain and that I had anobligation, not only as a Spaniard, but also because I was widowed and hadto defend the rights of my daughter as well as the rights of Spain” (Català274).41 In the ethic of care, compared to other ethics, subjectivity is ofsupreme importance and constitutes the “foundation in relation.” Whereasother philosophies of ethics deem anguish to be the basic human affect,Noddings’s view, rooted in relation, identifies joy as the essential humanaffect. Thus she states “the joy that accompanies fulfillment of our caringenhances our commitment to the ethical” (Noddings 6). This is the case forSabina González who was deported to Ravensbrück with her mother; thelatter lost her life in the camp. González comments on the conviction andunquestioned human duty: “it seemed so natural [to my mother and me]that it never even occurred to us that we were forming part of andcollaborating with the French Resistance against the Nazi occupant”(Català 239).42 In an interview published by the City Hall of Cerdanyoladel Vallès in the spring of 2005, octogenarian Neus Català states: “Wewomen [in the camps], with culture and solidarity, constructed a barrierthat the Nazis were never ever able to break through” (Ajuntament),43 andidentifies her fight as having been for “peace and the rights of women.”44

Precisely because of a sense of connection between themselves and toothers, the interviewees were committed to human well-being on variouslevels: personally, morally, and politically.

As we have seen, in Regarding Resistance and Deportation, Català’s femaleinterviewees affirm life and love, and denounce the dehumanizing ideol-ogy they witnessed in Civil War–torn Spain, in occupied France and, ofcourse, in Ravensbrück. Most significantly, Català and her peers celebrateand promote collectivity and solidarity as fundamental to a kind, humane,and ethical political belief system. Català’s final call to peaceful, metaphor-ical arms recapitulates the human rights evident in the two democraticSpanish constitutions as well as in the UDHR: “We want peace, we do notwant war. We want well-being, not death . . . We will fight and we willspeak indefatigably for liberation, human brotherhood, for equality and forlife” (413).45 Català fights against past violence without vengeance oranger, simply in the hope of future solidarity (Dupláa 176). In so doing, sheunderscores life, the primordial human right. Català feels a bond with the



millions of individuals who perished. This commitment to life, in light ofthe horrors she and her peers witnessed, should be considered a genderedmoral and political standpoint.

Notes

1. In previous publications, I have viewed Gilligan’s care ethic in relation tofemale characters in Rodoreda’s fiction as well as in films by del Toro andSaura. I have published an article comparing Català’s Holocaust text toHéctor Faver’s Shoah film.

2. The Amical is an association of ex-deportees and ex-prisoners. Said associa-tion was vehemently promoted by Joaquim Amat-Piniella, to whom Roigdedicated her work.

3. “li volen fer saber allò que ella encara no ha sentit de cap veu masuclina: queals camps nazis hi va haver dones republicans” (15).

4. The publisher Edicions 62 published Núñez’s work in Catalan. Her work isavailable in Spanish through the press Península. It is not uncommon forworks to appear in Catalan through Edicions 62 and be available in transla-tion through Península. Such is the case for Roig’s Els catalans as well asCatalà’s De la resistencia.

5. “conscients que si algú continuarà exercint l’autoritat de la paraula sobre ladeportació aquest serà majoritàriament l’home” (Serrano i Blanquer 17).

6. On March 7, 2005, the director Susana Koska debuted her documentaryMujeres en pie de guerra. Català was one of the seven women featured in thefilm who recounted their wartime experiences.

7. “La dictadura franquista és responsable directa, com en són còmplices totsels seus col.laboradors per acció o omission, del destí de totes i cada unad’aquestes dones obligades a fugir en 1939. Es tracta d’un cas únic de gov-ern, per feixista que sigui, que no reclama retorn dels seus conciutadans nique sigui per a represaliar-los dintre del seu territori. A més, és un cas únicde govern que acepta que sigui un altre Estat, l’alemany en aquest cas, quees responsabilitzi d’aquesta repressió. La generació de la diaspora, desenten-der’s del destí immediat dels compatriotes i la deixadesa de responsabilitats,punitives en aquest cas, . . . acentúa el grau de responsabilitat . . . de tot unsistema” (30–31).

8. “íntimamente sentía una gran satisfacción y orgullo de haber tenido la fuerzamoral y física de haber resistido a la bestia nazi . . . Sabía que había cumplidocon 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 trabajode conjunto, muy bien dirigido por jefes hábiles en saber conjugar la audaciacon la meticulosidad . . . Todos pasamos horas difíciles y ocasiones delicadas,en donde nuestra vida estuvo en peligro, pero el amor a la libertad eraincomensurable y el compañerismo nuestra razón de ser” (Català 245).



10. According to Roger Griffin, Fascism is based on the myth of nationalrebirth (Griffin 8). The life of a Fascist individual only has value if itcontributes to the well-being of the nation (3).

11. “España es una República democrática de trabajadores de toda clase, que seorganiza en régimen de Libertad y Justicia; Los poderes de todos susórganos emanan del pueblo” (Art. 1); “Todos los españoles son iguales antela ley” (Art. 2); “España renuncia a la guerra como instrumento de políticaoficial” (Art. 6); “El estado acatará las normas universales del Derechointernacional” (Art. 7)

12. “La Nación española, deseando establecer la justicia, la libertad y la seguridady promover el bien de cuantos la integran . . . proclama su voluntad de:Garantizar la convivencia democrática . . . conforme a un orden económicoy social justo; Consolidar un Estado de Derecho que asegure el imperio de laley como expresión de la voluntad popular; Proteger a todos los españoles ypueblos de España en el ejercicio de los derechos humanos . . . ; Promover elprogreso de la cultura y de la economía para asegurar a todos una digna cali-dad de vida. Establecer una sociedad democrática y avanzada; y Colaborar enel fortalecimiento de unas relaciones pacíficas y eficaz cooperación entretodos 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 delos 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” (UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights).

16. “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degradingtreatment or punishment” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

17. “Todos tienen derecho a la vida y a la integridad física y moral, sin que, enningún caso, puedan ser sometidos a tortura ni a penas o tratos inhumanos odegradantes. Queda abolida la pena de muerte, salvo lo que puedan disponerlas leyes penales militares para tiempos de guerra” (1978 SpanishConstitution).

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,’ ” “‘lahez 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 perseguiral mismo enemigo que [se] había implantado en nuestra casa, sosteniendoun alzamiento contra el estado legal y democrático, la sucursal fascistallamada franquismo” (Català 100).



23. “una doble condición antialemana: prisioneros de guerra y enemigos políticos”24. “Nadie podrá ser detenido ni preso sino por causa de delito.”25. Francesc Vilanova found the supporting documentation (Vilanova 111–12).26. “Las mujeres españolas, las muchachas de la JSUC nos incorporamos de

una y mil maneras al combate. No fuimos simples auxiliares, fuimoscombatientes” (Català 28).

27. “sense la veritat no hi pot haver justícia. La meva intenció a intentar que esfaci justícia ha estat sempre procurer prevenir una resurrecció de lesatrocitats de la Shoah” (Serrano i Blanquer 12).

28. “és indispensable reconèixer la importància del paper de la dona en aquellallarga, dura y difícil lluita contra el terror que significava tota forma defeixisme” (Serrano i Blanquer 14).

29. “No reivindicamos la verdad como un privilegio, sino por justicia yreconstitución de una parte histórica que arranca de 1936; por el respeto anuestras muertas, por desagraviar a tantas mujeres olvidadas. Más de 400españolas pasaron [a campos nazis] procedentes de veinticinco departamen-tos controlados de los noventa y cinco que tiene Francia” (Català 47).

30. “Sí, unos combatientes oscuros, mal vestidos y peor calzados, con muy pocasarmas, en una proporción de dos contra cien, vencieron a los soberbiosseñores de la guerra, a los dioses de la calavera y las tibias . . . . Aquí se cumpliólo que una gran figura femenina, no sólo de España, sino del mundo, DoloresIbárruri, dijera durante nuestra guerra: ‘¡No pasarán!” (Català 253).

31. “Todos los de su grupo han sido reconocidos resistentes y condecoradosmenos Carmen ¿Porque era republicana española? ¿Se hizo todo cuanto fuenecesario para reparar una injusticia semejante?” (Català 136).

32. “A fin de cuentas somos ‘auxiliares.’ Para ellos [o sea los hombres], loshonores; para nosotras, el olvido” (Català 88).

33. Although it was composed in 1943 in London, contemporary twenty- tothirty-year-old Europeans have adopted it with one modification: theenemy (ennemi) is now xenophobia (xenophobie).

34. “no comprendía cómo los españoles podíamos ponernos a defender aFrancia después de tantas penalidades como nos hacían pasar las atrocidadesde aquel país. ‘Que lo hagan los franceses es normal, pero ustedes, ¿porqué?” (Català 139).

35. Nazi officials who were part of the hierarchical structure of the camps andhad direct contact with the inmates.

36. “clamor inmenso de indignación de odio que espantó a los propios SS, quedejaron de pegar” (133).

37. “Lo que hemos hecho era porque debíamos hacerlo: combatir al fascismo,porque el fascismo hay que combatirlo en donde se encuentre. Gracias a quese ganó la guerra, el fascismo no se instaló en Europa” (Català 327).

38. This heading implicitly refers to and recontextualizes the eighteenth-century “Rights of Man and Citizen.”

39. 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.



40. Phillips elaborates on this point: “The analogy with the family makes itclear: this is something deeper and more intimate than voting the same wayin meetings. As so often, the language of kinship is employed to assert apowerful and emotive bond. But the other side of this is moralism. It ismore testing to be a good sister than a sound political ally, and moredistressing 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 enFrancia, porque consideraba que la guerra continuaba en España y que teníauna obligación, en tanto que española, y más porque yo era viuda y teníaque defender los derechos de mi chica como defender los derechos deEspaña” (Català 274).

42. “nos parecía tan natural [a mi madre y a mi] que ni siquiera se nos pasó porla cabeza que estábamos formando parte y colaborando con la Resistenciafrancesa contra el ocupante nazi” (Català 239).

43. “Les dones, amb la cultura i la solidaridat, vam construer una barrera quemai, 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, porla fraternidad humana, por la igualdad y por la vida” (413).

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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 WeimarRepublic belonged to the urban middle class. A lesser known fact is thatnearly every fifth Jew in Germany was foreign-born, many were Polish,Russian, and Austrian immigrants, and the majority belonged to theworking poor (Richarz 6). Ilse H., herself a German Jewish Holocaust1

survivor of middle-class background, remembers Ostjuden (East EuropeanJews), living in Dresden during the interwar years (1919–1938), andcommented, “They were not important for history.”2 Social class differ-ences were often the cause for conflicts between German and EastEuropean Jews and German Jews often felt “culturally superior.”3 Ilse H.,for instance, called them a “lost generation” whose lives “were of noconsequence.” When I asked her what happened to these immigrantsduring the Nazi regime, she said that they were sent back to the Polishborder in 1938.4 She asserted: “They didn’t make history.” Paradoxically,the sheer number of Jewish Holocaust victims alone—the vast majoritybeing Eastern European (Hilberg 1220)—made history as the most hor-rific genocide in the first half of the twentieth century. I infer that a largenumber of Raul Hilberg’s estimate of 5,100,000 Jewish victims belongedto working-class populations. It is true, however, that ordinary peoplewere not considered important for history and are almost entirely absent inhistorical representations. The working poor have no public voice (hookswhere we stand 5).


Voices from the Margins

It was challenging and required perseverance to locate and interview sur-vivors who, first, identified as rural or working class and, second, emigratedto the United States.5 Borrowing Mary Jo Maynes’s concept of “worker,”I define “ordinary” women as those who came from the milieu of unskilledand skilled manual labor in either industry or agriculture (8). I comparePolish Jews with German Jews, in both urban and rural environments.Postulating a spiral of victimization, I incorporate the interwar and postwaryears (after 1945) into the temporal framework of the Shoah rather thanbeginning with the November pogrom (“Kristallnacht”) in 1938 andending with the liberation in 1945.

Jewish women in exile bear witness to the trauma of the Shoah eventhough they are conventionally not defined as survivors.6 By highlightinggender, class, religious, geographical, and temporal variables, I contextual-ize the escalation and long-term consequences of oppression rather thanlimiting the impact of the Shoah to a single catastrophic event, therebychallenging dominant constructions. I argue that working poor and ruralwomen’s oral histories provide a broader understanding of the Shoahthrough the complexity and diversity of their accounts. It is these narrativeson which I focus here. Within this space, I can only touch on topics fromwomen’s Alltagsgeschichten (day-to-day histories), which are explored indepth in my doctoral thesis, such as struggles for material survival andhappiness vis-à-vis poverty, discrimination, and resistance based on anti-Semitism, limits of education, early (thoughts of) emigration and escape,experiences of trauma such as death, and survival. I found that poverty is aprevalent oppression in numerous life stories of ordinary women and takesmuch room in their testimonies and consciousness.

Rose Lerman

My first audiotaped interview was with Rose Lerman, who immigrated tothe United States from Poland, in 1934. Lerman was born in 1914 as thetenth and youngest child of orthodox Jewish parents in a small village inrural Eastern Poland, near Mir, close to the Russian border. Her motherdied at age fifty-two, when Lerman was thirteen years old. Her older sistersand her father, who was a blacksmith, raised her. The family also ownedfour hectares of land, which barely sustained them. Throughout her girl-hood, Lerman suffered from deprivation and anti-Semitism. With the helpof an older brother, she was able to emigrate. In November 1941, Lerman’sfather, 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 thisday Lerman carries the trauma of losing members of her family in thiscatastrophe.

Lerman’s recollections led to my understanding that there were manyimportant stories of the Shoah left unrecorded. In comparing her life as arural poor Polish Jew with that of other survivors in written records, I wasstruck by the ways her struggle was manifest on a daily basis. Although shewas 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 schol-arly and published auto/biographical writing, I looked for them in severalHolocaust archives. Given the general dearth of archival findings, I con-ducted interviews with other Polish and German Shoah survivors. Mystudy is primarily based on ten oral history interviews and twenty-sixvideotaped testimonies from the Survivors of the Shoah Visual HistoryFoundation. For this essay I have chosen short excerpts from audiotapedinterviews I conducted with Rose Lerman and Mathilda Wertheim Steinas well as two videotaped interviews conducted with Fela P. and Doba A.by interviewers from the Shoah Foundation. My goal is to amplify voicesof women who did not have the time or means to write their autobiogra-phies. More general statements are inferred from interpreting numerousoral history interviews, which do not claim to be representative for all.These are preliminary findings in a new field, which need to be corroboratedwith further in-depth studies.

My approach focused on each participant’s memories of everyday expe-riences, not only relating to the Shoah, but to her entire life. Informed byfeminist methodologies and practices, I was particularly sensitive to issuesof social positioning, reciprocity, and power imbalance between inter-viewer and interviewee (Stanley Feminist Praxis; The Auto/biographical I;Stanley and Wise). My social location as a scholar in German and FeministStudies is partial and composed of gender, class, sexual identity, ethnicity,and age, impacting interactions and interpretations.8 I grew up in a working-class Lutheran family near Hamburg, Germany, in the 1960s and 1970s andimmigrated to the United States in 1994.

I used a feminist oral history method that acknowledges and emphasizesthe multiple subject positions of the survivors as well as my own as aresearcher. As agents and makers of history, women recount narratives ofdeprivation, 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 orGerman Jewish narrator and non-Jewish German listener, faced genera-tional and linguistic gaps, as well as worried about the survivors’ risks ofretraumatization versus the educational benefits of making their storiespublic.

Gendered Voices

Early researchers rarely considered gender differences because the premisewas that all Jews were subject to Nazis’ genocidal politics, regardless of theirgender.9 Joan Ringelheim (“Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust”141–49) began questioning the “generic” approach to Shoah Studies in the1970s and encountered opposition for bringing up the issue of women’sinvisibility and sexism. Since then, scholars have shown that although allJews were threatened with annihilation, gender differences must not beoverlooked.10 Jewish women lived in double jeopardy as Jews and aswomen—subjected to particular gender/sex-specific persecution.11 At thesame time, Jewish and non-Jewish women of working-class and middle-class background were very effective as members of resistance movementsbecause the Nazis underestimated women’s courage.12 Although feministscholarship has proven extensively that gender mattered, an analysis ofgender differences remains absent or, at best, marginalized in prominentrepresentations of the Shoah.13

Recent publications underscore the significance of linking the Holocaustand gender (e.g., Baer and Goldenberg; Ofer and Weitzman); however,they fail to emphasize that class was a pivotal factor in survival. The major-ity of German Jewish women whose memoirs are published and archivedcame from middle-class backgrounds, as Lorenz (172) has pointed out. Myresearch provides evidence of significant differences of rural and working-class women’s day-to-day lives compared to their urban middle-class coun-terparts whose upbringing and education did not prepare them for thedeprivation 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 prematurelytook on adult responsibilities. Many knew that their limited educationwould overshadow their future. Familiar with oppression, they saw nohope for a better life in Germany or Poland and sought ways to emigratebefore the Shoah. Early on, many ordinary women crafted their personal



as well as their families’ survival. Moreover, their struggles did not endwith emigration but continued in exile, for example, while making aliving as domestics, cashiers, or factory workers. Survivors are “comingout” about the stigma of poverty. An example is Fela P. who was inter-viewed by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1997.She speaks directly about her class background and the covering up ofpoverty.

I am not ashamed to tell you I was poor because a lot of people were ashamedto 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 classis a slippery category, which can be hidden or masked. In order to avoid thestigma associated with poverty people are willing to construct their narrativesin 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 memo-ries as “not happy” (01:05:35) because of poverty—her father worked as asales 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 muchlonger. Soon after the beginning of the Second World War and bombingof Warsaw in 1939 she insisted on accompanying her father to the SovietUnion—against his wish, for he could not pay for her ride. Both reachedthe Russian-occupied part of Poland safely but Fela decided to return aloneto rescue the extended family, which she accomplished successfully. Sherecounted that her uncle, who was better off than her family, could notcope with the material scarcity in wartime Russian-occupied Poland andreturned home where he perished. However, Fela and her family memberswere able to adjust to the poor living conditions and worked under theRussian occupation until the Nazi German invasion in June 1941. Felaagain guided her family further east out of immediate danger and everyonesurvived the war in Kazakhstan. Exiled in the Soviet Union, she worked asa crane driver in a factory and eventually as a bookkeeper. After the war herfamily returned to Poland where they were again confronted by anti-Semitism. She eventually moved to Israel in 1950 and reunited with herfamily in Melbourne, Australia, in 1960.

Escalating anti-Semitism and the oncoming war motivated Fela to leaveeverything behind and escape early on, taking the risk of further hardshipand uprootedness. The assertiveness in her decisions to flee against all oddsand her adaptation to many deprivations can be interpreted as a tool forsurvival.



Class Theory and Praxis

In her book feminist theory: from margin to center bell hooks (30) criticizesbourgeois class biases in feminist theory, which has been subject to the“hegemonic dominance” of white academic women: “Had poor womenset the agenda for feminist movement, they might have decided that classstruggles would be a central feminist issue; that poor and privileged womenwould work to understand class structure and the way it pits women againstone another” (61–62). Thus, she promotes intellectual work that is in itselffeminist 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 classby understanding that “. . . class was more than just a question of money,[. . .] it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases thatinformed the way knowledge would be given and received” (hooks“Confronting Class in the Classroom” 178).

The complexity of social class (besides gender and Jewishness) constitutesthe third axis of a person’s social location.15 The potential fluidity of class posi-tions in various temporal frames and individuals’ biographies (between theFirst and Second World Wars; in exile; in later life) as well as the many grayzones of class definitions complicate and subvert static categories. Material dif-ferences mattered, even or especially, in extreme situations as they still dotoday. Nobody wants to live in poverty. People tried to escape this oppressionbut often did not have the means to do so. Despite their possible visions of lifewithout poverty, reality held them back. If one looked at the (con)texts of theShoah through the “lens of class”—whom and what would one see?Confronting class means raising the issue of Jewish (male) upper- and middle-class bias as a social and ideological construction. Privileged classes have con-structed ideologies that legitimize a stigmatization of working classes inaddition to their economic oppression.16 As hooks (where we stand 93) haspointed out, the Holocaust started with deprivation, not murder.

I argue that Jewishness, gender, and class differences need to be exam-ined concurrently. Feminist Holocaust scholarship has developed theoriesto differentiate analyses on gender; and even though inquiries into socialclass have been done successfully (e.g., Kaplan The Making of the JewishMiddle Class), they focus on Jews of the normative (urban) middle class—an unmarked category.17 Working poor women are thus almost absent andunderrepresented, even in feminist research.

History from the Borderlands

Ruth Klüger, scholar and Holocaust survivor from Vienna, includesreflections on class, gender, and ethnicity in her autobiography and



analysis. She points out that material differences mattered when it came toemigration.

Denn ohne Geld konnte man nicht auswandern. In allen Ländern der Weltwaren die armen Juden noch weniger willkommen als die wohlhabenden.

[For one could not emigrate without money. In all the countries of theworld, poor Jews were even less welcome than wealthy Jews.] 18

Education was in general much more accessible to middle-class Jewishwomen until the Nazis’ intervention. The influence of Bildung (education)can certainly not be denied for Klüger. Her early girlhood (born 1931) wasin a sheltered, middle-class home. She was one of two children in thefamily. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, schooling forJewish children deteriorated and Klüger’s formal education ended afterfour years. However, at home she continued reading literature to pass thetime. 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 ornot? I went to a neighbor and she gave me a book [. . .]—that’s the first timethat 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. Readingwasn’t allowed during [the week]—only on Saturdays . . . (Lerman 13)

Spending time reading a secular book was not appreciated in Lerman’sfamily. Defiantly, she had to hide it and herself in a neighbor’s house. Shewas supposed to work, not read, during the week; it was a secretive activ-ity (Zborowski and Herzog).19 When I asked her about what joys sheremembered 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 thatthey would light candles and my mother, and then my sister when mymother died, they would bake potato pancakes. And that was a big thing andthat was a happy time. And we didn’t have enough money, my father didn’thave enough money for candles, so he would take a potato, cut [it] out inthe middle, and put oil and then put in a—some kind of cotton, and thatwould burn instead of [candles] . . . [C]andles were expensive and we couldn’tafford it. Because they had to do it a whole week, you know. When youthink of it, everything was so hard, a little—even a candle.

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



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

Women were resourceful and creative given the scarcity of basicmaterials in the camps.20 Lerman’s example indicates that easy access tocandles cannot be taken for granted in interwar Europe and that theywere luxury products for poor Jewish families. Also, it illustrates thenecessity to problematize dominant class representations and analyze theShoah as part of an escalating spiral of oppression. Recent research sug-gests that not only do texts need to be contextualized but also contextsneed to be textualized (Felman and Laub xv). In other words, the pre-cursors leading to the genocide, including its axis of class, have to beexamined more closely.21

Maynes agrees with Emmrich when he suggests a different yardstick tomeasure autobiography of proletarian accounts in comparison with those ofthe middle class.

The plotting of a human life course along an “ascending line” could notcapture the experience of people who struggled to stay afloat and were besetby the chronic insecurity, poverty, illnesses, accidents, and family tragediesso common in working-class existence. (Maynes 33)

In fact, many ordinary women who had to overcome the deep loss of aparent and other tragic events in their families developed various copingmechanisms for emotional and material deprivation and struggled for theirsurvival. Lerman’s entire family nearly succumbed to typhus after the FirstWorld War and her beloved mother died of emphysema after a long sick-ness when Lerman was a teenager.

And how important that is, because my tragedy of my life with my family isnot 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 historyfrom the borderlands and defies its absorption by the central (bourgeois)history. She points out the tensions and ambiguities of working-class lifehistories, the “drama of class” (22). Their subjects are denied emotionalcomplexity and a particular personal history (10–11).



Double Margin

Much research on Nazi totalitarianism (1933–1945) has focused onGermany, and only recently have scholars started to analyze women’s livesin Poland during the interwar years (Ofer and Weitzman, Bacon,Ringelheim). This period has been overshadowed by the devastatingmurder of about 3,000,000, ninety percent, of Polish Jewry. Consequently,memoirs of survivors concentrate on the horrors of the Shoah, often roman-ticizing prewar childhoods. Lerman is an example of a Jewish working poorwoman in the interwar years, who has not received any scholarly attentioneven though her family was victimized. Her class background compoundsthe unlikeness of scholarly interest. She is doubly marginalized: she emi-grated “too early” and belongs to the “wrong” class.22 Paula Hyman (34)calls attention to the interwar years in Poland when “most Jews struggledeven more fiercely [than middle-class Jews] to simply survive.” Poverty wasprevalent among Jewish workers who made up between a third and a quar-ter of the population in major Polish cities and towns. They faced growinginstitutionalized and popular anti-Semitism and economic deprivation. Allfamily members had to work for their collective survival.23

Lerman realized as a young girl that there was no future for her inPoland. She pleaded with her mother to let her move to France. Eventhough she was very close to her mother, her despair was so great that shewanted to leave her family and Poland behind.

You just had to go to work, milk your cow, bring milk home and go in thegarden or go in the fields. Work. (Lerman 8)

And especially in Europe, where you were pushed around, because you comefrom 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. [. . .] Likean animal; you just worked, and you worked. (25–26)

Lerman observed the struggles of her older sisters and decided that shewanted a different life. Talking about her eldest sister, Elke, she said, “Iwouldn’t accept many, many things that my sister accepted. I am the tenthchild, and in these years, things were changing very drastically in Europe”(249). Lerman had dreams and expected more of life than her sisters andparents before her.

I wanted more love than just marriage. Besides, I saw how unhappy mysisters were. When I say unhappy, I mean the poverty was so great, and I justnever wanted to live like that. Life changes with times, and their type of life



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 pos-sible. 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 yoube happy when your life is always work, work, work? But, I mean, theydidn’t quarrel, or there was no bitterness among them. (249)

Unlike common templates of Holocaust representation, Lerman is not acamp survivor, a resistance fighter, or an immediate victim of the Shoah.She experienced the trauma in exile. However, her background sensitizedher early in her girlhood to discrimination based on gender, religion, andclass. This consciousness motivated her to find ways out of an oppressivesituation before it took on genocidal dimensions.

Doba A.

Women’s stories sometimes attest to the simultaneity of poverty and hap-piness. A few survivors recounted that they had been poor and happy. Onesuch story is Doba A.’s.24 Both her parents worked in a textile factory inBialystok, Poland. Her father died in 1919 when she was not yet two yearsold. 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 enrichedmy life, I think. It gave me the strength to survive everything. (01:07:54)

A survivor of the death camps Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen, Doba credits her mother for giving up herfood in the ghetto to keep Doba strong. Her mother was murdered inTreblinka. Before the war, she had been active in the socialist Bund25 andits women’s organization YAF (Yidishe arbeter froyen) and sent Doba to thesocialist children’s organization SKIF (Sotsyalistisher kinder farband).

For a child like me who was poor and even sad sometimes I can’t waitlong enough to run to SKIF. It took by foot hours to come to SKIF. Andover there was a new world, a world of birds, like a bird, free andenjoyable . . . (01:15:10)

At SKIF Doba learned music, songs, sports, and discussed beliefs with-out judgments. She feels lucky that she received instruction and love fromhelpful teachers who influenced her life.



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

Doba remembers feelings of “jealousy” because she did not have dolls ora piano and sees the paradox in her childhood; however, her ideal valuesare not about material wealth. She developed her creative skills and becamea (Yiddish) writer.

I loved reading and I loved writing and somehow my mother encouragedme 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 thinkthat was the only thing Mother could have the joy—could be happy abouther children [. . .]. She said [. . .], “There is something good in store foryou.” 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 itfinancially and sent her to a technical school instead. She explained thisdecision to her.

“If a war breaks out,” that’s what she said, “you are left with a skill to dosomething 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 inslave labor and concentration camps later on. Even in the ghetto Dobacontinued her writing, which became part of her survival strategy. Sheworked in the ghetto underground as a courier until she decided that it was more important to stay with her mother. One of the resistanceleaders 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’tmuch of a big deal. Even then, can you imagine, even in those times, Ithought that [a] shoemaker didn’t have much knowledge. Much knowledgehe had, but not much education. (3:23:48)

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



that intelligence and knowledge are not identical with (formal) educationbut also valuable. She sees intelligence as an inherent ability and knowledgeacquisition as possible without formal schooling. One does not need to beeducated to have knowledge of the world. Doba’s values contrast middle-class concerns for education “as a marker of class standing and instrumentof 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 anextraordinary book about the Jewish community, including her extendedfamily, in rural Hesse. Her mother worked as a homemaker and her fatheras a cattle dealer.28 Even though her family of four belonged to the ruralmiddle class, Stein recalls her parents’ and her own hard manual labor as shewas growing up.

I remember when my mother was sick at that time I had to knead loaves ofbread—I was only nine—I kneaded the dough for three. And the loaveswere not small. That must have been at least three pounds of flour, that’s alot 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 Witnessin Hessen” 68–69)

Childhood stories of manual labor are common in the narratives of ruraland working-class women in the interwar years. Many children con-tributed their work to the family’s income and maintenance. Childrennotice class differences early on. Stein recounts that itinerant Schnorrer andSchnorrerinnen from the Bukovina came to her house, requesting food andshelter. Her mother gave graciously to all but dismissed the women quicklybecause, according to Stein, she did not want her daughters to see them.Stein was also aware of hidden poverty of families in her own Jewishcommunity (41). She remembers that Jewish women in rural Hesseworked in the public sphere as seamstresses and Flickfrauen (women whomended clothes) as well as milliners.

It was a combination of class oppression and anti-Semitism that becamethe decisive factors in Stein’s decision to emigrate. In first grade (in 1921)she encountered anti-Semitism and decided that she must leave Germanyas soon as possible.

It began . . . the day I entered school as far as I am concerned but it was moreopen later. You know, in a way I was glad when it became more open, I



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

Stein recalled that her elementary school teacher beat up a little Lutheranboy from a working poor family every day. She believes that the teacherdid 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 Christianreligious 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 Iwas, 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 orwhatever fifty minutes whatever the length of the school period was. Henever gave us a book, we didn’t have a seat, if you have to stand, youcan’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 afterforty-five minutes, he screamed again, “Juden rein!” [Jews in!] You knowthe 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 therewas no catechism. [. . .] I mean, unbelievable. Unbelievable. And I wantyou 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 Idecided I would not stay in Germany, regardless. Maybe I would tryanother 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, manyJews read the alarm signals of Fascism early on and left as soon as possible.Mathilda Stein is convinced that “Hitler only legalized and intensified thepersecution, which had been going on for years. I never knew anythingelse” (85)

Stein recounts that she was not only attacked for her Jewishness but alsodiscriminated against because of her father’s profession. She was seven oreight years old when her Lutheran girlfriend’s father provoked her.

Well, we were playing dolls, she had a marvelous assortment of dolls and Ireally think I liked her because of, you know, how children are, we wereplaying 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



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

Stein is proud that she “toughed it out” (109). She continued her friend-ship with the girl who became a Nazi and “spat out” in front of Stein in1933 (110). Stein did not wait much longer. As Lerman did, she emigratedto the United States in 1934. Soon after, her father was forced to give uphis work and eventually—with her help—her immediate family escapedGermany. During the interview Stein told me that she still has nightmares—as do Doba A. and Lerman—and lives with an “injured soul” (124). Herstruggles did not end with her emigration; memories of the first years in theUnited States were still too painful to talk about (120).

Lerman struggled with unemployment and language barriers after herarrival in the United States but eventually found work in New York’sLower East Side’s garment industry. She was fired for union activism butultimately escaped poverty. However, she never left her working-classsensibilities behind and still acts in solidarity with oppressed populations.30

As one of many compelling voices, Lerman insists, “My life is a part ofhistory” (233).

Notes

I owe much gratitude to all “ordinary” women, and especially to Rose Lermanand Mathilda Wertheim Stein, for sharing their life stories with me. I also wishto thank my spouse, JB, for her tireless support and editing of several drafts ofthis paper. Furthermore, I appreciate Dr. Virginia Steinhagen, Dr. MonicaClyde, Dr. Norma Smith, and Dr. Arlene Teraoka for their helpful suggestionsalong the way. It is through careful collaboration that voices of ordinary Jewishsurvivors of the Shoah are recorded.

1. I use the terms Holocaust/Shoah interchangeably. I find the Greek-derivedHolocaust problematic in its connotation to sacrificial offering, however.

2. Telephone conversation with Ilse H. (name changed) on June 6, 2004. Sheescaped Nazi Germany in April 1939.

3. Richarz (20–22); Koonz (362). According to Kaplan’s source (“Sisterhoodunder Siege” 193–94, n4), by 1933 only 8.7% of German Jews identifiedthemselves as “workers” and 46.4% as “independent” (shop owners, peoplein commerce, or members of free professions, such as lawyers, doctors). It isnot clear how “worker” is defined in this context and how the remaining44.9% identified.

4. Telephone conversation with Ilse H. on June 6, 2004. In October 1938, NaziGermany deported between 17.000 and 50.000 Polish Jewish immigrants tothe Polish border. See Burleigh and Wippermann (89) and Koonz (373).



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, andLaCapra 46; Stanley and Wise 60).

9. Joan Scott suggested a very helpful and detailed account for consideringgender as a category of historical analysis. Her definition of gender is basedon the interconnectedness of two propositions: “gender is a constitutiveelement of social relationships based on perceived differences between thesexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power”(42–43). Scott points out that within the highly complex, dispersed, andinterrelated constellations and processes of unequal power relationshipsbetween individuals and society, there is also a component of humanagency 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, forcedprostitution, 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) pointedout, women and children often made up 60–70% in the death camps’ firstselections for immediate murder. She critiqued the Permanent Exhibition atthe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for omitting a “conceptu-alization of gender” and facts significant for nuanced Holocaust representation.Gendered Holocaust research, Ringelheim demonstrates, is still in danger ofbeing 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 HistoryFoundation, 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 economicdetermination and historical change in which the category of gender istreated as byproduct of economical structural change (30). This Marxiandefinition, Scott points out, maintains a level of coherence that does notextend to “race” or gender. While Scott critiques Marxian concepts of classin order to complicate it with gender, I think it is necessary to also extendthis definition of class; see bell hooks.

16. hooks addresses the hatred and contempt she experienced from individualswith class privilege (where we stand 35).

17. hooks (“Confronting Class in the Classroom” 184). Class is often synony-mous with middle class. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon,



for instance, Gurewitsch. She presents oral histories of women from differentethnic backgrounds and documents the lives of twenty-five women. Onlyone out of twenty-five is working class, the other twenty-four are middleclass. See other examples of middle-class bias in Koonz (61, 147, 347, 353,36); Lixl-Purcell.

18. Klüger (13–14). Translation from Kluger’s first English-language editionStill Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (22).

19. In their picture of the shtetl during the pre–World War I period, Zborowskiand Herzog distinguish between “people of the week” (unschooled, workers,artisans, peddlers) and “people of the Sabbath” (learned elite) (142–43).

20. They probably mobilized resources they knew before the war. I thank Dr. Norma Smith for this insight.

21. Bos (37) also suggests to “look more carefully into the effects of men’s andwomen’s pre-war socialisation” because the social location of Jewishness,gender, and class are central to survivors’ narratives.

22. Lerman’s life story is even more unusual because few Polish Jews workedthe land. Glenn (13).

23. Hyman (35). She analyzed rare interwar documentation in 350 autobio-graphical accounts by Polish Jewish conducted by YIVO (Institute forJewish Research) in 1932, 1934, and1939. They show a portrait of a youthwho “perceived it had no future” (35). Many youth describe their unhappyand large families, in which six to eight children were common, aseconomically deprived. Despite that Hyman disputes that Polish Jewishfamilies were typically large (35, n29).

24. A., Doba. 1997. Interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual HistoryFoundation, Melbourne, Australia, March 28. Interview Code 29753.Tapes 1–3.

25. Algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund in lite, poyln, un rusland—General JewishWorkers Alliance of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was foundedsecretly in 1897 in Vilna. Dobroszycki and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (195–97).

26. Spelling unverified.27. Stein (“Testimony of an Eye Witness in Hessen, 1920–34).” Personal

Interview, Atlanta, 2002.28. In southern and western Germany, 75% of all cattle dealers were Jews

(Richarz 14).29. Telephone conversation with Mathilda W. Stein on November 18, 2003.30. 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 inInterwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies.” In Women in theHolocaust. Ed. Dalia Ofer et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 55–67.



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. ElizabethR. Baer et al. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 23–50.

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany1933–45. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Dobroszycki, Lucjan, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Image Before My Eyes: APhotographic 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. Einautobiographischer Bericht. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993.

Gurewitsch, Brana, ed. Mothers, Sisters, Resisters. Oral Histories of Women WhoSurvived the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism andthe Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575–99.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes andMeier, 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 andNazi 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 inImperial 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.



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 andConfronting 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-JewishWomen.” 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 thePolitics of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Stanley, Liz, ed. Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in FeministSociology. 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. NewBrunswick, 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 Widerstandgegen Faschismus und deutsche Besatzung. Frankfurt am Main: FischerTaschenbuch Verlag, 1989.



———. 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 Townof Eastern Europe. 1st ed. New York: Schocken, 1962.





PART II

LITERATURE AND THE ARTS




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 associatedwith typical German upper-middle-class bourgeois households. Her father,Theodor Samosch, managed Zade und Falk, a store that manufactured hataccessories. Gertrud’s mother, Augusta, enrolled her in ballet and Grazieclasses when she was seven. Uninspired by academics, Gert dropped out ofschool. When her father lost his fortune through a poor investment at thebeginning 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 DieElegante Welt (The Elegant World) to help support the family.

In 1915 Maria Moissi accepted the twenty-three-year-old as a student inher acting school. Gert practiced the roles of a variety of character typeswhile conquering her inhibitions about performing in public. Moissi rec-ognized Gert’s talent for both acting and movement, and referred her todancer Rita Sachhetto for whom Gert auditioned. Gert’s peers were aspir-ing young dancers, including Anita Berber, who later became one of themost 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


fearful to aggressive, graceful and refined, to brutish. The work stood outglaringly against delicately choreographed, Greek-styled dances of the daythat showcased elegant tunic-clad young women. In contrast, Gert dressedin garish orange pantaloons; she painted her face chalk white and the areaaround her eyes neon blue (Mein Weg 30). Exaggerating everyday expres-sions and gestures to grotesque proportion, Gert’s outrageous figureresembled 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 desireto shake up the audience that I exploded into the atmosphere of lovelinessthat the others created. [. . .] and the same movements that I had previouslydanced gently and gracefully, I now exaggerated wildly. With mammothsteps I stormed across the podium. Hands splayed, my arms swung like ahuge 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 etherealworks by her contemporaries insipid and predictable. Tanz in Orangebrought her a job performing grotesques between movies at a doublefeature on Nollendorfplatz (Nollendorf Place), a popular bohemian settingknown for its bars and nightlife.

Moissi soon sent Gert to Munich to audition for director OttoFalckenberg, who hired her as a character actor for a variety of small rolesin his Münchener Kammerspiele (Munich Studio Theater). Though unsatis-fied with the modest roles, it is there she became familiar with pre-Expressionist and Expressionist theater. She acted in Frank Wedekind’sMarquis of Keith and King Nicolo, Heinrich Mann’s Madame Legros, andAugust Strindberg’s fairy tale production Kronbraut. At the studio theater,Gert perfected her ability to impersonate characters, capture a given move-ment or facial expression with acuity, and then magnify it to monumentalproportions. Upon her return to Berlin, she was hired by Max Reinhardt2

at Deutsches Theater, where she continued to play grotesque character rolesin a variety of dramas ranging from Molière’s The Citizen as Nobleman toGoethe’s Faust.

In 1924, she abandoned theater altogether in favor of film, but the inno-vations of avant-garde theater were tremendously influential in the making ofGert’s performance art. Her experimentation with and modification of thesestrategies coupled with personal magnetism and a taste for the bizarre werethe makings of an innovative dance theater, elements of which were not tobe found in works by any other modern dancer of the Weimar period.

S Y D N E Y J A N E N O R T O N98


Gert’s influence on contemporary performance art is unmistakable.During the 1920s Gert pioneered her inimitable grotesque dance as a vehi-cle for political/social satire and ideology critique. Many of the avant-gardetechniques that she introduced into the realm of modern dance of the1920s—her use of grotesque distortion, montage, her repetition and exag-geration of “ordinary” gestures on stage, and integration of voice into herdances—have resurfaced in the performance art of leading postmodernchoreographers today. German choreographer Pina Bausch,3 for example,incorporates an immense repertoire of everyday movements and humanbehavioral patterns into her work, in order to reveal the ideological under-pinnings of social conventions normally accepted as truths. Like Gert,Bausch interprets “ordinary behavior” as a form of learned social perfor-mance that requires deconstruction as a means of eliminating destructivepatterns in social relationships. American choreographers Sara Hook andMary Cochran have been known to incorporate voice and text into theirchoreography as a means of underscoring or intensifying the performativeeffect of a given social behavior, a process that Gert first introduced into therealm of avant-garde dance in the late 1920s in Berlin.

Gert’s performance art, both in Berlin and in exile, is rooted in the the-atrical innovations by Max Reinhardt, Frank Wedekind, and many of theearly Expressionist dramatists. Like Reinhardt, Gert favored a bare stagethat drew audience’s focus to the actors’ expressions. In fact, she furtheredhis notion by performing on a tiny stage to afford a more concentrated andintimate exchange between performer and audience. She also experiencedfirst-hand Reinhardt’s general de-emphasis of the spoken word and hisattempt to liberate audiences from a meaningless web of language.Exaggerated gesture, song, pantomime, dance, and parody—all elementsoriginally 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 formsinto drama was also significant for Gert’s performance art. Wedekind com-bined the colorful imagery of both circus and vaudeville—that is, entertain-ment for the masses—into his literature as a way of disrupting the formalconventions of classical theater. His grotesque and often satirical depictionsof the societal tensions that exist between irrational sexual instinct andbourgeois morality, a phenomenon that Gert, too, examines at length in herperformance art, initiated the modernist shift from the realistic representa-tion characterized by Naturalism to the exaggerated subjectivity of earlyExpressionism.4

Gert, like Wedekind, was fascinated by and sought inspiration inpopular culture. Boxing, circus acts, variety, and movies became primesubject matter in her dances, not only because these activities were

V A L E S K A G E R T 99


movement-based media, but also because her incorporation of them aidedin collapsing the ideological boundaries between high art and popular cul-ture, two realms of entertainment that were deemed separate and unequalby the majority of the educated elite. Her incorporation of mass cultureinto her repertoire, together with her grotesque renderings of modernurban problems and the bourgeois moral hypocrisies, place her perfor-mance art within a late modernist, avant-garde genre, which served to exposeand dismantle the ideological underpinnings of what many perceived tobe an unacceptable social order.

The depth and variety of Gert’s dance theater is impressive. From 1919to 1924 she performed highly subjective Expressionist works such as To Die,Humility, To Love, and Birth. The only historical documentation available onmost of these early dances consists of a few lines in her memoirs, pho-tographs, and some brief descriptions by her biographer Fred Hildebrandt.But from these fragmentary sources one recognizes Gert’s close ties withExpressionistic theater in her renunciation of the ornamental, and a totalconcentration on movement, gesture, and facial expressions. Her dance, ToLove, according to Hildebrandt, comprised “nothing more than a single armmovement, torn asunder, which contained everything: the joy and theanxiety, the misery and the torment and the rapture” (132). Gert’s desire tofocus on the simplest, purest, and least constructed utterance of a givenemotional state is characteristic of the early Expressionist move to simplify.Like the woodcuts created by early Expressionist painters Ernst LudwigKirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt Rottluff, Gert eliminated allunnecessary shades and contours, only to magnify the crucial strokes thatexpressed the ultimate emotion and supplied the dance with form.

