Naming the Dead of WWI

From: BBC News (29 Jan 2010)

Memory-related quote: "'Even if his body isn't found, in some respects his memory is even more alive now. By researching what sort of person he was, we now know much more about him,' Mr Parker says."

The lost soldiers of Fromelles

By Peter Jackson
BBC News

The first of the remains of 250 World War I soldiers found in France are being reburied with military honours after painstaking efforts to identify them. How do you put the right name on a headstone after so long?

When the first chipped and battle-scarred bones were excavated from a muddy field in northern France last May, the story of the forgotten battle of Fromelles began to emerge.

The remains of 250 British and Australian soldiers had lain undiscovered for 93 years since falling on the Western Front.

Boots, purses, toothbrushes and other personal artefacts lay amongst the twisted skeletons at Pheasant Wood, offering partial clues about the men's identities.

But it is the unique genetic codes within these remains that offer the best chance of putting names to each unknown soldier.

So far, more than 800 UK families who think they may have lost a relative at Fromelles have given DNA samples, but many will be disappointed.

The man whose job it is to help identify the soldiers says it is like finding a needle in a haystack, albeit with a very good metal detector.

"The problem with DNA that's been in the ground for 90 years is it degrades in quality and quantity," says molecular geneticist Dr Peter Jones.

"If it's a very acidic site, there's no chance of DNA at all because acids attack DNA rapidly. If it's dry and arid like in a desert, you get good DNA. If it's wet, less good."

The remains extracted from Fromelle's muddy burial pits have produced small but workable amounts of DNA, says Dr Jones. The teeth, which preserve well because they are encased in enamel, give by far the best samples.

"The hardest part is finding the right families and getting them to come forward... you can have good DNA profiles, but no family to match it up to."

Although 250 bodies have been recovered from the graves, it's thought about 1,500 British and 5,500 Australian troops fell in the battle, making it all the harder to match.

And when it comes to matching DNA samples across several generations, Dr Jones says the methods are far from perfect.

Unlike the seven "markers" used for more exact matches on the National DNA Database, he only has two at his disposal - the Y (paternal) and mitrochondrial (maternal) profiles.

"If we had the children of the soldiers, we could use the same markers as the DNA database. But because we are three generations away, the markers get diluted out through each mother and father."

Families searching for their ancestors have been asked to give maternal and paternal samples - preferably two each - using a simple cheek swab.

The DNA results will be added to the anthropological, archaeological and historical information to try to get positive identifications.

Families will be told sometime after March, once the remains of all 250 soldiers have been buried. Their final resting place will be a new war cemetery nearby, the first to be built in 50 years.

The £3m project, funded by the British and Australian governments, is overseen by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Waiting for news will be Richard Parker, 47, who has spent 25 years trying to retrace the footsteps of his ancestor Leonard Twamley. His father's uncle was just 19 when he volunteered for the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Six months later, the 20-year-old died at Fromelles.

"He was an ordinary working class lad from Coventry working in a cycle factory, who gave his life because it was considered his patriotic duty to do so."

Although interested in Len's story since his 20s, Mr Parker did not know he was killed at Fromelles until an amateur historian contacted him last year.

Since then he has made a pilgrimage to the French village with his father, who supplied DNA, along with Len's surviving nephews and nieces.

"Even if his body isn't found, in some respects his memory is even more alive now. By researching what sort of person he was, we now know much more about him," Mr Parker says.

"My grandmother died without knowing where Len was buried... this would bring proper closure to a family tragedy that goes back 95 years."

Unknown soldiers

The bodies that remain untraceable will be buried with a headstone marked simply "Known Unto God".

Dr Jones fears many will suffer this fate. He estimates the final number identified to be up to 100, but more likely tens.

Even if there is a DNA match, it may not necessarily be the right family because some DNA profiles are relatively common.

Adoptions, women who married and changed names, and paternity issues can also throw a spanner in the works. Other families simply die out.

