Finding Mabel: documentary on Argentina's disappeared

Awhile ago, I received an email from Eileen Reardon, the director of Finding Mabel, a feature-length documentary film centered on Argentina's so-called "Dirty War." The film's synopsis follows:

Finding Mabel is a gripping documentary that follows a young woman's journey to Argentina, to piece together the enigmatic disappearance of the woman she was named after, one of the 30,000 people who disappeared during Argentina's last military dictatorship. Part scavenger hunt, part self-discovery, Finding Mabel intelligently weaves Argentina's recent dark past with today's polarizing struggle for justice.

For more, please see these links:

Fundraising campaign
Official website
Interview with the director here

New book on Trauma - Haunting Legacies

From: Columbia University Press

About the book:

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.

Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Writing Against Memory and Forgetting

3. Haunting Legacies: Trauma in Children of Perpetrators

4. Identity Trouble: Guilt, Shame, and Idealization

5. Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss

6. Deadly Intimacy: The Politics and Psychic Life of Torture

Bibliography

About the author: Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her books in English include Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis; Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood; and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

Documentary Film - "A Generation Apart" (1984)

I am in the final stages of planning for the honors seminar course on memory and historical trauma that I am teaching this semester. One of the films I have been considering is "A Generation Apart," which was originally produced in 1984, but re-released on DVD in 2007. If I do end up using this film in class, I will do so in conjunction with a discussion of postmemory. I am really surprised that I did not come across this film earlier, during research for my dissertation (I'm sure I must have read about it, though I never saw it). The film is not a documentary masterpiece, but I do believe it is a valuable text with which to look at the particular challenges facing second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (and perhaps, by extension, descendants of other historical traumas). Director Jack Fisher interviews his parents, Auschwitz survivors, and his older brother Joe in an attempt to understand how the direct, lived experience of the Holocaust, as well as its intergenerational transmission, have affected his family. A Generation Apart also includes poignant interviews between the director's friend Shelley and her mother Mary, who survived Bergen-Belsen. There are obvious moments of tension between parents and children, and between the siblings as well. Of particular note is the segment in which the Fisher brothers address one another regarding the importance of the Shoah in their everyday lives.

The Children of Fascist Parents

In Germany, there is an entire sub-genre of "second generation" literature, which includes works not only by and about the children of Holocaust victims, but by and about the children of Nazi perpetrators. In Spain, the context with which I am most familiar, it is difficult, if not impossible, to recall memoirs written by the children of Francoist parents (not that the experiences of the children of Nazis and the children of Francoists are necessarily comparable). In recent years, the focus has really been on the victims of the Franco dictatorship and their descendants -- and with good reason. I am still waiting to read Esther Tusquets's Habíamos ganado la guerra (We Had Won the War), but from what I have heard, this memoir is one of the few to address openly a childhood in the heart of a pro-Franco family of the Catalonian bourgeoisie.

A recent BBC report addressed the children of "Blackshirt women." I wish I could have heard the broadcast, but unfortunately, it is only available in the U.K.

Blackshirt women's children live with shame

By James Maw
Presenter, Mother Was A Blackshirt

Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mothers' fascist sympathies.

When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London.

As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings.

At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.

I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother.

It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?

"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said.

And many of these women did.

Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.

"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible.

"There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home.

"I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."

Inflammatory speeches

In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms.

I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too.

But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.

"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.

Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.

One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage.

Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes.

But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.

Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history.

They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.

"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.

'Battle of the shirts'

But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction?

Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".

The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology.

Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.

"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.

Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother.

Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.

"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand.

"Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting.

"She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.

It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father.

John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth.

A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.

Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.

"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason.

"They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.

So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'sieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison.

But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.

Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.

"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."

Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.

Or catch-up afterwards on BBC
(UK only).
Story from BBC NEWS