In To Die, a dance created sometime between 1919 and 1922, and onethat she continued to perform during her years in exile, Gert focused exclu-sively on the physical and emotional changes that take place in a person, anyperson, at the moment of death. Remaining true to the Expressionist beliefthat inner necessity was the catalyst for all true art, Gert asserted that herdeath dance was inspired by the trauma she experienced with her father’sdeath. Nevertheless, the reason for its overwhelming success in the WeimarRepublic is that it fulfilled the spectator’s need to face death on both apersonal 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 bodytenses up slowly, the struggle begins, my hands clench into fists, tighter andtighter, the shoulders bend, the face becomes distorted from pain andmisery. The pain becomes unbearable; my mouth opens to accommodate asilent scream. I bend my head back, shoulders, hands, my whole body becomesnumb. I try to restrain this. Pointless. For seconds I stand there motionless, a



pillar of pain. Then slowly, the life gradually withdraws from my body, andvery slowly it relaxes. The pain quits, the mouth becomes softer, the shouldersfall, the arms become slack as do the hands, I feel the benumbed staring of peo-ple in the audience, I want to console them, a glimmer of life slips into myface, 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 strugglewithout decoration, acrobatics, or musical accompaniment. A black shape-less gown devoid of ornamentation served as her costume. Her chalk whiteface served only to intensify the expression of suffering.

The effect of Gert’s performance of To Die on Weimar spectators wasdramatic. A critic from Wiesbaden compared Gert’s ability to reenact themoment of death process to the subtle handwork of a sculptor. Anothercritic emphasized the pointlessness of using musical accompaniment for awork fraught with such emotional depth: “It is completely logical that themusic falls silent: this art of expression works so intensively through itself,possesses so much inner rhythm and spiritual sound, that audible accompa-niments would only weaken the impression.” The emotional impact of ToDie was so profound that the audience was unable to applaud following theperformance (Krey 81).

The success of an avant-garde work is purported to depend on its abilityto obliterate the traditional aesthetic frameworks that allow the spectator tomake predictable emotional associations that reinforce the dominant politicaland social values of the time.6 Modern dance, even in its developmentalstages, is an art form that clearly served the avant-garde objective of breakingwith the aesthetic traditions of the past. Valeska Gert is an anomaly in therealm of modern dance, however, in that she was the first dancer who sup-plied German modern dance with a revolutionary aesthetic that catapultedthe art form into the realm of critical thought and social consciousness. AsGert became famous during the mid-1920s, she expanded her repertoire toinclude movement montages and tone dances. She had become familiar withmontage theory through her acquaintance with films created by members ofthe Russian and German avant-garde in Berlin. Just as avant-garde filmmak-ers Sergei Eisenstein7 and Walter Ruttman8 employed montage to representthe discontinuities and contradictions of modern life in their works, so, too,was Gert able to reproduce the montage aesthetic with her slice-of-life rep-resentations of the modern metropolis.

Performed in brief episodic format lasting no longer than two minutesat a time, Gert’s montage compositions resembled film strips in that theyconsisted of a series of unrelated scenes and images separated from eachother only by a momentary black out or freeze. Gert describes: “[In Kino



(Movies)] I created a film strip by indiscriminately acting out a long dis-tance runner from the newsreel, a cartoonist, a cranking projectionist, aneccentric old lady, the diva, a silly flapper, and pig-headed soldiers. Mymovements flickered, giving the impression that the camera had movedtoo much” (Hexe 49).9 Indeed, Gert offered a kinesthetic version of thefilmic montage. But rather than fancy editing work, her montages werebased on mechanical precision of movements, the mastery of quick tempothat emulated the filmic restructuring of time, and facial and body distor-tion analogous to the close-ups, enlargements, and diminutions of anobject made possible by the camera lens.10

Gert never openly aligned herself with the German or, in exile, theAmerican women’s movement; nevertheless, many of her dances exploreaspects of constructed female identity. Her tone dances, for example, usedsound and monosyllabic utterances to exaggerate, and thus underscore thesocial behavior of female figures that traditionally had been overlooked ortrivialized by patriarchal society. They include her Erotic Grotesques, a tril-ogy in which Gert explored the emotions/motivations of the prostitute atvarious phases in her career; Die Amme (Wet-nurse), in which she magni-fied and theatricalized the fundamental emotions of happiness and sadnesswithin the parameters of a wet nurse’s identity; and finally Diseuse,Tragédienne, Coloratura, and Chansonette, a cycle of dances parodying thevarious constructed identities of the bourgeois female artist. Her amplifica-tion of the female character’s behavioral patterns helped to expose the dis-crepancies between the woman’s projected outward behavior and heractual emotional and material circumstances (Norton 152–78).

Gert’s provocation and alienation of her audiences via grotesque distor-tion can best be illustrated by taking a closer look at her Erotic Grotesques,her most scandalous and controversial dance trilogy. The dances spannedseveral years. The first episode, Die Dirne (Dregs), portrays the life of anadolescent prostitute. It is one of Gert’s earliest works and was rarelyperformed after 1921. Little has been written about Die Dirne, and no exist-ing footage of this dance exists. Noteworthy, however, is that it was per-formed independent of musical accompaniment. In its place Gert generatedverbal and tonal sounds that both enriched and intensified the effects of hermovement sequence. Later, the employment of monosyllabic utterancesand sounds would become one of Gert’s choreographic trademarks.Remaining true to the notion that language was nothing but a discursiveprison, Gert’s vocal expressions existed as extensions and intensifications ofmovement and emotion. By the late 1920s, a point at which Gert hadappeared in several notable films of the period, Gert had created severalsound dances, performance pieces that more intensively explored theinterplay between sound and movement.



The second dance of the trilogy, Canaille (Whore), explores themovements and motives of a prostitute, a woman whose motivation in lifeis spurred by feigned lust and material necessity. Gert commenced herperformance of Canaille with the following visual picture:

I wiggle my hips provocatively, raise my black skirt and show the exposedwhite skin above my long stocking and pink garter for a moment. I’m asensitive whore. My movements are gentle and lascivious. I wear high-heelsand my white face is practically covered with black strands of hair. My headgradually falls and my face disappears except for the bright red mouthshowing above the collar that hangs loose around my neck. (Die Bettlerbar 79)

Other choreographers from the 1920s portrayed the non-virtuous, uglieraspects of a woman’s identity, but Gert, who added a human dimension tothe outcasts she portrayed, was the only one of her generation to exposethe interconnectedness between the woman’s grotesque behavior, hersocial ostracism, and her material desperation. Gert achieved this through acrass portrayal of the raw sexual act, removing it from the standard narra-tive framework of bourgeois romantic love. The climax of Canaille is theprostitute’s loveless, but lustful climax with her customer, a brief butgraphic scene described in detail in her memoirs:

I sink slowly to my knees, open my legs wide and sink even further. In asudden cramp, as if bitten by a tarantula, I convulse upwards. I oscillate toand fro. My body then relaxes. The cramp dissolves, the jerking becomessofter, 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 andsocial ostracism, Gert captured the essence of the material motivations of aprostitute, while simultaneously revealing the destructiveness of a govern-ing institution fraught with economic and legal inequities for women.Gert’s Canaille underscored the negative consequences of industrial moder-nity and confronted spectators by alluding to the abysmal social conditionsof unskilled women workers, most of whom had moved from theprovinces to the urban metropolis in search of economic opportunity. Herperformance of the prostitute resounded with particular vibrancy duringthe 1920s in Germany, a period in which prostitution had become a rapidlygrowing and undeniable social problem.



104

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


Gert’s celebrity as a grotesque dancer brought her into contact withmany key figures from the avant-garde movement. Bertolt Brecht admiredher for her ability to create an alienation effect in the dance medium; heinvited her to perform regularly at Die Rote Revue (The Red Revue), hiscabaret at the Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich Studio Theater). In 1925,renowned filmmaker G.W. Pabst cast her in the role of the madame, FrauGreifer, in his silent street film Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Streets), where Gertplayed a supporting role opposite Greta Garbo as Kupplerin (Madame). In1929, she astounded Weimar spectators in Pabst’s Tagebuch einer Verlorene(Diary of a Lost Girl) with her macabre performance of a sadistic governessin a women’s detention home. In 1931, she appeared as Polly Peachum’smother in the filmic version of Brecht’s Die Dreigroschen Oper (The ThreePenny Opera).12 Because few of Gert’s dances from the Weimar years exist onfilm, Pabst’s recordings of her phenomenal grotesque character performancesare particularly valuable.

Exile Years: 1938–1949

As National Socialism dominated the early 1930s, many critics becameincreasingly antagonistic toward Gert’s theatrical presence, characterizing itas “unGerman” and “unnatural.” Theater critic Adolf Stein, for example,criticized Gert for “her Gallic hatred of everything German” (Stein in Peter69). Other blatantly anti-Semitic critics, who were counting on Hitler’srise to power in 1933, drew connections between her choreographicattempts to slander German traditions and her Jewish heritage (Peter72–77). Nationalists and anti-Semites alike associated her socially criticalperformance art with a treasonous lack of patriotism, and regarded herpersona with intense hostility.

Despite the increasing animosity toward Gert’s performative presence inGermany during this time, she experienced notable successes in Budapest,Krakow, Paris, and particularly London, where she developed an enthusi-astic following within the city’s avant-garde circles. Her roles in threesuccessful 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. Shealso continued solo performances regularly and with success. Noteworthyabout Gert’s performance art in exile is that her social critiques extendedbeyond German borders to parody both universal Western phenomena aswell as social realities specific to her exiled home. Impressed by Gert’stalent for simultaneously entertaining and alienating her audiences, actor/theater critic Robin Anderson became her personal manager, and foundengagements for her that included numerous pre-theater solo recitals andthe role of Canina in Stefan Zweig’s theatrical piece Volpone.13



Gert, like countless other artists in exile, never fully adjusted to livingand working outside of Germany. Political refugees were aware that theywere tremendously fortunate to receive asylum. Yet, as newcomers, theywere not fully welcome, and very few of the educated ones could actuallyearn a living working within their areas of expertise. Though some of themost prominent émigrés, such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, BertoltBrecht, George Grosz, and the composer Friedrich Holländer, enjoyedimmediate professional successes in the United States, most exiles wereforced to struggle on the most basic level, in order to fulfill their mostfundamental survival needs.

As an exile, Gert experienced alienation on multiple levels. Her perfor-mance art was deeply rooted in Weimar Berlin’s distinctive vibrant avant-garde scene. Yet with the advent of the Third Reich, Gert had become analien in her own country. Even relations with her closest friends hadbecome strained as she was singled out in public as a Jew. By 1934, racelaws prevented her from using her stage name. Extra benches were erectedin parks to prevent Jews and “Aryans” from sitting together. In 1935, sheand her first husband Helmuth von Krause14 officially divorced so that hewould not be arrested for breaking newly enacted laws against intermar-riage between Aryans and Jews, a crime that was punishable by both publichumiliation 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 aclose-knit group of friends for emotional, managerial, and even financial sup-port.15 Her tours to Paris and London at this time were disrupted by severepanic attacks, which sometimes prevented her from performing. Once inpermanent exile, both in England and in the United States, Gert managed,albeit at times with great difficulty, to remain outwardly functional. She oftensuffered severe bouts of cultural disorientation, which stemmed from a com-bination of lack of a network of friends, heartbreak over lost love, financialworries, and isolation from her own, specific cultural milieu. She wrote:

I was suddenly left to fend for myself since my three men remained inEurope. Each one of them had his reasons for remaining behind. I didn’tknow 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 therewere many people in the U.S. who knew me from the stage, but I didn’tknow them. I also didn’t know that there are many institutions like the NewSchool of Social Research that give money to prominent artists [. . .] I neverunderstood how to play up my “prominence.” (Hexe 97)16

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



London. He gave her a cash advance of 500 dollars and her boat ticket toNew York where they had planned to draft a contract. But shortly after herarrival in New York her agent died from a heart attack. Gert was virtuallywithout friends or family in New York.

A month after her arrival in New York City, Gert traveled by Greyhoundbus to Los Angeles, rented an apartment there, and attempted to secureacting roles in Hollywood. However, her critical approach to performanceand her atypical appearance left her, for the most part, unappreciated in acountry where light musical comedy and Hollywood romance reignedsupreme. Curiously, German artists in the United States who were familiarwith, and even complimentary about Gert’s work in the 1920s, showed alack of enthusiasm. Director Ernst Lubitsch, who moved from Berlin toHollywood in the mid-1920s, would not cast her because she made openlynegative comments about Hollywood actresses. Producer Walter Wangerdid not consider her to be the right type for Hollywood movies. AlthoughGert managed to work briefly under contract at Universal Studios andappeared in a film called Rio directed by John Bram, her scenes were cutfrom the final version of the film because the studio feared that hergrotesque performances would alienate American audiences.

After attempting—albeit unsuccessfully—to interest the writer KlausMann in an idea for a movie, Gert returned to New York, where she per-formed at the Barbizon-Plaza theater, and a couple of months later at theCherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Some of her most populardance 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 duringthese early exile years, and according to her memoirs had difficulty findingeven menial jobs. After a medical doctor wrote a letter to the NationalRefugee Service stating that Gert was severely undernourished, shereceived $7.50 per week. With this money she was barely able to rent anattic room in Manhattan and purchase groceries (Stein in Peter 81–83).

In exile, Gert found herself in a milieu that was in many respects unre-ceptive to her performance style and intolerant of her status as bothforeigner and Jew. The reasons for American intolerance were notablydifferent from the disfavor many Germans demonstrated toward her artduring the early 1930s. German bias stemmed, in part, from rising anti-Semitism and the desire on the part of ultra-conservative nationalists toeliminate from the cultural purview any artistic presence that exposedinconsistencies of traditional German ideals and customs. American unre-ceptiveness, on the other hand, stemmed from a cultural and geographicalinsularity that resulted in a lack of understanding of a form of satire that didnot fully embrace mainstream American cultural values or aesthetics. Gert’s



status as a single female refugee—an artist trying to make it on her ownwithout 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 forherself by opening Beggar Bar in fall 1941, a small cabaret on MortonStreet in Greenwich Village. She invested five dollars in the dark cellar,repainted it, and recreated a Montparnasse atmosphere by installing color-ful light fixtures, paintings, and offering bitters, apple cider, and a nightlypeasant soup. Beggar Bar was denied a liquor license, but, nevertheless,became a tremendously popular nightspot for artists, writers, and entertain-ers who tired of the glitzy dinner club atmosphere popular at the time. Thenightly entertainment was unusual and diverse. A young, yet to be discov-ered, Tennessee Williams waited tables and held poetry readings there.Exiled cabaret performers Kadidja Wedekind and Heinz Watenberg per-formed German cabaret songs. Aspiring American singers and musicalcomics presented their new material. But the main attraction was alwaysGert who would at any moment during the evening spontaneously per-form a grotesque dance or sketch, sing a satirical song, or recite a poem(Forbes).

Gert continued to have economic concerns, but the Beggar Bar’ssuccess instilled within her a modicum of financial security and newfoundself-confidence. The cabaret also functioned as her community away fromhome. Because she advertised her nightspot in the German immigrantnewspaper Aufbau,17 much of her initial audience consisted of émigrés likeherself. The National Refugee Service sent her names of exiled cabaretsingers, several of whom she hired to perform. As word spread aboutBeggar 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 scandalor suspicion. Regulars at the club, many of whom were experimental artiststhemselves, both admired and respected her critical performances. But in1941, the year that the United States entered the Second World Waragainst Germany, numerous Americans considered Gert’s performances tobe both antidemocratic and in bad taste. Aside from the satires she hadperformed in Germany, Gert created new works, which exposed contra-dictions in the American concept of freedom18 and called into questionAmerican patriotism. Particularly during wartime, judgments againstGert were magnified because of her refugee status. Many of Gert’sexperiences—her relations with the police, immigration agencies, andneighbors—were tainted by unforgiving disapproval of her unconven-tional lifestyle, her status as a single female refugee, and her socially criticalart form.



Gert had, however, established friendships and connections withGerman exiles and artists based in New York. The German Jewish exilepainter and filmmaker Hans Richter, who in 1942 became director of CityCollege’s Film Institute, was a regular at Beggar Bar, and was complimen-tary about both the quality of the cabaret numbers and the décor. Gert alsomentions the art dealer Karl Nierendorf, another German Jewish exile,who in 1929 had financed Katakombe (Catacombs), the last politically leftistBerlin cabaret before the Nazis came to power. In 1941, he agreed to investin the Beggar Bar, helped her obtain her cabaret and restaurant licenses, andoffered Gert a combined sum of a thousand dollars to fund her enterprise.But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Nierendorf backed out of furtherfinancial support, convinced that it was too risky to invest in a cabaret dur-ing wartime. Aside from the prominent exiles, Gert hired and befriendedrefugees to whom she refers on a first name basis in her memoirs. BothEsmerelda (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 ofGert’s harshest critics were representatives of the German Jewish exile com-munity, who expressed their dissatisfaction with Gert’s satirical performancesand outspokenness in local newspapers. Especially after the U.S. entry intothe war, Gert was harshly criticized for demonstrating a lack of courtesy toher host country and tactlessness in her general day-to-day behavior. Manyof these exiles earnestly believed that Gert’s satire would negatively affecttheir own reputations and possibilities for success in the United States.Illustrative of the general close-mindedness toward her performative pres-ence in New York is a threatening letter she received from the editorialboard of Aufbau, the same publication in which Gert placed an ad for hercabaret. Written December 29, 1941, three weeks after U.S. entry into theSecond World War, the letter warned Gert to stop performing works thatcould 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 con-tent of your program in such a way that is as tactless as it is tasteless. Youmake a mockery of this country’s establishments, criticize its concept of free-dom, and indulge in countless allusions that you as an immigrant may not dounder any circumstances. Also, your parody of the “American Daughter ofRevolution in Coney Island” is, to quote the opinion of a very reservedAmerican, “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 pre-paredness to offer you support, and that if you do not change your behavior,we will attack you most severely in our publication.



Please finally begin to grasp that your person is too insignificant toendanger 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 conse-quences for artists, since the advisory board included high profile andpowerful figures such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and LionFeuchtwanger. Being attacked by a publication that was widely read by themajority of the exile community minimized her chances of gaining artisticrecognition and sponsorship, let alone governmental support for refugeeservices. Perhaps it was imprudent of Gert to assume that she could imple-ment the same performative alienation strategies in the United States thathad impressed European audiences of the 1920s, many of which activelysought alternative art forms. But to expect anything less from Gert than anaggressive, critical, and confrontational representation of modern societywas to underestimate her often brutally uncompromising approach to bothart and life. It was this unwillingness to dilute her works for the sake ofpopular consumption that in the 1920s earned her praise from politicallymotivated artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky,21 and SergeiEisenstein.

Yet, the hallmarks of Gert’s performance art—her mockery of thenarrowness of the bourgeois mindset, and her exposure of contradictions inWestern dominant ideology— disquieted most American spectators who,during wartime, required an upbeat form of entertainment that would helpthem perceive themselves as a unified group of likeminded citizens. Gert’sperformative critiques were works that forced audiences to question theirdaily assumptions and actions, and for this reason ran counter to broad-based national efforts to bring together the American people.22 Gert’sconfrontational art form prevented her from attaining significant successesbeyond the walls of her cabaret. Nevertheless, Beggar Bar remained anexceedingly popular nightspot until 1945, when Gert was forced to closefor serving cognac-infused “Beggar Sip,” without an alcohol license. In thesummer of 1946 she moved to the small coastal town of Provincetown,MA, where she opened a cabaret called “Valeska’s: Different Food andDifferent Entertainment.” She kept this establishment open during thesummer months, but returned to the city in September, and remainedthere unemployed until March 1947.

Return to Europe (1947–1976)

Gert was finally able to return to Europe via Paris in March of 1947 at theage of fifty-five. A year later she moved to Zurich, and while she waited for



the necessary legal papers for reentry into Germany, she opened a relativelysuccessful cabaret called Café Valeska und ihr Küchenpersonal (Café Valeskaand her Kitchen Personnel). In December 1948, she left Zurich for Berlinand within ten months she was able to open a comparable establishmentcalled Bei Valeska (At Valeska’s Place), located in the basement of an operahouse on Kant Strasse.23 Here, she and other artists—mostly aspiring actorsand 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 ofNazi Germany were far too blunt for German audiences to appreciate at atime when the majority was unable to come to terms with the atrocitiesthat had taken place in their immediate past.

During the 1950s, Gert wrote and performed political verses that con-fronted the German citizen by exploring problematic mental patterns offormer Nazis who attempted to make a comfortable transition into postwarGerman society. One of her most disturbing skits was her portrait of IlseKoch, the notoriously ruthless female commander of Buchenwald. Gertappeared on stage as an innocuous elderly lady sitting in a rocking chairdoing embroidery, but audiences were soon chilled by the incongruity ofthe sympathetic image of the kindly grandmother and her horrendousverbal 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 methen I’ll leave you all in peace.Paint this lampshade for mewas once the skin of a human being.Now, ten years later,none of it’s true.never hurt anyonewas 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 frenzywould serve as an obstacle to the furthering of Gert’s career in the 1950s



and early 1960s in Germany, a time when the majority of the WestGerman population was not yet prepared for the ruthless confrontationwith self that Gert’s performances demanded. Instead, many West Germansdirected their attentions to the Communist threat outside of their geo-graphic borders, preferring to channel their energies against an outsideenemy rather than reflect on internal crimes of previous years. Gert was, inmany respects, just as much an alien in the conservative, provincial, andunexperimental milieu of postwar Berlin, as she was during her geographicalexile in the United States.

Some of her performance art of the 1950s and early 1960s dealt with sub-jects from the recent Nazi past; she also wrote songs and poems that wereopenly critical of the political inclinations of many postwar West Germans.Like many of the German writers of the late 1940s and 1950s such asHeinrich Böll, Siegfried Lens, and other members of Gruppe 47,25 Gert wassuspicious of the swiftness with which the average German citizen embracedany 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 literatureabout the artist. Nevertheless, the verse is rooted in the political cabarettradition that originated around 1903, in Max Reinhardt’s cabaret Schallund Rauch (Sound and Smoke). The brief, satirical rhyme became a favoritegenre of politicized cabaret performers, who recognized that combiningserious political or social concerns with the lightness of humorous versemade their critiques more powerful and far reaching.27 In “Jubil-Jubilar”the audience members are emotionally drawn into the celebratory, spirited



rhythm of the verse, but suddenly find themselves intellectually confrontedwith lyrics that question the unreflective jubilation that accompanies polit-ical demonstrations, thus exposing the opportunism and hypocrisy thatoften lie hidden behind outbursts of mass euphoria.

With the exception of a handful of Gert’s admirers who recalled Gert’scommanding presence during the Weimar years and of a couple of criticswho promoted the entertainment at Bei Valeska (At Valeska’s) and hersecond Berlin cabaret Die Hexenküche (The Witch’s Kitchen) in localnewspapers, Gert was doomed to virtual obscurity during the 1950s andearly 1960s. She still performed her cabaret numbers and, as a rule, receivedpositive reviews, but her following remained limited to a surprisingly smallgroup of well-wishers. Nazi censorship and persecution had abruptlycurtailed the rich and multifaceted cultural terrain of the Weimar period,turning Germany into little more than a cultural vacuum during the yearsimmediately following the war. As a result, many young Germans tendedto look to foreign artists who possessed no affiliation with German cultureas models in art and entertainment. Under these circumstances, the majoritywas indifferent to the tribulations and opinions of returning exiles.

Unlike other Jews who were forced to flee or who had lost families in theHolocaust, Gert never received reparations from the German government.The official argument was that Gert’s life had never been endangered by theNazi regime, since she managed to acquire a British passport in 1936 and wasfree to leave Germany. Gert, however, assessed the situation differently. Thefollowing statement appears in a 1954 Berlin newspaper and reflects hernostalgia 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 Iwant to die in Berlin. . . . I was here until 1938 and experienced that onlysome of the German people were National Socialists. I perceived emigrationas something temporary and wanted to return as soon as the specter wasgone. I believed that the art world would be just as lively as it was afterWorld War I, but I was mistaken. . . . It is . . . simply untrue when onewrites the revival of contemporary pantomime originated in France. Itcomes from Germany. But, of course, the young people know nothing moreof me, because I was silenced during the Hitler period. Only Wigman28 ishonored as the pioneer of modern dance. This is only partially true. It is justthat she was here the entire time. And the older people who watched me andloved me are dead, far away. Those who remain are tired, uninterested orcowardly. . . . There should also be spiritual reparations for exiles, not justfinancial ones.29

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



when they were achieving their greatest success. Gert’s art was an ephemeralone, 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, andpoetry, but the powerful intensity of her performative presence can no longerbe fully grasped in its entirety.

Yet, despite her difficulty in reestablishing herself in Germany afterexile, Gert made a miraculous career comeback in 1965 at the age ofseventy-three, when Frederico Fellini cast her in the role of the psychicmedium called Bhishma in his film Julia and the Spirits. A year later Frenchdirector Pierre Philippe Bonnard gave her a title role in his short film LaBonne dame, in which a seemingly good-hearted old lady who attendschurch, drinks coffee, and plays with the children develops the bad habitof murdering and burying her handsome male tenants. In 1968, the sameyear that La Bonne dame premiered, Gert published her memoirs Ich bineine Hexe (I Am a Witch), and in 1970 Rainer Maria Fassbinder30

officially recognized her outstanding contributions to German film bypresenting her with the German film prize. Two years later, she appearedin his television series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’tMake A Day).

Not until the mid-1960s and early 1970s with the advent of the NewGerman Cinema did a generation of young and gifted avant-garde film-makers begin to critically explore Germany’s past, one that had remainedvirtually obscured during the 1950s, when both artists and spectators wereprimarily concerned with reconstructing and solidifying a workablenational identity.31 Because the 1950s offered little in the way of tolerancefor artistic digression from the above goals, controversial exiled artists likeGert disappeared into virtual oblivion. It is not surprising that a fascinationwith Gert’s persona would once again resurface during the early 1970swith the work of avant-garde filmmakers such as Rainer Maria Fassbinderand Ulrike Ottinger.32 Fassbinder, who trained and acted in experimentaltheater in Munich before becoming a filmmaker, was a master at exposingthe intricate mechanisms of social and personal power inherent in intimaterelationships via detailed and magnified exposure of personal interaction.Like Gert’s performance art, his films and theater are politically uncom-promising in their irreverence of social institutions. The films of UlrikeOttinger share particular commonalities with Gert’s grotesque dance, intheir distorted parodies of socially constructed gendered identities and intheir preference for bringing the margins of society—freaks, hermaphro-dites, drunks, and prostitutes—into center view. It is perhaps due to theircommon 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).



In 1976, at the age of eighty-four, Gert appeared as Aunt Preskovia inVolker Schlöndorff’s33 Der Fangschuss (Coup de Grace). Fascinated byGert’s colorful narrations of her life experiences during the set breaks,Schlöndorff immediately undertook a new project with Gert, this time adocumentary of her life called Nur zum Spass; Nur zum Spiel-KaleidoskopValeska Gert (Just for Fun, Just to Play: Kaleidoscope Valeska Gert). Thisdocumentary contains valuable footage of a few of her dances from the1920s and captures the eighty-five-year-old performing Japanische Groteske(Japanese Grotesque), a work she first performed in 1917. Only throughthe inventiveness of these gifted German filmmakers from the 1970s, who,fifty years after Gert, were seeking theatrical and filmic strategies forexploring the moral paradoxes of the German citizen, were Gert’s extraor-dinary contributions to dance and film rediscovered. Not until this time didshe receive the recognition she deserved.

Notes

1. “Als ich auf die Bühne schoß, war ich so übermütig und so sehr erfüllt vondem Trieb, das Publikum aufzurütteln, daß ich wie eine Bombe in diese vonden andern geschaffene Atmosphäre der Lieblichkeit hineinplatzte. [. . .]Und dieselben Bewegungen, die ich auf der Probe sanft und anmutig getanzthatte, übertrieb ich jetzt wild. Mit Riesenschritten stürmte ich quer über dasPodium, die Arme schlenkerten wie ein großer Pendel, die Hände spreiztensich, das Gesicht verzerrte sich zu frechen Grimassen. [. . .] Im Publikum warein Aufruhr. Die einen trampelten vor Begeisterung, die anderen pfiffen vorWut” (Mein Weg 30). All German to English translations are my own.

2. Max Reinhardt (b. Baden, Austria, 1873–1943) was Germany’s most impor-tant stage producer and director during the first third of the twentieth cen-tury. He exerted enormous influence on German and international cinema.

3. Pina Bausch (b. Solingen, Germany, 1940) danced at the Folkwang Schoolin Essen under renowned expressionistic choreographer Kurt Jooss. In NewYork City (1960–1962) she studied classical ballet and modern dance atJulliard with Anthony Tudor, José Limon, Louis Horst, among others.

4. See Dowden (252–63). For further discussion of the incorporation of circusinto 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 sichlangsam,der Kampf beginnt, die Hände ballen sich zur Faust, immer fester,die Schultern krümmen sich, das Gesicht verzerrt sich vor Schmerz undQual. Schmerz wird unerträglich, der Mund öffnet sich weit zu lautlosemSchrei. Ich biege den Kopf zurück, Schultern, Arme, Hände, der ganzeKörper erstarrt. Ich versuche mich zu wehren. Sinnlos. Sekundenlang steheich bewegungslow da, eine Säule des Schmerzes. Dann weicht langsam dasLeben aus meinem Körper, sehr langsam entspannt er sich. Der Schmerz läßt



nach, der Mund wird weicher, Schultern fallen, die Arme werden schlaff, dieHände. Ich fühle die Starre der Menschen im Zuschauerraum, will sie trösten,ein Abglanz vom Leben gleitet in mein Gesicht, schon von sehr weit hererscheint ein Lächeln. Dann versinkt es jäh, die Wangen lassen nach, der Kopffällt schnell, der Kopf einer Puppe. Aus. Weg. Ich bin gestorben. Totenstille.Niemand im Zuschauerraum wagt zu atmen. Ich bin tot” (Hexe 49).

6. See Bürger (22–26).7. Russian avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948)

became famous for his innovative revolutionary films Strike (1925) and TheBattleship Potemkin (1925). His theory of montage influenced experimentalfilmmakers throughout the world. Montage, made possible through thecutting and reordering of raw footage, enabled the creation of a new kindof narrative independent of classical linearity and closure.

8. Filmmaker Walter Ruttman (1887–1941) experimented with geometricforms in motion. His documentaries, particularly Berlin: Symphonie einerGrosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City) (1927), had a lasting influenceon world cinema.

9. “[Im Kino] machte ich durcheinander einen Dauerläufer aus derWochenschau, einen Trickzeichner, einen kurbelnden Filmoperateur, diekomische Alte, die Diva, einen albernen Hackfisch und sture Soldaten.Diese Bewegungen waren flackernd, so daß sie wie verwackelt aussahen”(Hexe 49).

10. For further discussion on Gert’s montages, see Brandstetter.11. “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. Ichschwinge auf und nieder. Dann entspannt sich der Körper, der Krampf löstsich, immer sanfter werden die Sprünge, immer weicher, die Abständewerden länger, die Erregung ebbt ab, noch eine letzte Zuckung, und ichbin wieder auf der Erde. Was hat man mit mir getan? Man hat meinenKörper ausgenutzt, weil ich Geld haben muß. Miserable Welt! Ich spuckeeinen verächtlichen Schritt nach rechts und einen nach links, dann latscheich ab” (Hexe 48).

12. Gert appeared in a total of eight films between 1924 and 1933. She was castin seven films between 1934 and 1977, one during exile in England, and sixin Germany ten years after her return from New York.

13. Anderson published a biography on Gert, a single copy of which presentlycannot be located.

14. Helmuth von Krause (1893–1980), a medical student, was married to Gertfrom 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 aftertheir separation and divorce, and upon her return from exile.

15. Members of Gert’s Kolhkopp ensemble, particularly her collaborator andlover, Aribert Wäscher, often managed the practical aspects of Gert’s career.

16. “Als ich aus Deutschland wegging, war ich allein auf mich gestellt, dennmeine drei Männer blieben in Europa. Jeder hatte einen Grund. Weder



wußte ich, wie man Geld verdient, noch wie man die richtigen Kontakeschließt. Kontakt schließen gehört in Amerika zum Karrieremachen.Natürlich waren in den USA viele Menschen, die mich von der Bühnekannten, aber ich kannte sie nicht. Ich wußte auch nicht, daß es vieleOrganisationen gibt, von denen prominente Künstler Geld bekamen. ZumBrispiel die New School of Social Research . . . Auch hier verstand ichnicht, meine “Prominenz” ins Spiel zu bringen” (Hexe 97).

17. Aufbau, a Jewish American weekly written in English and German, wasestablished during the Second World War, in order to serve the interests ofthe immigrant community. The newspaper aimed to help Jewish immi-grants successfully assimilate into American life as effortlessly and invisibly aspossible.

18. Reference is made in a letter to Valeska Gert from Aufbau regarding a dancecalled American Daughter of Revolution in Coney Island, in which Gert revealsthe paradoxes inherent in the American notion of justice.

19. Other performers or waiters, some recognized and others unknown, who atone time worked at the Beggar Bar included Kadidja Wedekind, MariaCollm, Sonja Wronkow, Dorothy Johnson, Elmo Barnay, Fred Witt,Heinz Watenberg, Erwin Strauss, Judith Malina, and Julian Beck (Hexe121–50).

20. The letter as seen in this essay is my translation.21. Author and journalist Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) wrote for the leftist

journal Die Weltbühne (The World Stage). He wrote under various pseudo-nyms including Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, and Theobald Tiger. In 1929,he published a satirical book of illustrations and montages by JohnHeartfield called Deutschland, Deutschland über alles: Ein Bilderbuch von KurtTucholsky und vielen Fotografen. All of his books were burned in Germanywhen the Nazis came to power in 1933.

22. American artists of the 1930s and 1940s such as the Andrew Sisters, ShirleyTemple, and Judy Garland were tremendously popular entertainers whosesongs and movies were both patriotic and pro-American. The entertainerclosest to Gert in performative approach was Charlie Chaplin, an actorwhom Gert greatly admired. Compared with Gert, however, Chaplinmaintained a substantially greater amount of American slapstick, whichalleviated the harshness of his social critique.

23. Within a year, Gert was forced to vacate the opera house basement. In 1959she opened her final Berlin establishment called Die Hexenküche (TheWitch’s Kitchen), a cabaret that hosted a variety of young talents, mostnotably Klaus Kinski. In 1952 she had to vacate the premises again, this timebecause her taxes suddenly tripled. At this point she left Berlin to retire inKampen on the island of Sylt. Here too, she opened a cabaret called theZiegenstall (Goat Stable), which was exceptionally popular with the youngergeneration of artists and performers.

24. Arbeitet schneller, die Augen heller.Marsch, marsch, schlagt euch auf den Arsch.Ihr seid in meiner Macht,



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 LampenschirmWar einst Haut auf Menschenhirn.Jetzt, zehn Jahre später, istNichts 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 inBerlin. They are also published in the closing pages of Hexe.

25. Gruppe 47 (1947–1967) was a group of German writers who took a standagainst the pompous and meaningless rhetoric of the Nazi period by writ-ing as simply, clearly, and honestly as possible. Its goal was to help enlightenand educate the German population in the years immediately following thewar, in order to help them make the desired transition to a democratic wayof life. Of the forty-five authors who were at one time members of thegroup were Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll,Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

26. Jubil-JubilarWilhelm, 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 zuletztsind 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 MannDa bet’ ich eben Truman an.Ob Dollar oder Rubel,Ich jubel’, jubel’, jubel.

27. Theatrical presentations of satirical poems are rooted in developments thatoccurred in conventional theater as early as the 1890s, when variety showand vaudeville elements were inserted into traditional dramas to appeal to a



wider audience. The revue-like sequencing of short numbers that includedsongs, comic monologues, dialogues and skits, dances, pantomimes, puppetshows, and even short films became the ideal cabaret format. According tothe social theorist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the contemporary citydwellers craved diversity and variety, phenomena to which they had grownaccustomed with the fast pace and fragmentation of everyday urban life. SeeJelavich (Berlin Cabaret 2–3, 24–25).

28. See note 6.29. Article dated 1954 in the Valeska Gert archive at the Akademie der Künste,

Berlin. Issue and page number unknown.30. Rainer Maria Fassbinder (1946–1982), born in the Bavarian town of Bad

Wörishofen, was a tremendously gifted and prolific film director andprominent voice for the New German Cinema. His first internationalsuccess was Ali-Angst essen Seele auf (Ali-Fear Eats the Soul) in 1974. Hisgreatest commercial successes came with his 1978 film Die Ehe von MariaBraun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), the television series BerlinAlexanderplatz (1980), and his film adaptation of Effie Briest (1974).Fassbinder made a total of forty-one movies in fourteen years, and alsoworked as an actor, producer, and cameraman. His death is considered bymany to be the end of New German Cinema.

31. The first chapter of Timothy Corrigan’s book on New German Cinemadiscusses some of the reasons that high quality German films, in particular,failed to flourish between 1945 and 1962 (see especially 1–17).

32. 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 les-bian, feminist filmmaker, she considers herself an outsider even withinavant-garde film circles in Germany. Among her experimental films thatexplore gender behavior as masquerade are her 1979 film Bildnis einerTrinkerin-Aller Jamais Retour (Portrait of a Woman Drinker—Ticket of NoReturn) and Freak Orlando (1981).

33. Fillmaker Volker Schlöndorff (b.1939 in Wiesbaden, Germany) establishedhimself as one of the foremost talents of the New German Cinema with hisfilm Der junge Törless (Young Törless; 1966). Since that time he has directeda total of twenty-one films, including the highly acclaimed Die verlorene Ehreder Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum; 1975) and DieBlechtrommel (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.



Dowden, Steve. “Frank Wedekind.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. WolfgabgD. 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 VillageIs 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

“Home” and “nostalgia” in Ceija Stojka’s work belong to her desireto recuperate, repair, and return. As such, her poetry is part of a

genre that some have called “exile writing.”1 Although painted rather thanwritten, her art should be considered exilic as well. Both her plastic andpoetic works reflect a hybrid present of an individual caught between dis-parate times and two separate spaces; Stojka is a woman living within aborderland, 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. Andalthough this binarism appears in her exile painting and poetry as shadowand sunlight, these oppositions should not be viewed as a dichotomy butrather as a paradox. Because of the suffering represented by the darkness,Stojka celebrates the joy of life and vitality of the Roma people as indicatedby the sunlight.

In the literary field, exile writing defines a genre that encompasses dis-courses of a desire to recuperate, repair, and return. It is a writing thatfocuses on moments from another place in another time to which the exilewriter continually returns. As a traveler, the exile is no longer in the placedeparted nor is s/he of a new place (Kaminsky 30), rather she inhabits aplace that is “in between.” In the literary imagination, this liminal site canfunction as home, and it is as such that we encounter it in Ceija Stojka’srecent work: a place where family and friends gather, where music andnature’s gifts (flowers, plants, food) are omnipresent.

Stojka, a Holocaust survivor, is the first female Roma in the German-speaking world to openly describe Roma life in the concentration camps,


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 Austriangypsy writer, singer, painter, and poet’s autobiographical texts Wir Leben imVerborgenen (1995) and Reisende auf dieser Welt (1992) describe Stojka’sfamily life and the life of other Roma prior to, during, and shortly after theHolocaust. Yet, since these memoirs lack the emotional language reservedfor discourses of a desire to recuperate, repair, and return, they do not qual-ify as “exile writing” as would most of her work since the mid-1990s.3 Inher “exile painting and poetry,” for example, Stojka casts nostalgic glancesat her life prior to the Second World War, hoping to return to the“paradise” she experienced before the “inferno,” the Holocaust. Stojkaexpresses grief and outrage about the senselessness of this incomprehensible“event,” allowing for two currents within the two genres of her “exilework”: shadow and sunlight. The former is characterized by the use of drabcolors, rigid lines, violent and cold public spheres. This current casts ashadow over the sunlight displayed in her second tendency, which containsvibrant colors, soft lines, peaceful and warm private spaces. In highlightingher created/creative “home,” I will show that her nostalgia for an idyllicpast and her anger about the senselessness of totalitarian violence form aninseparable duality, a yin and yang. The following poem articulatelyexpresses such duality:

Mein erster Atem [My first breathder erste Sonnenstrahl the first sun rayder erste Tag the first daydie erste Nacht the first nightder erste Klee the first cloverder erste Schnee the first snowdas erste Lächeln the first smilemein erster Schrei.4 my first cry.]

One can read this poem as a description of the “paradise” she is born intoand in which she experiences a sudden pain, the “inferno” or “fall ofhumanity,” resulting in her scream. One can also see that she counts herlife in natural time and natural cycles, which grow larger just as she growsbigger: a ray, a day, a night, a spring, a winter, for earth’s natural settingswere “home” to her as a gypsy growing up before the Holocaust. Withinnature’s sphere she (re)acts happily (see “the first smile” as the last of the sixanaphors). Outside of nature’s nurturing “womb” (as indicated by thebreak from “the” to “my”), however, she is vulnerable, and expressesanguish. As indicated in this poem, which I use here as an introduction toher 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 discussbelow, is rather distant as indicated by metaphors that refer to negativessuch as “night,” “snow” and “cry.” This outer world is dark, public, andmale, a domain in which war and aggression reign: the yin. Defined inopposition to each other, the yang and the yin are inextricably linked andjuxtaposed.

In Stojka’s paintings, her subject choices “speak” vividly, especiallycombined with her choice of vibrant colors. Her preferred hues are yellow,red, green, blue, white, brown, and black. The latter three colors predom-inate, particularly in her Nazi Camp Series.5 Images of the camps can beseen 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 thecamp’s inmates perform menial labor under the watch of grim armedguards (Latrine 1993). Furthermore, camp inmates shuffle to the gas cham-bers in Mächtige Stiefel (1993). In these paintings, the viewer notices notonly the endless barbed wire fences, now a symbol for the revocation of theright to freedom, but also the efficiency and machinery of Fascism. Therigidity of this “law and order” is portrayed by Stojka’s straight lines demar-cating barracks and fences, separating prisoners from armed SS guards withguns and/or watch dogs. Rigid linear strokes, characteristic of Stojka’srepresentation of the male public sphere, are also present in her portraits ofNazis, especially in two untitled close-up portraits from 1993, which arepart of her Nazi Camp Series (Meier-Rogan 22–23). In one of these por-traits, two red and white clad Nazis stand beside each other against a blackbackground. The one on the left raises his left arm for a Nazi salute whilethe one on the right holds his right arm down. Their legs and feet arepointed in the opposite direction of the arm that points to the ground.Their other arms join hands in unity, pointing down in straight lines. Theimage of Fascist power, conveyed in the symmetry of soldiers’ bodiesmoving in formations during actual Nazi party meetings and in the body ofindividual Nazis in this painting, cannot be overlooked.