But a match can be made through cousins, nephews or nieces on the family line. So if a family is missing a paternal link, they can trace the soldier's father, grandfather or brother, then locate their living relatives.

Dr Jones says one family went back seven generations on the maternal side then came forward five to find a suitable relative.

Forensic anthropologist Professor Margaret Cox says the team is so reliant on DNA matches as 90% of British enlistment records were destroyed in the Blitz.

And the painstaking methods of extracting and cataloguing remains have been refined at the scenes of genocide and war crimes in Rwanda, the Balkans and Iraq.

As at those sites, the bodies recovered gave clues to their fate - in this case, fractured bones showing damage from machine guns, rifles, mortar shells and shrapnel. But they were buried in deep graves with order and respect.

"You try not to imagine what it was like, it makes it difficult to do our work," she says, adding that this is easier said than done at times.

What brought the tragedy home were the artefacts - the inscribed bibles and lucky charms.

For her, the two most poignant came from Australian soldiers. The first was a small lucky charm in the shape of a boomerang, to symbolise returning home.

The other was the return half of a railway ticket from Freemantle to Perth, intended for the soldier's journey home to his family.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8473444.stm

Published: 2010/01/29 12:05:37 GMT

The Legacy of the Pinochet Dictatorship

The opening of a new Museum of Memory for victims of the Pinochet regime and the surprising election of a right-wing president have put Chile at the top of the "Americas" headlines in the NYT. The following article chronicles the justice-seeker Ana González, and talks about a recent TV DNA campaign to help families locate the remains of their loved ones who "disappeared" during the dirty war. This quote, from the end of the article, is worth highlighting: "'I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,' she said, her eyes welling up for a moment. But, she said, 'How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?'"

For those interested in seeing the videoclip to which the article makes reference, I've posted it below (it is in Spanish, but I've translated to English the words that appear on the screen):



"If you are the family member of a person who disappeared during the military dictatorship, a simple blood sample can help identify the remains located thus far and those yet to be identified. National campaign. Blood samples taken free of charge. Results confidential."

From: The New York Times

January 23, 2010
The Saturday Profile

A Serene Advocate for Chile’s Disappeared
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

SANTIAGO, Chile

ON the morning of April 30, 1976, Ana González and her husband, a Communist Party member named Manuel Recabarren, were in a rush to get out of the house.

It was the third year of the murderous Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Two of the couple’s sons, Luis Emilio and Manuel Guillermo, along with Luis Emilio’s pregnant wife, Nalvia, had failed to return from work the evening before. Ominously, their 2 ½-year-old son had shown up later that night crying on a neighbor’s lawn.

Mrs. González was eager to get to her job at the water company to ask her manager for an advance on her pay and temporary leave, so she could look for her children. But she volunteered to stay behind to look after another grandson while her husband searched.

“You go ahead, and I’ll come later with the child,” she said.

She never again saw her husband, or her sons and daughter-in-law, nor did she hear a word about their fates. All four are believed to have been “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, which came to power in a bloody 1973 coup that claimed the life of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

In the 34 years that followed, Mrs. González transformed her outrage and grief into a tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

She participated in hunger strikes and sit-ins during the Pinochet years, pushed judges to investigate suspected atrocities and traveled to the United States seeking to pressure Chile’s military government to release information about the missing.

Her broad face and sad eyes — and the way photographs of her loved ones often hung from her neck — became emblematic of Chile’s long struggle to unearth the truth. Beyond her courage, Mrs. González’s soothing voice, cutting sense of humor and unrelenting optimism helped break through the indifference of the many Chileans who were unaffected by the years of violence, human rights leaders said.

“They never thought that a woman, a housewife who didn’t know anything, not even where the courts were located, would take up the battle cry,” said Mrs. González, now 84, in an interview in the same modest home on Santiago’s outskirts where she lived with her husband and children. Faded pictures of her missing family members still hang in the dining room.

Last year, her grandmotherly image landed on posters and in television advertisements as part of a government campaign to link DNA samples from family members with the scattered remains of presumed victims of the regime’s torture centers.