Some principles of Gestalt theory are visible in Stojka’s vertical lines andthe rigid symmetry with which she portrays the Nazis. The Law ofPragnanz, for example; the basic law of this theory “implies that if a per-ceptual field is disorganized when an organism first experiences it, theorganism imposes order on the field in a predictable way. This ‘predictableway’ is in the direction of a ‘good’ Gestalt” (Clark), which means it isregular, simple, and stable (Blosser 43–53). A regular (i.e., rigid andsymmetric), simple, and stable order is impressive and powerful, since itsignals “control.” Stojka reproduces this “law and order” control in herNazi Camp Series and thereby mimics the Nazis’ phallic power structure bywriting 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. Inthe second portrait of this series, for instance, a swastika even constitutesthe whole body of a Nazi German. Needless to say, the Nazis’ pervasiveFascism stands out as does their barbaric nature, embodied in their over-sized garish teeth and open mouths. Like their bodies and faces, the Nazis’mouths and teeth are bloodstained as well. Through the plastic, represen-tational form, Stojka comments on totalitarian ideology. Those responsiblefor so much spilled blood are themselves bloodstained in Stojka’s visualtexts. Similar to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, whose obsessive guilt isevident in the often quoted line “Out, out, damn spot,” Stojka paints bloodas an emblem for collective Nazi blame, guilt, and responsibility.6

Thus Stojka’s paintings in this Shadow Collection (re)present the dark sideof humanity. As such they point fingers at the culprits, castigating the Nazis’actions. Her straight lines, which are reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s cubistpaintings, are a perfect tool for a social critique of the accumulation of Fascistpower displayed in bodily structures and public spheres, because cubism, asindicated by Edith Egger in Kubismus, does not reflect what the eye sees, butrather that which the spirit (Geist) perceives. As Stojka is preoccupied withrevealing to the rest of the world the shades of Nazism and the “inferno,” hercubist elements are thus well chosen to express her outrage and anger aboutthe Holocaust in which, among many others, 1.5 million Roma and Sintiperished.

Her emotional involvement in putting together the grouping I havetermed Nazi Camp Series forces her to revisit the “unconfrontable” in orderto ease her pain and to repair. Yet has she become silent in light of suchhorror, brutality, and inhumanity? It is striking to note that her concentra-tion camp paintings lack titles. This verbal void points to an impossibilityof expressing the unspeakable and unthinkable. Thus her ugly past, paintedin bleak colors and straight lines, exists directly beside her beautiful andpeaceful one, portrayed in her Sunlight Collection with vibrant colors andwith 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 writingsWir Leben im Verborgenen and Reisende auf dieser Welt, Stojka’s paintings andpoetry are an outlet for her thoughts regarding a variety of subjects.7 Theyrange from “freedom,” embodied in the Romni’s life style, to “love” andthe loss thereof,8 to the idea that only in numbers can one be strong. FranziHelmreich writes: “[m]emories and love for life emanate from Ceija Stojka’spictures 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 dailyexistence. 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 Rapportand Andrew Dawson observe in Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of “Home” ina World of Movement, “[b]eing ‘at home’ and being ‘homeless’ are not mattersof movement, of physical space, or of the fluidity of socio-cultural times andplaces, as such. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environmentin which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which onefinds one’s identity best mediated” (Rapport and Dawson 10). They furtherelaborate: “‘[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 thatassumes that identities are inescapable destinies predetermined by kinshiprelations, locality, shared culture, and ethnicity; instead, they believe thatmultiple identification processes are the reason why people can also be “athome” when living in different, changing physical surroundings.9 AlthoughStojka has been living within the borders of Austria all her life (with theexception of her camp experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück,and Bergen-Belsen) and identifies closely with her Rom culture andethnicity, she nevertheless has moved from Austria’s countryside to the cityof Vienna, leaving her life on the road for an apartment in Vienna. And shehas 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 homeis very similar to her former one, described in the poem I discussed earlier.Not only is she surrounded by flowers and plants and memorabilia fromearlier times, she also creates spaces in which she revisits her beloved coun-tryside 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” (SummerPasture), she favors the colors black and green; and in her painting“Sommer” (Summer), the color yellow. In “Sommer,” black soil withpoppies and the white and yellow flowers as well as the exuberant greentrees in the background stand for lushness and fertility. The numerousyellow sunflowers that lift their faces toward the evening sun, while theystand proudly behind the golden pumpkins and behind the swayingbranches of a tree, show vitality and warmth. The luscious and rich earthappears as a Garden of Eden, as does the field of sunflowers in the center ofthe painting. This is paradise before the “inferno,” light before darkness:the “romantic” gypsy life she led as girl, teenager, and young woman. Dirtroads on which her people’s wagons travel are surrounded by sunflowerfields, which are also present in the pastures on which her people camp.



The sunflower is special for Stojka both in her paintings and daily life. InKarin Berger’s film Ceija Stojka, Stojka proudly points out an artificialsunflower and comments:

This is my flower, the sunflower. Of course, it has to be here. When I wasyoung, . . . My father gave it to me. Yes, [the flower] is always with me. Andits color, right? A piece of nature. One needs that. Nature is important. Butthis one is not real [she points to a large plastic sunflower]. A beautifulwoman 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, itcontributes to and represents the laughter and joy of the Roma (44).10

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

I would be exaggerating if I claimed the sunflower to be a symbol of theRoma or for the Roma, yet it is without a doubt a leit motif in the Romniculture and for Stojka a metaphor for the idyllic Romni life before theHolocaust. Franzi Helmreich remarks on the flower’s link to remembrance:

Memories/the act of remembering and love for life emanate from CeijaStojka’s paintings and written texts. The sunflower, for example, is theflower of the Roma. She makes the flower laugh—no roses, they are thesymbol of mourning. The sky as symbol of freedom has a lot of energy andconveys moods, which the nomads were allowed to experience, outside innature, their beloved nature. . . . Ceija has experienced a lot, in her real past,the good and the bad. . . . frequently, she portrays her dreams, that won’tdisappear. (Qtd. in Meier-Rogan 44)


In Stojka’s paintings, the Roma are as much part of her pastoral settingswith lush pastures, trees, the sun, and the wind as her sunflowers. In hercompositions, her people wash, cook, dance, talk, play music, and pet theirhorses in key positions, precisely where her flowers are situated. Thus, insummer and winter, as nature’s (flower) children, Stojka’s Roma roam theland 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 branchesthat appear to embrace all (Meier-Rogan 44), her sunflowers, billowing inmotion, 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 depic-tions of gypsy life, in which horses, wagons, colorful gypsy women andgypsy men in darker colors, as well as gypsy music portray the romanticizedlife of the Roma. It is the fictionalized existence of the carefree gypsiesfrom nineteenth-century German literature, where Zigeunerromantik (theromanticization of gypsy life) was not uncommon.11 One might wonder ifStojka’s retrospective might not be blinded by stereotypical romanticnotions about the bohemian life of the nomads (Landfahrer). Without adoubt, Stojka’s memories are tainted by popular notions about the life ofthe Zigeuner (gypsies).

Her look back at her “home,” for instance, is a nostalgic glance at Romalife that focuses on the positive elements of her people as nomads. In herpainting entitled “Vor dem Schlafengehen” (Before Bedtime), for example,we see three women sitting inside a caravan wagon (Meier-Rogan 14). Itis evening, and the sun sets behind the trees from which a woman holdinga 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 theysituated 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 SunlightCollection 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 heris 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 engagedin conversation on a large bed in front of the window. Although theRomni stand out, they are not the centerpiece of her painting. Many otherobjects are of importance as well: the portrait of the Virgin Mary in the lefthand corner, the mirror and armoire in the right hand corner, the table



with coffee and milk cans, a pot and tomatoes, surrounded by chairs in theforeground on the left, the colorful rug in the middle, and the wood burn-ing stove with the red teapot, the Dutch oven and the polka-dotted pot inthe 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 theimpression that a child painted her former home, lovingly rememberingmany objects, and particularly the kitchen with its many utensils. Stojka’simpressionistic style brings this kitchen to life. Was this, perhaps, the placewhere 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 swayingsunflowers 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 Collectionis the stark contrast between her portrayal of light, warm, private spaces anddark, cold, public places inhabited by male subjects. Her Nazi Camp Seriesin particular, with its dark colors and straight, masculine lines, is in oppositionto the light colors and curved, feminine lines of her Nomad Living Series.

Another painting of the latter category depicts, again, the inside of awagon. In this untitled painting,12 Stojka remembers the view from thewindow into the world outside, where chickens roam, and where a pathleads 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 stovewith polka-dotted pots (Meier-Rogan 12). As in van Gogh’s Bedroom atArle, lines run toward one point in the painting, denying a “real,” objec-tive view. Instead, we find a subjective look, in Stojka’s case not of abedroom but of a kitchen. The atmosphere in her very personal domesticportrait is peaceful and comforting, conveying warmth and security, just asin the previous painting. The kitchen as the heart of the “home,” as achild’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 SunlightCollection mirror the thematics of her paintings in the same category. Inparticular, it is the joie de vivre emanating from her light paintings that is alsopresent 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 extremelyrich in “natural resources,” a nurturing place for Stojka that provides forher, for she “grows and prospers” and becomes “strong and healthy,” as thepoetic voice of “I am a root” indicates:

Ich bin eine Wurzel [I am a rootaus Österreich from Austriaeine Wurzel a rootdie sich auch nicht umsetzen läßt that cannot be transplantedich würde woanders ja gar nicht gedeihen no where else would I grow

and prosper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .meine Wurzeln liegen tief my roots are deepja tief in der Erde yes deep in the groundund mein Stamm ist kräftig und gesund. 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 fer-tile soil, inextricably linked to it by the roots that anchor her. Nowhere elsewould she be able to thrive, other than in this poeticized homeland. Likemother and child, joined by nature’s pulsating nourishing lifeline—theumbilical cord—Austria imparts to her the sustenance with which to gainstrength and vitality. As is evident, Stojka’s poetic voice is undeniablyfeminine, depicting nature as a feminine archetype, as a warm place and aprivate sphere: home.

Home and Nostalgia

What I referred to earlier as Zigeunerromantik (i.e., romanticization of gypsylife) is evident in Stojka’s construction of “home,” which, as BenedictAnderson reminds us, is an imagined construct (7). Although spaces such asthe wagon and moments in times such as a season or the period before thewar express for Stojka the feeling of home, in her works it is evident thathome in not a tangible place. As “home,” Stojka’s “home” is an imaginaryplace at an imaginary time within a fixed time frame, the period before theSecond World War. Stojka’s “home” is her imagined space in which herchildhood and life on the road are relived, and where her nostalgia showsa longing for a life lost. This “place that is not a place, and a time that is not



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 artisticreconstruction of home. The result is a liminal site in which the feltabsence 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 com-plements, for the most part, painful images of the Holocaust. RobertaRubenstein writes that nostalgia “fuels a desire not only to retrieve emo-tionally resonant memories but to ‘fix’ them: to make of the momentsomething permanent and also to transmute losses it represents into some-thing more consoling.” (33). In Berger’s documentary we witness Stojka’sdesire to “fix” these memories. This artist-poet provides a framework forretrieving them during family gatherings at which her children and in-lawstalk and sing in Romanes, mixed with German. They congregate aroundthe main dish prepared in a “Reindl” (Dutch oven) similar to the subjectof 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 harmo-nious past, fixed as memory during these gatherings, becomes part of thepresent, literally. Stojka, I argue, clings to the Romni custom in whichfamily 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 cher-ished as a child. The kitchen becomes an intimate private space in which asense 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, pub-lic realm and the warm, light, private realm, Stojka’s nostalgic look at thekitchen as home loses its sentimental touch and becomes more sober in thispoem in that the perspective—i.e. the poetic voice—is not of a child or ofan adult, but that of a “Reindl,” a Dutch oven, as indicated in the secondhalf 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) andthe idea of a pot spitting at Stojka’s sister Mitzi (Mitzl) undermine theromanticization we have seen in previous texts by Stojka, as does the wordblöd (stupid), describing Mitzi’s hair, as well as the fact that Stojka writes inan Austrian dialect. For instance, in first complimenting and then insultingher 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 speakin a mainstream Austrian dialect:

A Dutch oven from the mid-twentieswas very much badgered and always on the stove.Once a goulash, then a crab andthen again tschewabschidschithat was the most beautiful mish mashthe poor Dutch oven was always on the stovebecause the whole gang is coming again.Out of anger the dutch oven spits alreadyonto Mitzl’s apron so that it spatters.Mitzl never cleans me as nicelyas Franzl [cleans] his Porsche.I also don’t get put away in abox as I should be.But today we have goulash againand I can spit onto Mitzl’s apron againand 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, unitingRomni family members, is recognized for its hard work, playfully. Unlikemuch of her other poems, this one stands out for its realistic rather thanromanticized description of memorabilia and for the deliberate union ofpast and present as Stojka, the “Austrian,” comments on part of her former“Romni” life.

Rapport and Dawson do not assume that identities are inescapabledestinies. Instead, they believe that multiple identification processes are thereason why people can also be “at home” when living in different, chang-ing physical surroundings. “A Reindl” underlines Stojka’s multilayeredidentity, which is not only at “home” in the past but also in the present, forthe language she uses to speak about her past is an Austrian dialect, spokenonly by Austrians. Thus, her bilingualism and her biculturalism enable herto be at “home” despite being a “displaced person.”

Notably, Stojka’s bilingualism and interculturalism provide a home forher in a setting created by oral poetry or songs in Romanes that she spon-taneously improvises. It is for those who know Romanes to analyze thestriking examples of nostalgic moments as evident in Karin Berger’s film inwhich Stojka, on impulse, sings about love, longing, suffering, and mourn-ing. Ignorant of Romanes as well as of Lovara15 culture, all I can ascertainis that with this oral poetry, emotions are relived and painful experiencesconfronted to help cure emotional suffering. Though Stojka’s lyrics and



melody thus express her feelings during her performance, they are never-theless tied to past events and customs when her voice trembles and quiversRomani words across a field, or into a living room, where family memberslisten attentively to life’s “truths” experienced and relived in Romnifashion.

This assuaging of painful memories, as we see in Berger’s film and inStojka’s creative texts, is routinely built into Stojka’s daily living, providingfor imaginative spaces. Because these spaces are filled with life, beauty,and peace in her paintings and poetry that depict lost yet reconstructedRomni life, their contents, as I already stated, are not historically reliable.For this reason, Rubenstein refers to romanticized memories as “lyingnostalgia” and argues that nostalgia must be resisted, because it distorts andfalsifies memory (16). For Rubenstein, “ ‘lying nostalgia’ becomes a judg-ment about the difficulty, in fact the impossibility, of recovering, througheither memory or fiction, the ‘authentic’ version of past experiences” (17).I fully agree with Rubenstein’s assessment that romanticized memoriesdistort and falsify, although I do not share her wish to resist them.Remembered/imagined visions of one’s past are always constructed andthus are quite dissimilar to historical documents. Whereas previously scien-tific research upheld that the brain stored memories, recent developments in neurology have confirmed the extent to which memory constructs mate-rials from the past. The neurological researcher Israel Rosenfield affirmsthat 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, ofcourse, on our body’s physiological, neurological, and psychological devel-opments. Thus, our representations of reality—be they psychological,neurological, poetic, or artistic—are dynamic and constructed rather thanstatic and mimetic in nature (Schacter 12–13). Nostalgia, by nature, islying, since the act of remembering distorts and falsifies. Memory cannot betrusted as a factual document, but it is most reliable as an individual’sperception, her (present) recollection of the past. That is to say that memoryconstitutes 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’senvironment: 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 laterglimpses are no longer secret. They are visible looks from the desk ofsomeone who is prepared to delve into her past, someone who makes aconscious and conscientious effort to return to what once was, andespecially to what once was peaceful and beautiful.

In her apartment, which is filled with memorabilia, including thealready mentioned plastic sunflower given to her to remember the ever-lasting sunshine, an atmosphere is created, conducive to visiting her pastand bringing it back to her present. At her desk in the living room, amongher many flowers and her precious collection of wall hangings and porce-lain 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 atwork; Stojka paints and writes. In this segment of the film, Stojka recollectsand revisits family members who have passed away due to natural causes orwere exterminated in the camps. She tells the story of each of them whileregarding their photos. The physical stimuli activate and revive Stojka’smemory. And she cherishes each and every photo as it is a story of theRoma, her people.

Undeniably, her roots as a Roma are tied to her people’s experience inthe camps. That experience is ever-present in her poetry and paintings. Asalready stated, she prefers painting trees, especially those with branches thatsway in the wind. Stojka favors the plant, and especially the metaphoricaluse of roots in written poetry, as is evident in her poem “I Am a Root fromAustria.” Yet while she recalls nature’s loving connections in her creativeworks, she also recalls humanity’s brutal killings, as signified by a particularbranch from Bergen-Belsen in the corners of each of her paintings anddrawings, tied to her signature. The Holocaust thus defines her as it definesall its victims. Hidden, yet omnipresent, it casts a shadow over Stojka’smemories about her former happy life in the countryside.

Rubenstein describes the dual nature of remembering, a process thatrevives both fondness and suffering.

Most individuals experience [. . .] loss not merely as a separation fromsomeone or something but as an absence that continues to occupy a palpableemotional space—what I term the “presence of absence.” The felt absenceof a person or a place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as apresence that may come to possess an individual. Nostalgia in this sense is akind of haunted longing: figures of earlier relationships and the places withwhich they are associated both remembered and imagined, impinge on aperson’s emotional life. . . . The yearning of painful nostalgia is thus closelyrelated to, indeed, a form of mourning, the process whereby an individualgradually works through the intense grief experience when a loved onedies. (5)



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

Notes

I wish to extend my gratitude to Patricia Meier-Rogan who was instrumental inprocuring Ceija Stoika’s “Sommer.”

1. Portions of the material in this essay appeared in a considerably differentform 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 toroma: seikansha no taikenki to shogen (1991); Ceija Stojka: Bilder und Texte1989–1995 (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 siezum Lachen—keine Rosen, die sind das Symbol der Traurigkeit” (CeijaStojka: 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 NaziCamp Series.

13. This excerpt is from a poem in her poetic Sunlight Collection (Meier-Rogen 24).

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14. A Reindl aus den fünfundzwanziger Jahrenwar sehr geplagt und immer auf dem Herd.Amal a Gulasch, amal an Hummer und wieder Tschewabdschidschides war für damals die schönste Schmauserei.Des arme Reindl war immer auf dem Ofendenn schon wieder kummt die ganze Hotwollee.Vor lauter Zurn spuckt scho des Reindlauf der Mitzl ihr Schürzn, daß’ nur so boscht.Mich putzt die Mitzl nie so feinwie der Franzl seinen Porsche.I kumm a net ins Kastl wie sich’s g’hört.Aber heut’ gibt’s wieder a Gulaschund i kann wieder spucken auf der Mitzl ihr Schürznund auf die Rüsche in ihrem schönen, blöden, langen Haar.

15. Stojka belongs to the Lovara, a subgroup of the Roma known for theirsinging.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism. 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.” CulturalAnthropology 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.



Rapport, Nigel and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of “Home” in aWorld 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 Mourningin Women’s Fictions. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Schacter, Daniel L. “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status.” In MemoryDistortion: 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.

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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 cordthat 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

This essay2 uses the literary works and life of María Teresa León toanalyze the relationships among social and political realities, moth-

erhood, and exile, and how they are reproduced in literature. María TeresaLeón was a young woman at a time in Spain when society valued womenas mothers more than intellectuals. León, however, was an intellectual anda mother. Society compelled her to choose between her children and herprofessional goals and political beliefs, and ultimately forced her into exile.Her decision to accept exile from her children and later her country createdlife-long feelings of guilt and pains of abandonment. León spent most ofher life away from her children and homeland, trying to fill spaces createdby the absence of her family. In both her writing and life, she is drawn tochildren and women who are suffering the same familial separation andabandonment 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 leftbehind in Spain.


To fully appreciate the ways in which León’s professional accomplish-ments were influenced by her relationships with, and feelings for her chil-dren, this essay places her life in the historical and cultural context of Spainaround the Second Republic. It begins by briefly analyzing the status androles of women in Spain before the Second Republic,3 and introducesMaría 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 herexperience in exile shaped her writing and professional accomplishments.

M A R Í A D E L M A R L Ó P E Z - C A B R A L E S138

Excerpt (1997) by Jayme Christine.

María Teresa León: Writing, Motherhood, and Exile

Norms of Spanish society before the Second Republic limited opportuni-ties for women to realize professional goals. Historically, Spanish laws,although relatively progressive during the Second Republic (1931–1936),


did not treat women as equals to men. Women’s access to educationillustrates the patterns of discrimination in Spain prior to the SecondRepublic. The Krausistas were early advocates for women’s rights in Spain.They created independent schools for women in order to educate womenwith their new, progressive ideas and, thereby, separate them from theinfluence of their Church confessors. Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist revolu-tionary and pedagogue, established the first modern school for both menand women in 1901. In 1915, under the direction of María de Maeztu, theKrausistas founded the Liceo Femenino in Madrid. Many of the women whoparticipated in the Liceo were later leaders in the fight for equal rights. Inspite of these advancements and much debate, by 1920, only two percentof the university population was female.4 María Teresa León began to realizeher interest in and talent for writing during this period.

Inequalities were also evident in Spain’s supposedly progressive literarycommunity before the Second Republic. Until very recently, criticsexcluded women from membership in the famous Generation of ’27.5

Critics and the actual members of the Generation of ’27 ignored texts bywomen, and hardly included female characters in their major works. Theonly member who collaborated with women and completed significantworks about women was Federico García Lorca. In fact, he, along withRafael Alberti, Jacinto Benavente, and Benjamín Janés, collaborated withthe group of women who were members of the Liceo Femenino. Women’sinvolvement in Spain’s literary movement was marginal at best.

Women who sought artistic, creative, and professional goals inpre–Second Republic Spain were inhibited by gender bias in the literaryworld as well as by restrictive societal norms. María Teresa León struggledto become a writer as well as fulfill her duties as a mother, in this social andprofessional context. León pushed the boundaries of what women wereexpected and allowed to do. Once the Spanish Civil War started, León wasinstrumental in moving valuable Spanish works of art from the Prado andEscorial museums out of Spain to save them from being destroyed by thefighting, and she placed her life in danger by participating in a travelingtheater group that performed for the Republican soldiers.

The tension between family and professional interests emerged early inLeón’s life. María Teresa León Goyri was born on October 31, 1904, inLogroño, Spain. Growing up in Burgos, León’s father was a colonel in thearmy.6 Her aunt,7 the first woman in Spain to earn a doctorate in philoso-phy and letters, taught university classes. In 1920, when she was just sixteenyears old, León married Gonzalo de Sebastián with whom she had twochildren, Gonzalo and Enrique. María Teresa León ultimately studied atthe Institución Libre de Enseñanza and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophyand letters.

M A R Í A T E R E S A L E Ó N 139


By 1929 it was becoming clear that León’s marriage was faltering.8 Shefound it impossible to balance her drive to participate in the literary worldwith her more traditional responsibilities as a wife and mother. As shebecame more politically active and began to pursue literary goals—she hadalready published under the pseudonym Isabel Inghirami (D’annunzio’sheroine)—María Teresa León drifted from her husband and children.Around the same time, she met Generation of ’27 poet Rafael Alberti. Leónand Alberti later fled to Mallorca and under the Second Republic weremarried in a civil wedding in 1932. The only person from her family whoattended the wedding was her mother.9 León later lost legal custody ofGonzalo and Enrique.10 Memories, feelings of guilt, and pain related to herseparation from her first family affected María Teresa León’s writings as wellas her feelings as a mother and an “exile” throughout her second marriage.

María Teresa León was an accomplished professional apart from herunofficial title as wife of the great Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. Free from theconservative atmosphere that characterized the years she lived in Burgos dur-ing her first marriage, León took up political struggles to aid the oppressedand the proletariat and began to publish her own writings. León’s politicalcommitments were clear in her early travels to Russia and Latin America, aswell as in her active opposition to Fascism and her strong advocacy of theideals of the Second Republic in Spain. Soon after their marriage, León andAlberti received a grant to study the European theater movement, travelingto Berlin, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Holland. Thecouple also visited the United States after the Revolution of Asturias to solicitfunds to aid victims of the workers’ uprising.

María Teresa León was a Communist, the founder of the “Guerrillas ofthe Theatre” that performed on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War toentertain the Republican soldiers, a founder of the Marxist journals Octubreand El Mono Azul, and a prolific writer of prose, poetry, and theater.11 Inanticipation of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War, León participatedin the Committee of the Defense and Protection of the National ArtisticTreasury (Junta de Defensa y Protección del Tesoro Artístico Nacional) thatmoved works of art from the Prado Museum and the Escorial to safetyoutside 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 from1939 to 1940. They worked as translators and announcers for LatinAmerican broadcasts for the French radio station Paris-Mondial. They thenlived in Argentina for twenty-three years. In 1963 they moved to Italy, andon April 27, 1977, León and Alberti returned to Spain after the death ofFranco and the restoration of democracy. María Teresa León died onDecember 13, 1988.



Throughout their relationship, León was often treated by critics and thepress as merely Alberti’s attractive companion. In spite of her accomplish-ments, an interviewer in Mexico in 1935 referred to her as: “María TeresaLeón, la escritora española, [. . .] en compañía de su esposo, el famoso poetaRafael Alberti [. . .]. De buen cuerpo, rubia como el sol en esa región deEspaña donde las mujeres tienen la gentileza, la gracia, la manera de hablary hasta el tono de voz que la hacen en extremo simpática y agradable”(María Teresa León, the Spanish writer [. . .] who is accompanying herhusband, the famous poet Rafael Alberti [. . .]. She has a nice body, andblonde hair like the sun in that region of Spain where the women havesuch charm, grace, and a manner of speaking that, down to the tone ofvoice, is so pleasing; Marrast 59). In the same interview, however, MaríaTeresa responded to a question about “female literature in Spain” by recit-ing a long list of women who were active writers at the time.12 There is astark contrast between León’s serious discussion of literature by women,and the journalist’s superficial physical description of the author. This inci-dent highlights the discrimination women of this period faced when theyaddressed serious topics. Ingrained paternalistic tendencies in the press—and even in literary circles—often focused disproportionately on theirphysical beauty, while ignoring their analyses.

Behind this strong, blonde, combative, and smiling woman, as she isdescribed in the majority of the books and critical articles about her, thereis a tormented woman. León was a mother without children who suffereda life in exile, one who had to find children (as she explains in Contra vientoy marea) in the battles, taking them by the hands in the streets during theSpanish Civil War because they were lost, orphaned, alone, because theywere children and victims of the war. In the short story that lends its titleto the collection of short stories, Una estrella roja (A Red Star), Leónpresents the story of a little girl caught in the midst of war. She is killedtransporting explosives and is buried with a red star (estrella roja).13 In thisstory, León uses the voice of a mother, “a brave woman,” to tell how herchildren were born to be servants of the people, but educated to be cham-pions of justice. León expresses the dreams and desires of this woman whohopes 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 duringthe 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 wasin exile? Information about Gonzalo and Enrique during this period isscarce. León’s memoirs Memoria de la melancolía—written during her exile



after the Spanish Civil War—is a gallery in which the imprints of manyinfluential people are left on the past and present life of the author. Thereis 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 experienceof motherhood in Buenos Aires had erased the memories of the two sonsshe had when she was only sixteen and nineteen years old? Unlikely. In hermemoirs, León talks about herself like the woman who gave birth too soonwhen she was still playing with dolls, “Nació el primer hijo cuando ella eratan joven que enternecía. . . . el médico se quedó a la cabecera, acaricián-dole la cabeza. Niño, niño, le balbuceaba mientras ella perdía elconocimiento. Le costó mucho acostumbrarse a que un niño y no unamuñeca la esperase en la casa. ¡Quince años! ¡Santo dios y un deber tanalto!” (she was so young when the first child was born that it broke yourheart. . . . the doctor stayed at the head of the bed, caressing her head.Baby, baby, she stammered while she lost consciousness. It took time forher to become accustomed to the fact that it was a baby, not a doll thatwaited 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 Memoriade la melancolía, and in different occasions says that the narrator follows theblond 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 shecontinued 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 andseparation from loved ones—above all her mother and her children. Shedoes so in a way that is common in her narratives, through the voices ofother women who have suffered similar experiences. In this way, her voiceis lost in an “I” (exile) and a “you” (family and Spain) of different voices.

Pero ¿y nuestro destierro? ¿Quién ha comentado nuestro destierro? Aseguranque el español es un ser aclimatable fácilmente. ¿Fácilmente? Diría otra cosasi hubieran entrado en el pozo de nuestra angustia. Con qué rudeza nos hanseparado 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 porqueyo . . . Bueno, mándalos a la m[ierda] . . . Estoy bien. . . . ¿Me recordabamamá antes de morirse? Sí, estoy muy lejos, en América. Estamos bien,aunque se ha muerto el niño . . . No puedo dormir sin ti, amor. ¿Hastacuándo durará este martirio? . . . A tu hermano le han echado veinte años decárcel. No te aflijas, dicen que puede haber algún indulto. . . . Crecen losniños, 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 firmabanMaría y Antonia, y Angustias y Carmen y Dolores . . . Yo he visto cartas ycartas con esa letra incierta y me he hundido en ese mar de penas. (Memoria320–21)



[About our exile? Who has mentioned our exile? They assured us that theSpanish adapt easily. Easily? It would be different if they had entered into the well of our anguish. With what coarseness they have separated us fromthose 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 donot greet you because of me. . . . Well, tell them to go to h(ell) . . . I amfine. . . . Did mother remember me before she died? Yes, I am very far, inAmerica. We are fine, although the baby has died . . . I cannot sleep withoutyou, my love. How long will this torment last? . . . They have sent yourbrother to jail for twenty years. Don’t let it affect you, they say that theremay 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’tknow how to write, you already know. I sign the letter. And I sign María yAntonia, y Angustias y Carmen y Dolores . . . I have seen letters and letterswith that uncertain writing and I have drowned in the sea of sadness.]

León is clearly aware of the effect her intellectual, professional, and per-sonal decisions—leaving her husband and children to be with Alberti andpursue her career—had on the people she loved. She is also aware that sheis not the only woman suffering this fate. Social as well as political realitiesforced many women like her to deal constantly with the pain of beingapart, and the guilt of causing others to suffer.

Before leaving her first family and Spain, León did dedicate her firstbook 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 introduc-tion, her aunt María Goyri recounts that León is a mother “endowed withthe temperament of an artist,” who knows how to “take possession of theheart of the child and make it fly with her stories.” In this book, MaríaTeresa León uses the narrative voice of a mother who is telling stories toher child, and all of the children who like dreaming.

This figure of the educator mother is present throughout all of herworks. The content of León’s stories is often social, such as when a mothertells her daughter that many children cry because they cannot smile, “theyare cold and hungry, and the people pass by them indifferently; not know-ing that a book would make them happy” (Cuentos 58). There are alsomany children who are happy, “they have mothers, books, and toys, buttheir hearts are hardening, and they pass by the children who are cryingwithout seeing them” (Cuentos 58). Many years later, in a letter written tohis mother and collected in the volume María Teresa León, León’s eldest sonGonzalo remembers his mother and her stories:

Por circunstancias familiares y por nuestra absurda guerra no viste a tus hijosdurante muchos años. A pesar del cariño que siempre nos demostró nuestro



padre y toda la familia, no nos dábamos cuenta pero nos faltaba algo. No séa Enrique, era muy pequeño, yo te recordaba como un persistente sueño.Tenía ganas de volver a verte. . . . Quisiera . . . recordarte siempre como lapreciosa madre joven que me tenía en su regazo, mientras me leía Cuentospara soñar. (María 78–79)

[For family reasons and because of our absurd war you did not see your chil-dren for many years. In spite of the affection that our father and all of thefamily gave us, we could not help but notice that something was missing. Idon’t know about Enrique who was very small, but I remember you like aconstant dream. I long to see you. . . . I wish . . . to remember you always asthe precious young mother who held me in her lap while she read Cuentospara soñar.]

María Teresa León always carried her love for her first children. Shesuffered the separation produced by two exiles: the one from her firstchildren, and the other from her country. In Memoria de la melancolía, sherecounts 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 hermemoirs she mentions Enrique. While trying to find hope for the futureand for new generations, she remembers the hands of her younger son withthe hands of hundreds of other male workers. She makes sense of her lifebecause, “I feel the hands of my son Enrique, a worker’s hands, hands of aman 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 herseparation from Gonzalo and Enrique with the birth of her Americandaughter, Aitana—the daughter that brought her hope. This is mentionedseveral times in both Alberti’s and León’s memoirs. León said that people inexile would tell her that “when the baby arrives, you will see how it erasesthe memories” (Memoria 28). But María Teresa could only remember, say-ing that motherhood could not take away her memories of her last steps inMadrid. She remembers the day that Aitana was born, “one day we left theriver, the patio, [. . .] the little town, [. . .] the horses, the mountains ofCórdoba 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 herarrival, the birth of our daughter was the sweetest gift that could have comein those first years of exile. We were filled with hope and expectations thatwe 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 apart of her, a part of her memories and a part of her life. Maybe because of



that, after relating the history of the birth of Aitana in Buenos Aires, Leónsays, “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 doorone day saying, “I am hungry,” and stayed day after day until he suddenlydisappeared. She never forgot him.

Maternity and education—for mothers as well as for children—areever-present themes in León’s books. For León, a political feminist andtireless fighter, education was a fundamental element through which soci-ety advances. As Torres Nebrera comments, in the thirty-plus articles Leónwrote for the Diario de Burgos between 1924 and 1928, her profile wasalready one of a woman who was progressive, a woman who fought toadvance the feminist cause—and greeted the presence of María de Maeztuin the ateneo of Burgos (18). The same author explains how María TeresaLeón told the story of a young woman who was a servant in a wealthyhome. Defending rural women and emphasizing the value of equal educa-tion, León criticizes the hypocritical society that made the woman preferkilling her own child over suffering criticism for being a single mother. ForLeón, lack of education was often the reason women gave in to paternalisticand discriminatory customs and traditions.

Regarding maternity, María Teresa León presents the nation as a motherand its citizens as her children, much of the time victims of injustices. Suchis the case of the tears that followed the death of the exile Ignacio Hidalgode 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 canleave on your floor [. . .] this time death has hit one of your best sons whodefended you, mother, until the final moment. Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisnerosillustrious son of yours, mother Spain” (Memoria 50).

On occasion, León’s feelings of maternity and her need to help theunprotected spill over to non-humans. An example is the dog Niebla,whom she encountered during the Civil War and who was with Albertiwhen a bullet passed above his head and struck the tree behind him. Nieblawas for them,

una maravilla viviente. Por fin, algo no estático e inmovil estaba en lacasa . . . herido por un camión de guardias de asalto . . . es una víctima de larepresión. ¡qué hermosos los ojitos entre la lana! Lo tengo hoy aún aquí, bajomi mano. “niebla, tú no comprendes. Sí, no comprendes nuestra ternura queviene de tan lejos y la hemos ido traspasando a todos los perros que seacercaron a nuestra vida.” (Memoria 31)

[a living marvel. Finally, something that was neither stationary nor immobilewas in the house . . . injured by a truck . . . it is a victim of the repression. Itseyes are so sweet surrounded by fur! I have him here with me, under my



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

These same feelings arise with the other “children” that the author encoun-ters during the war, during exile, and during the pain left by exile—theemptiness that is filled with people, with the faces that arrived in her housein Buenos Aires and later in Rome. Memories rush over María Teresa.She hurts and complains because the memories follow her, make her lookat 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 torecuperate the past that she feared, that she would forget sooner or later.19

María Teresa León anticipated the future—old age and solitude—anddefended the old women who do crazy things to get attention: “A mí meda miedo que llegue un día en que nadie me vea. Sería un purgatorio esode andar por la calle sin que ninguna mirada se cruzase con la mía. Yo creoque por eso las viejas muy viejas con personalidad se vuelven borrachas oescandalizan a todo el mundo. Sí. Hay que hacer algo, distinguirse” (I amafraid of the day when no one takes me seriously. This would be a purga-tory of walking through the streets without having a single gaze cross myown. I think that because of this, the very old women who have personal-ity become drunks or they scandalize everyone. If you have to do some-thing, distinguish yourself; Memoria 44). She keeps returning to these crazyold women in the Trastevere in Rome, medicating and feeding their cats,which, according to the old women, are like children. One of themstopped to talk with María Teresa and, crying, she said that her cat wasbetter 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, whileshe was living in Buenos Aires with Alberti and Aitana, does not appear inany of her texts. In the introduction to a new edition of short stories byLeón, written by Alberti’s second wife María Asunción Mateo, the latterexplains only that Aitana was born in Buenos Aires and that Gonzalo joinedthem 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 húmedamañana de abril [. . .]. Te acompañaban Losada y Rafael. No podría explicarlo que sentí entonces, una mezcla de alegría y de miedo a lo desconocido.Casi éramos unos extraños, sin embargo el encuentro fue muy fácil, teníastalento para resolver cualquier circunstancia que se presentara. ¡Qué cariño,paciencia y dedicación tuviste con él [Alberti], con Aitana y conmigo!(Mateo 78)



[I remember how you were waiting at the Buenos Aires port on a humidApril morning (. . .). Losada and Rafael accompanied you. I cannot explainwhat I felt, a mixture of happiness and fear of the unknown. Even thoughwe were almost strangers, the reunion was easy, you could resolve anycircumstance that faced you. What affection, patience, and dedication youhad with him (Alberti), Aitana, and me!]

María Teresa León’s home and life were full of people and animals thatshe 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 littlevillage where we even have a garden. I will take my dogs, the cat, theparrot and the canaries. What a family!” (María 85). Nonetheless, León,now a grandmother,20 could never forget the pain of not seeing her otherfamily, 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 nietapasase 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 tenganovio y se case” (The other [family], that walks on two legs, I hardly see. Iwould 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 notresigned to her growing-up, having boyfriends, and marrying; María 85).

It is clear that León’s children, and her separation from them, are integralto understanding her life and accomplishments. Although the eldest of herchildren, Gonzalo, realized his dream of reuniting with his mother in BuenosAires after many years, the writer always carried the heartbreaking experienceof being separated from her children and her native land. She never becamefully 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 algobueno cuando suenen las 12 campanadas en Gobernación” (I have spent manyyears away from the Spanish celebrations. Seeing as though I cannot becomeaccustomed to this, I ask you to please wish for something good for me whenthe twelfth bell rings in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid; María 81).

An orphaned woman without a homeland, María Teresa León had towait until 1977 to go back to Spain. When she finally returned, she could nolonger recognize anyone. Behind the pressure to remember and rescue hermemories through writing, María Teresa León had forgotten everything. Shecould not even remember her children. Gonzalo wrote in a letter,

Madre: [. . .] ¡Qué mala pasada te jugó la vida al final del libreto! Tú, queposeíste una de las inteligencias femeninas más brillantes de España, acentuada



personalidad, una conversación tan amena, te encuentras con la memoriadisgregada, los recuerdos borrados, la mente confusa, disminuidos lossentidos. ¡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, astrong personality, such a pleasant manner, you find yourself with adisintegrated mind, the memories erased, the thoughts confused, the sensesdiminished. 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 notleft with even a crack in which to store her own memories. AnotherSpanish writer, Benjamín Prado, comments that León was lost on a voyageinside herself that pushed her further and further away from her surroundingsand her loved ones.

En una ocasión, al visitarla, llevé conmigo un ejemplar de su libro Memoriade la melancolía, por ver si era capaz de escribir en él su nombre, dedicán-domelo. Y María Teresa, tomando el libro alborozadamente, comenzó a leersu vida contada en el resumen biográfico de la contraportada: [. . .]. Quélejos está [. . .] de aquélla que fundara las Guerrillas del Teatro del Ejército delCentro. (María 69)

[On one visit, I brought a copy of her book Memoria de la melancolía to see ifshe 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 delTeatro del Ejército del Centro.]

She was far from the days when she wrote these words at the beginning ofher Crónica general de la guerra civil (1937),

Sólo con el fin de ayudar a la memoria, atareada continuamente enacontecimientos decisivos y trascendentales de nuestra lucha, he recopiladoestas 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 thedecisive and far-reaching events of our struggle, I have compiled these chron-icles of the Civil War (. . .). I think that the memory, like fire, needs to be stirredup, so that the people who forget, are forced to remember; emphasis mine.]

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



another. “Estoy cansada de no saber dónde morirme. Es la mayor tristezadel emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con los cementerios de lospaíses donde vivimos? Habría que hacer tantas presentaciones de los otrosmuertos, que no acabaríamos nunca” (I am tired of not knowing where Iwill die. It is the saddest part of being an emigrant. What do we have to dowith the cemeteries in the countries that we live in? There would have tobe so many introductions to the other deceased that we would never rest;Memoria 31). In this way, María Teresa León assumed the narrative voice ofthe suffering and protective mother of a generation of exiles and orphans.

Conclusions

Themes such as motherhood, family, exile, and abandonment are importantto understanding the works of María Teresa León because Spanish societybefore the Second Republic forced women to either forget or leave aside(not always voluntarily) their personal lives—their families and children—ifthey wished to dedicate themselves to goals other than marriage. MaríaTeresa León chose to be a part of the intellectual world, but she was neverfully able to leave behind the more traditional world of her family andchildren, and she probably never truly wanted to abandon this role.

León’s commitment to write and be active was complicated throughouther life by memories of the family she left behind. Whether in Spain duringthe Second Republic, or in exile in Buenos Aires and Italy, León struggledto balance her personal pain from being apart from her children, with herstrong desire to be active in the literary and political circles that had origi-nally pulled her from her family. León’s attempts to find equilibrium in herlife were made even more difficult because of her gender. Though she wasan equal to her more famous second husband Rafael Alberti, she facedpaternalistic discrimination even among supposedly progressive authors andactivists. And in spite of her bold decision to leave her first family to bewith Alberti, León always carried with her the expectations early-twentieth-century Spanish society created for women and mothers, expectations thathad been ingrained in her from her earliest days living in conservativeBurgos, Spain.

The life and works of María Teresa León illustrate the personal andprofessional price many women had to pay to break with the beliefs andconstraints of Spanish society during the early twentieth century. MaríaTeresa 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 andpolitical worlds. They aspired to change how women engaged society eventhough many such as María Teresa León paid dearly with their families.



Appendix: Literary Works by María Teresa León

Novels

Contra viento y marea, 1941El gran amor de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1946Juego limpio, 1959Menesteos, marinero de abril, 1965Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar, gran señora de todos los deberes, 1968Cervantes. El soldado que nos enseñó a hablar, 1978

Short Stories

Cuentos para soñar, 1928La bella del mal de amor, 1930Rosa-Fría, patinadora de la luna, 1934Cuentos de la España actual, 1935Una estrella roja, 1937Morirás lejos, 1942Las peregrinaciones de Teresa, 1950Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid campeador, 1954Fábulas del tiempo amargo, 1962

Memoirs

Memoria de la melancolía, 1970

Theater

Huelga en el Puerto, 1933La libertad en el tejado, 1989

Scripts

La tragedia optimista, 1937Los ojos más bellos del mundo, 1943

Essays

Crónica General de la Guerra Civil, 1939La historia tiene la palabra, 1944

Other

Nuestro hogar de cada día, 1958Sonríe China, 1958



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 lit-erature and working to improve the country with the same strength, passion,and force as men? Why was María Teresa León, the constant companion ofRafael Alberti who was cited by the poet in his book of memories, Laarboleda perdida, as the person most decisive to his work as a writer, excludedfrom “the greats” of ’27? Why haven’t María Teresa León’s memoirs aboutthe Spanish Civil War and her subsequent exile with Alberti, Memoria de lamelancolía, received the continued attention from critics and publishers as herhusband’s memoirs?

6. León mentions her mother several times in her Memoria de la melancolía. She isthe one who called her to tell her with happiness that the Second Republichad been established and that the Monarchy had been overthrown. InMemoria, 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 howdifficult it was to relate to her mother because León had not ended up beingwhat 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 tochoose between you and the world, and I chose the world” (Memoria 112).

7. Her aunt, María Goyri, was married to the reknowned Hispanist RamónMenendez Pidal, of whom Alberti had pleasant memories in his Arboleda per-dida. León relates an anecdote about her aunt’s first day teaching at the uni-versity. At the university, María Goyri was preparing for her class, when theDean arrived and took her to an office and told her that she would be lockedin the office until the hour of her class, when he would accompany her tothe classroom. She had to teach with him in the classroom with her for theentire semester (Memoria 23).

8. Little has been written about María Teresa León’s life previous to hermarriage with Alberti. Research conducted at the Fundación Rafael Albertiin Puerto de Santa María, Spain, in July 2000 yielded little new informationabout María Teresa León’s first marriage. Official reactions to León may alsoaffect research into her life. For example, in the writer’s hometown ofBurgos, the president of the Municipal Commission of Culture, JoséSagredo, questioned the appropriateness of awarding the city’s Gold Medalto the writer. Sagredo proposed rescinding the award because of “motives ofconscience,” contending that León’s novel Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivargives “a vision of El Cid’s separation from his wife that is much too intimateand contains too much racy description” (Mozo 4). A hostile political



atmosphere in León’s hometown may contribute to the shortage of researchinto her past.

9. There were different notes in the press commenting on María Teresa Leónand Rafael Alberti’s escaping to Mallorca, saying that it was a repeat of thelove story by the artist Chopin and George Sand. In La arboleda perdida,Alberti remembers, “notes appeared in some newspapers and magazines, themost entertaining being one that said, ‘the poet Rafael Alberti repeated theMallorcan episode from Chopin with a beautiful George Sand from Burgos’ ”(300).

10. Information provided by the Fundación Rafael Alberti, July 2000.11. 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.12. These writers included Mercedes Gaibrois de Ballesteros, Ernestina de

Champourcín, Josefina de la Torre, Concha Méndez, Rosa Chacel, MaríaZambrano, María Martínez Sierra, Victoria Kent, Magda Donato, and LuisaCarnés.

13. See Pérez (49).14. 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 theother to see the arrival of the first Soviet ship. When the child told her andAlberti: “Greetings, revolutionary comrades,” María Teresa asked him if hehad a mother. The boy answered, “No, I have an aunt” (Memoria 49). Thissensation of being orphaned, abandoned, and alone, but also being strong inthe fight, in the revolutionary cause, was something that the author feltduring this tough period of Spanish history, and it shaped León’s writing.

15. For an analysis of the different persons mentioned by the author in thebook, see Pochat.

16. Aitana is a bold name because it refers to a Spanish mountain range nearValencia.

17. Aitana Alberti has published several notes in ABC in which she recalls herexciting life with her parents, their travels, their friends and at the sametime, their suffering away from their beloved Spain. Aitana used the title“La arboleda compartida” for this series of memories.

18. Rafael Alberti wrote a letter/poem “Carta a Aitana” (1971) to Aitana whenhe was expecting her visit, “Querida niña Aitana: [. . .] / ¿Eres feliz? Conpoco 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 / [. . .]teesperamos / los dos con todo el coro / de babucha, el canario, el buco, elloro / y, tal vez ya en el aire, / te besamos” (Obras 279–80).

19. “Now in Rome, María Teresa started to show signs of the terrible sea ofAlzheimer’s disease, which had also affected her mother” (Pochat 138).

20. In Memoria de la melancolía, long before she became a grandmother, MaríaTeresa León mentions, “I am afraid that they will ask me: grandmother, whatis life? And I will have to reply: I don’t know . . . I will turn around almostwith tears in my eyes feeling embarrassed for being such a useless waste” (328).

21. See chapters III and XIV in Alcalde (1996).



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?Ella�leon�.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.





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 culturalconventions and practices are scrutinized to either be legitimized and per-petuated, or rejected and rectified. The import of this responsibility weighson the minds of writers. Françoise Lionnet, a French literary critic, believes,“Women writers are often especially aware of their task as producers ofimages that both participate in the dominant representations of their cultureand simultaneously undermine and subvert those images by offering a re-vision of familiar scripts” (132). The traditional ideology assigned towomen of wife, mother, and daughter are subtly undermined in the workof Mercè Rodoreda. Josefina Hess, a Spanish literary critic, acknowledgesthis demythification process:

En las novelas de Rodoreda se observa la presentación de personajes femeninoscuyas existencias están en conflicto con los modelos de madre y esposapropuestos por la sociedad tradicional. Temas como la maternidad, el aborto,la prostitución, el abuso físico y sicológico de la mujer, son presentados conrealismo percibiéndose claramente una posición ideológica que intentaromper el silencio e iniciar cambios respecto a la mujer y su rol en lasociedad. (281)

[In Rodoreda’s novels one observes the presentation of female characterswhose existences are in conflict with the traditional role models of motherand wife proposed by society. Themes such as maternity, abortion, prostitution,physical and psychological abuse of women, are realistically presented


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

Rodoreda’s characters challenged the norms by which women lived andviolated the prescribed behavior, just as Spanish literary critic ElizabethRhodes 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 injus-tices and double standards within patriarchy. Yet, domestic violence wasnot a topic that entered the sphere of public discussion until the 1970s, andonly recently is Spain considering laws to protect the rights of the femalevictims. Violence degrades women and their sexuality, as well as demon-strates patriarchal oppression. Women are victimized by male-dominatedsocial structures that perpetuate their invisibility and silence.

In The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, and “The Salamander,” theprotagonists are victimized by violence, which includes mental and physi-cal abuse, rape, and dismemberment. In each work the portrayal of theactual violence is attenuated, mimicking an official stance that violenceagainst females does not exist. Thus, the representation of the various formsof violence is so subtle that if a reader were not careful, the abuse wouldfade into the texture of the narration, and be dismissed as additionaldescription. The narrator does not comment or pass judgment on the malecharacters’ words or actions, and thus leaves the readers to draw their ownconclusions. With respect to violence, Rodoreda relies on various literarytropes to depict it instead of directly presenting it. The fact that Rodoredadoes 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 itrelates to language should be considered as an attempt by Rodoreda toconstruct a language of marginalization and exile.

Types of Abuse Portrayed

The English literary critic Emily Detmer has identified many tactics abusersuse to control and and dominate their victims. Among those utilized areisolation, intimidation, emotional abuse, economic manipulation, sexualassault, linguistic dominance, and denial of basic needs such as food andsleep (283).2 The tactics are used to create fear and dependence in the vic-tims so they will submit to the will of the abuser. Many of these abusivestrategies are present in The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, and “TheSalamander.” The portrayal of violence increases as Rodoreda’s productionprogresses. In The Time of the Doves, there is limited physical and mentalabuse. In Camellia Street, chronologically the next work produced, the

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protagonist endures, besides the physical and mental abuse, a gang rape, andsequestering. Finally, in “The Salamander” the violence escalates to rape,lapidation, and finally dismemberment.

In The Time of the Doves, Rodoreda portrays domestic violence with atenuous distinction. This novel narrates the existence of Natalia throughher courtship and marriage to the abusive Quimet, and her struggles withher two children to survive the Spanish Civil War and the postwar perioduntil she marries the kind Antoni. During their relationship, Quimet abusesNatalia emotionally, mentally, and physically. The confining tenor of theiraffiliation is foreshadowed by Natalia’s mentioning of two items duringtheir first meeting at the dance. The first is her long description of thedecorations at the dance to include the flowered paper chains that adornthe plaza. The flowers cannot hide what lies beneath them: the chains thatwill bind Natalia to Quimet. Her marriage is linked to the image of theelastic waistband of her petticoats, which confines her breathing and marksher skin, making her feel “martyred” (16), a word that describes her duringher espoused state. Her attempt to escape from Quimet at the end of theirfirst 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 thewind” (19). The wind, which is a natural element, is associated with thefemale archetype. By detaining her, Quimet has metaphorically conqueredher and her nature. This event, described by the two characters, casts a verydifferent light on the scene. Natalia’s perception is negative, whereasQuimet interprets the same event in a seemingly amusing anecdotalfashion. In the relationship that ensues, Natalia’s faithful perception of her“martyred” marital life is at odds with Quimet’s “official version” that willdominate their life together (Glenn, “Plaza” 61).

The representation of female victimization encompasses an entire rangeof suffering throughout their courtship and marriage. For example, one ofthe first ways Quimet dominates Natalia is by isolating her from anyonewho could encourage her to question his authority. This causes Natalia torely solely on Quimet for validation. He begins by forcing her to sever allties 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 ofthe peace I’d felt before a little door had opened that was hiding a nest ofscorpions and the scorpions had come out and mixed with the pain andmade it sting even more and had swarmed through my blood and made itblack” (21). As time passes, she stops seeing her friends with the exceptionof Señora Enriqueta. The couple only socializes with Quimet’s malefriends. The isolation intensifies when he insists she quit her job at thepastry 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 therest of the world becomes complete when the street festival returns a yearlater and they spend the week “cooped up” in their apartment (53). Thisnot only portrays Quimet’s broken promise to Natalia, to dance again atthe plaza del Diamante, but it also demonstrates her isolation from theworld. The opposition between interior and exterior world are counter-poised as Natalia bitter-sweetly notes, “The streets glittering with joy andme picking up clothes off the floor and folding them and putting themaway” (54). In this entire passage, the anaphoric usage of the word “and”not only portrays Natalia trapped in the tedium of marital life, but alsoimplies 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), bydecorating their apartment as he wishes (30), and by making a chair for hisexclusive use from which she is forbidden (49). He forces her to ride themotorcycle with him inspite of her fears (45), and later takes their son onit against Natalia’s explicit wishes (73). He shows blatant disregard for heras he awakens her to chatter about his designs for his chair (46). OnceNatalia stops working and becomes financially dependent on Quimet, she isexpected to seek his approval on all purchases. Hence her autonomous deci-sion to purchase chocolate cups enraged him (44). His overreaction pointsto his unvarying drive to control Natalia (46). He punishes her by belittlingher in front of his friends. His decimation of her self-worth reaches its peakwhen he devalues her ability to carry a child and give birth by minimizingthe 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 methodhe uses to erode her self-confidence and foster dependence.

Rare is the instance in which verbal abuse is directly portrayed in thetext. Yet this occurs when Quimet is infuriated about a business transac-tion: “And I had to pay for his bad mood. And when he was in a badmood he’d start in with ‘Colometa, get a move on,’ ‘Colometa look whata mess you made’ . . .” (53). In this instance, the reader is able to viewQuimet’s verbal mistreatment of Natalia. More often, though, Nataliarepetitively uses the phrase “Quimet said” to portray the abuse she endures.This phrase seemingly confers authority to the pronouncement, becausein 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 poorhealth (62), and of his criticism of how she is raising their children (64).Natalia’s subjection to Quimet’s will—that is, abuse—annihilates herself-esteem.



In addition to mental abuse, Natalia endures physical mistreatment,beginning with their courtship. It is then that Quimet establishes hisprospective archaic expectations surrounding their impending marriage:“he hit my knee with the edge of his hand and made my leg fly up withsurprise and said if I wanted to be his wife I had to start by liking everythinghe liked” (22). Here, in the text, Quimet demands that Natalia subordinateher identity, refashioning it to fulfill his wishes and the traditional idealsheld by society in which women were to be subservient to the male spouseand the family. When Natalia finds this illogical and expresses the inalter-ability of her individual desires, he belittles and lectures her. Quimet’scomportment reflects that of Western culture in which a woman is to focusher energies in the house, adopting an inferior role. Virginia Woolfdenounces that within patriarchy, woman is “so constituted that she neverha[s] a mind or wish of her own, but prefer[s] to sympathise always withthe minds and wishes of others” (“Professions” 278). Quimet physicallyimposes his will on Natalia. When she resists Quimet’s mandate to quit herjob, he violently loses control. She recalls, “He grabbed my neck and shookmy head from side to side” (25). This aggressive male personage viewswomen as “property” and therefore justifies his use of violence on thefemale body as within his right. The force implemented to make a resistantfemale “obey” is viewed as an appropriate method of maintaining control.It is even more justified if it is viewed as disciplining one who hasoverstepped her boundaries.

After they are married, the abuse perfectly correlates to Natalia’s voice-lessness. As the physical violence escalates, her silence augments. When sheshows him a dress she has made, he reacts violently:

he jumped up . . . and he threw himself on me . . . I started running downthe hall with Quimet behind me . . . he . . . threw me on the floor andpushed me under the bed with his feet and jumped on top of the bed. WhenI tried to get out he’d slap my head from above. ‘Bad girl!’ he shouted. Andno 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 pro-tagonist endures during her marriage. She, ironically, softens the violenceby excusing the aggressor’s actions as a “joke.” Yet, this joke is oftenrepeated. By forcing Natalia under the marital bed, Quimet makes patenthis sexual dominance. Just as the protagonist submits to his will in everydaylife, she must also bear his control over her body in bed. Natalia’s ownsexual desire is never registered and is therefore silenced, since Quimet’sassertion of supremacy is all that matters (Mayock 124). Natalia briefly



articulates the reaction his sexual dominance illicits from her. She states,“And I’d see stars” (49). Euphemistically, she alludes to the violence withwhich he accosts her during their sexual encounters. Her inability todirectly name the torture she undergoes indicates her helplessness in thissituation and perpetuates patriarchal society’s directive of silent complicity.Even after Quimet’s death and her remarriage, she fears that he will returnand the violence will resume: “he’d show up and wreck everything . . . Andhow I’d try to follow him around explaining that it was nothing . . . Andhe’d give me a couple of whacks that’d leave me flattened” (171). This fearof the abuser’s return hounds her for several years.3 As Spanish literary criticMaryellen Bieder notes, Rodoreda’s female characters are paralyzed by afear that renders them incapable of reacting against the violence: “Paralysisis the principal trope for the protagonist’s feeling of entrapment. It is atonce a physical paralysis that impedes her movements, an emotional paral-ysis that thwarts her self-representation, and a psychic paralysis that blocksher resolve to abandon a destructive relationship” (93). Therefore, after hisdeath, memories of Quimet’s abuse still haunt Natalia.

An even more detailed description of the exploitation of male/femalerelationships and violence is revealed in Camellia Street. This novel narratesthe life and loves of the orphaned Cecília who runs away from home andturns to prostitution to survive. As a child, her adoptive parents,Magdalena and Jaume, ingrain in Cecília that improper behavior will elicitcorporal punishment. When she escapes the house, Señora Magdalenagives her “such a hard slap that I had a nosebleed all morning. After thatthey locked me in a lot, but I could always escape” (32). Not only isphysical discipline an acceptable castigation for disobedience, but so isimmurement. These acts typical of abusive situations have the purpose ofbreaking the victim’s spirit. This establishes the pattern of physical vio-lence, confinement, and rebellion, which is repeated in most of Cecília’srelationships. Similarly, Cecília’s romantic relationships are characterizedby violence and isolation as “punishment.” An example is the jealousy ofher first lover Eusebi, who is enraged on finding Cecília flirting with theirneighbor, Andrés. Cecília narrates, “[he] kicked my ass so hard I didn’tstop till I reached the bed, and then he came and tore my dress off. I didn’tknow if he wanted to make love or murder me, but after standing therethinking with the dress in one hand he suddenly opened the trunk, threwthe 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 corporallypunish her, but he also imprisons her in the shack. The fact that heremoves her clothes leaves her with no possibility of flight. Cecília’snakedness in this scene serves to emphasize her imposed helplessness andvulnerability.



Her next relationship with Cosme also acquires abusive characteristics.Cosme keeps her confined to his small living quarters. Even when sheleaves this controlled, asphyxiating space, he spies on her (84). Cosmefurther governs her by monitoring her attire and forbidding her to wearmake-up (80). Cosme’s alternation between kindness and aggression actu-ates his control over her and creates a bond between them. Sociologist LizKelly observes that violence is deemed acceptable by society if the woman’sbehavior seems to provoke it (69). When she adorns a new outfit with a redrose in her hair, “without asking his permission” (81) and thus draws theattention of other men, Cosme flies into a jealous rage. The next day heretaliates against her: “he tried to knock me out by throwing me down thestairs 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 beenperceived as “property,” the disciplining of rebellious females in privatewas a common practice in society as it was viewed as maintaining controlover one’s “property” (43). Cosme’s constant questioning and accusationsdrive Cecília back to the streets. After two years she flees to Paulina’s housebecause, “if I went back, I’d be doomed forever, how one day he’d thrownme down the stairs, how just thinking about it made me sick how I was fedup . . .” (85). With this brave act Cecília tries to break the cycle of mentaland physical abuse.

Nonetheless, she then enters her most violent relationship. Cecília’srelationship with Marc mirrors many of the phases Lenore Walker outlinesin The Battered Woman. As a mistress, Cecília has a marginal role in thesocial economy. A mistress is to be available to satisfy her lover’s needs andin return she receives financial remuneration. Yet the role is marginalsince this arrangement is held outside the bounds of the marital contract.Consequently, the mistress has no rights or legal recourse. Marc choosesCecília because she is socially, sexually, and physically inferior. Shebecomes the currency for exchange in their relationship. Marc provideshousing and financial resources, and Cecília provides her body. Marc’s atti-tude 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 manipulateto his content.

Marc tries to isolate Cecília from others as if she were a toy he couldeasily place in a closet when he tires of playing. He sets her up in a smallapartment with a balcony encaged in glass, and does not take her out. Themetaphorical significance of this confinement is that she is being heldcaptive, yet the strictures that bind her are invisible. When she does ven-ture out onto the streets, he reprimands her and uses other recourses to



keep her in the house. Marc tries to control her actions through deprivingher of her sleep, phoning her, and making unexpected nocturnal visits (99).Marc also abuses Cecília mentally and fosters her dependency by threaten-ing to end their relationship and inciting jealousy over his devotion to hiswife and children (93). Other forms of mental abuse ensue such as the ring-ing door bell, the prank phone calls, the movement of knick knacks in theapartment, the game of the crooked doormat, the planting of photographsin the apartment, and the spying on her by the neighbor, the tailor, and thebrown car. With all of these strategies, Marc seeks to have Cecília obeyhim, stay at home and wait for him. Cecília responds rebelliously to hismind games by continuing to leave the house, buying and wearing aprovocative pink dress, and dining with the general, an acquaintance shemade 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 foreshad-owed by the photograph of the stormy sea, which she interprets to meandeath. Cecília, desperate to escape Marc’s abuse, abandons the apartmentwith Eladi. While she recuperates at Eladi’s apartment, he plies her withalcohol and confiscates her clothes so that she cannot flee (126).5 ThereCecília is reduced to an animalistic state in which she has her basic needsmet; she eats, sleeps, and drinks. At this time she is being completelycontrolled. The alcohol inhibits her ability to be rational, while her naked-ness keeps her caged. In this state, her vulnerability is exposed, and Cecíliabecomes the object of the male gaze. Thus, eroticized she is cut off fromsubjectivity, desire, and action (Dawson 305). The transgression, whichbegins with gazing, quickly escalates as the men Eladi brings gang rape her(129). Her inebriated state does not allow her to defend herself or recordmuch of what occurs, only that a “shadow” approaches her, and “did whathe wanted with me” (129). The sexual act here represented only expressesthe males’ desires and the lack of acquiescence by the female. As MacKinnon,a lawyer and feminist activist, points out, “Consent is supposed to bewomen’s form of control over intercourse, different from but equal to thecustom of male initiative. Man proposes, woman disposes” (45). Biederalso observes the interrelationship, which exists between violence to thebody and silence, “For the women in Rodoreda’s fiction, control over thebody is intimately associated with control over language” (87). Gang raped,Cecília is no longer in command of her body; in an inebriated state, herlanguage—power to reason or protest—is lost. In her study of The Time ofthe Doves, Ellen Mayock links the black color in the text to the protagonist’ssilence, voicelessness, and powerlessness. Mayock extends the silence foundin the novel to that of the repression of “voice” during the post–Civil Waryears. Certainly, Cecília’s raped body could be a metaphor for Catalonia,



heavily bombarded at the end of the Civil War and mistreated during theearly 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 duringthe hallucinations, she periodically perceives the rape as “day and night,and the cold between my legs and the shadow flitting in one door and outthe other” (132). The induced stupor causes her only to register the senso-rial values of touch and sight. Because of this repeated assault on her bodyshe slits her wrists to end the horror (132). Yet her attempt to control herlife is unsuccessful because Eladi returns Cecília to Marc’s apartment for herfinal humiliation and justification of his abuse. Thus, Marc uses language asan instrument of power in what Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal hasdefined as “the fundamental struggle to enforce and strengthen dissymmet-rical (unequal) power relations” (18). This scene of the end of their affairencapsulates the mental and physical abuse she has had to endure. As theaction progresses, the violence and commotion slowly ebb and what is leftis 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 placingthe diamond cross around her neck (136). This cross, similar to the one thatMaría Cinta wore and Cecília as a child aspires to have, is symbolic of herconcubinary. Not only does Marc take away Cecília’s will to live, but healso further reduces her status as a woman. Marc’s final beating causesher to miscarry the child conceived during the gang rape, and as a result shebecomes sterile. Thus, Marc manages to take away from her part of heridentity as a woman.

Yet the debasement of female protagonists at the hands of male charac-ters representative of patriarchal society reaches its exacerbated peak inRodoreda’s short narrative work “The Salamander.” The prevalent viewheld by many critics of this story is that it centers “around a love trianglewith 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 beproposed, which reveals not a love story, but a violent transgression. In theinitial scene of the story, the young girl is walking under the willow tree bythe pond. The second line of the story records how the idyllic nature turnsinto a hostile environment with the appearance of the frogs. The frogs, tra-ditionally associated with fertility and lasciviousness, insistently tug on herundergarment, and serve as alter egos for the men in town who petitionfavors from the young girl. Unable to express her feelings about theseadvances, she projects onto the water her emotions and “the water’d growsadder and sadder, and the trees on the hillside slowly darkened” (3).6 Theincreasing darkness described foreshadows the impending male aggression,



as has been seen in the previously mentioned works. The water, which isalso a life-giving element, has traditionally been associated with the femi-nine and in this instance adopts the feelings of the young girl. The image ofthe shattering of the self often experienced after a rape is evoked when “thewater’s mirror shattered into little pieces.” Spanish literary critic KathleenGlenn sees the water as a symbol of the unconscious and female side ofone’s personality (“Muted” 136). The man who shatters the water is notattributed a distinct form, but is referred to as a “shadow,” similar to theportrayal of the rape in Camellia Street. The girl’s running through thewoods is not flirtatious cavorting, but an attempt to evade danger, just asNatalia did when fleeing from Quimet. Glenn sees the unemotional toneused in the narration as heightening “the impact of the story and throwsinto high relief those few occasions when she mentions her fright andanguish” (139). The fear intensifies when the action comes to a standstill:“[e]verything was quiet.” This still-framing technique sets the stage for therape that is about to occur. The idyllic nature setting established at thebeginning of the narration is metamorphosed. The beauty and vitality ofthe willow are now transformed into an object of incapacitation when heraggressor pins the young woman against the tree: “He planted himself infront 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 withmy hair all disheveled, between him and the willow tree, I bit my lip so Iwouldn’t cry out from the pain in my chest and all my bones feeling likethey were about to break” (4). If this were a lovers’ tryst, or even a rela-tionship 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, norwould she feel pain in her lover’s embrace. Another indicator of violenceis her inability to describe the sexual act for what it is; instead it is portrayedas being “pressed.” The inclusion of the description of her hair as“disheveled” is a clear indicator that a rape has occurred.7 The violence isreemphasized 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). Theburning sensation does not convey the passion from a kiss, but shame oreven repulsion. The burning feeling thus foreshadows her final demise inthe fire for the acts that were committed (Rhodes 170).

Male violence continues as the young girl is serially raped. The inclusionof the color “black” when they reencounter each other evokes the aggres-sion. Again, the man restrains the girl: “He held me again against thewillow trunk, and put his hand flat over my eyes” (4). Sight is not the onlysense of which violence deprives her. The girl loses her sense of hearingand then her voice: “my tongue was frozen with terror, I asked him, ‘Andyour wife?’ And he told me, ‘You’re my wife. Only you’” (4). Her uttered



words cannot be misconstrued as jealousy or caution, but an attempt to useher voice to dissuade him from the violence by evoking in him a sense ofloyalty 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 denialof acquiescence is obvious in the setting of the violence. The violenceagainst the young girl does not cease, even after his wife discovers them;instead, it multiplies. Soon the townspeople join in the harassment of theyoung girl by ostracizing her, insulting her, stoning her, defacing herhome, and nailing dead animals to her door. Their hatred culminates in thefinal communal violence of the burning of her home and her body at thestake. Even when she is transformed into her animal state, the violence isrepeated as the man’s wife once again accosts her, the children again lapi-date her, and even the eels appear at the pond replacing the bothersomefrogs.8 As suggested by Janet Pérez, the eels’ abuse of the salamanderimplies the abuse men foist upon the outcast woman (195). The evolutionof the men from frogs to eels is easy to understand since she has beenforcibly initiated into the adult world as the victim of male sexual aggres-sion. Therefore the lecherous frogs are transformed into animals that moreclosely resemble the phallus. In this case, the eels dismember her, removingher hand, a symbol of supremacy or power. In her Freudian essay “TheMedusa’s Head,” feminist theoretician Hélène Cixous argues that disfigu-ration and decapitation of female figures by patriarchal males is a displace-ment of male castration anxiety. Thus, the loss of the hand serves as apunishment or retaliation for the castration the males feel at her thwartingtheir advances. The circularity of the narration brings us back to the pointof departure of the story. Perhaps this is done to show that violence iscyclical or perhaps that if one’s voice is not heard, transgressions will beperpetuated. The violence registered in “The Salamander” is the mostextreme of these three texts due to the progressive destruction of theprotagonist. First, she is raped and loses her own self-worth. Then, she isostracized by others and loses her communal identity. Finally, the dismem-berment by the eels connotes the destruction of her physical form and lossof corporal identity. This escalating cycle of violence that some victimizedwomen experience does not allow any escape.

The Role of Naming

The violence toward the protagonists in these stories seems to be activatedby their designation in the text. Feminist critic Molly Hite notes that names“both identify and constitute identity” (39). Therefore, when the malecharacters name the females as “wife,” “whore,” or “witch” they are



attributing to them the generalized characteristics prescribed for thesenames. All of these names denote marginalized status and are only associ-ated with women. In The Time of the Doves, Quimet acquires power throughlanguage 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. Itimplies a power that she will never have, because as his “wife” she is to beseen and not heard. The marriage establishes a new hierarchical relationshipin which he is the dominator and she is the subordinate. It is also at thistime when Quimet renames her “Colometa,” his little dove, instead ofaccepting her name, Natalia. Even though she argues angrily, he overrulesher as he has already classified her as his “wife.” He then reasserts his deci-sion that she “could only have one name: Colometa” (18). Kathleen Glenndefines this act as “merely the first in a series of acts of aggression against hersense of identity and individuality” (“Muted” 61). Wyers believes that forNatalia “the beginning of her narration is also her silencing” (303). Natalia,by responding to “Colometa,” gives him not only verbal dominance, butalso complete sovereignty. His naming her “wife” also redefines the para-meters of treatment she receives in Spanish society. She loses her identity asa nubile girl to be viewed only as the “wife” or “second class citizen” in themarital economy. In this case, given Quimet’s archaic views of malespousal domination, he uses the appellation “wife” to justify the domesticviolence.

In Camellia Street, Cecília is treated as an inferior to other charactersbecause she is a prostitute. During one of their fights, Cosme, the first tolabel Cecília a prostitute, accuses her, “ ‘How did you make a living?’ hekept asking. ‘From those blouses? That’s a lie!’” (82). Cosme is not theonly one to remark negatively about her profession. Marc also brands heras such when he gives her the diamond cross. Throughout the ages, theposition that the prostitute held in Western society has been tenuous, anduntil the seventeenth century the range of attitudes surrounding the pro-fession ranged from severity to liberality.9 Once bourgeois morality becameentrenched in society, an imposed silence surrounded this figure. Victorianmorality, religion, and male chauvinism reigned supreme and colored theconcept of women. Thus, bourgeois sexual ethics supported by religiousteachings, recognized marriage as the only suitable framework for a sexualrelationship (McCombs 33). In general, degradation, double standards,sexism, and stern justice have hounded the whore since prostitution vio-lates the one mandate expected of women: that they remain chaste andconstant. The prostitute is defined as a woman who offers to sell her bodyfor indiscriminate sexual intercourse. The key word in this definition is“indiscriminate,” which seems to imply that she will do anything, evenendure violence, for financial remuneration. Since she sells her body for



consumption, many believe they have the right to treat her in any fashionthey choose.

When the couple is caught copulating in “The Salamander,” the wifebrands the young girl a “witch.” The labeling of another as a “witch” trans-fers pressure and attention from the namer to the named (Bovenschen 86).By denominating the girl “witch,” the wife negates the shortcomings inher own relationship with her husband and casts all blame on the girl asseductress. The wife’s use of “witch” is apropos as witches were associatedwith unbridled female sexual power. Witches have also been feared as theyhad the power to defy the laws of nature through levitation, psychokinesis,influencing natural phenomena, causing illness, accidents or death, andlycanthropy. The Church in its zealous attempts to eradicate any vestiges ofmatrilineal society discredited witches by associating them with evil. AsGerman literary critic Silvia Bovenschen states, “the fear and horror thatthe program of persecution and annihilation of heretics and witchesunleashed in the populace served to restore the Church’s power” (96).10

Female power threatened the Church and the patriarchal sovereignty itheld in society. The appellation of “witch” changes the status of the girlwithin the community, and compels the town’s people to ostracize herfrom it. The protagonist narrates, “the people in the village started lookingat me like they didn’t see me, and some of them would cross themselvesquickly when I went by. After a while, when they saw me coming they’dgo into their houses and lock the doors” (4). The “witch” label also pro-motes further cruelty against the girl. During the act of burning her at thestake, lycanthropy occurs and the young girl metamorphosizes into asalamander. The transfigurative fire in which the witch is burned also servesas a symbol for purification (Encinar 9). In Discipline and Punishment,Foucault elaborates on the usage of torture on the body as a way of obtain-ing the truth (97). Thus, any means necessary was permissible as long as aconfession from the heretic reinstated the beliefs of the people with anadmission of guilt. The event transformed into a spectacle, in which theentire town participated in celebrating their common values. Yet, theyoung girl does not confess to anything and barely understands what isoccurring to her. Even her transformation is incomprehensible to her untilsomeone calls her a “salamander.”

Factors that Allow the Abuse

Another factor key to these characters’ vulnerability is their status asorphans. As suggested by literary critic Nancy Miller, the choice of a femaleorphan as a protagonist “offers narrational fringe benefits because socialinsecurity is complicated by sexual vulnerability: the orphan-heroine



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 sheis considered an orphan within the Spanish culture because her mother isdeceased. Once he remarries she narrates, “there was nothing left for me tohold onto” (28). Natalia describes her existence in her own home as that ofa boarder. With no parental protection, Quimet easily assumes a domi-neering role in her life. As an orphan, she will be easier to silence as shedoes not have anyone in whom to confide and alone must confront theinjustices perpetrated upon her. In Camellia Street, Cecília’s assailability islinked to her being a foundling. Since her youth, Cecília believes that herorphaned state distinguishes her. For Cecília knowing the identity of herparents would personally fill a void within her as well as give her stature ina society that marginalizes their bastards. Señora Magdalena uses this statusto castigate Cecília and shame her into better behavior. Magdalena andJaume raise her to believe she is inferior to other girls and isolate her inorder to protect her from rejection, “it’d be worse in a school with nunsbecause the girls would catch on right away that no one knew where Icame from. And they’d treat me like dogs with puppies that won’t nurse akitten even if you slip it under their bellies. And then they’d bully me till Ileft the school” (14). Yet, her caregivers publicly reject her, and SeñoraMagdalena quickly disavows Cecília as her daughter to others (24). In “TheSalamander,” the young orphan girl becomes a target for the men of thetown. Left alone after her mother is burned at the stake as a witch, the girlis forced to survive as a field laborer. With no male in her house to protecther or her honor, she is easy prey. The girl is clearly portrayed as aningénue from the very onset of the story. Her narrative voice, with its lackof comprehension concerning the events occurring around her, indicatesthis. She seems to be unable to define them, uncertain of what she shouldsay or do. Her life is guided by routine actions without a clear cause. Eachtime she is confronted with danger or aggression she reacts by stating herinability to move or a desire to defend herself as if she were paralyzed. Thisbecomes patent in the burning scene when they extract her from herhome, “they bound my arms and feet and left me with my skirt pulledup . . . . I watched everything through a red downpour” (6–7). The previousrestraining when she was raped now evolves into the binding to burn her.

Not only are these women vulnerable for being orphans, but theiradolescence also constitutes a precarious stage in the development of theirconcept of self. In The Time of the Doves, Natalia’s lack of maternal influ-ence affects her self-esteem. She has a painful sense of loss of the maternalfigure as she states, “My mother had been dead for years and couldn’t giveme advice” (16). The realization of her loss of self crystallizes when shestops before the doll shop windows. This store display is important as it



symbolically encapsulates her lost childhood and is one she will stop bywhen she has to make any serious decisions about her life. Natalia’s iden-tity loss is so profound that she states, as she gazes into a window, “I reallydidn’t have any idea what I was doing in the world” (38). Natalia’sthoughts demonstrate her sense of loss about herself and lack of self-worth.As Spanish literary critic Nancy Vosburg has pointed out, mirrors and theirreflections are an integral part of Rodoreda’s fiction. These reflectivesurfaces are used in the three texts to portray the protagonists’ identitycrises. This pronouncement, in front of a reflective surface, indicates theneed to confirm one’s existence. The beckoning of a reflective self intensi-fies the solitude Natalia feels in her life, the alienation from a sense ofcommunity and her struggle for self-knowledge. The importance that themirror holds for women has been noted by feminist literary critic JenijoyLaBelle as a vehicle to “gain insight into the reciprocal interchangesbetween interiority and exteriority as these create what a woman is to her-self and to her culture” (9). These reflections gain prominence whenNatalia sets out to recapture her identity. As this process begins, details ofNatalia’s appearance are revealed, “I dawdled and wasted time looking atmyself in all the shop windows and looked at myself walking by reflectedin the windows where everything was dark and shiny. My hair kept gettingin 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 tolook inside herself and recognize her worth once she is free from Quimet’sterrorization. Thus, she is able to finally retrace her life through the city untilshe 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 ofshedding an old skin or identity, so that she could assume her new and right-ful identity as Señora Natalia. Elizabeth Scarlett views “Colometa” writtenon the door of her old home with Quimet as an epitaph, thus concludingthat 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, tolet out her primal scream; thus she assumes control of her life (197). Glennsees this scream as the liberation of her “psychic confinement” (“Plaza” 65).

Cecília’s concept of self is related to her outward appearances. When shesees herself in the mirror she realizes that she has transformed into a youngwoman, “I looked into the mirror . . . I looked in my own eyes and felt likeI wasn’t alone . . . and I couldn’t describe what I felt: that I wasn’t like otherpeople, I was different because all alone, surrounded by towels and the smellof soap outside the mirror was the loveable one and inside the one wholoved her” (34–35). Cecília marks the physical changes that occurred in herbody, as well as a perceived duality of her being: the exterior person who is



attractive and loved by others, and the interior person who feels emotion.As in other works by Rodoreda, reflections abound as Cecília stares intostore displays and out of café windows. As Marc’s mistress, she is convertedinto the desirable object for consumption, encased in the window displaycase that is her glassed in balcony. In this space, Cecília would spend, “hourafter hour lying on an ottoman on the glassed-in porch with my back to thestreet, staring at a frieze on the dining room wall made of little angels andpomegranates sliced in half” (91). The pomegranate symbolically representsthe story of Persephone and Hades. Persephone, who is also held captiveand raped by Hades, dooms herself to be detained in the underworld by eat-ing pomegranate seeds. This story of entrapment and rape echoes Cecília’srelationship with Marc, which becomes infernal. While she is recuperatingat Esteve’s, she catches glimpses of herself in the bathroom mirror andthinks, “that woman didn’t seem like me” (142). This questioning beforethe mirror points to what Vosburg terms a crisis of identity, “The con-frontation with the mirroring surface, characterized by disunity between selfand reflected image, allows the author to dramatize and literalize a metaphorof alienation from self and society” (68). Cecília needs to see this doublingto recognize herself and her “other.” The exterior Cecília, the one thatattracts men who want to possess the stunning beauty counterposes the inte-rior Cecília with humanity. To view her body as a commodity, she puts onher diamond cross, which marks her as a prostitute. Inch by inch she assessesthe value of her wares. Just as the evil queen in “Snow White” asks themirror to confirm her beauty, this prostitute expects a price quote,“I . . . asked the mirror how much each of my bones was worth. The bellydoesn’t count, the breasts are priceless, let’s leave the heart out of it. I had tolive until I died. A life has a lot of days in it. I pulled myself up to my fullheight and told that Cecília in the mirror she’d have to do something if shedidn’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 whatBerger notes, in Ways of Seeing, that women assign themselves an identitybased 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 sheis raped and she looks to others to define her. Her return home, after themetamorphosis in an effort to recuperate her identity, is thwarted as her houseis burned down. She is then forced to do as the spiders and weave her tale inhope of reconstructing her identity (Rhodes 174). Her return to the rapist’shouse 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 totallyalive, and I prayed hard because I didn’t know if I still was a person or only



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

Her disorientation accentuates her alienation. In “The Salamander” theonly reflective surface registered is that of the water in the pond. This sur-face bears the girl’s emotions and witnesses the transgression against herbody. 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 thesight of herself. When she is ostracized by the townspeople and begins todespair, she thinks of the pond, and yearns for the way she used to bebefore the violence began (6). The pond later becomes a refuge for her asshe recuperates from her wounds and becomes accustomed to her newidentity.

Voicelessness

In the texts there are multiple silences at play. Extratextually, we have theauthor’s own silence on various levels. First, Rodoreda was a womanwriter in a time period during which feminine texts were implicitly andexplicitly undervalued as a direct result of the author’s gender. Second, shepreferred to write in Catalan, a language spoken by a relative minority, thusher texts were inaccessible to the greater public. Third, after the SpanishCivil War, Rodoreda, as a supporter of the Republic, was forced into exileto a country whose language she had not mastered.11 Then, there is aperiod of silence of approximately twenty years, in which she does notproduce or publish any works. Textually the silences are just as numerous.First, there is the inability of the characters to vocalize their needs anddesires, which is caused by the males’ domination and abuse of these pro-tagonists. Second, there is the narrative voice in which Rodoreda choosesto portray her characters’ stories. She grants control to the women to telltheir own story by choosing a first-person narration. Third, through theutilization of rhetorical devices such as anaphora, ellipsis, metaphors,metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, the violence in the texts is silenced orat least attenuated.

The violence that is perpetrated upon these women causes them toslowly lose their voices. The men gain verbal dominance over the womenby manipulation until they reduce them to silence. After renaming Nataliaas “Colometa” and his “wife,” Quimet systematically silences Natalia as heimposes himself verbally. Her opinions, which she ventures to offer at thebeginning of their relationship, have no value and over time she stops



giving them. When they go out with his friends she feels excluded fromtheir conversations and invisible to them (28). Even while she is sufferingthe final months of her pregnancy, Quimet tries to shift the attention fromher onto him by developing a leg ailment and upon which he fixates so sheself-censors her complaints about the discomfort and pains of pregnancy(101). Many times she states that she does not say anything for fear of howhe will react. The quintessence of verbal domination in The Time of the Dovesoccurs in the scene where Quimet insists Natalia has been seeing Perebehind his back. He verbally manipulates her denial to construe it as anadmission of guilt. Desperate to please, she agrees to say anything to put anend to the scolding. He further humiliates her by asking her to kneel beforehim to ask for his forgiveness. Though she refuses, he says he will accepther “mental kneeling” as her wish to be forgiven by him. Her eroded self-esteem results in her acquiescence to Quimet’s tyranny. Hence, she acceptsQuimet’s views and designs for her life.

While others speak, Natalia’s own speechlessness marks her alienationfrom 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, andaverts her gaze when they speak unable to articulate for him “all my secretsand all my pain” (56). When Señora Enriqueta asks Natalia about her sex-ual experiences, Natalia never answers and instead deflects the conversationto other topics. Her silence on this topic indicates that verbalizing the vio-lence would in fact confirm that she permitted the violence to occur.Natalia seems to be a creature that is subordinate to language as she herselfhas trouble evoking any words and exists in her own world of thoughts andsilence. Wyers has noted this as, “This book, all about words, is aboutspeechlessness communicated in a language that is itself, at the time of itswriting, being eradicated” (304). Natalia finds herself trapped by the insti-tution that is supposed to protect and nurture her and her children. Nataliaclaims that she understands the silence that exists in marital life because it iswhat engulfed her parents’ relationship: “She and my father spent manyyears quarreling and many more not even speaking to each other. They’dspend Sunday afternoons sitting in the dining room, not saying a word.When my mother died, the silence got even bigger” (26). The fact that herparents’ marriage, as she witnessed it, was “without words” points to theonly possible role of women in the patriarchal world: silence and conse-quently a lack of communication (Carbonell 20). Her silences are so deepthat 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 youcan’t tell anyone and I didn’t say anything,” she points to her inability toarticulate and utilize language to break the silence (200). Her silenceannounces her powerlessness and passivity.



Of the three protagonists, only Cecília attempts to voice her objectionsto the violence and abuse she suffers. Unfortunately for her, the men withwhom she associates are not interested in a woman who vocalizes herdispleasure. Her confrontations with her lovers lead to physical retribution.In these passive–aggressive relationships, Cecília irritates her lovers by dis-regarding their “suggestions” to stay home. When Cecília tries to voice herobjections about the apartment or her qualms about being spied upon,Marc is condescending toward her and disregards her concerns. Shesilences her qualms as she fears Marc will consider her insane (105). As timeprogresses and the mental and physical abuse augments, she becomes inse-cure and fears articulating anything. Cecília finally reaches a breaking pointdue to lack of sleep and the accumulation of mental abuse. In her relation-ships when she is “dumb enough to tell him,” this information gets thrownin her face, so she learns to be more guarded (80).

In “The Salamander,” the voice of the young girl is muted from thebeginning of the story. What is interesting is that her voice is directlyrecorded but one time. The literary theoretician Jacques Derridà believesthat which is absent is as important as what is present in all narrativeprocesses (145). In this short story, her lack of voice seems to reflect herinsignificance to the community in which she lives as she is an orphan anda woman. Her only attempt to communicate is with the rapist, remindinghim of his marital obligations hoping to dissuade him from violating her.When this attempt fails, her voice is not recorded again. The young girlonly passively notes all the disparaging remarks against her without retort-ing. When her life is threatened by violence a second time, her attenuatedvoice 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 “Iscreamed.” 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 pun-ished for an act of which she was the victim. The aggressor on the otherhand 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 arebestowed upon her by the patriarchal institution of marriage—is the bearerof the “official story,” whereas the victim is humiliated and ostracized fromsociety.