In the posters and TV ads, Mrs. González, her gray hair pulled back into her signature bun, is reaching out with a red flower as men and women from younger generations stand behind her.

“Today, there are many bones that need to be identified so that one day families can mourn their losses,” Mrs. González said.

The new campaign was part of an effort by the departing president, Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture victim of the military regime, to revamp a DNA-matching program that previously had misidentified remains.

The campaign Mrs. González participated in — “You live in us, we carry you in our blood” — urged Chileans who lost loved ones during the regime to submit DNA samples that experts could then match with unidentified remains. So far, only six victims have been identified, but the government expects to announce more matches soon, officials say.

MRS. GONZÁLEZ was born in a small town in the far north of Chile. Her mother, who had been widowed with six children, married a railroad worker, and Mrs. González was one of their two children.

When she was 11 years old she took a trip to Santiago and ended up staying, living with an aunt and uncle in their house with a dirt floor and an outhouse.

Her uncle regularly bought El Siglo, a Communist Party newspaper, and Mrs. González would try to read it. At school, a classmate talked about Spain under the dictator Franco and the Spanish resistance. “I began to hate Franco,” Mrs. González said.

Her parents later moved to Valparaíso, outside Santiago, and Mrs. González joined them for a time, later returning to Santiago as a teenager. Then one day when she was 16, a young man invited her to a meeting of the Young Communists. “I discovered a new world at that meeting,” she said. “I loved it.”

It was among the Young Communists that she met the love of her life, Manuel Recabarren.

They were married in 1944. Over the years they had six children, and remained active in the Communist Party.

After Mr. Allende was elected in 1970, Mr. Recabarren headed a local Committee of Provisions and Prices, which distributed food. After the coup in 1973, the military disbanded the committees, which had been headed nationally by Alberto Bachelet, the future president’s father. As a former committee head, however, Mr. Recabarren was a marked man. So, too, were the three relatives who were snatched, all of whom were Communist Party members.

The day after her husband disappeared, Mrs. González found an anonymous note at her home that left little doubt that he had been seized by the regime.

“Go to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad,” the note read, referring to a human rights organization set up by the Roman Catholic Church. It was where everyone went for help once their loved ones vanished. Later, survivors of the Villa Grimaldi torture center said they had last seen her husband there in August 1976.

To this day Mrs. González feels blessed but sad to consider what might have been. “If the child and I had left with my husband that day, I also would have been disappeared,” she said, dragging deeply on a cigarette.

Instead, Mrs. González began to organize with other families of the disappeared, holding demonstrations that the Pinochet security forces would break up.

But Mrs. González was never intimidated. She continued to organize protests, including hunger strikes at churches, embassies and the offices of the Red Cross and the United Nations.

“SHE was on the front lines, showing tremendous courage,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “Without her courage, more people probably would have been disappeared, and the national attention to this would have been close to zero.”

Mr. Vivanco said that Mrs. González symbolized something else. “She represents the voice of somebody with no hatred,” he said. “She talks about her case and human rights in Chile in a calm, serene way. She has been able to speak to many Chileans who never suffered in the dictatorship or who publicly supported the repression.”

Mrs. González remains active in human rights affairs and said she was working on a book about her life. She ran the large red beads of her necklace through her hands as she thought back on her campaign for the missing.

“I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,” she said, her eyes welling up for a moment.

But, she said, “How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?”

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago.

Resenting the Past

Just because it happened some 60 years ago, doesn't mean the past is dead and gone.

From: BBC News

German Heligoland islands still a minefield for Britons

Germany's Heligoland islands were part of the British empire in the 19th Century - but they were used to test British bombers after World War II and a vast explosion in 1947 caused massive destruction. Resentment still lingers, as Tom Blass discovered.

I was fighting off the cold with beer and bratwurst when my friend Judy suggested I speak to the boys in blue. Three men in uniform were nursing gluhwein in a corner of the makeshift bar that was really no more than a tent.