Silence is all that is left for Rodoreda’s protagonists as they recognizethat language has failed them and communication is impossible (Bieder 82).A tension is established between language and silence. As feminist literarycritics 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



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

If these women do not label or speak of the violence, then it will cease toexist. The naming of violence, however, would acknowledge and validateit. 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 thatconstructs much of her identity is dominated by men (Fleckenstein 107).Thus, by choosing a first-person narrative, the female writer provides anopen space to rescript experiences. The narrative voice used in The Time ofthe Doves, Camellia Street, and “The Salamander” is a first-person innermonologue. 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 moremoving than any portrayal of grief or rage (Glenn “Plaza” 66). Wyers notesof Natalia’s limited voice: “She cannot categorize or judge; she does nottell us about her violence but she describes her violent acts. Nor does shereflect on her position as a woman; she simply puts it before us” (307). Thesubjective point of view also allows the reader to identify the emotions andperceptions of the protagonist. According to Fleckenstein, “A woman’srhetorical evocation of first person . . . may in and of itself constitute an actof rebellion, and act of selfishness” (113). The exclusion of the male voicein these narratives must fulfill the purpose of restoring the voice and iden-tity of these women. Since the male voice is not registered, then, theemphasis of the stories centers on the mutilated bodies of the women.

Language

Historically there has been a distinction between the “common” mothertongue or materna lingua that coexisted with the “civilized” male speechor patrius sermo. In Latin, one language was reserved for the male realm ofthe senate and written texts and the vernacular tongue was used in dailyspeech. Although this tongue was perceived as “uneducated,” the rise ofthe vernacular language promoted the concept of “mother nation.” Thereis no identification in these stories of a “patria” or “fatherland” becausethroughout the narration, the spatial denominators dissolve as they arementioned less frequently. The specific spatial markers fade or ebb away



as the protagonist’s own identity does. All three protagonists revisit theirpast in an effort not only to find their bearings, but to reconstruct theirlife and overcome their feelings of “exile” or alienation. For Nichols,there exist two exilic syntagms in Rodoreda’s writing: expulsion andexpatriation:

For Rodoreda conceived of all adult life as a form of exile, whether livedwithin or without the borders of one’s native country. Adulthood, particu-larly womanhood, is the stage that follows expulsion from the garden ofchildhood; the adolescent is banished and may not return. It is around thisuniversal experience of exile that all of Rodoreda’s novels are structured. Inmany of her short stories, on the other hand, she deals with a particularhistoric form of exile, that of the Catalan’s expatriation after the fall of theRepublic. The two formulations of the exile experience are complementary.(“Exile” 407)

Although none of the protagonists in these works is exiled, per se, thereexists 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 andalienation in these works. By utilizing these literary recourses, the violenceof the transgression is silenced or attenuated.12 Rodoreda relies on thefigurative language to illustrate what she cannot specifically describe. Theserecourses serve to ironically underscore the presence of certain “unmen-tionables” in patriarchal discourse. The narrator never interprets or analyzesany of this figurative language, granting these women the right to commu-nicate in their own voice. The usage of these tropes can also be linked to adefamiliarization with language, which indicates the state of alienation feltby 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 tocreate tension, which reflects “the pain and ambivalence of exile” (Laurila177). Thus through a choice of narrative voice and rhetorical devices,Rodoreda is able to portray the alienation of exile. The violence againstwomen, then, depicts the pain of those “exiled” outside of their bodies.

Conclusion

The inclusion of violence against women in a literary text crystallizesawareness of gender oppression and brings this problem to the forefront inthe social culture. The depiction of repeated abuse, suffered by women,indicates that perhaps patriarchal society is at fault by tolerating andimplicitly endorsing these actions. Rodoreda’s protagonists are imprisonedin a social and textual space that silences them. The reduced space



manages to control the actions and even the thoughts of the characters. Anironic feature of Rodoreda’s narratives is that they follow Showalter’sadaptation of Bakhtin’s concept of the “double voiced discourse” sincethe protagonists’ muted voices become the dominant ones, whereas the“official” voices of the males are filtered in the text. The voice thatemerges from these texts, then, is one of resistance, a resistance to theoppression and abuse that women suffer under patriarchal rule. Womenredefine the traditional power relationships by being subversive in the textand in life. According to Foucault, power is not just domination but anetwork of force relationships with some expected resistance (History ofSexuality 93). Nichols describes these women as triomfadoras because they“impose the shape of their desire on the world around them. In ametaphorical sense, all . . . may be seen . . . [as] women who have seizedcontrol of the signifier” (“Writers” 171). In unison, their voices call out toothers to end their pain and to hear the female story. The Catalonianauthor accomplishes what Virginia Woolf envisions in A Room of One’sOwn, for Rodoreda is a female writer who is able to overcome the oppres-sion of the patriarchal construct by recording the thoughts and dreams ofsilenced women.13

Notes

1. I would disagree with Rhodes’s assertion that most of Rodoreda’s womenare “willing participants in their own downfall” due to “a perverse butpowerful attachment they feel to those who are responsible for destroyingthem” (181). Fear of violence is what forces these women to submit andremain with their aggressors, as well as the fact that these characters arevictims of learned helplessness.

2. Many of these tactics promote the Stockholm syndrome in which the hostage or victim forms an emotional attachment to and dependenceon 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 thinksabout 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 withmadness, shame and extreme grief of the effects of recent violence” (36–37).



Also Showalter, in “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and theResponsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” presents a rereading of this charac-ter’s sensuality and notes, “In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the stagedirection that a woman enters with disheveled hair indicates that she mighteither be mad or the victim of a rape” (700).

8. For the cyclical characteristics please see the insightful study by Rhodes.9. In Ancient Greece there was a regimented hierarchy of whores in which the

highest representative was the highly respected hetaera, a prostitute with animpeccable 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 thehetaera diminished. As time progressed the prostitute became a figure ofdissolve. Only her successor, the courtesan, maintained a small amount ofher former influence.

10. Thus the Church intended to eradicate the bond between women andnature. The Marian cult vindicated the docile women of society and themore rebellious received the moniker of “witch.” This duality later evolvedinto the figure of the mother, the possessor of many virtues, and the prostitute,the assertive woman.

11. Glenn summarizes Rodoreda’s personal marginality: “as a woman, as aCatalan who, moreover, wrote in Catalan, and as an exile who was ostra-cized by some members of the exile community because of her relationshipwith Armand Obiols” (“Autobiography” 112).

12. The rhetorical devices most frequently relied upon are anaphora, ellipsis,metaphor, irony, metonymy, and synecdoche. This is by no means anexhaustive study of the rhetorical devices in Rodoreda, but only a few briefexamples to reinforce my point. In all the texts there is the anaphoric usageof the verbs “know” and “understand,” which are negated. This denotesthe lack of comprehension on the part of the protagonists to what is occur-ring to them. Also there is the reiterative conjunction of the polysyndetonand conveying the protagonists’ lack of self-assuredness. The detaileddescriptions of the rape scenes form ellipses in the text.

13. Bieder notes that Woolf believed female writers could catch “thoseunrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves,no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women arealone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex” (88).

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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

Nivaria Tejera, who was born in Cuba in 1933, lived her childhood inthe Canary Islands, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War and Francisco

Franco’s dictatorship. Her adolescence coincided with the regime ofFulgencio Batista in Cuba. Later, Tejera worked as a Cultural Attaché tothe Cuban Revolution in Paris and Rome. Since 1965, Tejera has been anexile in Paris. This Cuban-Canarian writer’s multiple exiles are revealed inEspero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. My transatlantic reading of this textwill establish Nivaria Tejera’s writing as a space of resistance in which theauthor subverts authority by trespassing political, national, literary, linguistic,gender, and genre borders.

Immediately following the Revolution of 1959, Cuban-Canarian writerNivaria Tejera took one of the first flights from Paris to Havana in order towork for the new government in Cuba (Saladrigas 37–38). Six years later,the author resigned her position as Cultural Attaché in Rome and movedto Paris, where she presently resides. Her dream of a revolution turnedinto a nightmare of four free walls of exile, seemingly liberating yet moresuffocating than incarceration itself. The expression “four free walls” istaken from Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. The third person-narrator


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. Seacabó todo. Cuba, el sueño final de la revolución fue soñado” (Only thatParis 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), representsthe author’s most direct criticism written about the Castro government.This testimonial novel/essay/poem is an inspirational work of art withinnovative style and ethical commitment. The author seeks poetic move-ments of unconsciousness and destroys the rules of language in an expres-sion of freedom. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explores themechanisms 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 intro-duce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, andthreatens it. The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poeticlanguage practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means ofits transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival andrevolution. (81)

Thus, poetic language threatens and challenges authority by entering thesocio-symbolic order2 from the realms of the semiotic. Nivaria Tejera’swords, always poetic and subversive, become the only way to liberate along life of repression.

In addition to her literary value, the unique perspective of a womanwho worked inside the Cuban Revolution originates a testimonial jewel ofthe Literature of Displacement and Exile. Cuban critic and writer MadelineCámara states:

Tejera es una de las voces más originales y poderosas en la novelística cubanaactual. La novela [. . .] será sin duda la revelación definitiva de una escrituralúcida e innovadora sobre la dictadura castrista y el exilio, cuyos juicios alrespecto son los más críticos y profundos que ha formulado un escritorcubano sobre el controvertido tema. (Cámara 13)3

[Tejera is one of the most original and powerful voices in contemporaryCuban narrative. This novel will be the definitive revelation of a lucid andinnovative writing about Castro’s dictatorship and exile. The authorexpresses the most critical and profound judgments offered by a Cubanwriter about this controversial topic.]

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

M A R Í A H E R N Á N D E Z - O J E D A182


N I V A R I A T E J E R A 183

regimes that oppose free artistic creation, using a most effective weapon:the poetic word. In fact, all of Nivaria Tejera’s works constitute one singlecreative force, where exile is the common link.

This essay focuses on the political and literary exiles discovered andinhabited by Nivaria Tejera. The author not only denounces her experi-ence in the Cuban Revolution but also uncovers her transoceanic life andwork marked by dictators. The reader learns of the author’s political exileas well as her exclusion from the Spanish-speaking literary world. Themultiplicity of Nivaria Tejera’s exiles is contested through her word, creatinganti-dogmatic literature as a cathartic experience of liberation. A transat-lantic reading of Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución will reveal theauthor’s writing as a plural space of resistance.

Understanding the artist’s transatlantic condition is crucial to investigateher 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 foralmost ten years by the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco during theSpanish 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 laépoca universitaria. Me fui de Canarias con la incertidumbre de dejar atrás ami 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 byJosé Clavijo, the Cuban Consul in Tenerife. I left the Canary Islands withthe uncertainty to leave my father behind, ignoring if he could follow usto Cuba.]

In 1954, during Fulgencio Batista’s regime, Nivaria Tejera decided to fleeto 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 inFrance where she met André Breton, Samuel Beckett, and NathalieSarraute among many other artists who significantly influenced her view ofArt and Literature (Weiss 10). Tejera states that the city of Paris became“una especie de desierto pero desierto de libertad en el que empecé areconstituirme, a crearme a mí misma” (a sort of desert, but a desert of free-dom, where I began renovating and creating myself; Navarrete 1). Inspiredby these artists, Tejera begins a search for her own poetic aesthetics throughliterary fragmentation and experimentation. As Cuban critic Pío Serranostates, Nivaria Tejera is close to the generation of 1950s Cuban writers,


along with authors Cabrera Infante, Arcocha, Montes Huidobro, Casey,and other early exiles (168). Tejera’s exile in Paris coincided with that ofother Cuban authors of her time, such as Severo Sarduy and José Triana.

Nivaria Tejera has published several poetry books as well as essays andliterary articles.4 Her narrative works include El barranco5 (1959) and a tril-ogy about Cuba and dictatorships: Sonámbulo del sol (1971), Fuir la spirale(1987)6 and Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución. El barranco, a short testi-monial novel, describes the experience of a young girl who witnesses theimprisonment of her father during the Spanish Civil War. The story isbased on the author’s own experience in Tenerife, Canary Islands; hersecond narrative text Sonámbulo del sol narrates the journey of Sidelfiro, anAfro-Cuban man who wanders the impoverished city of Havana duringFulgencio Batista’s regime. Nivaria Tejera’s third work, Fuir la spirale, for-mulates 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 aresult of her political and literary exile, her experiences under the regimesof Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista, and Fidel Castro, as well as the per-sistent lack of recognition of her literary production. The three differentrepressive regimes have greatly influenced her perception of the world andthe 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 primerfusilamiento” (Revolutions end with the first execution; Espero 20), refer-ring to the execution of those involved with the previous regime. Tejerareproaches the persecution of homosexuals, artists, intellectuals, and allthose who did not conform to the rules of the system, which she witnessedas Cultural Attaché to the Cuban Revolution from 1959 until 1965. Theauthor/narrator states that Fidel Castro is the “Maximum Leader” and“Caudillo disguised as benefactor,” who assumes every charge in poweraccording to “his concept of perpetual command.” In her book, FidelCastro’s government is a religion perceived from the agnosticism of theartist. Cuban critic Pío Serrano asserts, “Con lucidez desgarradora, laescritura de Nivaria Tejera dibuja el trayecto que va de la ilusión amigadaen la muchedumbre a la soledad intolerable de una conciencia crítica en elexilio” (With piercing lucidity, Nivaria Tejera’s text draws the trajectoryfrom the dream befriended in the crowd to the insufferable solitude of acritical consciousness in exile; 166–67). Exile becomes the ever-presenttheme in all of the author’s creative works.




Exile means madness and uprooting to Nivaria Tejera. The narrator ofEspero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, a female character with no name andfull biographical resemblance to the author, claims that she often suffers“ataques de locura psicodélica” (psychedelic madness attacks; 45). At thatpoint, she can no longer stand being a foreigner: “esa envoltura fragmenta-dora, esa anonimia” (that fragmented wrapping, that anonymity; 45).Uprooted in Paris, the city she loves and hates, Nivaria floats free like awater lily: alive yet adrift (Espero 64). Her 1965 exile to Paris, where she haslived now for forty years, is the narrative spine of Espero la noche para soñarte,Revolución. The narrator likens remembrance to stripping ancient layers thatencase a mummified body:

Pues como una momia egipcia el exilado se envuelve de vendajes, vendajesque en sus múltiples y complejos reburujones (horizontales diagonales oespirales) cobijan, en su cuerpo semimuerto, cada una de las conviccionesque le alejarán del país verdugo, convicciones aislantes que a su vez seconfunden con las que le unieron al mismo. (158)

[Like an Egyptian mummy, the exile is wrapped up in bandages, bandagesthat, in its multiple and complex layering (horizontal, diagonal and spiral)shelter every single one of the convictions that will keep her away from theexecutioner country, insulating convictions that could also bind her to it.]

Tejera identifies the exile (herself) as a mummy, a semi-dead body wrappedin different layers of bandages, such as silence and isolation, which she isremoving in the own act of writing this book. The Cuban Revolution isrevealed as a train that never stops. “She,” the main character, is deter-mined to jump out of the train and leave its dogmas behind, despite theconsequences.

Terrible angustia de abandonar una revolución, sus dogmas bien perfilados, yescalar sin titubeos el extramuros de su línea de conducta, de sus consignasincesantemente renovadas en vistas a no se sabe qué meta incógnita. Siempreoscilante meta bien calculada: hoy contra unos, mañana contra otros. Afiladalínea de fuego esa meta que a priori y como in fraganti hacía de todos nosotrossus irremediables blancos. Tarde o temprano, sus condenados. Detrás de esetren, cuya carrera me avecinaba de un inextricable exilio que pondría coto aldesesperado propósito de huir que me obsesionaba día a día, iba quedandorezagada en su despampanante despotismo, algosa, esponjosa, flotando comoun paisaje en la hojarasca, una revolución ideal. (Espero 14–15)

[Terrible anguish to abandon a revolution, its well-shaped dogmas, andclimb without hesitation outside its line of behavior, its incessantly renewedorders with a view to an unknown goal. Always a well-calculated oscillatinggoal: today against some, tomorrow against others. A sharp firing line is the



goal that made all of us, beforehand and red-handed, its irremediabletargets. Sooner or later, we are convicted. Behind that train, whose journeyapproached me to an inextricable exile that would put a stop to the desperatepurpose to flee which became my obsession day after day, I was fallingbehind its stunning despotism, slimy (algae-like), spongy, floating like a deadleaves-landscape, an ideal revolution.]

The leap from that train in 1965 meant her desertion from the Revolutionin which many believed; yet Nivaria Tejera was already outside. In fact, theCuban-Canarian writer had always been an outsider, an exile, as the narra-tor reveals in Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución when describing herlife-long political experiences: “La trilogía Franco/Batista/Castro hadominado mi vida como una siniestra tela de fondo que la amalgama deviajes, regresos, separaciones, huidas ha ido destiñendo [. . .] Y la poesía, enrelieve sobre todo el resto, siempre protectora” (The Franco/Batista/Castro trilogy has dominated my life like a sinister canvas, faded by theamalgam of journeys, returns, separations and escapes [. . .] and poetry, inrelief over all of this, always protecting; 93). Like Cuban writer ReinaldoArenas, Nivaria Tejera did not fit in the normative space of the politicalsystem. Literary critic Ricardo Ortiz states that Reinaldo Arenas “was anartist in exile long before his physical expulsion from Cuba” (104). Ortizobserves 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 heteronor-mative society. Tejera was also a dissenting voice before she left hercommitment with the Revolution. As shown in Espero la noche, her narra-tive texts became a testimonial expression of her political transoceanicexperiences, beginning in El barranco.

Years of broken childhood caused by the imprisonment of NivariaTejera’s father inspired the creation of El barranco, a testimonial text ofSpanish Civil War literature and the first novel about the 1936 war from aCanary Islander’s perspective. A young girl narrator suffers a dramatictransformation for the loss of her father, hunger, and loneliness. Needless tosay, the fictional voice was Nivaria Tejera’s own word. In an interview byEduardo Chamorro, the author explains the importance of creating Elbarranco: “La experiencia que para mí representó la guerra puede conden-sarse en una noción vivísima de lo justo y lo injusto. Mi padre era un int-electual 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 deuna sensación interior” (My experience of the war can be condensed in thenotion of the just and unjust. My father was a frustrated intellectual, and heencouraged me to begin writing. Writing became the only possibility toreveal my inner turmoil; 26). Tejera’s early encounter with the Spanish


Civil War and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship catalyzed her need to write.In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, “she” the unnamed protagonistrecounts that her permanent state of dissatisfaction comes from her father’simprisonment. Her account is unequivocal: “La niñez, la adolescen-cia . . . ¡qué memoria del horror le devuelven! Recuerda sólo hechos aisla-dos, incongruentes, y, fantasmagóricos, sus consiguientes secuelas [. . .] Hastaque poco a poco fue descubriendo lo que era: alguien que tenía un problemacon la percepción del mundo que le rodeaba” (Childhood, adoles-cence . . . 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 aproblem with the perception of her surrounding world; 113–14).

Nivaria Tejera’s perception of her surrounding world is attached to thesun. In her second narrative work, Sonámbulo del sol, the main character ispoor, a mulatto, and a homosexual, wandering around the sun-drenchedcity of Havana in the 1950s. Sidelfiro perceives reality through noises,images, sensations, and street talk as flashing fragments. The sun stalks theprotagonist, causing a claustrophobic madness in Sidelfiro, as well as a senseof chaos in the reader. That same sun7 symbolizes Fulgencio Batista’sregime, which represents a constant reminder of hunger and injustice forthose characters that Sidelfiro came across in his journey. Thus, dictator-ships and solar light have an unmistakable connection to Nivaria Tejera.The author lived her experiences of oppression on two islands, Cuba andTenerife, 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 lostroncos de palmas se multiplica, le cierra el camino” (But it is true that hisspecter 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 thegovernment of Fulgencio Batista asphyxiating its citizens. The oppressiveforce of the sun in Sonámbulo del sol is analogous to Albert Camus’s The Stranger where the protagonist Mersault narrates: “[. . .] Today, withthe sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, itwas inhuman and oppressive” (15). Mersault continues making referenceto the excessive heat throughout the novel: “We walked on the beach fora long time. By now the sun was overpowering. It shattered into littlepieces on the sand and water” (55). Critic Anselm Atkins explains thesignificance of the sun in The Stranger:

The sun and the sea are constant motifs in Camus’s writings [. . .] To thesun-symbol are annexed the father and other authority figures: judges,obnoxious old men, priests, policemen, even God. The sun thus comes tosymbolize any external repressive force which lessens freedom. In The




Stranger [. . .] the sun is nearly always oppressive. [. . .] The sun not onlystands 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 authorityfor Nivaria Tejera, as shown in Sonámbulo del sol. Away from the Cubansunshine, the author searched the shade of night in Paris to create freely andsubvert, away from scrutiny. The writer awaited the night to dream of herown Revolution. Paris, then, became a necessary continental night space.Perhaps the irony resides in the fact that Nivaria Tejera settled in “The cityof lights,” particularly in the capital region “Île de France.” This semanticirony of of the insular nomenclature perfectly reflects Tejera’s exile: shefound a sealess “island” within a city that boasts the brightest night-lights.

In Paris, the main character of Nivaria Tejera’s next work continuesanother urban journey. Claudio Tiresias Blecher continues Sidelfiro’sexodus, but instead of Havana, the protagonist of Fuir la spirale penetratesthe streets of Paris in an enigmatic and imaginary search. Like Sidelfiro,Claudio Tiresias Blecher is paradoxically alone yet surrounded by hundredsinside an urban space. He is an exile in Paris; his loneliness is intricate. Thecharacter’s impossibility to communicate with others is reflected in hisobservations of other individuals equally imprisoned within the streets ofParis. The third-person narrator describes Claudio Tiresias Blecher’s visionof the pedestrians from his window: “[. . .] Le rythme de la marche deNoirs de Blancs d’Indonésiens, d’Indiens qui soulèvent d’un pied puis del’autre leur propre poussière de chaque côté du quartier latin” (The rhythmof the march of Blacks, Whites, Indonesians, Indians who lift a foot thenanother, then other, their own dust in every corner of the Latin Quarter;10). He is surrounded by foreigners who walk without direction in aforeign 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 forfreedom. As Tejera states in her 2002 interview, the journey is without adoubt a permanent theme in her work:

Viaje y vértigo conjugan para mí un mismo aliento liberador. El tema delviaje en mi universo literario está ligado al vértigo existencial, es decir, a labúsqueda azarosa de una nueva respiración que despeje los círculos concén-tricos de la monotonía. Me espanta, me disminuye, me consume y espasmala monotonía [. . .] Forzarme a una distancia es como reinventar la vida, y esedesconocido que el viaje promete ha de traducirse, es claro, en búsquedapoética. (Hernández-Ojeda 47)

[Journey and vertigo represent the same breath of freedom to me. The themeof journey in my literary universe is tied to an existential vertigo, that is to say,


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

Thus Tejera’s never ending transatlantic journeys cannot escape herwriting. The character “she” in Espero la noche endures the same journey ofthe young girl from the Canary Islands, the Afro-Cuban man of Havana,and the multiple exile in Paris. These protagonists in Tejera’s four narrativetexts represent a collective that pierces the empty spaces of exile, thusbecoming one.

Literary Exiles

Nivaria Tejera’s personal experience as a multiple political exile is combinedwith her literary exile from the Spanish-speaking literary canon. Her literaryproduction has not been fully acknowledged fifty years after her first publica-tion Luces y piedras (1949), and her creative works remain exiled from librariesand bookstores. The author appears on lists of Cuban, Canarian, and Frenchexiled authors, yet her work is vastly unknown on either side of the Atlantic.She is a Spanish-speaking writer whose narrative works were translated intoFrench from the original Spanish so that they might be published.8 One ofher texts, Fuir la spirale, has not found a publisher in its original language asHuir la espiral. The trilingual condition of Nivaria Tejera’s works (Cuban-Spanish, Canarian-Spanish, and French) reflects her contradictory status inthe world of literature and problematizes the recognition of her work, as itdoes not fall into a single national category. In Espero la noche para soñarte,Revolución, the unnamed protagonist “she” uses irony to express her difficultyin finding publishing houses: “He llegado a pensar que la única manera deencontrar editor es atreverse a salir desnuda por 5ta. Avenida” (I have eventhought 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 FulgencioBatista’s regime to Paris as a young woman in 1954; and finally, the authorbroke her ties with Castro’s Cuba, after her most direct political involvementas a Cultural Attaché to the Revolution from 1959 to 1965.

The reasons for Nivaria Tejera’s exclusion deserve further attention. Inhis article “Gallery of Cuban Writing,” Rafael Rojas examines the mecha-nisms of Cuban canonical authority in order to understand the inclusion orexclusion of specific literary works. One of these mechanisms is the“denationalization of the text,” which refers to the process of exiling worksof literature from the canon if they do not conform to the national or



geographical model. Rojas exemplifies the case of the nineteenth-centuryCuban-born poet and novelist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, whosepoetry has been characterized as “Spanish” rather than “Cuban” because ofthe long period that she lived and wrote in Spain. The critic adds that herfellow countrywoman, twentieth-century Cuban poet and recipient of theCervantes Award, Dulce María Loynaz, had her Madrid publicationsexcluded from selected Cuban literary histories. Both Avellaneda’s“Spanish tone” and Loynaz’s Spanish texts coincide with Nivaria Tejera’shybrid national categorization. Her works have been “denationalized” dueto their transatlantic condition, which has become an obstacle for theirreception and distribution. Her ambiguous Atlantic identities should repre-sent an advantage to critics and readers as they allow multiple readings fromall 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 ofnational identity probably motivates these mechanisms of the aestheticcanon” (254). In this light, Roja’s mechanism of “generic excellence”equates the narrative literary genre with masculine gender. Like Avellanedaand 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” (Thefarthest from colloquial language. And you realize that it is not a novelanymore, but poetry [. . .] and then you are trapped; Espero 111). Tejerawrites poetic narratives, always unclassifiable, which have resulted in agradual invisibility of her writing. The author’s hybrid national, cultural,and literary identities are not the only reasons for her “exile” from thecanon. Nivaria Tejera’s literary trajectory has always been located in amasculine space.

In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, the female protagonist voiceswhat could be viewed as the author’s impotence to find herself in a mascu-line space in which she has no voice: “Imposible escapar a su destino demujer enclaustrada en una sociedad de hombres entrenados por muchossiglos” (Impossible to escape the fate of a woman enclosed in a society ofmen trained for centuries; Espero 112). From her earliest publications,Tejera stood out as a female author amid her peers. In 1953, the prestigiousliterary magazine Orígenes included chapter IX of El barranco. That sameissue contained the works of Fayad Jamís, Roberto Fernández Retamar,José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, and Manuel Altolaguirre, among otherwell-known Cuban writers. Nivaria Tejera was also surrounded by estab-lished 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




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 SpanishAward “Plaza y Janés” in 1991, although it did not appear in print inSpanish until 2002.

Tejera’s literary contemporaries received literary recognition whereasshe remained in relative obscurity until recently. Forty years after LorenzoVega’s anthology, a section of Espero la noche was included in the anthologyEscritoras cubanas: La memoria hechizada (2003). Madeline Cámara, whocompiled twelve works by Cuban women writers, considers that theseCuban female authors confront authoritarianism and, in so doing, have cre-ated “otra visión de la Patria que se escapa a los dogmas nacionalistas”(another view of the ‘patria’ [fatherland] that escapes the nationalist dog-mas; 15). Some of the other authors chosen for this anthology include thenotable Cuban writers Gertudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Dulce MaríaLoynaz, Julieta Campos, and Zoe Valdés. Cámara’s inclusion of NivariaTejera creates a necessary space for the nearly forgotten exiled authorwithin diverse female voices of Cuban literature; thus, she is vindicated asboth 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 PeterBush’s anthology. A chapter of El barranco has been included in the 2003publication Spain: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Peter Bushand Laura Dillman. Here, Nivaria Tejera was selected to represent theliterature of the Canary Islands, as the collection is dedicated to Spanishwriters from different regions of the country.

Undoubtedly, Tejera’s vital and literary hybridity constitutes her mostattractive and complex particularity. The author’s exclusive categorizationwithin one specific Cuban, Canarian, Spanish, or French national or geo-graphical group would limit the possibilities of her work. It is necessary toinvestigate the reasons and implications of Nivaria Tejera’s omission fromthe Spanish-speaking literary world, which affected the visibility and distri-bution of her creative production in drastic ways. Despite renewed interestin her writing, publishers have not reissued the majority of her work. Anyattempt to locate a copy of Sonámbulo del sol results in futility. Her artisticand political experiences of isolation created a unique space of resistance, atransatlantic 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 elresultado de hondas incisiones negras en la piel que extraen tinta a su sangre



desde una atmósfera sorda que nada parece habitar” (each line is the resultof deep black incisions in my skin extracting ink from blood in a deafatmosphere inhabited by nothing; Espero 50). Every word in Tejera’s textsis felt, internalized, and bled. The author searches to shock the reader withbeauty and experimental writing (Weiss 9). French writer NathalieSarraute’s use of different textual voices and narrative levels was particularlyinspiring for Nivaria Tejera, who states,

Cuando leí Tropismes de Sarraute, . . . me preguntaba cómo había sidoposible toda esa concretización de la imagen, de la poesía, la palabra, del actocreador vigilante, de la contención en lo que no se debe decir, o sea, aquellaplasmación absoluta de la grandeza que en pintura había descubierto en elLouvre. [. . .] [L]uego compré Planetarium, y sentía que era como si mehubieran lanzado en medio de un volcán en erupción. Mi experiencia alconocer a este ser investigador de la escritura fue explosiva y de ello quedómi necesidad de inventarme mi propia escritura. (Navarrete 3)

[When I read Tropismes by Sarraute, . . . I wondered how it was possible tocreate that concretization of images, of poetry, of word, of the watchfulcreative act, of contention in what not to say, that is to say, the absolute formof 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 andfrom this I felt the need to invent my own.

The language in Tropismes moved Tejera to challenge conventional writingin her own work. As indicated by critic Valerie Minogue, Sarraute uses herown consciousness as primary matter. By exposing language throughimages and inarticulate analogies, Sarraute compels the reader to participateat the same level as the writer, using her/his own movements of con-sciousness 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, representsan example of “scriptible” text.9

In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, there is no traditional plot oraction. Unlike a conventional narrative, the reader becomes a visitor of anExpressionist Art Gallery, reading different “paintings” throughout thetext. Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución is not a novel, but a collection ofpaintings in words. Instead of a paintbrush and watercolor, Nivaria Tejerauses a pen to draw a literary text. Her narrative outline consists of mono-logues, descriptions, a dialogue with a writer friend, an encounter withCuban exiles in the Rastro10 of Madrid, a walk in Paris with another friend,Giorgio Pirandello, the grandson of “the inventor of truth,” and muchbackground music. These are real images that become expressionist



compositions when written by the author. Tejera needs to extract her innerworld and searches the poetic discourse in the intensity of the senses.Perhaps as a hint to the reader, the character reveals the impact of VanGogh’s Sunflowers: “Se sienta a mirarlos y el cerebro se le vacía” (Her brainempties at their sight; 64). However, the process of writing becomes adesperate fight that leaves the author exhausted: “No soporto ya que siganahí dentro [los personajes] utilizando mi lengua y mi silencio [. . .] El prob-lema es que cuando finalmente los sacas fuera te quedas como muerto, conun cansancio en los músculos” (I cannot stand having them [characters] inthere, using my language and my silence [. . .] The problem is that, whenyou finally take them out, you feel dead, with sore muscles; 99). Writing isa necessary act of liberation, yet it becomes a rigorous task with the choiceof every single word. In Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, the attentivereader 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 puestoque las tramas y los personajes le aburren y que los problemas que le intere-san de la escritura no caben en una estructura formal. Aparte de que lasreglas están hechas para violarlas” (will be carried out as fiction, becauseplots and characters are boring and she is only interested in questions ofwriting that don’t fit into formal structures. Besides, rules are made to bebroken; 13). Divided in nonlinear sections instead of chapters, Tejera’s textis an everlasting work that demands a reader who participates in thecreative process of the narrative.

Nivaria Tejera continuously searches for a different voice, another lan-guage to conform to her own particular expression. Her transatlantic expe-riences represent different discoveries that influenced her interpretation ofart. In her initial stage, the author reveals her interest in Cuban writer JoséLezama Lima: “Durante los primeros años de la década de los cincuenta medediqué a interpretar a Lezama” (During the first years of the fifties I wasdedicated to interpret Lezama; Chamorro). Later, during her first stay inParis, the author was significantly impacted by the French surrealist artistsfollowing her experiences with the repressive regimes of Francisco Francoand 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 paraello. En el año 54 los surrealistas estaban en pleno auge. Aún se reunían en loscafés, uno sabía dónde, a veces en la rue Blanche, en Pigalle, otras por Opéra.Acudía a esas reuniones y automáticamente [. . .] me sentí compenetrada conesa manera convulsiva de comunicar. Era siempre la imagen, la preguntabrusca, la respuesta aguda, inesperada, colectiva, la interpretación colectiva. (3)



[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 wouldknow where, sometimes in rue Blanche, in Pigalle, others by Opéra. I wentto those meetings automatically (. . .), I felt connected with that convulsiveway of communicating. It was always the image, the question, the ingenious,unexpected, collective response.]

Experimenting, then, became a necessary outlet that allowed the author toachieve her personal expression through poetry and destruction of literarygenres. Tejera’s diverse influences and experiences produced writing thattranscends traditional narrative due to its transatlantic dimensions, while itconfronts the repressive power that dictatorships generate on the artist. Bybreaking literary rules, the writer destabilizes the experiences of a past filledwith norms and, thus, creates a space of resistance.

Nivaria Tejera’s writing belongs to a heterogeneous epistemologicalspace that articulates the multiplicity of her voice. Literary critic JulioOrtega writes,

La crítica transatlántica busca exceder los marcos de lectura nacional, quesuelen ser resignados [. . .] Pero, justamente, en la perspectiva “pos-nacional”(donde lo nacional es una pluralidad no dictaminada por el Estado) las difer-encias de la cultura se hacen más sensibles de cara a la homogenización. Paraliberar los textos de los cánones normativos, la perspectiva interculturalpermite 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 pluralitynot dictated by the State) cultural differences become more sensitive in rela-tion to homogeneity. In order to free these texts from normative canons,intercultural perspective allows one to see clearly the operating strength ofthose works that surpass models, authorities and traditions.]

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



Nivaria Tejera’s writing is created through her plural national identity,political experiences, literary rebellion, gender and genre crossings, and theplurilingual condition of her texts. The author’s literary production decon-structs national boundaries through its heterogeneity, which questionspolitical and literary hegemonic models. The writer’s hybrid status affectedher visibility in the Spanish-speaking literary world and became an obstaclefor her recognition, instead of revealing the uniqueness of the author.Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución must be viewed as the continuationand culmination of this Cuban-Canarian writer’s literary production,where exile is the common thread. Hence, writing for Nivaria Tejeracomprises 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 aremy own translation from its original text in Spanish.

2. One of the most important contributions of Julia Kristeva to the field oftheory is her description and delineation of the semiotic and symbolic order.The semiotic order is associated with the pre-Oedipal space, where languageis 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 andsyntax, where the semiotic is regulated.

3. See Madeline Cámara. Escritoras cubanas: La memoria hechizada. Cámara’santhology of Cuban women writers includes a section of Nivaria Tejera’sEspero la noche para soñarte, Revolución, among other authors such as GertudisGómez de Avellaneda, Dulce María Loynaz, Julieta Campos, and Zoe Valdés.

4. Her first poetry texts were published in Cuba: Luces y piedras (1949), Luz delágrima (1951) and La gruta (1952), and Alba en el niño hidrópico (1953). Otherpoetic texts include La barrera fluídica o París escarabajo (1976), Innumerablesvoces (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 theeditorial 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 thefirst books published by the new Cuban government, and 1982 and 1989,two Canarian editions. This text will be reedited once more in the CanaryIslands 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 sameimpact on another important Cuban text: Tres tristes tigres by GuillermoCabrera Infante, which also received the Award “Biblioteca Breve SeixBarral” in 1964. Several critics have pointed out the connection betweenboth works.



8. Le ravin, Series Les Lettres Nouvelles, Paris, 1958; Sonámbule du soleil, LesLettres 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 ofliterary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer aconsumer, but a producer of the text” (4). Barthes explains the differencebetween a text “lisible” and “scriptible.” The first one is created to be reador “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 MadelineCámara 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.


———. “Nathalie Sarraute: Un primitivo de la vanguardia.” Nueva Revista Cubana1 (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.





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

Introduction

This essay aims to explain the tension observed during the oral historycollection between two generations of female Austrian Shoah exiles inLondon. It hypothesizes that the loss of the mother tongue and of culturalnorms can lead to conflicts within a mother–daughter relationship. Basedon 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 thereasons for the mother choosing to remain a voice from the margins ofBritish society, whereas her daughter and grandson are assimilated into thehost culture and language. The two main factors identified as causingtension between mother and daughter in this interview are languagemaintenance/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 ethnicpersecution following the Anschluss2 of Austria to the German Reich onMarch 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 school-ing. She read English and French before emigrating, but lacked oralproduction skills in these languages. During her working life in London shemanaged a shop with her husband. Dor was a central figure of the AustrianJewish refugee community. She organized annual reunions of the “AustrianCentre,” an organization around which much of Austrian refugees’ social,


cultural, and political life revolved in the early days of immigration. Doractively encouraged meetings between the researcher and her family andfriends. 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 UnitedKingdom and worked as an office administrator. Viv’s son Nic was ateenager in his third year in secondary school.

This study focuses on the ninety-minute interview with Dor and herdaughter for the following reasons:

1. The interview provides particularly rich and informative accounts ofthe central female informant’s (Dor) life in exile in twentieth-century Europe.

2. Dor’s daughter Viv joins the main informant and the researcherapproximately forty-five minutes into the interview and gives herown perspective as a second-generation émigré on many of thetopics previously explored with Dor.

3. The data give rise to the hypothesis that the tension between motherand daughter exists predominantly because of linguistic and culturalalienation between the generations. That is, the generation conflictsoccur mainly because of language and culture loss. Food and foodconsumption 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 terminologymust be defined. I will use Culture both in its restricted, normative sense ofordinary usage (Bourdieu 1979), and with reference to socially acquired orlearnt behaviors, knowledge, beliefs, values, and customs. “A society’sculture is whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate ina manner acceptable to its members” (Goodenough 1957). Culture lossthus is the loss of knowledge, beliefs and behavioral norms that allow anindividual to operate in a social network or society in an acceptablemanner. This definition implies that an individual’s behavior can becomeunacceptable in a certain cultural context, if cultural systems are not trans-mitted from generation to generation. Assimilation is the adjustment ofindividuals, groups, or a people to another culture. With particular refer-ence to the German Jewish refugee community in the United Kingdom,Mallet and Grenville stress that the process of integration is not a clear-cutone. Individuals can furthermore place themselves on a continuum ofassimilation, and the process of assimilation is not irreversible, that it, it canbe counteracted by culture revival.

Processes of assimilation and acculturation are almost inevitably accom-panied by Language shift, that is, the process by which one language

E V A E P P L E R202


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 oflanguage use in different domains over time; that is, it is associated with areduction in functions and domains of use. When a language is reduced inits function, speakers become less proficient in it; they become semi-speakersor 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 oldlanguage are closely tied up with the individual’s sense of identity . . . andtheir degree of integration into their adopted country.”

Language shift is almost always accompanied by the use of languagecontact phenomena, that is, linguistic phenomena that only occur in situa-tions of language contact. Two language contact phenomena that illustratelanguage shift in the speech of my informants are borrowing and code-switching.Linguistic borrowing is the introduction into language A of words and setexpressions of language B. It can often be explained by investigating thepoints at which a given vocabulary is inadequate in the cultural environ-ment in which contact occurs. Code-mixing is defined as the juxtapositionof longer stretches from two languages in one utterance.

In the sections that follow, I will present and analyze extracts from theoral histories of Dor and Viv, representatives of the first and second gener-ation of Austrian Shoah exiles in London. The analysis will be carried outwithin the linguistic framework of Discourse and Conversation Analysis. Iwill 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 bepaid to which concepts are expressed with signifiers (words) from bothlanguages and to language contact phenomena. Language will be taken as adiscursive signifying system in which the speaking subject makes andunmakes itself in the course of telling its story. Further, I will compare thespeech of first- and second-generation female exiles to show that linguisticand cultural factors emerge from the data as main causes for the observedtension between the displaced mother and the assimilated daughter.

The First Generation

In this section I will present and analyze extracts of the oral history ofDor from emigration to the 1990s and supplement them with historicalbackground information.

The Jewish population of Vienna was already exposed to a considerableamount 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

F E M A L E S H O A H E X I L E S I N L O N D O N 203


rather than as a social factor. Initially, however, anti-Jewish regulationswere not implemented systematically but often in contradictory ways: periodsof violence and draconian measures were followed by periods of relativecalm. Immediately after the Anschluss, hundreds of Jews were arrested, butreleased soon afterward, arrested again and sent to German concentrationcamps. In March 1938 thousands of Austrian Jews were set free from Dachauon condition that they would leave the country within a fortnight. Theseand the other Jews, for whom the Reichskristallnacht (November 9–10,1938) had made it brutally obvious that there was no future for them inAustria, sought the help of various “refugee” organizations to obtain visas.Between May 1938 and November 1941, two-third of the approximately206,000 Austrian Jews left Austria, between 27,293 and 30,850 of them forGreat Britain. The main informant (Dor) on whom this essay is based wasone 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 fromEnglish. This is not the norm among the German-speaking refugees inLondon but quite common among those who mainly socialize in refugeecircles. That is, they use a mixed (German/English) code as a mode ofeveryday interaction. This kind of linguistic behavior has been interpretedby Myers-Scotton to express the dual cultural identities of the speakers.

From a linguistic point of view it is interesting to analyze the kind ofelements Dor borrows from English. They are, on the one hand, elementsthat link discourse and explain the causal connections between utterances,such as but and because. We will see that Dor frequently uses English dis-course markers and conjunctions in her narratives. The but in this contextis particularly interesting. It marks an upcoming unit of speech as a con-trasting action. The anti-Semitism or “bad times” Dor experienced are notexplicitly mentioned, but she implicitly contrasts them with the “goodtimes” she had. In other passages of the interview Dor specifies what shemeans by “good times”: spending time with her family and friends andgoing out (to the theater, cinema, and other venues). The other type of



elements Dor borrows in extract 1 is keywords, such as happy and memory.Both element types are essential in constructing oral history and show thatDor needs both her languages to convey it. This supports Myers-Scotton’sinterpretation of code-mixing as a discursive strategy that expresses a dualcultural identity. The extract presented so far frames not only Dor’s narrativebut 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 schöneZeiten (good times) they had had as adolescents in Vienna and reassembletheir identities out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile (Said 179).

The British authorities and the relief organizations created by the Jewishcommunity in Britain did not necessarily facilitate the immigration ofAustrians to Britain, for legitimate reasons: the relief organizations hadgiven notice to the British government in 1933 that no Jews fromGermany would become a public charge. After the Anschluss of Austria tothe German Reich it became obvious that the Jewish guarantee could nolonger hold good for the Austrian Jews who also sought refuge in theUnited Kingdom. Precisely for this reason, visas3 were imposed on newrefugees from May 21, 1938, onward. Dor was admitted into the UnitedKingdom on a so-called domestic permit, that is, she was expected to seekemployment as a domestic servant. Once in the United Kingdom, mostAustrian Jewish refugees—like the German Jewish refugees before them—settled in northwest London. This part of the city is and has always beenpopulated by affluent, well-educated, middle-class people and many artists.This is interesting from ethnic, social, and linguistic points of view: bothGerman and Austrian Jewish refugees did not settle in the traditional Jewishsettlement areas of London, that is, the working-class East End of the citywhere Yiddish was spoken, but in gentile, cultured, middle-class Hampsteadwhere—due to the influx of a growing number of German-speakingexiles4—German soon became the lingua franca. In the interview, Dordescribes her reason for settling in Hampstead.

Extract 2

Dor �, aber hier in Hampstead # xxx # auf der Strasse # man hat nurDeutsch gesprochen.[but here in Hampstead # xxx # in the street # people only spokeGerman]

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

Dor das war nach dem Krieg # und auch jetzt # wenn ich gehe xxxStimmen höre � . . .[that was after the war # and even nowadays # when I walk andhear voices � . . .]



Dor 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 typischEnglisch.[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 seemsto strongly influence Dor’s decision to live there. Like the vast majority ofViennese Jewish refugees, Dor does not speak Yiddish, as they all camefrom assimilated backgrounds. Dor then lists other cultural reasons forchoosing this particular area of London; for example, that it was morebohemian. As a shopkeeper, Dor clearly cannot associate herself withartistic, hedonistic, and decadent individuals. Dor’s choice of the Englishborrowing in an otherwise predominantly German context, however,testifies to her subtle command of her host culture language. She borrowsthe English word bohemian because only this signifier has a meaning that isappropriate in this context, that is, “a gipsy of society, one who eithercuts himself off, or is by his habits cut off, from society” (Oxford EnglishDictionary). German böhmisch does not signify this. By carefully choosing ashade of meaning only present in one language, Dor not only illustrates herlinguistic competence, but also an acute awareness of her social and culturalstatus in the United Kingdom, that is, as a foreigner, an outsider, anindividual at the margins of her host country’s society. The word bohemianfurthermore has social-class connotations that distance her from theworking-class English Jews in the East End, working-class Austrians, andworking-class English gentiles. After reinforcing that the bohemian charac-ter of Hampstead is the very reason why the majority of refugees settledthere, Dor highlights the sociocultural contrast with the majority cultureby explicitly formulating because it was not typically English. The third factorfor choosing to live in Hampstead was the availability of continental shopsand food. Apart from the discourse markers you know, this is the secondkey-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 iscontinental. This statement again indicates Dor’s acute awareness of the cul-tural differences between her home and host culture and her competencein her host language English. In extract 2, food is introduced as a culturalcomponent to one’s identity that is relevant to Dor. The relevance of foodand the culture of food consumption for identity building will be discussedin more detail later.



Settled in northwest London, an area that is neither typically English andEnglish-speaking, nor Jewish and Yiddish-speaking like London’s East End,but bohemian, continental, and German-speaking, Dor socially embedsherself in continental surroundings: her family and friends are predominantlyAustrian (see extracts 3 and 4). Dor’s parents and sister were fortunate enoughto survive concentration camps and joined her and her young family inLondon after the Second World War (see extract 3). By choosing to settle ina cultural and linguistic enclave that resembles home at least in terms of thelanguage, the shops, and the food, Dor and her fellow Jewish refugees dimin-ish the effects of displacement and life in exile. They create a home away fromhome. Dor, however, is also aware of the drawbacks of this choice: she didnot integrate into British society and learn the English language as fully as shemight have done otherwise. She may have acquired dual identity, yet there isa price she has to pay for it. In spite of the central role she plays in the AustrianJewish refugee community, for British people she remains a displaced femaleexile at the margins of their society, a foreigner. In the fist line of extract 3, sheadmits–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) lauterösterreichische Freunde,[And I have (//) maybe that’s the mistake (/-) all my friends areAustrians,]

�, hardly any Engländer -. because mein Mann war auch einWiener.[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 nichtgekommen wären,[yes yes # and # my sister if my parents hadn’t come,]

waer(e) 0sie sofort zurueck -. weil sie hat nie gehoert xxx zumAustrian Centre xxx.[she would have returned immediately because she never belongedto 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 ichEnglisch sprechen.[the only thing # with my daughter # with my grandson I have tospeak English.]



Extract 3 starts with Dor reflecting on having hardly any English friends.She tries to explain this with her family circumstances: her husband wasViennese, and so were her parents and her sister. In this context, Dor alsostresses the importance of organizational support for the Jewish refugees: inher mind the Austrian Centre5 was important enough as a social, cultural,and political factor to influence her sister’s decision to re-migrate toVienna. The only “exception” to Dor’s German-speaking extended familywas her daughter and later on her grandson, with whom she had to conversein her non-native language English.

In line 2 of extract 3, Dor refers to the English as Engländer although thisGerman word is otherwise entirely surrounded by English words.“Genuinely English people” (see line 1, extract 4) remain the culturalOther for Dor. In extract 4, she acknowledges that she could have social-ized with English people, but did not want to, for a fairly comprehensivelist 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, dieselbe mentality.

[You know, we have the same # not only the language, the samementality.]

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 sieals Kinder gehabt haben.

[we have different (//) the same ideas, really, #which we had aschildren.]

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. Inthe first utterance she repeats that she never socialized with genuinely English



people. The motivation for this withdrawal, however, becomes moregeneral than her immediate family (see extract 3). Dor extends her family tothe linguistic, cultural, and ideological group with which she associates her-self: 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, thementality, the beliefs (idea-en) and shared customs and behaviors. The onlyillustrating example for shared customs/behaviors Dor gives in extract 4again relates to the culture of food consumption: spending hours in coffeehouses with friends. Viennese Kaffeehauskultur involves meeting friends andacquaintances in a public space, that is, a coffee house, at a (roughly) pre-arranged time and staying there for hours talking to friends, reading thepaper, and drinking coffee. The English “High Tea,” by contrast, is by invi-tation only, frequently takes place at family homes, and is strictly limited intime by the onset of dinner/supper. Note furthermore that the rendition ofKaffeehauskultur triggers shared laughter of cultural understanding betweenthe interviewer and the interviewee. Dor then seems to return to culturaldifferences between her fellow Austrians and English people and produces afalse start. She refocuses and highlights the cultural similarities with “herown people” instead. After drawing attention to the continuity in anindividual’s development, she returns to the previously abandoned sentenceand concludes this narrative sequence with the main point she wishes tomake: one does not have so much in common with the English.

In sum, Dor perceives the language, mentality, beliefs, and customs tobe different between the English and the Austrians and, as these funda-mental building blocks of culture are not shared, Dor finds it difficult toidentify with her host-culture. Even half a century after emigration, one’sown is still Austria and home is still Vienna (see extract 3). From a linguisticpoint of view, the English borrowings in Dor’s predominantly Germannarrative are consistently discourse markers, such as you know, conjunctionssuch as because, and keywords (nouns and adjectives) such as mentality, themorphologically integrated idea-en, different, and in common.

In extract 5, the base language changes to English due to the fact thatDor’s daughter Viv has arrived. We gather evidence for what Dor revealedat the end of extract 3, that is, that she has to speak English with herdaughter. Viv understands German, but refuses to speak it in her mother’scompany, for she is embarrassed by her mistakes. Apart from conceding toher daughter’s language choice (English), Dor knows for certain wherehome is, even half a century after emigration.

Extract 5

Eva xxx it always depends on how far you identify with thecountry where you are living.



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

(Activities: Dor laughing)

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

Dor’s minimal responses and laughter underline the message content. Sheeven confirms it in German, “ja, home, the place to which we properlybelong 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 notunderstand.” I have already highlighted in several examples that the Englishremain 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 isactually sitting opposite her. For Dor, Viv also seems to be the culturalOther as mother and daughter have taken diametrically opposed roads onthe intersection of language and culture contact. The tension between thefirst- and second-generation female exiles seems to exist, among otherreasons, because mother and daughter have taken refuge in differentsymbolic orders (language and culture). Both Dor and Viv are threatenedand 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 whichthe conflicts within this particular mother–daughter relationship occur isthat, in the face of these threats and challenges, the two women draw onthe resources of different languages and cultures in order to stabilize andmaintain boundaries as well as to create a concept of home for themselves.Dor emphatically roots herself in the German language and Austrian cul-ture, whereas Viv opts for the English language and British culture. Incombination with language shift, cultural differences also cause alienationand conflicts in other refugee families (Berghahn; The Jewish Women’sHistory Group; Mallet and Grenville). Many first-generation refugeesstill regard the German language (as well as German and Austrian literature)as superior to English. The second generation, on the other hand, has aless positive attitude toward the German language (and German art ingeneral).



The Second (and Third) Generation

Dor’s daughter Viv, the second-generation Viennese immigrant in thisstudy, 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 wellas be considered) the “English child of a foreign family.” I will start bylooking at the way this utterance is produced. The hesitation pause, therepetition of of and the unusual word order indicate production difficulties.These kinds of linguistic phenomena are frequently associated with states ofemotional 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 aspauses, tags (you know, sort of ), and false starts, which point toward thespeaker’s emotional unease. Extract 7 furthermore provides evidence ofViv’s embarrassment at her place of work when her family background isrevealed and introduces one of Viv’s major preoccupations: the ability tospeak “good English.”6 This insistence is rooted in mainstream Britishculture. The following extracts reveal Viv’s fear and certainty that hersociolinguistic heritage is at odds with the dominant culture and thelanguage 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 inwith very well spoken English people, she is reminded by a colleague that hermother is identified by her accent as foreign. Viv is caught in the conflictbetween 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 herforeign origins, we must consider the historical background. Viv was bornat the beginning of the Second World War at which time the British gov-ernment invoked the Alien’s Act. Home Office tribunals interviewed andallocated refugees to three categories of “enemy aliens,” two of which wereto be interned. Although few people were interned for more than six



months, there was a general consensus among the informants of my largerstudy: they felt deeply humiliated by these measures. Once the UnitedKingdom had entered the Second World War, the incentive for manyrefugees 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-speakingJewish refugees to not speak German in public.8 Nonetheless, this policyhad little effect on those who sought refuge in Hampstead. The nextgeneration, that grew up surrounded by German at home and in the com-munity, was faced with the mistrust of mainstream British society, and wasparticularly sensitive to the language issue. One of Mallet and Grenville’ssecond-generation exiles, for example, states, “I was terrified my parentsspoke German in the street, especially during the war. I would sort of crawlaway—‘I don’t belong to them’ sort of thing” (237). Therefore, Viv’sconflict is common within the second generation precisely during the warand the postwar years.

I have also anticipated that it was Viv who initiated the shift fromGerman to English in her family. Dor speaks to Viv’s insistence and herown resistance to the language change within the home domain.

Extract 8

Dor aber sie [Viv] hat sie [die Grosseltern] gezwungen, dass sie Englischlernen.[but she (Viv) forced them (her grandparents) to learn English.]

Dor sie hat immer gesagt �” you are in England # you have tospeak 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 Deutschgesprochen.[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 athome. Note that Dor uses müssen (must) four times in a word-order posi-tion that is pragmatically/rhetorical motivated, that is, to further stress themust. Dor seems to derive considerable satisfaction from the fact that Viv



was obligated to understand and speak German at home. Thus, with herparents’ help, she managed to pass her mother tongue onto the nextgeneration, in spite of the next generation’s reluctance and resistance. Weknow from Dor that Viv feels embarrassed speaking German in front of hermother.

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, theabandonment of a native tongue is a symbolic matricide (Kristeva 244). Vivhas not resolved her conflict and, as a result, is incapable of identifying withher 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 toEnglish is complete by the third generation of German and Austrian Shoahexiles in the United Kingdom. This particular case is accelerated whencompared with other refugee communities and can best be explained bythe fact that German, my informant’s mother tongue, was deemed thelanguage 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 Deutschgekonnt 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 analy-sis so far have shown that Dor never felt at home in the United Kingdomand mainly socialized with fellow refugees from Vienna. She lives a life atthe margins of British society, preferably socializing with fellow refugeesand speaking German interspersed with elements from her secondlanguage. Her daughter, on the other hand, feels uneasy about her “foreign”family background, believes that living in England requires a certain



amount of assimilation and acculturation, both linguistically and culturally.She imposes this on the previous generations and takes it a step further inher own life and in her son’s (Nic) upbringing and education. Viv wantsNic to be a well-mannered and well-spoken Englishman who has mastered“good English.” This rapid linguistic and cultural change does not happenwithout friction between the generations. The next section highlights thefact that the third generation is caught in the cultural conflict between hisAustrian grandmother and his English mother.

Der Würstelstand/The Hot Dog Stand

The domain affected by language and culture contact in this extract hasalready 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 andvery good (English table) manners are of utmost importance due to the factthat she believes them to be part of the socially recognized British culturalnorms. Her son Nic, that is, the third generation, is caught in the languageand culture conflict between his mother and his grandmother on returnfrom his trip to Austria precisely because of the manner in which he con-sumed a Würstel9 in his grandmother’s country of origin, where Dor hadtaken him on holiday to convey her cultural and linguistic heritage. Allthree 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 verydifferently.]

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 verydifferently.]

Dor so wie er nach Haus gekommen is(t), hat er (e)s in die Handgenommen.

[so when he came back home, he ate it (the sausage) with hisfingers.]

Dor sagt die Vivien “what are you doing?”[Vivien says, “what are you doing?”]



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 whenthe narrative about the Würstelstand is recounted and the first Germanword in it, the place-name Salzburg, cannot really be avoided, as it sets thescene for the narrative. For the second German borrowing in this narra-tive, that is, Würstelstand, only American English has a term that roughlycovers the concept: the hot dog stand. For Dor, however, this term doesnot 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, usuallywith different kinds of bread and mustard. People eat Würstel at theWürstelstand as if standing at a bar. Visiting the Würstelstand means muchmore than simply having a snack, eating sausage, and drinking beer.Würstelstände are also places of communication. They are open until latein the night or even early in the morning. The practice of experiencingWürstelstand culture permeates all socioeconomic strata. It is not an indi-cator of class, for it is part of the popular culture. In other words, peoplefrom 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 betweenthe Würstelstände and Viennese coffee houses (see extract 4), which are instark contrast with fish and chip shops, the English fast food place. At fishand chip shops, one leaves the shop as soon as the meal is prepared andconsumes it in the privacy of one’s home; at Würstelstände and Viennesecoffee houses one stays to consume the purchased goods in company.

Borrowing the term Würstelstand may also be intended as an indicatorfor the other cultural in-group member in the audience (Eva). At thisparticular venue, there is only one culturally appropriate way of consumingthe 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 con-suming sausages at a Wüstelstand, for example, with plastic or woodenknives and forks, is culturally marked. Eating Würstel with one’s fingers is acultural behavior that, as a symbol, assumes its meaning in relationship toother symbols that constitute the cultural experience of going to aWürstelstand. Other culture traits connected with the larger pattern of theWürstelstand are standing, drinking beer, and conversing with the proprietor



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 ofreceivers only” (Leppihalme 3). The full meaning of this word is culturallydetermined and can only be understood if its use evokes the referent andsome characteristic features linked to it. The receiver familiar with thiscultural practise in the setting under discussion is Eva. As at the end ofextract 5, Dor thus indirectly divides her audience into cultural and lin-guistic 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, Salzburgand Würstelstand, consequently trigger frequent intra-sentential code-mixing.The explanation/reason why it is important for Dor to stick to the Austrianway of consuming a particular food is already given in an almost entirelyGerman clause with the exception of the English conjunction because dasschmeckt ganz anders (that tastes completely differently). With the Englishconjunction “because,” Dor is literally trying to reconnect her grandsonNic with the elementary taste for the flavors of food from her own culturalbackground (Bourdieu 1984).

Dor obviously enjoys telling this particular part of the story and repeatsthe entire previous utterance, which also constitutes the peak of the narra-tive, translated entirely into German, and she does not bother to switchback to English for the next transition in the narrative. By adhering to herlanguage choice, Dor may not exclude Viv from her audience, but mostprobably Nic. As if to heighten the language and culture conflict betweenherself and her daughter, Dor reverts to English to quote Viv’s shockedreaction to her son’s newly acquired Austrian manners. Gumperz analyzedcode-switched direct quotations and found that it is the contrast between“we” and “they” codes that is important in this construction type. Dorquotes her own daughter in English. Nic, on the other hand, who has justbeen taught an Austrian culture trait, is quoted in German. By choosing torepresent her daughter in the “they” code, Dor highlights the fact that herdaughter embraces different cultural norms and excludes her from the cul-tural in-group. Conversely, Viv interprets her mother’s acculturation exer-cises with her son as unwelcome interference with her own educationalgoals: to eliminate any foreign customs and behaviors that may be revivedin the family and to raise her son as a well-spoken and well-manneredEnglishman. Another issue that may come into play is that, in this case, a(national) cultural practice of food consumption may be misinterpreted as asocial-class issue by Viv. If interpreted as a marker of social class, eatingsausage with one’s fingers may be interpreted as working-class behavior.



What Viv, the cultural out-group member, may not be aware of is thatcertain cultural norms of food consumption, that is, how to eat Würstel at akiosk, cut across social-class boundaries in her mother’s culture. Dorunmistakably provokes conflict with her daughter by actively counteract-ing culture and language loss across generations, and by attempting torevive her own culture of food consumption in the third generation. Thetension between the two generations of female Viennese exiles emergesdue 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 tothe next generation of immigrants, and thus cause considerable frictionbetween mother and daughter, I would like to end this essay on a moreconciliatory note by quoting an abstract in which Viv almost (!) acknowl-edges her own linguistic and cultural roots. As mentioned in the introduc-tion, the process of assimilation is a process, and linguistic and culturaltraditions are not completely lost in one generation. Extract 12 illustratesthat Viv does feel an affinity with people of her own linguistic, cultural, andethnic background.

Extract 12Viv 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 thetopic—possibly caused by her uneasy cultural and linguistic identity—againresults in considerable production difficulties (hesitations pauses, trailingoff, tags, and retracings; cf. extracts 6 and 7). In this rather gingerly way Vivdiscloses in extract 12 that she immediately recognizes people from hermother’s hometown, even on the telephone, but her own language usedoes not reveal her Austrian heritage and hybrid identity. Viv acknowl-edges feeling an affinity with the Viennese callers, but does not comeforward with her own cultural and linguistic background. Although shedesires to comfort them by saying “look, don’t worry,” she cannot bring her-self to actually verbalize it. She does, however, consider Viennese people asher own kind.



Conclusion

This essay has shown the ways in which language shift and culture loss ofthe second- and third-generation Austrian Jewish refugees living in theUnited Kingdom can lead to conflicts within mother–daughter relation-ships. This particular study is based on only one representative of eachgeneration of Viennese Jewish refugees in London, but the analysis issupported 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 isbased on Dor, who does not mind living in the margins of her host-culture and society. She is certainly displaced geographically; however,socially, culturally, and linguistically, she lives in an Austrian enclave in


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


northwest London, within a community that should be considered ahome away from home. The linguistic exceptions within this German-speaking domain are her daughter and her grandson. The daughter (Viv)does not understand her mother’s continued attachment to her homecountry, culture, and language—which is maintained by memory and lan-guage use—and feels uneasy about her foreign roots. Viv raises her son,the third generation, to become a well-mannered and well-spokenEnglishman who, as such, must speak “proper English.” Thus, languageshift from German to English and loss of Austrian cultural traditions arevirtually complete within three generations. This accelerated shift leaves alinguistic and cultural gap between the generations. The essay furthermorehas shown the symbolic value of cultural traditions that manifest them-selves in seemingly insignificant social practices. As we have seen, how toeat Würstel—and all that it symbolizes—can trigger an escalation of thecultural conflict between the generations.

The discourse and conversation approach (with which the analysis ofthe conversation extracts was carried out) reveals that the insistence oncultural identity rooted in language and everyday customs creates tensionbetween first- and second-generation immigrants. Austrian-born Dor feelsmore at home living in Hamstead, UK, with her unassimilated existencethan her daughter Viv who has assimilated to the dominant culture, andconsiders herself “the English child of a foreign family.” The dual lan-guage use for Dor connotes a “we” and “they” code (Gumperz 1982) thatindicates cultural in- and out-group membership. Consequently, herdaughter Viv is identified as the cultural Other. The analysis thus indicatesthat living a life at the margins of the host culture—but at the center of theexiles’ community—does not lead to alienation for a first-generationimmigrant, but strongly impacts the linguistic and cultural generationalgap and causes cultural identity to be put into question in the secondgeneration.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

� . . . trailing off�” quotation follows[//] retracingxxx unintelligible speech�^ quick uptake�, self-completion[/-] false start# pause



Notes

1. The study is part of a larger project “Language Use of German-speakingJewish Refugees in London” (working title, Eppler).

2. Anschluss literally means “annexation.” Austria, however, was integrated intothe German Reich following a plebiscite in which the majority of theAustrian population had voted in favor of the Anschluss.

3. The criterion for the granting of a visa was whether or not an applicant waslikely to be an asset to the United Kingdom. The principle of pre-selectionof potential immigrants to Great Britain in the country of origin led to ahighly restrictive immigration policy that divided applicants into desirableand undesirable ones. Among the “undesirable” refugees were “small shop-keepers, retail traders, artisans, agents and middlemen, whose livelihooddepends on commission and, therefore, on trade activity, and minormusicians and commercial artists of all kinds” (Muchitsch 14).

4. Only one of my forty-eight informants spoke Yiddish. This is representativeof the German and Austrian Jewish refugee community in the UnitedKingdom as a whole. Yiddish was not spoken because the vast majority ofShoah 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 organizationcalled “Young Austria” of which Dor was a member, and an umbrella orga-nization called Free Austria Movement (FAM), which was founded inDecember 1941 with the aim of bringing about a united political front of allAustrian anti-Fascist groups in exile. Many of FAM’s leading members wereCommunists, and therefore some refugees were reluctant to join theAustrian Centre. Stefan Holland’s (Mallet and Grenville 116) assessment thatthe Austrian Centre fulfilled a social rather than a political function for manymembers seems accurate to me. The Austrian Centre even had its own the-ater, the Laterndl, which staged many popular performances during the waryears 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 dic-tionaries and grammar books, spoken with “Received Pronunciation,” theaccent used in private education institutions such as Eaton; that is, a form ofspeech 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 inder Öffentlichkeit, wie z.B. in Restaurants. Sprechen Sie lieber stockendEnglisch als fliessend Deutsch- und sprechen Sie nicht laut.” (Ratgeber desGerman Jewish Aid Committee für ankommende Flüchtlinge [Please do notspeak German in the streets, on public transportation or anywhere else inpublic, as for example in restaurants. You should speak broken English ratherthan fluent German. And do not speak loudly]; cited in Muchitsch 33).

9. Würstel is an umbrella term for different types of sausages. The equivalentterm in German spoken in Germany is Würstchen.



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 CosmopolitanStyle.” Writing after Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind. Ed. Edward Timms, AndreaHammel, and Silke Hassler. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2001. 158–76.

Goodenough, Ward. “Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics.” In Report on theSeventh 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.





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 becameessential for the growth, restructuring, and rationalization of the produc-tion processes of the most advanced economies of Western Europe.Following the oil shocks of the 1970s, although all European countries thathad relied on foreign workers in previous decades declared their bordersclosed to further labor immigration, and some even initiated programsaimed at encouraging return migration, the numbers of foreign nationalsresiding in Western European countries considerably increased in the1980s and 1990s. This was to a large extent a consequence of the processesof family reunification resulting from the maturation of the migrationcycles initiated during the period of constant economic growth during the1950s and 1960s (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain; Cornelius et al.).

One of the most striking consequences of the migratory processesaffecting European countries has been the considerable change in theethnic composition of their populations. The newly imported diversity hasbeen reflected primarily in the development of ethnic minority communi-ties clearly identified by their national origins, languages, and religions, aswell as by their different ways of conducting their everyday lives. The poli-cies developed by Western European governments to respond to thisgrowing diversity were determined by each country’s specific “philosophyof integration.” These “philosophies” are based on country-specificnotions of citizenship, pluralism, equality, public order, and tolerance,


which constitute “a set of consensual ideas and linguistic terms held acrossparty political lines that can be analysed into its respective normative andexplanatory goals and assumptions” (Favell). According to Favel, thesenormative systems have as a main objective the definition of a commonframework of reference (the basic rules of the game), whose aim is to“achieve stability and legitimacy by rebuilding communal bonds of civilityand tolerance—a moral social order—across the conflicts and divisionscaused by the plurality of values and individual interests.”

While most of the culturally determined attitudes and behaviors of theimmigrant populations have been perfectly compatible with the norms andvalues of the receiving societies, certain practices common among some ofthe newly arrived groups, such as polygamy, early or forced marriages, orfemale genital mutilation, have openly clashed with the ethical, normative,and legal frameworks of their liberal democratic host societies. Withrespect to these practices, the authorities of the receiving countries havehad to face a complex trade-off between their obligation to protect thebasic rights of the individual, and their will not to alienate the newlyarrived populations by repressing their traditional cultural practices.

In this essay, we focus on one example of such confrontations of valuesystems, namely the practices included under the heading of FemaleGenital Mutilation (FGM). These practices constitute an interesting casestudy for analyzing the policies toward diversity, because they represent aclear challenge to liberal foundations based on the principle of equality ofall individuals before the law, and on the protection of basic human rights.FGM poses the problem of the limits of both cultural difference and culturalcollective rights (Poulter).

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), FGM practicesare “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external femalegenitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural orother non-therapeutic reasons.”1 These practices are mainly performed ongirls between the ages of four and thirteen, either in unsanitary conditionsor in hospitals. The immediate health-related complications of FGM mayinclude “haemorrhage, pain, shock, tetanus, sepsis, urine retention, injuryto adjacent tissue, ulceration of the genital region and death” (MomohFemale Genital Mutilation).2 Before or after marriage or prenatally, mostwomen with infibulation go through a reversal procedure known as “de-infibulation” or “reversal”3 in order to allow penetration and delivery. Thisprocess is often followed by a “re-infibulation” after childbirth. Finally,FGM doubles the risk of the mother’s death in childbirth and increasesthree- or four-fold the risk of stillbirth.

In spite of being considered unacceptable from a medical, ethical, andlegal point of view in Western countries, and increasingly in Africa—where

G U I N É A N D F U E N T E S224


numerous African women’s groups, African women leaders, and govern-ments are fighting against these practices—FGM is still approved by manyAfrican communities. Among these groups, FGM is thought to conditionthe social well-being of the girls, to contribute to the affirmation of femininesocial identity, and favor access to marriage, womanhood, virginity, mater-nity, 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 losethe custom (APPG), and because they see it as a form of “defense” in soci-eties in which they feel discriminated against. In this way, FGM reinforcesmembership and the sense of ethnic belonging within the host society.

Among the European Union (EU) member states, the United Kingdomand France are the countries that host the largest immigrant communitiesoriginating from societies where FGM is traditionally practiced, and theUnited Kingdom is the country that receives most women coming fromthese societies (Osborn and Boseley). According to the British MedicalAssociation (BMA), the communities most exposed to FGM in the UnitedKingdom come from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen (BMA FemaleGenital Mutilation). The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) adds Djibouti,Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria to the list (RCM). Communities fromGhana, Gambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Zaireare also exposed to FGM in the United Kingdom (Read).

For obvious reasons—FGM is an underground practice due to itsillegality—obtaining precise data on the number of women who haveundergone some form of genital mutilation in Europe is an impossible task.Most of the evidence regarding these practices comes from key informantsand organizations, which, because of their direct involvement with minor-ity ethnic communities, have privileged access to the groups affected byFGM practices.

Officials estimate that more than 74,000 women currently living in theUnited Kingdom have undergone some form of FGM, and that approxi-mately 6,000 girls under sixteen are annually at risk of being exposed tothese practices despite their legal banning in Britain since 1985(Department of Education and Skills). The main destination where girlsliving in the United Kingdom are taken to undergo FGM appears to beDubai, in the United Arab Emirates.5 In the United Kingdom, the issue ofFGM inflicted upon girls abroad remains controversial, and has been aserious cause of concern for public authorities.

The main objective of this essay is to analyze the ways in which Britishauthorities have faced the challenges FGM practices pose to their norma-tive, ethical, and legal frameworks, which are, at least in principle, committedto the protection of the basic human rights of the individual. We will

F E M A L E G E N I T A L M U T I L A T I O N 225


review the discourses and practices that have characterized the British“philosophy of integration” vis-à-vis the immigrant populations living inBritain, and in particular toward the cultural, religious, and ethnic diversityintroduced into British society by their presence. The general frameworkof health policies toward ethnic minority groups will be used as an exam-ple of British multiculturalist policies. After defining the policy environ-ment in which responses to FGM practices have been designed, we willanalyze the implementation of those policies, paying particular attention tothe roles played by the different actors involved.

The concluding section will point out the overall failure of the Britishapproach in preventing FGM practices. We will see how British multicul-turalist policies, characterized by a combination of “respect” for minorityethnic cultures and the legal banning of FGM practices, has resulted in aweak degree of enforcement of the legislation and therefore in a low levelof protection of girls’ individual right to freedom from violence.

The United Kingdom: Unresponsive Multiculturalism

The evolution of the migratory processes affecting the United Kingdomroughly followed the general pattern traditionally described for the mostadvanced economies of Western Europe (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain;Cornelius et al.). With the arrival and settling of large numbers of migrantsfrom the former British Empire, the ethnic composition of the populationof the United Kingdom changed quite radically in the second half of thetwentieth century. According to the Census more than 4.6 million peoplewith ethnic minority origins lived in the United Kingdom in 2001, repre-senting 7.9 percent of the total population.6 The share of ethnic minoritypopulations was the highest in England, with some 97 percent of all non-white British populations living in this region, and ethnic minority groupsrepresenting some 9 percent of its total population. Most of those groupshad migrated to the United Kingdom from New Commonwealth countriesand held British citizenship, entitling them to settle in the United Kingdomand to enjoy the full set of civic, political, and social rights granted to citizensof that state. The largest group were those from the Indian subcontinent(Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis), followed by those coming fromAfrican Commonwealth countries and the West Indies. Nevertheless, otherimmigrant groups, including Chinese, Turks, Arabs, and Somalis, have alsogained considerable importance in more recent years.

Although it is very difficult to determine which populations may bemost exposed to FGM practices today, both British authorities and NGOsworking directly with ethnic minority women agree in their assessment



that the Sudanese, and even more so the Somalis, are among the most seri-ously exposed groups in the United Kingdom. Approximately 100,000people coming from Somalia and Sudan currently live in the UnitedKingdom, three-quarters of them in the London area. Half of this popula-tion is under thirty, and most have arrived as refugees within the past tenyears. This data gives us an indication of the potential importance of FGMpractices among groups that are relatively recent arrivals in the UnitedKingdom and constitute a fairly young population, in the process of form-ing families and having children in Britain.

Multiculturalism: Discourses and Practices

Britain recognized the ethnic diversity of its populations earlier than any othercountry 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 turneverybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies ofsomeone’s misplaced vision of the stereotypical Englishman . . . I defineintegration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equalopportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutualtolerance. (Qtd. in Joppke)

This statement expresses the three main traits that have defined Britishpolicy toward diversity over the past decades: measures to fight discrimination,equal opportunity policies, and official recognition of cultural diversitywithin the United Kingdom. Emphasis on the existence of ethnic cleavageswithin the British population comes, to a certain extent, at the expense ofthe recognition of other divisions, such as gender or class, and this results ina certain precedence accorded to the protection of ethnic groups’ collectiverights over the rights of individuals (Nazroo). Some authors have stressedthat this precedence of collective over individual rights is all the moredetrimental to women since their communities of origin are often stronglystructured along patriarchal lines (Fraser; Guiné “Multiculturalisme”;Ivekovic; Nash and Marre; Okin et al.; Sahgal and Yuval-Davis; Spenskyand Kennedy-Dubourdieu; Yuval-Davis).

According to the British group Women Against Fundamentalisms (WAF):

A consensus on multiculturalism has been established across the politicalspectrum, and it has become the pivotal aspect of the British state’s relation-ship with minority communities, particularly in schools, social services andthe law [. . .] many women who are trying to take control of their own livesand bodies [. . .] face the added obstacle of multicultural policies adopted bythe police, social services or the legal system. These institutions usually



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

The origins of the official “recognition” of the cultural and ethnic diversityof the British population may be traced back to the basic structures charac-terizing the creation of the political system of the United Kingdom (as con-stituted by several territories with strong differential traits: Scotland, Wales,England, and Northern Ireland), and the British Empire (in which citizen-ship was based on subject-hood to a common monarch, rather than on acommon nationality) (Soysal). The introduction of questions about ethnic-ity in the Census and other official statistical apparatuses reflected an accep-tance of the division of the British population along ethnic lines. Thegathering of information using ethnicity as a variable also allowed for analysisof the situation of the different “ethnic minority” populations, and for thedesign and implementation of policies aimed at preventing inequalities anddiscrimination on ethnic grounds.

In the health domain as a specific policy area, British authorities initiallyembraced a “color-blind” approach, which assumed that minority ethnicgroups could benefit from mainstream services to the same extent as thewhite majority population, provided that a policy of nondiscrimination andequal opportunity was strictly enforced. This policy remained unchallengedfor a significant period, despite accumulating evidence of the existence ofdiscrimination and inequalities affecting those groups (Acheson; Cohen;Kelleher and Hillier; Smaje). The picture started to change in the early1980s when, in a context of increasing political salience of the issue of healthinequalities within the British population, the campaigns and mobilizationof ethnic groups concerned with specific health problems particularly preva-lent among ethnic minority groups—among them rickets, sickle cell, andanemia—contributed to growing awareness of minorities’ disadvantagedhealth position7 (Townsend, Black, et al.).

The reforms of the National Health Service’s structure and operation, asconceived by the conservative government of the time (introduction ofquasi-markets, development of a contract culture), left little room for theintroduction of a fully developed and coherent set of policies to address thehealth inequalities affecting minority ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the offi-cial discourse about ethnic health inequalities changed significantly; theminister of health was quoted as saying that addressing the special needsarising from the presence of an ethnically diverse population was a questionof “considering different ways of providing existing services” (Department



of Health Ethnic Minority Health). In his annual report on the state of thepublic health for 1991, the British chief medical officer devoted an entirechapter to the issue of the health of ethnic minorities, as well as to thesituation of political refugees living in the United Kingdom, stating that“the NHS must address the particular needs of the black and ethnic minori-ties living in this country, and take positive steps to eliminate discrimina-tion” (Department of Health On the State of the Public Health). This reportfollowed 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 asgroups with specific needs to be addressed by health authorities. Thesedocuments stressed that special consideration should be given to thosegroups’ privacy and dignity, with particular attention to respecting theirreligious and cultural beliefs. The NHS executive instructed health servicesto begin collecting data on ethnic minority patients admitted to hospitalsstarting in January 1995, with the objective of generating a more reliabledatabase on morbidity and patterns of utilization of health services by thesegroups (Chandra).

Despite declarations by health authorities and public officials recogniz-ing the multicultural character of British society, and commitments toimproving the services provided to minority ethnic groups (Bahl), mostNHS bodies did not change the core of their mainstream practices and ser-vices to take into account the experience of such groups. Most measurestaken were in a process-oriented vein and most directly concerned themanagerial level; designed and implemented by individual regional or dis-trict health authorities, local governments, and third-sector organizations,they brought little substantial change in terms of service delivery. To quotethe authors of a report on the commissioning and purchasing of health careservices for ethnic minorities: “the evidence of this study is that insufficientthought had been given by senior NHS managers about the implementa-tion issues” (Department of Health Responding to Diversity). This evidencesupported those who argued that changes in the delivery of health care toethnic minority groups had been fairly superficial, and represented nothingmore than window dressing with regard to earlier policy failures, inresponse 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 onthe British political agenda. First, the publication of the 1980 report“Female Circumcision, Excision and Infibulation: The Facts and Proposalsfor Change” on FGM practices in the United Kingdom and internationally,



promoted by the Minority Rights Group (MRG);8 and second, the raisingof the issue of FGM in Parliament by Member of Parliament (MP) LordKennet.

The international context also contributed to the publication of the1980 report and to the political process leading up to the passage of theProhibition of Circumcision Act 1985. In 1979, the first WHO seminar onFGM took place in Khartoum, Sudan. In 1979, the Convention for theElimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women took place. In1980, FGM was discussed at the Platform for Action of the UN WorldConference on Women in Copenhagen. The UN Declaration on theElimination of all Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based onReligion or Belief was issued in 1981. In 1984, the Inter-AfricanCommittee on Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health ofWomen and Children and its twenty-seven national committees wereestablished, marking a strengthened African commitment to deal withFGM. Finally, the UN working group on Traditional Practices Affectingthe Health of Women and Children, composed of experts designated bythe sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection ofminorities (UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO, and representatives of concernedNGOs) was established in 1984.

The first draft of the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act, finallypassed in 1985, declared FGM practices illegal, except when considerednecessary for the physical health of women (mainly in cases of pre-cancerand cancer). After intense pressure from the Health Department and theRoyal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), who soughtto defend their freedom to practice medical female circumcision, the justi-fication of the act on grounds of mental health (due to congenital abnor-malities) 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 FGMas a measure of child protection, since FGM is mainly performed on chil-dren who are unable to give consent. It approached the problem with astrategy of interagency cooperation. The current main source of guidance,directed toward authorities in the health, education, and social servicessectors, as well as the police, the judiciary, and third-sector organizationsworking in this field, is the manual “Working Together to SafeguardChildren,” jointly drafted by the Departments of Health, Education,Labour, and the Home Office in 1999. Only a small portion of the guide-lines in this document is dedicated to FGM. It is stated that under Section 47of the 1989 Children’s Act, a local authority “can exercise” its investiga-tive 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,



local agencies should intervene in cooperation with the Area ChildProtection Committee (ACPC),9 the agency responsible for developingprevention strategies through community education and coordinatingtraining activities for health professionals. Lord Hunt of Kings Heath,undersecretary of state for the Department of Health, declared in theHouse of Lords on March 23, 2000, that education is central to eradicat-ing FGM in the United Kingdom and that his department would continueto fund relevant voluntary organizations. Moreover, the Criminal Justice(Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998 also empowers the Courts to pro-hibit parents from taking their daughters outside the United Kingdom tohave the operation performed.

The Department of Health, the BMA, the Conference of Medical RoyalColleges, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Nursing,and the National Association of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, all devel-oped protocols and guidelines for health professionals on how to deal withFGM practices. In its protocol on this issue, the BMA recommends thatdoctors treat patients with a “culturally sensitive” and “non-judgementalattitude”; that they provide psychosocial support, advise, educate, and raiseawareness concerning the rights of children and the existing legislativemechanisms of protection; and finally, that they contact the appropriatesocial services, in particular the ACPC, if, in their assessment, a girl is at riskof undergoing FGM (BMA Guidance for Doctors).

Special clinics were also set up to tend to women who have undergoneFGM practices. Thus, in 1993, Dr. H. Gordon, a gynecologist and FGMspecialist, established an African Well Woman clinic at Northwick ParkHospital in Harrow, Middlesex, with funding from the Department ofHealth, with the aim of providing midwifery, obstetric, and gynecologicalcare to infibulated women. Similar centers were created in 1997 at theCentral 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 cliniccalled African Women’s Health Clinic opened in 1999 as part of theCommunity Health Project in Leytonstone, Waltham Forest (North EastLondon).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, anAfrican Women’s Clinic “for women who have undergone FGM” wasalso started in 2002 at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson & Obstetric Hospitalin London. Some hospitals do not have an African Well Women’s clinicbut have adopted a written policy on obstetric care for women who haveexperienced FGM, as is the case, for example, at the Queen ElizabethHospital (formerly the Greenwich Hospital NHS Trust).14 According toComfort Momoh, the editor of the book Female Genital Mutilation,15 the



role of an FGM specialist midwife should be

. . . to increase professional and public awareness of FGM [. . .]; to form anetwork link with the local communities, local statutory and voluntaryorganisations [. . .]; to form a relationship based on caring and trust withboth professionals, women and communities that practise FGM [. . .]; tohave a lead in the development of local policies/protocols which can beadapted to individual needs [. . .]; to provide support, information, adviceand care for the communities that practice FGM. (Momoh Female GenitalMutilation)

In May 2000, the U.K. All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population,Development and Reproductive Health (APPG)—a group of parliamen-tarians desirous of establishing a dialogue between parliamentarians, civilservants, and NGOs16—conducted parliamentary hearings on FGM prac-tices with the participation of health, education, and social services author-ities as well as national and international NGOs. As Harding argues17 thisinitiative was motivated by the lack of a comprehensive source of advice,information and training for governments, local authorities and otherNGOs; its objective was to “develop and implement appropriate legisla-tion, with due consultation with community based organizations and othergroups working in the field (. . .) to encourage governments to increaseinvestment in activities geared to the elimination of FGM.”

As we shall see in the next section, the APPG called on the governmentboth to make changes in the law and to promote the prevention ofFGM. Finally, within the framework of the general British policy ongender equality, the Women’s National Commission (WNC) set up anFGM working group whose purpose is to gather all the concerned indi-viduals and organizations working against FGM18 in order to influencegovernment policy and devise a national strategy against FGM.

A Policy Failure?

The following quote from Dr. Gordon’s statement reflects the British atti-tude toward FGM, and toward those who break the law governing FGMpractices: “FGM is not conventional child abuse. The parents who puttheir children through this procedure honestly believe that they are doingthe right thing, with 600 years of tradition behind them. I would rather seeit stamped out through education than through prosecution.”19 The Britishstance toward FGM, expressed at parliamentary, humanitarian, and medicallevels, has been to educate parents, prosecute doctors,20 and help traditionalcircumcisors living in the United Kingdom to change activities. Indeed,although the 1985 law stipulates a fine or a prison sentence of six months



to five years for those practicing FGM, no arrest has taken place under the1985 law and only two doctors have been expelled from the GeneralMedical Council (in 1993 and 2000), for having practiced FGM. SomeAfrican women’s organizations based in the United Kingdom are also cur-rently working for the rehabilitation of traditional circumcisors in London,Liverpool, and Cardiff.21

Several aspects of the British institutional framework have been identi-fied as obstacles to the process of eradication of FGM. In the first place, thejustification of FGM on mental health grounds constitutes a loophole in thelaw. Since the mental health of the girls and women concerned is thoughtby many to depend largely on their being “circumcised,” it is easy for apatient to justify the need for this “operation” on “mental health” grounds.This exception to prohibition, to some extent, negates the original inten-tions of the 1985 act and may help to explain the fact that FGM practiceshave continued to be performed in British private hospitals (LordsHansard).

A second factor that weakens the British position against FGM has to dowith to the impact of the Law in the 1980s upon some organizations rep-resenting Somali women’s rights (Guiné “Mutilación”). The U.K.-basednonprofit organization London Black Women’s Health Action Project(LBWHAP), as well as the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) andLord Kennet, opposed prohibition on grounds of custom or ritual as“racist.” Established in 1982 by Shamis Dirir in East End London, firstknown as the Somali Women’s Association, and currently called BlackWomen’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), LBWHAP—today oneof the main grass roots community organizations working for the preven-tion of FGM in the United Kingdom—organizes its campaigns againstFGM around the notion of “blackness” as a way of fighting against what itconsidered in the 1980s to be the government’s “discriminatory” approach.LBWHAP holds that “female circumcision” cannot be called child abuse atall and “must be understood and located in the overall context of blackstruggle,” with two objectives: “to counter state control and repression andcriminalization of issues of female sexuality,” and “to counter the image ofblack people as performing ‘barbaric’ primitive practices” (LBWHAP).LBWHAP works against FGM within a “holistic” perspective since it con-siders FGM “within a wider health, cultural, social and economic context,”given its efforts to favor, more generally, the integration of Somali men andwomen in the health, legal, housing, and work domains. From the momentthe 1985 law came under discussion, the organization mobilized the Somalicommunity against it, denouncing the absence of dialogue with theaffected communities during the process of the law’s passage as well as the lack of funds allocated to prevention programs. For LBWHAP, the



enforcement of the law could only lead to reinforcing the clandestinecharacter of FGM practices, attributing to them an aura of resistance todomination and repression,22 while transforming otherwise “protectiveparents” 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 therecommendations made by the APPG in 2000, the manual “WorkingTogether to Safeguard Children” should, in future editions, specifyrequirements for ACPCs to include FGM within their local proceduresand policies for child protection; a Supplementary Guidance to “WorkingTogether to Safeguard Children” should be developed on FGM alongsimilar lines to the “Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution”Supplementary Guidance; the new U.K. Sex and Relationship EducationGuidance makes clear that each school should have staff members to dealwith child protection issues, but it makes no reference to FGM; thegovernment should provide funding to develop women’s leadership andliteracy skills to enhance their ability to speak confidently on issues con-cerning their health and well-being; the government should require healthprofessionals and other relevant authorities, under the law, to report inci-dents of FGM, develop information and media campaigns targeting specificgrassroots community groups and professionals to promote awareness ofthe Act, and coordinate interagency research involving the immigrationservice, refugee councils, and health and education (APPG). Concerninggovernment funding, according to a former Women’s Equality Officerwho worked for a London Council, “It is difficult for women’s voluntarysector organisations to get funding for any work which is not direct serviceprovision. In other words, it is difficult for organisations to get funding forstrategic work. There needs to be support for ethnic minority women’sorganisations 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, thehesitation, fear, and apathy of local authorities to interfere with FGMpractices may have contributed to their perpetuation (Guiné, “Etat, droitsdes individus et droits culturels”). The reasons for these reactions are bothcultural and political. For example, according to a Policy Development andReview Officer in a London Council:

There has been reluctance on the part of the Council to raise the issue ofFGM on the political agenda. I believe there is reluctance because it is seenas a divisive issue, one on which the minority ethnic community or sectorsof that community are divided. Put simply, there are no votes for politicians



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

A survey of how English and Welsh local educational and social serviceauthorities deal with FGM, carried out in 1998 for FORWARD, revealedthat very few local authorities have a good knowledge of the African com-munities that may practice FGM within their jurisdiction, and that theyfear 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 andthe relevant local authorities often prove powerless. A health visitor25 whoworks in a London hospital26 tried to explain the reasons for the scarceintervention by the social services and the police:

Unless you’ve got hard evidence you can’t really do anything. Nobody tellsyou they’re going to do FGM [. . .] Social services can’t intervene unlessthey’ve got some evidence. So all we can do is primary prevention, trying toeducate 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, whathappens after this, the child is looking at the prosecution of her family andshe’s going to be blamed, her father might reject her, she might have to gointo care. So they won’t say. This is why there is no prosecution and nointervention, 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, racialequality, and minority rights workers, but also the health professionals andthe social services “don’t quite want to take the issue of FGM on boardthemselves [. . .] They just don’t want to face it. They hide from it ratherthan attacking us openly” (Ruge).

As a consequence, only poor monitoring schemes have been set up toidentify circumcisors and girls potentially at risk. Similarly, the lack ofadequate material to train health and education professionals on how toprevent those practices is quite apparent. According to the health visitor:27

About circumcisors [. . .] The resources aren’t there to really set up perfectmonitoring systems. Often they’ve got the warning and are monitored for afew months or a year, then they stop monitoring them because they’re notdoing it. At the moment you stop monitoring they go right back to it. So thequestion is, do you monitor them for a lifetime? And even when you’remonitoring them, they still find ways [. . .] I’m not aware that we’ve identi-fied anybody or progressed in any cases in this light. But should there be acase, would the British government be prepared to put the money in to



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

The British case shows that a specific law against FGM does not neces-sarily imply prosecution or penalties for the parents, practitioners, andother professionals who fail to protect the individual rights of the girlsconcerned. It also shows that identifying the “needs” of ethnic minoritiesis senseless if it avoids recognizing and dealing with the particular needs ofthe girls who, within these minority groups, are the first victims of patriarchaland oppressive customs.

The debate remains open about the appropriateness of taking more activesteps to prosecute parents and FGM practitioners. According to Linda Weil-Curiel,28 even though British initiatives have been generally positive, theycannot be effective, since prevention is not accompanied by any penalty forlack of compliance with the legislation. Some U.K.-based African NGOswould like to see a more preventive strategy implemented, with “circum-cisors” being retrained in new skills rather than being sent to jail. However,according to Shamis Dirir, development coordinator at BWHFS,29 “I thinksending to jail is a fine strategy, because if I educate a circumcisor and counselfor a year or two, and she still does it, the only way she can understand is togo to jail. After jail, she should be rehabilitated, but I think that no mothershould have her children taken away from her and go to jail.”

The conclusions of the APPG Report published in November 2000acknowledged the failure of the 1985 Act, since that normative frameworkseems to have been unable to stop FGM practices from being performed onBritish ethnic minority girls, either in the United Kingdom or abroad. Asurvey conducted shortly after the publication of that Report amongNGOs working in the field of FGM, local health and education authorities,social service departments, and refugee councils revealed that only forty-sixpercent of the respondents were aware of the existence of the 1985 Law;twenty-five percent expressed fears of being perceived as “culturally insen-sitive” if they were to try to bring the issue of FGM to the surface; and onlyeighty percent expressed the same concern in the rest of Europe.

Following the guidelines provided by the APPG, Ann Clwyd, a LabourMP, presented a Private Member’s Bill aimed at amending the 1985 legis-lation. This text, discussed and finally passed in 2003, introduced significantchanges in the handling of FGM in Britain. Among these is the fact that theterm FGM is introduced in the very title of the Law, abandoning termssuch as “female circumcision,” criticized by some grassroots organizationsspecializing in FGM issues. This new law gives extraterritorial effect to theprohibition of FGM practices, even if they are performed in countrieswhere those practices are not illegal; it punishes those U.K. citizens and



residents who perform, facilitate, or incite FGM; raises the maximumpenalty from five to fourteen years of prison; and calls upon the healthauthorities to report on any case of FGM that comes to their attention. Thehope of NGOs working against FGM after the passing of this law lies inraising awareness about this problem, and in ensuring greater commitmentby British public administrations to preventing these practices, in particularto adopting an integrated approach combining domestic and internationalpolicy (RWRP). According to Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, director ofFORWARD, 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 theAPPG recommendations into account, instead of adopting a nationalprevention program that would be far more expensive (Lockhat 100).

The UK-based organization Womankind International produced abackground and position paper, endorsed by the BWHFS, insisting on thefears of many ethnic communities and health experts that if legislation isnot accompanied by awareness-raising about the new law, the concernedAfrican communities might be criminalized and families might be keptapart for not being aware of it and its penalties. In a manner similar to theimpact of the 1985 Act on some African organizations in the UnitedKingdom, many members of the concerned ethnic groups “feel excludedfrom the discussions and decision-making about what they perceive as a‘private’ community issue. Feedback from these groups suggests this leg-islative change will not be a successful tool to encourage people to abandonthe practice” (RWRP). Some other reactions against the new FemaleGenital Mutilation Act were quite violent. For instance, in 2004, at Urban75 forums, under the title “Protest against Racist Blunkett FGM Act,”could be read: “That Racist Blunkett passed a law which will jail people for14 years for arranging the Sunna Circumcision of their daughters abroad.Not only does RACIST Babylon not allow free Sunna Circumcision ofgirls on the NHS, the Fascists will jail parents for taking their daughtersoverseas to practise their religious rights.”30

The fact that the issue of FGM is now dealt with at the Women’sNational Commission (WNC) may be quite positive for a better awarenessraising and for the implementing of an effective national preventionstrategy. Indeed, according to Sarah McCullough, national director of theAgency for Culture and Change Management:31

There is no such strategy on FGM and at moment there is very little infor-mation on who is doing what and where. There are various agencies or indi-viduals working on FGM issues around the country but we are not aware ofthem. Their views or good practice strategies in operation are not being



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

Similarly, according to Grace Evans, policy development and reviewofficer at Greenwich Council,32 “There is in Britain, broadly speaking, aculture of political correctness and cultural liberalism which fails to see thatwithin some minority ethnic communities there are practices which runcounter to fundamental human rights: one such practice is FGM.”

Conclusions

In the United Kingdom, the multiculturalist model of integration wasdesigned with the objective of recognizing the cultural and ethnic diversityof contemporary British society, articulating mechanisms for the protectionof ethnic minorities’ collective rights. Though that policy frameworkresulted in a relatively high level of protection of group interests, a trade-off takes place between collective and individual rights, and especiallywomen’s rights, regarding certain cultural practices brought to the hostsociety by the ethnic minority groups. In this context, British authoritiesdisplay a relatively hesitant position in addressing the consequences of thattrade-off. Their lack of determination results in a weak defense of individ-ual rights as evidenced by the poor degree of effective protection of thegirls and women exposed to FGM.

Paradoxically, although Britain is the first European country to passanti-discrimination and equal opportunities legislation, and is one of thefirst to elaborate a law explicitly aimed at preventing FGM practices withinits territory, it has left a relatively large gap in its legislation by allowing thecontinuation of those practices when justified on physical or mental healthgrounds. Interagency cooperation programs aimed at preventing FGMprove relatively successful when it comes to designing and implementinginformation and education campaigns, but the reluctance and fear of thelocal authorities to denounce the FGM practices of the ethnic groups resid-ing in their areas, and the inhibitions of the judiciary in prosecuting caseswhere the 1985 law has been clearly violated, seem to have resulted in anoverall failure of the British policies to prevent FGM practices.

The recourse of the U.K. courts to enforce legislation and to deter newpotential cases could prove effective against FGM. The initiative of theAPPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development andReproductive Health) may have opened the door for a change in thelegislation in 2003, with the aim of finding more effective strategies ofprevention. It also remains to be seen whether the Department of



International Development’s gender and development policies, directedtoward developing countries,33 and characterized by the desire to under-stand local cultures and implement participatory strategies, could be alsoadopted in the United Kingdom and contribute to a more successfulprevention of FGM.

This essay has analysed the way British cultural relativism has deter-mined the policies designed and implemented to discourage parents fromsexually mutilating their daughters. The struggle against FGM should beconsidered an integral part of the objective of protecting the bodilyintegrity and dignity of young girls and women, and therefore must bedeemed a human rights issue. Let us hope in particular that the Britishgovernment will be equal to the new challenge currently awaiting not onlyitself, but also the U.K.-based African women’s grassroots organizations: thetargeting of religious and community leaders who mostly defend traditionalpractices and take advantage of British multicultural policies to keep thesecustoms alive. According to Shamis Dirir, development coordinator atBlack Women’s Health and Family Support (BWHFS), the abandoning ofFGM by the Somali community depends mainly on religious leaders:

Our target for the next conference is religious leaders. We have a lot, theyare not doing enough themselves. Some of the Somali religious leaders saywe 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 conferencewith them in England, but we’re going to. We send them letters, they cometo meetings, but they don’t come out and talk.34

The gendered dimension of citizenship cannot be dissociated from itsmulticultural dimension. The “universalism” of citizenship has proved to bede facto exclusively masculine. Is multicultural citizenship also doomed to beconstructed along patriarchal lines? Is the identity dimension of ethnicityincompatible with women’s interests as individuals? To John Rex’s observa-tion 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 aregroup identity and cultural and ethnic recognition detrimental to class inter-ests, they also produce an androcentric multiculturalism that deeply contra-dicts the principle of equality between men and women before the law. Byethnicizing itself even more in the host society, the collective identity of theminority group affirms itself through the strengthening of its own culturaltraditions, and this is very likely to run counter to the individual rights ofwomen. If British multicultural policies content themselves with fightingracism and enhancing ethnic identity, they favor the minority group—almostalways represented by men—and its racialization, to the detriment of class



and gender inequalities. As evident in the trail-blazing British model, multi-culturalism in its current guise cannot be fully democratic unless it seriouslyfaces the problems of social justice existing within the specific ethnic groups.

Glossary of Acronyms

ACPC Area Child Protection CommitteeBMA British Medical AssociationBWHFS Black Women’s Health and Family SupportCRE Commission for Racial EqualityFGM Female Genital MutilationLBWHAP London Black Women’s Health Action ProjectMP Member of the British ParliamentMRG Minority Rights GroupNGO Nongovernmental OrganizationNHS National Health ServiceRCM Royal College of MidwivesRCOG Royal College of Obstetricians and GynaecologistsUNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

OrganizationUNICEF United Nation Children’s FundWAF Women Against FundamentalismsWHO World Health OrganizationWNC Women’s National Commission

Notes

For their help and support, we especially acknowledge Lord Kennet; MartineSpensky, Full Professor in Gender Studies and British Studies, Blaise PascalUniversity (Clermont-Ferrand, France); Shamis Dirir, Development Coordinatorat 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 SpecialistMidwife 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 forthe Abolition of Female Genital Mutilation (GAMS, Paris) and Marie-HélèneFranjou, Pediatrician and President of the Group for the Abolition of Female GenitalMutilation (GAMS, Paris); Khady Koita, President of the European network for theprevention of FGM; Linda Weil-Curiel, Human Rights Lawyer and President ofthe Committee for the Abolition of Sexual Mutilations (CAMS, Paris), Adriana Kaplan



Marcusan, Anthropologist, Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), EstelaRodriguez, member of the research group “Comunicación y Construcción deGénero,” University Ramón Llull, Barcelona, and Jim Cohen, Associate Professorin Political Science, Paris 8 University.

1. At the first British conference on FGM in 1989 it was decided that theexpression “female circumcision” should be avoided and replaced by“female genital mutilation” (Dorkenoo and Hedley). That choice wasaccepted and confirmed in 1991 by fifteen Eastern and Western Africancountries during a United Nations Human Rights department meeting.However, some African grass root organizations based in the UnitedKingdom would prefer to use the expression “Female Genital Cutting”rather than “Female Genital Mutilation” (APPG). The expression “femalecircumcision” is considered misleading by many activists, for it reminds oneof the much less dangerous practice of male circumcision, whose causes andconsequences cannot be compared with those that are related to the genitalcutting of girls. However, the terms “(female) circumcision,” “cut,” “oper-ation,” “Sunna,” or the expression “to be closed” continue to be used at thecommunity level, since they are the ones that many ethnic groups normallyuse. The WHO distinguishes three types of FGM practices: “circumcision:excision of the prepuce, with or without excision of part or all of the clit-oris” (or Sunna); “excision: excision of the clitoris with partial or total exci-sion of the labia minora,” and “infibulation: excision of part or all of theexternal 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 scar-ring 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, depres-sion).” In the case of infibulated women, “penetration can sometimes take aslong as six months or even longer . . . Lack of sexual pleasure response can bea 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 underadequate analgesia and is best carried out at 20 weeks gestation (midtrimester) 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 urethraduring labour. It also ensures complete healing prior to labour. Somewomen prefer to have this procedure done during labour or the 2nd stage asthey stated they do not want to suffer two separate pains; that is, deinfibulationand 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 Londonand working in a prenatal clinic, June 2004.



6. With migratory flows coming mainly from the Commonwealth, the conceptof “immigrant” was deprived of many of its connotations (boundaries ofexclusion and inclusion defined by nationality), and the racial/ethnic catego-rization became the most important marker for the identification of the newlyarrived populations in the United Kingdom. As an example of the differencesbetween 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)—amajority of those included under the category “ethnic minority” were bornin the United Kingdom, and therefore are not immigrants.

7. The publication of the final report of the Research Working Group oninequalities in health, the so-called Black Report, pointing at the existenceof important class differences in health status within different groups of theBritish population (including minority ethnic groups), represented a funda-mental milestone in the fight to place the issue of health inequalities on theBritish political agenda (Townsend, Black, et al.).

8. This report was edited by Scilla McLean who was then in charge of theresearch section of the MRG. In 1981, after this publication, EfuaDorkenoo, who was then a Ghanean nurse, founded the Women’s ActionGroup on Female Excision and Infibulation (WAGFEI) under the patron-age of the MRG. WAGFEI later became what is currently known as theFoundation for Women’s Health Research and Development (FORWARD).FORWARD is a nongovernmental organization that mainly focuses onresearch, information, and awareness training of professionals about FGM inthe 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 patientsattending these clinics. Northwick Park Hospital is mainly attended byrefugees from the Somali educated middle-class, whereas the CentralMiddlesex Hospital is mainly attended by Somali women from moredeprived groups (Leye et al.).

11. The African Well Woman clinic of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital Trust isrun by Comfort Momoh, FGM specialist midwife, member of the CoreGroup of the Female Circumcision Strategy Group of Black Women’sHealth and Family Support (BWHFS), and member of “Optimum HealthServices,” a multidisciplinary and multiagency working group on FGM forthe London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, and Lewisham (L,S&L)(Forward).

12. Letter from Jennifer Bourne, outreach nurse at the African Women’sHealth Clinic in Waltham Forest (North East London) to A. Guiné,September 2003. According to J. Bourne, their services are to be main-streamed, and because many of the women attend from outside the area ofWaltham Forest, it cannot be funded by the local primary Care Trust. Sheadded that they have high numbers of women coming through the service



and that they now have links with Whipps Cross Hospital (Waltham Forest)for reversals (de-infibulations).

13. Interview with J. Bourne by A. Guiné, April 2002, London.14. Letter from Grace Evans, Policy Development and Review Officer,

Greenwich Council, to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002.15. “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 caringfor both physical and mental needs of the vulnerable or suffering andmaintains an understanding, holistic and objective approach to the currentsituation.” Its contributors are Janice Rymer, Hary Gordon, Nahid Toubia,J. Dunkley-Bent, Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, Els Leye, Marwa Ahmed,Sarah McCulloch, and Sadiya Mohammad.

16. Within the initiatives developed by this group chaired by ChristineMcCafferty, some MPs carried out participating observation in projects toprevent FGM practices, and national and international NGOs were invitedto participate in hearings with MPs at the British Parliament (Indriso).

17. Quoted from letter addressed by F. Harding (coordinator of theParliamentary Hearings, Commonwealth Institute) to E. Leye (responsiblefor “Networking in Europe for the Prevention of FGM”), April 11, 2000.

18. For example, according to the minutes sent by Sue Green to A. Guinéconcerning the meeting of April 2, 2003, the following persons were inattendance: Anne Weyman, Sue Green, and Kristi Gooden, WNC; AdwoaKluvitse, FORWARD; Asma’u Joda, Women Living Under Muslim Laws;Sarah McCulloch, Agency for Culture and Change Management, Sheffield; GillFrances, 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.

19. Interview with Dr. Gordon by J. Jones (2000).20. Baroness Rendell, patron of LBWHAP and prime mover behind the cross-

party parliamentary inquiry into FGM developed in 2000, declared herself“convinced that some UK health professionals are still carrying out theoperation on request,” and stated that she “would like to see someprosecutions under the 1985 Act” (Jones).

21. Interview with a Somali woman by A. Guiné, 2002, London.22. As it occurred in the 1940s in Sudan, when the British colonial government

outlawed FGM without considering the local culture and traditions(Bibbings).

23. Letter by a former Women’s Equality Officer for a London Council, to A. Guiné, October 2002.

24. Letter by a Policy Development and Review Officer in a London Council,to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002.

25. Only a registered nurse can become a health visitor after a one-year, full-time course and two years part time. The course includes psychology,



physiology, normal and abnormal development, social policy, sociology,and epidemiology. The health visitor visits every family with a baby fromthe 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, upto five years. The school nurse goes in from five to sixteen years.

26. Interview with a health visitor by A. Guiné, April 2002, London.27. Ibid.28. 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.

29. Interview with Shamis Dirir, director of the Black Women’s Health andFamily Support (BWHFS), by A. Guiné, February 2002, London.

30. �http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-69502.html.�31. Note from Sarah McCullough to Sue Greene, February 20, 2003, as attach-

ment to the meeting minutes of the WNC’s FGM working group, sent bySue Green to A. Guiné, February 26, 2003.

32. Letter from Grace Evans to A. Guiné, October 2, 2002.33. 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 (CommonsHansard).

34. Interview with S. Dirir by A. Guiné, February 2002, London.

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RISING ABOVE THE BOTTOM OF

GERMAN SOCIETY: REFLECTIONS

ON INTERVIEWS WITH FEMALE ROMA

REFUGEES FROM FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

Monika Halpaap

As a peace worker I worked with refugee Roma1 women in Berlin in thesummer of 2004. The following essay is the product of my internship

that finalized my graduate degree in Peace Studies. From my work with thisgroup of female refugees from former Yugoslavia, I learned of the numerousobstacles that they face on a daily basis (ranging from overt and insidiousprejudice, to a precarious immigration status, to the inability to be gainfullyemployed). The most prominent characteristic that my interviewees mademanifest to me was their dogged commitment to forge a better life forthemselves and, most importantly, for their families in their new home andhost country (Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany). This essay should beviewed as a beginning, a door that is opening in our new millennium to theperception and treatment of refugees within the European Union.

A Humanitarian Perspective: Peace Worker and Theologian

Between October 2003 and October 2004, I participated in the first coursefor peace workers in Bolzano, Italy, under the tutelage of the Departmentof Professional Training, University of Bolzano, with financial support fromthe European Social Fund. Within a Europe that is still under constructionand 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 theglobalization of violence.


The one-year training course prepared me and other university graduatesfrom different universities for work in various fields of conflict since a peaceworker is a humanitarian operator whose intercultural and communicationskills may be applied in critical situations in order to decrease tension andpromote dialogue. The course focused on five areas: promotion of peace,intercultural cooperation, conflict transformation, management of humani-tarian and emergency aid, and international law. As future peace workers, wewere trained to work in the context of civilian interventions or peace oper-ations with the goal of promoting peace through conflict prevention andtransformation. Such conflicts might be interpersonal, local, or internationalin character.

My particular final project was a five-week internship in Berlin,Germany: a hands-on social research project aimed at gathering informa-tion on the intercultural conflict scenario involving Roma refugee womenin Berlin. My goal was to become aware of the clients’ emotional andpractical needs, and to ascertain the social, governmental, as well as per-sonal support provided to them. Peace work entails discerning, on the onehand, when and where individual consulting or training in intergroupmediation suffices and, on the other hand, when hard political work ofmonitoring and enforcing is necessary to sustain the implementation ofhuman rights.

As an individual trained to foster peace in disparate conflict-strickensettings, I believe in the fundamentally equal value of all human life andunderstand diversity as an opportunity and not a threat. So, beyond all diver-sity, the question is how can I help one particular Roma woman, her refugeefamily, her peers, and/or her group as a whole? In each situation I face, Imust discover the clients’ practical needs, the obstacles they face, and thethreats 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’spersonal situation with the political reality.

My week of interviews with ten Roma refugee women, which Iconducted in collaboration with Irene Canetti, a fellow student in myprogram, and Gesa Zinn from the University of Minnesota, provided mewith much insight. As a peace worker it is not uncommon to integrate thepromotion of peace and another profession. My personal engagement forpeace emerges from and relates closely to my training in theology. As aLutheran pastor, my position demands, for instance, an attentiveness to therelations between individuals or institutions and marginal groups in society,such as ethnic minorities. Furthermore, I give assistance by mediation ifconflict situations in family or other relations are threatening to escalate.

M O N I K A H A L P A A P250


One of my first tasks at the very beginning of my theological studies wasa 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 thevision of peace, the concrete utopia of a culture of peace in the world as awhole. It is within this context, as a peace worker and theologian, that I pre-sent to you the results of my on-going dialogue with female Roma refugeesin Berlin, whose hope for a better life spurred them on in overcomingnumerous obstacles.

Recent Historical Events and Personal Histories

Historical developments since 1989, including the Yugoslav Wars, providethe background for understanding my interviewees’ collective and personalhistories as Roma refugees. In 1989, the Cold War between the East andWest, and, on a smaller scale, between the Western European countriesand the formerly Communist East Bloc countries, ended. In 1992, after thefounding of the European Union (EU), the latter started the continuedopening of its borders, especially toward East and South eastern Europeanstates. Thus in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, migration move-ments from east to west have taken place and immigration laws as well asintegration and antidiscrimination legislation have been implemented inmany EU countries. Such is the case, for example, in the Federal Republicof Germany, a country which, like many others, is coping with migrationof non-nationals into their land, among them minority groups like theRoma, gypsy refugees from wartorn former Yugoslavia. They came toBerlin as a result of the Yugoslav wars, a series of bloody conflicts between1991 and 2001, resulting in approximately 300,000 deaths, with millionsmore driven from their homes. Many key individual participants were latercharged with war crimes due to their involvement in genocidal activities.As a result of the war in Bosnia, whose conclusion was officially recognizedby the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, tens of thousands of Roma wereliving in refugee camps or in overcrowded hut settlements in Serbia andMontenegro.

According to Miroslav Jovanovic, president of the Roma DemocraticForum, before the NATO bombing in 2001, approximately 150,000Roma resided in Kosovo. All but a few thousand fled (Mitric n.p.).According to estimates, about 10,000 Roma left Ni,, the second largest cityin former Yugoslavia, during the l990s. After the 1999 NATO campaignagainst Serbia, approximately 1,000 Roma from Kosovo settled in Ni,(Filopoviw 274). Other reasons for the Roma flight from their home country

R O M A R E F U G E E S F R O M F O R M E R Y U G O S L A V I A 251


can be found in their country’s poor recognition of civil rights and thepossibility of military conscription. Due to the war and its aftereffects, theeconomic situation in Serbia further deteriorated, as did the Roma’sstandard of living. Many, for example, were living in conditions so abjectthat survival became a daily struggle. As one Roma woman remembers,“Frequently, the children had nothing to eat. But here in Germany chil-dren never go hungry, no matter how little one has. Many [Roma] peoplecame here to Berlin since they had no longer any accommodations inSerbia. Or everything had been stolen.”

Discrimination against the Roma escalated in Yugoslavia during the late1990s. A young Roma refugee living in Berlin learned of the threat to herpeople’s safety in former Yugoslavia from relatives who returned to theirhome country after having lived in Germany for some time. She recountsthe racist graffiti that greeted school children as they approached their placeof learning: “ ‘When the Roma kids come, we are going to kill them.[signed] Serbs.’” Her following statement shows her belief that the formerYugoslavia is no longer safe for Roma children: “Before the war therewere problems being a Roma in Serbia, because we are Roma—we are notSerbs! But I myself had no problem with that at school. But now a differenttime has come. And the Rom and their children notice that.”

In support of this belief, the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaftfür bedrohte Völker) asks that the German government not repatriate Romarefugees due to the potential danger to their well-being. This associationappeals to the German government and to European institutions especiallyto deal with human rights violations against Roma peoples in EastEuropean countries. Needless to say, many German organizations and asso-ciations are concerned about the problems the Roma face in contemporarySerbia, one reason why the women I interviewed were able to remain inGermany for such a long time; yet, after the official end of the YugoslavWars in 2001, they cannot be considered asylum seekers, and their presencein Germany is uncertain.

During my five-week internship with them, which was concluded witha two-week-long interview process of ten Roma women who volunteeredto be interviewed,2 I discovered that the Roma had been productive mem-bers of their community when they left Serbia. Now in their host country,they continue to be hardworking individuals, eager to support their fami-lies, protect their children, educate themselves, look toward the future, andbe a part of a larger community within the city of Berlin. Note must bemade that I do not view these women as subjects; the perspective I offer isa human one. My efforts are simply to provide a glimpse into the lives ofthese women who must face hardship and adversity on a daily basis insearch of a better life for themselves and their families. Their lives are



plagued by prejudice, and often they are insulted with racial epithets andstereotypes simply for being part of an ethnic minority that has beenmarginalized throughout European history. Stereotypes are a generalizedfalse perception of a larger group. The result is always the alienation of boththe collective and the individual pertaining to the group. In presenting toyou what I believe to be an accurate portrait of these Roma women, it ismy hope to challenge and perhaps shatter the stereotype of the gypsy as amenacing and untrustworthy collective Zigeuner (the German derogatoryterm for gypsy) and to call attention to the dehumanization they face andthe obstacles they must overcome.

Roma in Germany

Currently, two main Roma groups exist in the Federal Republic ofGermany. The first group consists of approximately 70,000 Roma, includ-ing the subgroup of the Sinti, who are German citizens and recognized asa historically developed ethnic minority in Germany, similar to the Sorbs,Friesans, and Danes, who are German nationals. The number of all ethnicminorities in Germany is estimated at 240,000 or 0.3 percent of theGerman population (Klein 16). Many of the Roma who are currentlyGerman nationals came to Germany from southeastern European countriesbetween 1850 and 1920. As declared by the Council of Europe in l995, theConvention for the Protection of Minorities applies to the aforementionedgroups of German national ethnic minorities.

The second group consists of non-citizen ethnic minorities residing inGermany. Many Roma who are not German citizens are from the formerYugoslavia. The first influx of this group entered the Federal Republic ofGermany as guest workers in the 1960s and early 1970s of the twentiethcentury. As non-citizens, many have a residence and a work permit(Hermes 4), and on the whole, do not differ greatly from the mainstreampopulation. That is, they work, study, and lead similar lives to those of thegeneral German and non-German population.

Quite different, however, is the situation for the more recent influx ofRoma who arrived in Germany as refugees. Unlike the Roma who are rec-ognized as a traditional German ethnic minority, the Serbian (Macedonian,Romanian, and other East European) Roma refugees’ status is ambivalentfor these populations have been termed “new minorities.” The “newminorities” constitute approximately 5.4 million foreigners—in particularTurks and people from former Yugoslavia—who are living in Germany(Statistical Yearbook for the Federal Republic of Germany 65). These Roma areneither automatically granted minority status and minority rights nor dothey have the particular protection customarily granted to asylum seekers.



Known as Duldung, their status can be described as a temporary butrenewable stay of deportation, usually on humanitarian or practical grounds(Green x). Because these refugee Roma are not considered to be asylumseekers, their deportation is only suspended. Conditions that could deferdeportation might include threat of torture upon returning to the countryof origin, one’s physical or mental illnesses, the illness of a family member,or one’s involvement in a training or qualification measure recognized bythe state. As a group that is geduldet3 or tolerated, they are permitted to staywithin the Federal Republic within a defined geographical area until theconditions delaying deportation are removed.

As I learned from my interviews, if the Roma women refugees fromSerbia participate in educational training courses, their temporary permis-sion to remain may be extended to the end of the training period. Theirpermission card, which is not a residence permit, is not a legal claim toimmigrate. It merely allows the permit holder to stay within the FederalRepublic of Germany until s/he is notified to return to the country oforigin. The legal term for this process is expulsion. Thus several days beforepermission cards (which are valid for a maximum of six months) expire,one must request an extension. The application, of course, does not guar-antee the extension. At present, for the Roma, the temporary permissionslip only delays expulsion.

My Interviewees’ Legal Status

In summer 2004, as a peace worker in training, I researched aspects ofRoma and Sinti women’s lives in Germany and interviewed a group of tenRoma women who were able to receive such a permission slip that hadbeen renewed numerous times. As refugees from former Yugoslavia, theyfled Serbia when their town and homes had been bombed by NATOtroops and had now been residing in Germany for the greater part of adecade.

As was previously mentioned, a distinction exists between Germannational Roma who are officially recognized as an ethnic minority and therecent Roma refugees, the “new minority” Roma refugees, whose presenceis “tolerated” (geduldet) in the Federal Republic of Germany. Their particu-lar status is—among other factors—the result of the Berlin and Belgradegovernments signing a repatriation agreement in the autumn of 2002after the last of the Yugoslav Wars officially ended. This “reciprocalagreement . . . regulates the return and acceptance of people with an unreg-ulated residence permit. It applies to some 50,000 Yugoslav citizens who areesteemed to reside illegally in Germany” (CEELI). According to CEELI(American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative),



since 2002, numerous Roma singles and families have been repatriated toSerbia-Montenegro. For the moment deportation of my interviewees ismerely suspended. Hence, although they do not wish to return to theircountry of origin given today’s conditions, and desire permanence in theirnew 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 coun-try is limited. The temporary permission card, unlike a residence permit thatallows for freedom of movement, confines the cardholder to a specific geo-graphic area—that is, jurisdiction—until the return to the country of origin.Such immobility surprises many new arrivals in Germany. S., a middle-agedwoman who owned a flat and a car and held a job as an engineer when shewas 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 smallarea]. When I came here, I read that in my temporary permission papers.”Since family members are not necessarily living within the same city, thechance to visit them is limited. This is especially the case since these Romacan hardly afford to travel long distances via public transportation; an unau-thorized visit, which some of the women have undertaken in the past, isthus rare, adding to the isolation they already experience as outsiders.

Yet, I learned that regardless of their limited freedom of movement, alongwith their inability to work for lack of permits, my Roma interviewees doeverything possible to renew their temporary permission cards as a means toavoid expulsion. Every six months (and at times more frequently) they havetheir status of application reviewed. For many who have been in Germanysince the middle or late 1990s this visit to the Ausländeramt (Department ofForeigners) has almost become routine, yet still causes high levels of anxietyand fear. Unless governmental laws are rewritten, and the social and eco-nomic conditions under which they live change so that they are able toreceive a work permit so as not to rely on social welfare, Roma everywherewill continue to live on the fringes of society due to their ethnic origin andlegal 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 isGermany, our country [Serbia], or America, we are always aliens, foreigners.”N., a middle-aged Roma, adds, “There is no place for us Roma. People arenot 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 theyfeel tied to their home town and region in former Yugoslavia4 where their



families had been living for generations (some families even longer thanmost Serbian inhabitants). They still call their former dwelling place“home” (after eight or more years in exile), and especially if some membersof their family continue living there or have repatriated. When these Romawomen speak about their “being at home” or their “feeling at home,” theyuse 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 despitetheir 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 theinterview, others nodded in approval. Notwithstanding the labels of“foreigners” or “aliens,” and the discrimination, persecution, and hardshipsthey suffered in Serbia, these Roma women nevertheless refer to Ni,, aSerbian town of approximately 300,000 inhabitants, as their otajbina.Germany is their domovina, yet their children’s otajbina, and thus worth thefight to stay. Germany is where these women have their physical residenceand has become the homeland of their children. In other words, they viewtheir host country as conferring on their children a sense of belonging.

Within the Federal Republic, the majority of Germans know little of thebackground of the Serbian Roma, and even less about their “home” situa-tion. In fact, many Germans view the Roma through the prism of theZigeuner stereotype and still identify all types of Roma as nomads who travelthe countryside and move from one place to another, crossing borders,living free of responsibility, beyond the limitations of rules and laws. Yet infact, the majority of European Roma are not nomads and never were. Theyhave lived and are living at fixed locations as recognized—yet not alwaysrespected—minorities and citizens. My interviewees stressed that only arelatively small group of Roma lead a perpetually nomadic life style.

Little did the Roma I interviewed know the magnitude of their adjust-ment to the new environment. The majority of them had previously beenliving in the city of Ni,, the second largest city in the Republic of Serbia.Presently residing in metropolitan Berlin, the daily routine of my inter-viewees includes visits to the supermarket, walks, and bus or train rideswith their children to school. Frequently, they also visit the social welfareoffice, a physician, family members, and friends in the vicinity. Such a rou-tine 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, becausehe is a man. A mother’s place is always at home.” Thus the environmentdemands many adjustments, not least of them in the change of acquiredgender roles. The Roma’s traditional customs assign responsibilities athome 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



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 notchange before she herself has a daughter-in-law. Such social hierarchy ispartially the result of the beliefs and rules regarding decency and a sense ofhonor, for a Roma woman must always be attentive not to bring disgraceto her family members. The customs and liberties of the new environmentare in direct conflict with the traditional Roma way of life. Hence, theirgender roles have evolved and transformed the personal dynamic withinthe domestic sphere. The traditional hierarchy with the domovina has beendisrupted by exile. The displacement from former Yugoslavia has physi-cally alienated Roma from family and has—to an extent—liberated themfrom the rigid family structure and constructions. Nevertheless, thesewomen I interviewed might celebrate their newfound mobility, but fondlypreserve their home culture as best they can.

Yet did these women that we interviewed expect such changes? Didthey know that their lives would be different before coming to Germany?These are some questions in which I was very interested. I wanted toknow, for example, what they expected from the country they chose astheir “new home.” When I asked, I received the following response:

“That’s Germany” we thought. Germany has always meant a lot to us inSerbia. Yes, I was aware that I would have to go to the police upon myarrival, but [I] didn’t know that people would be aggressive towards us. Ithought they would be nice. Germany . . . People [were] only saying goodthings about Germany. “Germany is good” and so on. They mentionedbeautiful things.

The disparity between their idealized place and the harsh reality they hadto 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 fewwho spoke their language (Romanes, Serbian) or showed an interest inthem. Many of the Roma refugees were disappointed when they realizedthat Germany (i.e., Berlin) was such a large and cold place that turned itsback on them, and let them fend for themselves. “I didn’t know it wouldbe so hard,” commented one of the interviewees. No other Roma womanin the group of interviewees objected.

The general consensus was that the Roma’s “new home” was not whatthey had expected. The interviewees voiced that they felt unwelcome. Theyfelt that Germans hardly listen to or look at them due to widespread prejudicesagainst the Zigeuner (cigane). The Roma are unsure about their future. Theycannot feel integrated into German society. As S. recapitulates: “Nothingworks, if you don’t know where your place is. We do not know if we shall be



in Germany or Serbia? That’s [exactly] the problem. We are neither here northere.” S.’s verbalization of “neither here nor there” eloquently articulates theRoma’s emotional state of mind, legal uncertainty, lack of belonging, andsense of impermanence under the present circumstances.

Needless to say, one’s self-worth suffers under such conditions. ThoseRoma who had once been engineers, teachers, and nurses lose faith inthemselves, since they feel thwarted at every turn. Although they are eagerto 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? Itshould be accepted that we seek employment.” The women from Ni, aredisillusioned at the present and potential future. I, too, am disappointed; asa German, a theologian, and a peace worker, I find it difficult to accept thatin contemporary Germany, there are young, willing people without theright to earn money, and teenagers who are not allowed to study or to learna profession due to their “exceptional leave to remain” or their Duldunglegal status. As a result, young Roma women spend most of their time athome, either alone or with others, looking after their children, keepingtheir houses neat and tidy, and going for short walks, to pass the time. It isnot 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 dosomething. Every day I go to the doctor, do the cooking. Sit down.Visitors. Every day we have them. And my parents do the same. Visitfriends and family. Because you have no work, you have to stay at home allthe time.”

Discrimination and Alienation

It is estimated that one million Roma living outside European memberstates have not been recognized as a national minority. As a result of thislack of legal classification, it is difficult for them to attain financial auton-omy. Approximately eighty percent of the Roma in East and CentralEuropean countries are said to be unemployed (Borowiec 1). Most Romain former Yugoslavia and other parts of the former East bloc countries havebeen poor, unemployed, and have had to endure substandard livingaccommodations and discrimination. According to research by MargaritaAssenova, the painful process of economic transformation has exacerbatedpoverty and unemployment among the Roma in former East bloc states,where the rise of criminality and immigration to Western Europe has madethe mistreatment of this minority an international concern (1). Few havesucceeded in escaping the vicious cycle of poverty, marked by all of thedescriptors just mentioned. Needless to say, the Roma are a particularly



vulnerable group, which is why the Roma women in Germany are soaffected when their human dignity is violated from two sides: (a) by thexenophobic climate and anti-ziganistic prejudices within parts of theGerman population, and (b) by the hostility and discrimination from otherethnic and cultural groups within Germany. As for the former, foreignersare, generally speaking, regarded with reservation and suspicion, since theyare suspected to take jobs away from local people, and to live at the expenseof the “respectable” tax-paying Germans. Paradoxically, both mitigatingand incriminating as this may seem, as it concerns German xenophobia, theRoma are not singled out.

Xenophobia is a universal phenomenon. According to the InternationalOrganization for Migration (IOM), migrants are frequently “targeted as thescapegoats for all manner of domestic problems facing societies today, partic-ularly unemployment, crime, drugs, even terrorism” (IOM 1). As the UNSpecial Reporter of the Commission of Human rights on the Human Rightsof Migrants, Gabriela Rodríguez Pizarro, indicates, “A sense of alienation ispart of being a migrant. This is especially true in the case of the manymigrants who are undocumented or in an irregular situation” (2). Moreover,the Roma also face discrimination and hostility from other ethnic and cul-tural groups, particularly in a Berlin school whose name my intervieweeswished not be published. At this school, over eighty percent of the childrenare of non-German descent. According to the Roma women, their childrenare afraid to go to school for they fear being mistreated by “the Russians, theArabs, and the Albanians.” N. describes a scenario at this particular Germaninner-city school:

At a school in my neighbourhood, for example, there are children fromAlbania. Our friend’s daughter attends that school. She used to wear a neck-lace with a cross, and therefore the Albanians attacked her, yelling: “Why doyou wear this? That’s shit!” And also Arabs confronted us. And Turks.Albanian people and our Serbian people have been at war, intense war. Andtherefore this girl is afraid to go to school.

The fear with which Roma children live daily is a hindrance. It blocks theirparticipation in school and hampers their motivation to do their best. Evenexceptional teachers are not always successful in dealing with interculturalproblems. The Roma children and their families are therefore frequentlyalone in their attempts to cope with daily intercultural tension andconflicts.

It becomes evident from many of the examples above that to be “at thebottom 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



families who came to Germany from former Yugoslavia. Indeed, it con-tributes to the frustration experienced by Roma women that thwarts theirattempts to master their lives in exile. They feel stifled for the followingreasons: for having to reconcile their idealized notion of exile with thereality of living in a host country; for a liminal legal status; for being sepa-rated and alienated as a result of being subjected to restrictions regardingwork and mobility within the country; for enduring prejudices and dis-criminatory behavior; for being isolated from the rest of the population dueto their inability to effectively communicate in German; and for the con-stant threat of expulsion from the Federal Republic.

In spite of the interviewees’ frustration with the realities encountered inGermany, they did not succumb to resignation or despair. Instead, Inoticed 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 theyleft their country of origin (and, often, their extended family) to start a newlife. They hoped that exile would provide for them a life in safety and withmedical care, without food shortages, and with a good educational system.For their children’s sake, the Roma women aspire to remain in Germanydespite being homesick for family members and the life they left behind. V.clearly explains, “Our extended family lives in Serbia. My children want tosee 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 buyanything. For the children it is better here.”

The children represent the future of the Roma. A modern education, asindicated by D., is the key to bettering the status of her children.Specifically, D. refers to the basic education that leads to literacy, but alsoto 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 hisgrandma. He knows already several letters.” After I asked if she would buya small computer for her daughter, D. answered: “Yes, I will. . . . Simplyto make sure she knows it.” Her answer shows us that she considers com-puter skills to be important for both her son and her daughter, and that sheis concerned about their education. As I mentioned before, children playan important role in the lives of the Roma. Roma women particularly arestrongly motivated to make the best of being “at the bottom of Germansociety.” Their struggle for the right to reside in Germany and to have theirchildren raised in a secure environment cannot be underestimated; theyhave left behind a social safety net provided by kinship structures and beliefsthat support families economically and emotionally, which is lacking inGermany. Their extended family (parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters,cousins, aunts, and uncles) provides strong support for these women. After



marrying, the family circle widens and includes their partner’s family aswell as their own and the offspring. Family is the first contact if they needhelp and the last reliable resource apart from some authorities or institutionsto which they can turn for help.

Although the alienation from extended family signifies a lack of supportnetwork, the geographic separation allows for change and freedom. TheRoma I interviewed appeared to have gained some independence from thecustoms, rules, and regulations that govern traditional Roma life. Perhapsgrowing up in Communist Yugoslavia has changed them; maybe many oftheir traditions were shaken and/or destroyed by war; and, last but notleast, maybe the metropolitan environment in Berlin demanded that theseyoung women adapt. As one interviewee clearly stated, “In Serbia, Romawomen don’t have as many rights as here.”

Rights and Freedom

In their communications with government officials in Berlin, the Romawomen I interviewed proclaim to be more active and successful than theirhusbands, especially in their contact with public administration officials inBerlin. V., for instance, remarks: “I think women are more diplomatic.They talk and react. That’s just like it was in Serbia.” My interviewees arewell informed, especially regarding their rights and the benefits they canreceive from the social welfare office. D. affirms, “Here in Berlin theforeigner’s law is much better than in other cities. Here you have morerights [and] possibilities.” The interpretation and application of lawsdepends on the local government as well as institutions, and on the good-will and social consciousness of government employees. Berlin and itsgovernment employees provide—on the whole—less stressful conditionsfor Roma refugees than other German states. These women were indeedvery actively engaged in learning and in facing challenges. I learned thatthere are three signs indicating that a Roma woman has adapted to her newenvironment: (1) she is motivated to start a learning process; (2) she seesherself as a progressive woman; and (3) she is prepared to fight for herfamily’s and her own rights of residence, work, and welfare.

Learning, Mediation, Integration

At present, in Berlin and other German cities, qualification modules havebeen developed to train and educate Roma mediators in the areas of publichealth and school. Those chosen to participate in qualification modules takepart in German-language courses and are trained to mediate betweenofficials and clients, teachers and parents, and pupils of different cultures.



The Roma would be ideal candidates to become valuable promoters ofmutual understanding and conflict management, since for centuries Romain southeastern Europe have experienced living in multiethnic, multireli-gious 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 involveRoma. Since 2003, the center has been offering a variety of programs forRoma participants aimed at establishing the position of intercultural schoolmediator. Many of these school mediators are multilingual (Serbian/Romanes/German), and use multilingualism to help mediate conflictsthrough understanding. The focus of their hands-on work lies in accompa-nying children on their way to school, in class, in the schoolyard, and occa-sionally on excursions. They also motivate Roma parents to stay in closecontact with their children’s teachers, and they occasionally join them dur-ing their conferences with their children’s school teachers. These mediatorsliaise between the children, the school, and the families.

My interviewees were involved as intercultural school mediators as part ofan initiative that resulted from a Programme for International StudentAssessment (PISA) study mandated by the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development (OECD) in 2000.5 This study indicatedthat attending a conventional school is frequently too overwhelming andchallenging for children of ethnic minorities. In contemporary Germany’severyday culture, marginal right-wing extremism can be observed. Apropensity to violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia is particu-larly manifest among east German youths. Due to the inhospitable andfrankly potentially threatening environment in which young non-ethnicGermans find themselves, many Roma children find it difficult to adjust toa “normal” daily routine at a German school. When there has been a reportof an intercultural conflict, the Roma women as school mediators intervene.The following dispute involving a Roma girl who had been physicallyattacked in school is revealing. After discussions in the family to find outwhy sixteen-year-old M. was so frightened, M. recounted to me: “Theyattacked 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 what-ever. My parents said ‘We are Serbian Roma. That causes problems. Soyou will not go to school anymore.’” Intercultural mediation at schoolconducted by these women who are familiar with problems their peopleencounter in German culture(s), and with social competence in bothworlds (Roma and German), not only bridges the gap and promotesmutual understanding, but also optimizes the educational chances forRoma and engages them in life-long learning processes. Without interven-tion, the young Roma girl might have never returned to school, which



would have cemented her fate as an uneducated, marginalized woman withfew possibilities.

The collaboration between school, families, and well-trained mediatorsis of extreme importance, for it is necessary to inform Roma families aboutthe opportunities for conflict management in school yards and classrooms.Furthermore, the number of school mediators needs to be extended tohave an effect on society as a whole. The importance of cultural mediationtraining for German society and for the Roma families with school childrenshould 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 forintercultural school mediation have their expulsion from Germany sus-pended for the duration of their training. Hence, this situation is beneficialto all involved. The arrangement engages the Roma in learning, temporarilyprotects them from returning to the country of origin (where their well-being could be jeopardized), empowers them, and integrates them into thesociety 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 inthe intercultural field may be uncommon and perhaps difficult to accept.Yet the women I interviewed adhered to the traditional model less than Ihad expected. What is certain is that the lives that these Roma have forgedfor themselves are in stark contrast to the more conservative roles prescribedwithin their culture.

When I referred to them as “progressive women,” one young Romasmiled. She seemed proud to be different from her parents, who were alsoliving in Berlin. Although her parents thought ill of the term “progressive,”this young woman viewed it as having a positive connotation. It was atribute to her ability to adjust to a new environment, and to satisfactorilynegotiate the cultural expectations of her family and those of urbanGerman culture. When I further pressed the group of interviewees, V., aproud young mother of two children, explained her idea of a “progressivewoman”: “As time comes, you change . . . [These are] new times and newgenerations. As singles we don’t go to the disco, for instance. But if you aremarried, everything is quite different. Now I go [to the disco] togetherwith my husband. Why not?” Traditional Roma would never go to adisco, not even accompanied by their husbands, nor would a single womanbe in public with a man unless engaged or soon to be engaged to bemarried.



The private sphere is a traditional Roma’s domain. Public space hadbeen the territory reserved for men. Yet because of the new existenceforged in Berlin, the public–private, male–female dichotomy has permu-tated. These Roma refugees are not confined to the home. Their mobilityhas permitted them to play an active role within schools and public organi-zations, 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 withoutdiscarding the traditional family network essential to Roma culture.

Prepared to Fight

Such “modern women” are, for the most part, the ones I had the opportu-nity to meet and interview. I felt that they were ready to defend their family’sprivilege of residence and work, for the children’s welfare, for personalintegrity, and for a life without fear. My interviewees have the energy andcommitment to continue creating an existence with dignity for themselvesand their people. On a daily basis, they work toward reaching their goalsand achieving their dreams of a better life. Their everyday existence is partof an emancipatory process; it constitutes the struggle to rise in society.

We must ask ourselves who of the Roma women could have thecourage and energy to stand up for themselves and face adversity? Perhapsthe young ones might dare to stand up to those individuals who are disre-spectful toward them and display racist behavior. Yet it might take a fewmore years of confidence-building and learning to develop an appropriateresponse as is evident from the following example in which a young, singleRoma encounters an elderly German woman who unexpectedly shouted aracist epithet: “There was a woman of about seventy years. It was hard forher to walk. She came up to me, and I thought she wanted to ask me some-thing. But [instead] she said to me: ‘Go home, you Zigeuner!’” It is signif-icant to note the unexpectedness of the racial insult, the epithet itself, theage of the enunciator, and V.’s reaction. The insult was verbalized withoutany provocation; V. and the elderly woman happened to be on the streetat the same time. The senior’s age is notable for it indicates that prejudicesare deeply ingrained and have a long history in Germany. The insultitself, Zigeuner, again stems from the fear of the “other” that led to tragedyof unfathomable proportions in the twentieth century. Furthermore, thepersistent fear of the “other” is a constant reminder that prejudice and dis-crimination must change. Perhaps V.’s reaction is key to how change willtake 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



voiced by the senior is unfounded, yet in line with the xenophobictendencies that have plagued German history. Today’s im/migrant andrefugee situation in Germany is fortunately forcing German society to faceits multiethnic and multicultural reality. It is the progressive people (bethey German, German national minorities, or recent refugees), like thewomen I interviewed, who can boldly evolve with changing times.

Conclusion

In closing, I would suggest that those who receive training, who learn, whostruggle yet maintain their self-respect, and who speak up and stand up fortheir rights are the ones who will rise in society. As exiles adapting to theirhost country and effectively coping with adversity, they have a chance tosucceed. I hope and believe that will power, self-confidence, and culturalknowledge will help young women like V. create a new “home”—both asdomovina and otajbina—for themselves6 in the Federal Republic ofGermany. In spite of the challenges they face (poverty, discrimination,uncertain legal status, and the language barrier), these Roma intervieweesdo not wish to return to their country of origin. While preserving theirown cultural identity, these strong women that I worked with are eager tobecome integrated into twenty-first-century German society, and, byextension, the EU. When concluding my interviews, I inquired how theybelieved their lives would continue and what efforts they would put forthin order to rise above their present situation. The response was, “What canyou do? You fight. You have to fight!” I am confident that the resilientRoma I interviewed, along with many of their fellow female Romarefugees from Serbia, will continue to meet the challenges facing themwith 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 asby individual Roma themselves. One of the women, whose name I leaveunmentioned to protect her identity, served as a translator betweenRomanes and German and Serbian and German. All interviews wereconducted 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 ofKosovo and Wojwodina) and Slovenia. There were three official languages



(Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian) and three main religiousdenominations (Orthodox, Muslim, Roman Catholic). Yugoslavia washeaded by Marshal Tito as state supreme commander of the armed forcesfor life. It was intended that after his death—he died in 1980—the presi-dency should circulate among the Yugoslavian republics in a definedorder. But this, in fact, failed, and a series of wars began as the republicsstruggled for independence. Even international intervention was provoked—for example, the NATO bombing of Serbia. In 2002, an agreement wasreached in negotiations, and reconstruction of former Yugoslavian provincescould begin.

5. By order of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment, Paris) comparing tests were done within the framework ofProgramme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in early 2000; 265,000 students from 32 countries participated. The study showed that (1) inGermany—more than in other countries—achievements at school are closelylinked to a student’s social background; and (2) children of foreigners areoften severely handicapped by missing language competence (Aktuell 64).

6. It might not be “new” but it was home, since they left wartorn Serbia whenthey were very young.

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Assenova, Margarita. “New Freedoms, Old Problems: Eastern Europe HasStruggled to Overcome the Heritage of Political Repression and MarxistEconomics.” 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 forRoma in Ni,.” In Managing Hatred and Distrust, The Prognosis for Post-ConflictSettlement in Multiethnic Communities in the Former Yugoslavia. Ed. NenadDimitrijevic and Petra Kovács. Budapest: Open Society Institute, 2004. 271–81.

Green, Simon. The Politics of Exclusion. Institutions and Immigration Policy inContemporary 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 inDurban, South Africa, August 31–September 7, 2001. �www.un.org/WAR/e.kit/indigenous�.

Klein, Eckart, “Traditional and New Minorities in Germany: Different Degrees ofProtection.” In Rethinking Non-Discrimination and Minority Rights. Ed. MartinScheinin and Reetta Toivanen. Turku, Finland: Institute for HumanRights/Åbo Akademi U, 2004. 15–23.



Mitric, Joan McQueeny. “Kosovo’s Forgotten Refugees.” www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/03/serbrefugees.html

Rodríguez Pizarro, Gabriela. “Working Far from Home—Migration andDiscrimination.” In Report on World Conference against Racism in Durban, SouthAfrica, August 31–September 7, 2001. �www.un.org/WAR/e.kit/indigenous�.

Statistical Yearbook for the Federal Republic of Germany. Wiesbaden: Bundesamt, 2003.





LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Ann Dellinger is Associate Professor of Spanish at the Virginia MilitaryInstitute. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University, inspiringa career change from teacher training to language and cultural studies.Having lived and worked in Spain for eighteen years, she is interested inpeninsular topics, particularly those corresponding to the Civil War andFranco eras. She has coauthored several language textbooks for college-level learners of Spanish as a second language and Sendas literarias (2nd ed.),a secondary program for heritage speakers. Other publications includearticles on pedagogical issues, Spanish women essayists of the 1939 SpanishDiaspora, and García Lorca, as well as numerous ancillary texts for Spanish-language learners. Her current project centers on unpublished poetry andtestimony written by political prisoners of the Franco regime.

Eva Eppler is Senior Lecturer of Language and Linguistics at the Universityof Roehampton, London. She received her Ph.D. from University CollegeLondon in 2004 and her M.Phil. from Vienna University in 1993. She wasborn in Vienna to a mother of rural Austrian descent and a father of PolishJewish descent. Eva Eppler emigrated to London in 1995 because, inAustrian Jewish refugee writer Jakov Lind’s words, “The cultural mix ofLondon lets you live.” Eva Eppler has published extensively on bilinguallanguage use and intercultural issues, including Jakov Lind. Her researchinterests 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 Studiesfrom the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She received her M.A. inGerman from San Francisco State University in 1998. Her interdisciplinarydissertation focuses on women and the Shoah (Holocaust) with a specialemphasis on oral histories of working-class and rural Jewish survivors fromGermany and Poland. As a second-generation Gentile German originallyfrom Hamburg, her writing also reflects on her positionality in ShoahStudies. Her essay “Holding the Tension of Personal (Op)Positions”


appeared in Socialist Studies Bulletin 73 (Spring 2004); previous publicationsin German are concerned with women’s empowerment and the breakingof silence: Sirenen (Sirens), 1990, and Sprachgewaltige Frauen (Speak outPowerful Women), 1992. She enjoys both research and teaching inGerman cultural studies, especially women’s and Afro-German literature,poetry, and feminist linguistics.

Anouk Guiné was Assistant Professor of English Studies at Blaise PascalUniversity, France, from 1999 to 2003. She received her Ph.D. in GenderStudies from this university in 2005, and her M.A. from Paris 8 Universityin 1994. She was born in Biarritz (France) in 1967. She studied PoliticalSciences in Trieste from 1989 to 1991. She lived in Peru (Lima) for threeyears, where she studied “Gender and Development” and worked as a gen-der consultant in several NGOs. She was a teacher in Brazil (Rio deJaneiro) 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 interestsinclude 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. Sheworks part time in her profession as protestant pastor. Recently, she fin-ished additional vocational training as a peace worker at the University ofBolzano, Italy, as part of a pilot project that was carried out in collaborationwith local, national, and European bodies. This newly created professionaims to promote peace in the ambience of civil crisis intervention (media-tion) and crisis prevention/working on conflicts of international range. Sheis currently preparing herself for hands-on work in the area of socioculturalmediation in international missions.

María Hernández-Ojeda is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Hunter College-CUNY. Born and raised in the Canary Islands, Spain, she received her B.A.(Filología Inglesa) from Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She obtainedher M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Florida State University.María Hernández-Ojeda has published articles on Cuban-Canarian litera-ture, particularly the narrative works of Cuban author Nivaria Tejera. Herresearch focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century (Pen)insular litera-tures and cultures of Spain. She also studies the literary and cultural rela-tionship between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean from a Transatlanticperspective. 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 ForeignLanguages 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 in1988, and her B.S. in Microbiology from Ohio State University in 1986.Born in Madrid, Spain, she grew up in Europe, Africa, and the UnitedStates. Her research interests include: contemporary theater, narrative, film,and literary theory. Ketz has published articles on pedagogy, and twentieth-century writers such as Valle-Inclán, Pérez de Ayala, and Unamuno. Hercurrent book project examines the portrayal of violence by female authorsin Contemporary Peninsular Literature.

María del Mar López-Cabrales is Associate Professor of Spanish. She obtainedher Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in Philosophy andHumanities from the Universidad de Cádiz, Spain. Her research focuses onintersection of literature and culture in Latin America and Spain. She is par-ticularly interested in women’s writing as a “space” in which women createsocial discourses and communicate with each other. Her publicationsinclude the books La pluma y la represión: Ecritoras contemporáneas argentinas(2000) and Palabras de mujeres. Escritoras españolas contemporáneas (2000), aswell as articles and interviews in Letras Femeninas, Revista Iberoamericana,Confluencia, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes in Spain andLatin America. She is presently serving a two-year term as Secretary of theAsociación de Literatura Femenina Hispánica. She will be publishing a bookof interviews on contemporary Cuban female writers in 2006.

Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2003, where his thesis, a compar-ative analysis of health policies toward populations of immigrant origin inthe United Kingdom, France, and Spain, received the prize for the bestPolitical Science dissertation. He also holds an M.S. in Social Policy andPlanning from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in SocialSciences from the Juan March Institute in Madrid. Himself a result of themigratory waves that arrived in Catalonia from other regions of Spain inprevious decades in search of a better life, his interest in migration processeshas led him to spend time in multicultural metropolitan sites such as Londonand Paris in search of keys to understanding the complex mechanisms thatoperate in the incorporation of populations of different origins in their afflu-ent receiving societies. His research interests are currently focused on thestudy 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 alsoteaches 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 2007exhibition that focuses on a selection of outstanding contemporary Germandrawings from local collections. Sydney received her M.A. in Germanliterature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her Ph.D. inGerman Cultural Studies from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.Her publications include articles on performance art from the WeimarRepublic, German and Swiss artists’ colonies, and the history of the liter-ary 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 ofMinnesota Duluth. She received her Ph.D. from Michigan StateUniversity in 2000 and her M.A. from Loyola University in Chicago in1994. She was born in Torejón de Ardoz (Madrid) and has straddled theAtlantic all her life. Her mother is Madrilenian and her father a NewYorker. She grew up in Madrid, Zaragoza, and Louisiana. Being bilingualand bicultural, she considers herself a cultural hybrid. Tobin Stanley haspublished articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish femaleauthors such as Adelaida García Morales, Montserrat Roig, and MercèRodoreda. Her research interests include film, narrative, feminism, andpsychoanalysis. In her current research project, she studies reflections of theHolocaust in various genres from Spain as an attempt to recover collectivememory 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-first-century Hispanic literature (literature of the Spanish Civil War, postwar writ-ers, narrative under Franco, Spanish women writers, as well as on U.S. Latinoliterature), film studies, and exile studies, she has edited or coedited five booksand authored more than fifty articles and book chapters. Presently, theInstituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses/Destino and the Universidad de Murcia,respectively, have accepted two of her latest books for publication. She hasreceived numerous academic and professional honors, including a stipendfrom the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently she wasawarded the prestigious Joel O. Conarroe Endowed Professorship atDavidson College. As editors of Female Exiles, Maureen Tobin Stanley andGesa Zinn are most honored to feature her essay “The Grammar of ContestedMemory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts ofDiaspora” in this anthology.

Gesa Zinn is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University ofMinnesota Duluth. She received her Ph.D. from the University of


Minnesota. Born and raised in Kiel, Germany, she finished her primary andsecondary schooling in the Federal Republic of Germany before moving tothe United States where she has lived on the West Coast, in the South, andin 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 entitledFemale, Urban and Exiled: Gypsies in Twenty-first Century Germany.

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African Women’s Health Clinic, 231, 242

African Women’s Welfare Group, 235Ahmed, Hadiyah, 235Alberti, Aitana, 152Alberti, Rafael

exile identity and, 15flight from Spain, 140, 144, 152Generation of ’27 and, 24, 139La arboleda perdida, 22–23, 151León and, 21, 140–41, 143–45,

146–47, 149Lorca and, 139Zambrano and, 24

Alborg, Concha, 18Aldecoa, Josefina, 17, 19–20Alfonso, Manuel, 54All-Party Parliamentary Group on

Population, Development, andReproductive Health (APPG),225, 232, 234, 236–37, 238, 241

Allende, Isabel, 15Alltagsgeschichten, 76Alted, Alicia, 66Altolaguirre, Manuel, 190Álvarez de la Rosa, Antonio, 193–94Amat-Piniella, Joaquim, 54Amical Association, 53, 70Anderson, Benedict, 2, 3, 129Anderson, Robin, 105, 116Anschluss, 201, 203–4, 205, 230anti-Semitism, 51, 76, 79, 83, 86–87,

105, 107, 203–4, 262

Aragon, 58, 71Arcocha, 184Arenas, Reinaldo, 186Arendt, Hannah, 51, 54–55, 59, 60Argentina, 13, 140, 144, 146Arrieta, Regina, 62assimilation, 10, 90, 117, 202–3, 214, 217Atkins, Anselm, 187Aufbau, 108–10, 117Auschwitz, 59, 82, 84, 125Austrian Centre, 201, 208, 220avant-garde movement, 98–101, 105,

114, 119

Bal, Mieke, 163Barcelona, 16, 28, 42, 58Bargueño, Ramón, 54Bas, Josefa, 59Basques, 38, 58, 71Batista, Fulgencio, 9, 181, 183–84,

186, 187, 189, 193Batiste, Francesc, 54Bausch, Pina, 99, 115Beckett, Samuel, 183Beggar Bar, 108–10, 117Belgium, 2, 58, 67, 140Berber, Anita, 97Bergen-Belsen, 59, 84, 125, 133Berger, John, 170Berger, Karin, 126, 130, 131–33Berlin Wall, fall of

Communism and, 46displacement and, 1, 11

INDEX

(Please note that page numbers in Italics indicate endnotes.)


Bhabha, Homi, 3Bildung, 81Blanco, Alda, 18, 24Blascos, Carmen and Emiliana, 62Boix, Francesc, 54, 60Böll, Heinrich, 112, 118Bonnard, Pierre Philippe, 114Border Theory, 13Borràs, Josep, 54borrowing, 203, 206, 209, 215–16Bovenschen, Silvia, 167Bram, John, 107Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 106, 110Breton, André, 183British Medical Association (BMA),

225, 231Buatell, Carmen, 62, 64, 65Buchenwald, 59, 111Bueno Ester, Alfonsina Bueno, 62, 65Bush, Peter, 191

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 184, 195Cámara, Madeline, 182, 191Campoamor, Clara, 38Campos, Julieta, 191, 195Camus, Albert, 187Canary Islands, 9, 181, 183–84, 186,

189, 191Canetti, Irene, 250Cantú, Norma Elia, 14Carabantes, Andrés, 42, 43–44Cárdenas, Lázaro, 18Carrió, Jacint, 54Casadella, Lola, 62Castro, Fidel, 182, 184, 186, 189Català, Neus, 5–6, 51–70

deportation of Spaniards to Nazicamps and, 57–60

female voices and, 53–54, 61–64gendered moral and political

thought and, 67–70human rights and, 56–57recovery of the past and, 54–56Regarding Resistance and Deportation,

63, 69solidarity and, 64–66

women’s rights and, 66Catalonia, 38, 53, 58–60, 71, 162Catalonian Association of Former

Political Prisoners, 61Cate-Arries, Francie, 15–16, 17

Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire, 16

Cavalcante, Alberto, 105Cervello, Trinidad Revolto, 36Chacel, Rosa, 17, 24Chile, 13, 15, 18Cimorra, Eusebio, 42, 43–44Cixous, Hélène, 3, 6, 165, 174Claver, Pilar, 64Clement, Grace, 67, 68Clwyd, Ann, 236Cochran, Mary, 99code-switching, 203, 216Colombia, 13Comellas, Francesc, 54Comité Técnico de Ayuda a los Españoles

en México (CTAE), 18Communist Party

exile of, 34–35FAM and, 220Ibárruri and, 37–38, 39, 42, 45International, 36, 48León and, 140Soviet, 37Spanish, 5, 33–34, 39See also Komintern

Companys, Lluís, 59concentration camps

Doba and, 85Dor and, 204, 207effect on families, 77internment of Spaniards in, 5,

51–52, 53, 55Romni life in, 7, 121Stojka and, 124study of survivors’ stories, 59–60,

61, 63women and, 17, 40, 81

contested memory, 4–5, 13–27Cuba, 9, 11, 13, 14–15, 20, 23,

181–95

I N D E X276


Cuban Revolution, 11, 181–83,184–85

Dachau, 59, 204Dawson, Andrew, 125, 131de Déu Amill, Joan, 54dehumanization, 6, 53, 55, 61, 63,

69, 253Mujeres de la posguerra, 17

Delgado, Patricia González-Posada, 47Delirium and Destiny (Zambrano),

23, 24Dellinger, Mary Ann, 5, 269democracy

art and literature and, 5Català and, 6, 55, 69Franco and, 52–53, 59, 61, 140human rights and, 68Ibárruri on, 39, 43, 44La Marseillaise and, 65normative systems and, 224postwar Germany and, 118Republican Constitution and, 56–57social justice and, 240Spain and, 16, 17, 20, 34, 46, 55–57women’s rights and, 38, 61, 63

“Des Partisans,” 64–65Detmer, Emily, 156Dirir, Shamis, 233, 236, 239dual identity, 15, 207Dubai, 225Duplàa, Christina, 53, 62

Egger, Edith, 124Eisenstein, Sergei, 101, 110, 116El Salvador, 13Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 66, 68emigration

Dor and, 201, 203, 209exile vs., 14Franco-era Spanish refugees

and, 59Gert and, 113Holocaust survivors and, 76–77,

78–79, 81, 83, 86, 88Escuer, Joan, 54

Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución(Tejera), 9, 181–95

“ethic of care,” 6, 53, 63, 67–69“ethic of justice,” 67ethnics, 14–15European Union (EU)

displacement and, 1, 11, 251immigrants and, 225, 242, 251same-sex unions and, 12

exilecommunities, 7, 36, 39,

109–10, 177grammar of, 23, 26–27

Expressionism, 98, 99, 100, 192

Falckenberg, Otto, 98Fascism

Austria and, 220Català and, 53, 54–55, 57–59, 62–63Franco and, 8Griffin on, 71Ibárruri and, 40–42, 44, 46León and, 140Spanish democracy and, 53Spanish diaspora and, 34Spanish resistance to, 33, 39,

40–41, 62Stojka and, 123–24survivors’ stories and, 61–66

Fassbinder, Rainer Maria, 114, 119Fellini, Frederico, 114female genital mutilation, 10, 223–40,

241, 243feminist theory: from margin to center

(hooks), 80Fernández Alborz, F., 35Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 13, 14Feuchtwanger, Lion, 110Fleckenstein, Kristie, 174Flossembürg, 59Formica, Mercedes, 17Foucault, Michel, 167, 176Foundation for Women’s Health

Research and Development(FORWARD), 235, 237, 242

I N D E X 277


Franceanti-Fascism in, 62, 65Ibárruri and, 33immigrants and, 1–2, 55, 225León and, 140pantomime and, 113prison camps and, 16Spanish refugees and, 16–18, 34–35,

58–60Tejera and, 183–84, 190, 195women’s rights and, 67

Franco, Francisco1978 Constitution and, 57Allies and, 42De amor y de sombras and, 15death, 46, 140displacement and, 1, 8, 11female voices of exile and, 17–19Hitler and, 61human rights and, 63Ibárruri and, 5, 34, 35, 41, 44–47international recognition of, 42literature under, 5loss of labor force, 35“National Reconciliation” and,

42–43deportation of citizens to Nazi

concentration camps, 5, 51,57–58, 59

rebuilding of Spain and, 39Serrano and, 54–55Tejera and, 181, 183–84, 187,

189, 193Republicans and, 17war criminals and, 48Zambrano and, 24

Free Austria Movement (FAM), 220French Resistance, 5, 16, 51, 59–60,

61, 62–63, 64, 69Fuente, Inmaculada de la, 17–18

Garbo, Greta, 105García Lorca, Federico, 8, 139García Vega, Lorenzo, 190, 191Generalitat, 59

Generation of 1927, 8, 24, 139, 140, 151

Generation of 1936, 24Gerlind, Marion, 6, 269Gert, Valeska, 7, 97–115, 116–19

Beggar Bar and, 108–10, 117Bei Valeska, 111, 113Café Valeska und ihr Küchenpersonal,

111Canaille, 103, 104Die Amme, 102Die Dirne, 102Die Hexenküche, 113, 117Erotic Grotesques, 102, 108exile (1938–1949), 105–10Humility, 100life in Berlin (1892–1938),

97–105return to Europe (1947–1976),

110–15To Die, 100–1, 107To Love, 100

Gilbert, Sandra, 173Gilligan, Carol, 6, 53, 63, 67Glenn, Kathleen, 164, 166, 169, 177Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis,

190, 191González de Boix, Concha, 55González, Sabina, 69Gordon, Hary, 231, 232, 243Goyri, María, 143, 151Grenville, Anthony, 202, 203, 212Grosz, George, 106Gruppe 47, 112, 118Gubar, Susan, 173Guernica, 40, 42, 46Guerrillas of the Theatre, 140Gurometa, Graciosa, 62gypsies, 7, 122, 125, 131, 134,

251, 253Zigeunerromantik, 127, 129

Harding, F., 232Helmreich, Franzi, 124, 126Hess, Josefina, 155

I N D E X278


Hidalgo de Cisneros, Ignacio, 145Hilberg, Raul, 75Hildebrandt, Fred, 100Hitler, Adolf, 16, 34, 42, 61, 87,

105, 113Holländer, Friedrich, 106Holocaust

displacement and, 1, 11gender and, 77, 78Gert and, 113moral psychology and, 63social class and, 6, 80Stojka and, 121–22, 124, 126, 130,

133–34UDHR and, 56–57Vienna and, 201

homecommunity and, 2–4Dor and, 207, 209–15EU and, 1exile and, 19–20, 60, 130–32,

256–58immigration and, 9–11literary imagination and, 7–8nostalgia and, 127–28, 129–30Stojka and, 121–22, 125Tejera on, 9

homelandexile and, 3, 8, 15, 24Ibárruri onjustice and, 60Kristeva on, 63language and, 19León and, 147refugee survivors and, 69, 255solidarity and, 64–66Stojka and, 129voicelessness and, 8

Hook, Sara, 99hooks, bell, 80, 89

feminist theory: from margin to center, 80

Huidobro, Montes, 184human rights

documentation of, 56–57

Franco and, 57–58, 61–63, 64,68–69

Germany and, 250, 252, 259Republican Spain and, 46,

52–53, 55UK and, 10, 224, 225, 228, 235,

238–39See also Universal Declaration of

Human Rightshybrid identity, 15, 27, 217Hyman, Paula, 83, 90

Ibárruri, DoloresCommunist Party and, 37–38, 39,

42, 45democracy and, 39, 43, 44exile, 35–36Fascism and, 40–42, 44, 46France and, 33Franco and, 5, 34, 35, 41, 44–47homeland and, 40, 44national reconciliation and, 42–43rebuilding of Spain and, 39–42REI and, 33, 35, 39–42, 43, 48resistance, 5Spanish Civil War and, 33, 38, 62Spanish diaspora and, 34–35voice, 43–46World War II and, 42writings (1939–1977), 36–43

identitycultural, 9–10, 16, 204–5,

219, 265dual, 15, 207exile, 15–16hybrid, 15, 27, 217

immigration, 9–11exile vs., 14Gert and, 108historical events affecting, 1Holocaust and, 75, 76, 77, 88,

202, 205Spanish immigration to France, 58

International Brigades, 33, 65Israel, 79

I N D E X 279


Jamís, Fayad, 190Johnson, Roberta, 18, 24–25Jooss, Kurt, 115Jovanovic, Miroslav, 251Junta de Ayuda a Refugiados Españoles,

18Junta de Defensa y Protección del Tesoro

Artístico Nacional, 140

Kaplan, Marion, 80, 88, 89Kelly, Liz, 161Kent, Victoria, 17Ketz, Victoria, 8–9, 270–71Khrushchev, Nikita, 42Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 100Klüger, Ruth, 80–81Koch, Ilse, 111Kohlberg, Lawrence, 67, 72Komintern, 34, 36, 48

See also Communist PartyKrause, Helmuth von, 106, 116Kristallnacht, 76, 204Kristeva, Julia, 4, 60, 63, 66, 182,

195, 213Kwateng-Kluvitse, Adwoa, 237

La Belle, Jenijoy, 169Lacan, Jacques, 7Laforet, Carmen, 17La Pirenaica. See Radio España

Independientelanguage shift, 202–3, 210, 213,

218–19borrowing, 203, 206, 209, 215–16code-switching, 203, 216

Lejárraga, María de la O, 38Lens, Siegfried, 112León, María Teresa, 5, 14, 17, 137–49

Alberti and, 21, 140–41, 143–45,146–47, 149

children, 141–44, 147Crónica general de la guerra civil, 148Cuentos para sonar, 143–44exile and, 21, 22–23, 25essays, 150

family vs. profession and, 139–40flight from Spain, 140future and, 146maternity and, 145–46memoirs, 150Memoria de la melancolía, 8, 20–22,

141–42, 144–46novels, 150preservation of Spanish works

of art, 139Republic and, 20–21, 23–24return to Spain, 147–49scripts, 150short stories, 150Spanish diaspora and, 8, 15theatre, 150Zambrano and, 23–24, 25

Lerman, Rose, 76–77, 81–84, 88, 89, 90

Lezama Lima, José, 190, 193Liceo Femenino, 139Linares, Andrés, 37Lionnet, Françoise, 155Llaneza, Celia, 62, 69London Black Women’s Health Action

Project (LBWHAP), 233–34, 243Lorca, Federico García, 8, 139Lorenz, Dagmar, 78Losada, Gonzalo, 147Loynaz, Dulce María, 190, 191Lubitsch, Ernst, 107

MacKinnon, Catherine, 161, 162Maeztu, María de, 139, 145Maier, Carol, 23Mallet, Marian, 202, 203, 212Mallo, Maruja, 18Mangini, Shirley, 17–18, 37, 38Mann, Heinrich, 98Mann, Klaus, 107Mann, Thomas, 106, 110Marcó, Lluís, 54marriage

abuse and, 8forced, 224

I N D E X280


laws regarding, 106, 177patriarchy and, 173Republican Constitution and, 63

“Marseillaise, La,” 64–66Martín Gaite, Carmen, 17, 21Martínez-Robles, Felipe, 54Marxism, 34, 38, 40, 46, 89, 140Massaguer, Lope, 54Matute, Ana María, 17Mauthausen, 16, 54, 59–60Mayans, Marcial, 54Maynes, Mary Jo, 76, 82McCafferty, Christine, 234, 243McCullough, Sarah, 237Medio, Dolores, 17Meier-Rogan, Patricia, 126, 134Memoria de la melancholía (León), 8,

20–22, 141–42, 144–46memory

collective, 16, 23, 47, 61exile and, 15, 23

Méndez, Concha, 17–18Mexico, 13, 17–19, 23, 35, 141Migrants of Identity (Rapport and

Dawson), 125Miller, Nancy, 167Milton, Sybil, 81Minogue, Valerie, 192Mistral, Silvia, 17Moissi, Maria, 97–98Momoh, Comfort, 231–32, 241, 242Montero, Segunda, 62Montseny, Federica, 17Mora, Constancia de la, 17Moscow, 36, 48Mussolini, Benito, 34, 42

Naharro-Calderón, José María, 15National Federation of Deportees,

Prisoners, Resistants, and Patriots, 65

National Reconciliation policy, 42–43National Refugee Service, 107, 108Nazism

Austria and, 81

Barceló and, 55Català and, 63censorship and, 113deportation of Spaniards to Nazi

camps, 57–60displacement and, 1, 11Franco and, 5, 54French Resistance and, 63, 65, 69Gert and, 109, 111–12, 113Gruppe 47 and, 118Holocaust and, 75, 78Poland and, 79, 83Spanish exiles and, 5, 17, 51–52, 53Stojka and, 123–24, 128, 134Tucholsky and, 117

Nelken, Margarita, 38Neruda, Pablo, 18Neuengamme, 59Newly Born Woman, The (Cixous), 6–7Next Year in Cuba (Pérez Firmat), 20Nicaragua, 13Nierendorf, Karl, 109Noddings, Nel, 66, 68–69

Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethicsand Education, 68

Nolde, Emil, 100Norton, Sydney, 7, 271–72Núñez Targa, Mercé, 53, 54

Okin, Susan Moller, 66, 67Oropesa, Salvador, 18Ortega y Gasset, José, 24Ortega, Julio, 194Ottinger, Ulrike, 114, 119

Pabst, G.W., 105Palabra de mujer (Riera), 25Palencia, Isabel de, 17Pasionaria

See Ibárruri, Dolorespatriarchy, 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

I N D E X 281


Peachum, Polly, 105Pérez, Janet, 18, 165Pérez, Rita, 66Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 20

Next Year in Cuba, 20Perón, Juan, 21Phalange, 39, 41, 45–46, 48Phillips, Anne, 66, 68, 73Picasso, Pablo, 124Poland, 34, 76, 78–79, 83–85, 90polygamy, 224Prado, Benjamín, 148Prado museum, 139, 140Puerto Rico, 13, 23

Radio España Independiente (REI), 33,35, 39–42, 43, 48

Ramos Bello, Victoria, 47Rapport, Nigel, 125, 131Ravensbrück, 5, 52, 53, 59, 65, 69,

123, 125, 134Reinhardt, Max, 98, 99, 112, 115

Schall und Rauch, 112reparations, 113Republican exile, 13–15, 17–19, 23,

34, 59Retamar, Roberto Fernández, 190Rhodes, Elizabeth, 156, 176, 177Richter, Hans, 109Riera, Carme, 5, 14, 25

Palabra de mujer, 25Rimbaud, Arthur, 51Ringelheim, Joan, 78, 89Rivero, Eliana, 14–15, 19Rodoreda, Mercè, 8, 17, 70,

155–76Camellia Street,factors allowing abuse in works,

167–71La calle de las Camelias (Camellia

Street), 8, 156, 160, 164, 166,168, 174

La plaza del Diamante (Time of theDoves), 8, 156, 162, 166, 172, 174

“La salamandra” (“Salamander”),8–9, 156–57, 163, 165, 167,170–71, 173–74

language and, 174–75role of naming, 165–67types of abuse portrayed in works,

156–65voicelessness and, 171–74

Roig, Montserrat, 53–54, 60, 70Rojas, Rafael, 189–90Roma groups, 7, 122, 124, 126,

130–33Rosenfield, Israel, 132Rotspanier, 59Rottluff, Karl Schmidt, 100Royal College of Midwives (RCM),

225Rubenstein, Roberta, 3–4, 130,

132, 133Ruddick, Sara, 66, 68Ruge, Uta, 235Ruiz Funes, Concepción, 18Ruiz Ibárruri, Amaya, 47Russia, 5, 67, 75–76, 79, 90, 101,

140, 259Ruttman, Walter, 101, 116

Sachhetto, Rita, 97Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, 59Salisachs, Mercedes, 17Salvat, Josep, 54Sánchez, Luis, 37Sarduy, Severo, 184Sarraute, Nathalie, 183, 192Schlöndorff, Volker, 115, 119

Nur zum Spass, 115Sebastián, Gonzalo de, 139Second Republic, 20, 23, 138–40,

149, 151Semprún, Jorge, 54Serrano i Blanquer, David, 53, 54Serrano, Pío, 183, 184Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 60Servicio de Evacuación de Refugiados

Españoles, 18

I N D E X282


sexism, 78, 166, 239Shoah Studies, 6, 78silence

Boix and, 60Gert and, 113language and, 174–75León and, 21Republican testimony and, 61Rodoreda and, 8, 156, 162–66,

171–74Rojas and, 190Tejera and, 185voicelessness, 171–74women and, 4, 6, 53–54

Sinca, Amadeu, 54SKIF (Sotsyalistisher kinder farband ), 84Society for Threatened Peoples, 252song, 16, 64–66, 84, 99, 108, 112, 131Soviet Union, 33, 34–37, 43–44,

46–47, 58, 79, 140, 152Spanish Civil War

Allied “No Intervention” policyand, 48

Cate-Arries and, 16displacement and, 1, 11, 16Ibárruri and, 33, 38, 62León and, 21, 139, 140–42, 151Republican exile following, 13, 14Rodoreda and, 171Spanish democracy and, 53Tejera and, 9, 183–84, 186Time of the Doves and, 157Tusquets and, 16women and, 18, 19World 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, 15Cantú and, 14Cate-Arries and, 15–16de la Fuente and, 17–18

León and, 8, 20–23Mangini and, 17Palabras del exilo and, 18Pérez Firmat and, 20Rivero and, 14–15, 19Tusquets and, 16–17Zambrano and, 23–25

Stalin, Joseph, 42, 112Steedman, Carolyn, 82Stein, Adolf, 105Stein, Mathilda Wertham, 77, 86–88Stewart, Melissa, 18Stojka, Ceija, 121–34

act of remembering and, 132–34exile and, 7, 124–27Gestalt and, 123–24Law of Pragnanz, 123Mächtige Stiefel, 123Nazi Camp Series, 123–24, 128, 134Nomad Living Series, 127–29, 134nostalgia and home in works,

127–28, 129–30poetry, 128–29, 130–32Ravensbrück, 123Reisende auf dieser Welt, 122, 124Shadow Collection, 124“Sommerwiese,” 125sunlight and space in works,

124–27Sunlight Collection, 124, 127–28Van Gogh and, 128Wir Leben im Verborgenen, 122, 124

Strindberg, August, 98Sunstein, Cass, 67Survivors of the Shoah Visual History

Foundation, 77, 79

Teaching Representations of the SpanishCivil War, 20

Tejera, Nivaria, 9, 181–95Álvarez de la Rosa and, 193–94Cámara on, 182–83Camus and, 187Castro government and, 181–82early life, 183–84, 186–87

I N D E X 283


Tejera, Nivaria—continuedEspero la noche para soñarte, Revolución

(Tejera), 9, 181–95exile (1936-present), 184–89Fuir la spirale, 184, 188, 189, 192literary exile, 189–91Luces y piedras, 189Ortega on, 194Rojas on, 190Sarraute and, 192Sonámbulo del sol, 184, 187–88,

191, 195sun in works, 187–88writing as spaces of resistance,

191–95Tobin Stanley, Maureen, 5–6, 272Tomero Alarcón, Rafael, 25Torres Nebrera, Gregorio, 145totalitarianism, 5, 51–52, 54–55, 61,

63, 65, 83, 122, 124Triana, José, 184Tristany, Joan G., 61Tucholsky, Kurt, 110, 117Tuñon, Enriqueta, 18Turner, Victor, 3, 7Tusquets, Esther, 16–17

United KingdomArea Child Protection Committee

(ACPC), 230Children’s Act, 230Commission for Racial Equality

(CRE), 233Criminal Justice Act, 230Women’s National Committee

(WNC), 232, 237United Nations, 39, 56, 230, 241, 259Universal Declaration of Human

Rights (UDHR), 6, 56–57, 64,66, 68–69, 71

Valdés, Zoe, 191, 195Valis, Noel, 20Van Gogh, Vincent, 128, 193Vichy government, 16, 59, 60Vicuña, Vitorio, 62

Vilanova, Francesc, 59, 72Vitier, Cintio, 190voice

gendered, 78Holocaust survivors and, 53–54, 61, 62language and, 174–75Spanish exiles and, 18, 22women exiles and, 4, 8–9working poor and, 75–77written word and, 6

voicelessness, 159, 162, 171–74, 190Vosburg, Nancy, 169, 170

Walker, Lenore, 161Wanger, Walter, 107Watenberg, Heinz, 108, 117Wedekind, Frank, 98, 99Wedekind, Kadidja, 108, 117Weil-Curiel, Linda, 236Weimar Republic, 75, 97, 98, 100–1,

105–7, 111–13Wiesenthal, Simon, 61Williams, Tennessee, 108Womankind International, 237Woolf, Virginia, 6, 159, 176, 177working class, 6, 34, 37, 45, 75, 76,

78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 205–6, 216World Health Organization (WHO),

224, 230, 241World War II

displacement and, 1, 11, 122European economies and, 35Franco and, 61Ibárruri and, 42Spanish Civil War and, 58, 61UK entry into, 212U.S. entry into, 108, 109

YAF (Yidishe arbiter froyen), 84Yiddish, 205–7, 220

Zambrano, María, 5, 14, 17–18, 23–25

Delirium and Destiny, 23, 24Zinn, Gesa, 7, 250, 272–73Zweig, Stefan, 105

I N D E X284


Documents

Female Exiles in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Europe