Crime is not one of the waves lapping at Heligoland's shores. The last murder - a crime of passion, apparently - took place more than 200 years ago. Few of the 1,600 inhabitants even bother to lock their doors.

But if not the Bronx, this small fog-bound candidate for the lost city of Atlantis still harbours secrets.

In fact, it turned out that my new drinking companions were not policemen after all, but a crack team of bomb disposal experts flown in from Schleswig-Holstein on the mainland.

"Busy day?" I asked.

In reply, I got a cold, but curious stare. Then one of the trio broke into a slow smile. "Two British bombs," he said. "Tomorrow we will send you the bill."

The other drinkers, Judy included, roared with good-natured laughter and there was another round of gluhweins, eiergrogs and schnapps. The joke, it seemed, had made everybody's day - and nudged away a degree or two of frost.

But it was more than just the usual Anglo-German banter.

Devastating blast

For eight decades, Heligoland, seized during the Napoleonic Wars, was an unlikely outpost of British Empire in the North Sea.

But Germans still came. Tourists flocked here to swim and flirt while "dangerous" intellectuals pitched up to escape prison and the censor. A charming, bucolic touch was added by the islanders themselves, their quaint customs and their ancient dialect.

But in 1890, it all came to an end when the British government, as part of a colonial swap with Germany, traded Heligoland for the island of Zanzibar.

This delighted the German Kaiser, but outraged Queen Victoria who said "next we'd be giving up Gibraltar" and that she thought it was a "bad business".

So did the Heligolanders. Their idyll rapidly became a fortress and while the tourists still arrived on the steamer from Hamburg, the halcyon days were over. But grimmer changes were to come.

Erich Kruess, the island's archivist, was 13 when, on 18 April 1945, the Royal Air Force launched a sortie of 900 bombers. He remembers later emerging from a bunker into a cratered moonscape and being evacuated to Hamburg by ship. He, like all the other islanders, would not be able to return for another seven years.

He finds it hardest to understand what the British did in 1947. They decided to destroy the Germans' war-time U-boat pens and set off a huge explosion codenamed Big Bang.

This caused massive devastation. Buildings all around were destroyed, and a plume of smoke was sent spiralling high into the sky.

For another four years, the British used it as a testing ground for their bombers. It was even touted as a good place to test H-bombs until attention turned to the Bikini atoll.

Now only the newness of the houses and the broken bricks extruding through the turf give any hint of the scale of destruction.

His mild tone of voice belying any evident outrage, Erich says: "We were not even at war then. The British built Heligoland. Some of us had British passports and we never supported Hitler."

Much as he mourns for the buildings, he also grieves for the loss of a social fabric which had remained strong even in the years of exile. He fears the present generation cares little about the island's history. As a result, the islanders have become strangers to one another, he says.

Resilience

But the young beg to differ. In fact, they complain about the way that everybody on the island knows everything about everyone.

Even at Krebs nightclub it was clear that the youth contingent, however bleary-eyed, does feel engaged with the island's past.

At midnight, Judy's son Sven and I were getting on like a house on fire. Two hours later, it was our conversation that was getting heated. Between slugs of vodka, the 30-something Metallica fan began to vent his anger at what the British had done.

"They tried to destroy us. But look - Lang Anna is still standing!" notionally pointing towards the guano-clad pillar of rock which is to the island what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

Sven's friends gave a chorus of approval before reverting to a dance-floor the size of a dustbin lid. "Heligoland will always be German!" one shouted as a parting shot.

"What you have to understand about Heligoland…" said Sven. Then the diatribe juddered to a halt, overtaken by the vodka.

The island, I was learning, was a minefield in every sense of the word. "Is it hard work disposing of these bombs?" I asked the man from Schleswig-Holstein.

He sipped his gluhwein thoughtfully. "Yes," he said, "because they lie well hidden, close to the surface. Anything can set them off."

Or anyone, I thought. Anywhere. And I ordered another bratwurst to fend off the chill.

How to listen to: From Our Own Correspondent

BBC Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

Spielberg to produce documentary series on WTC rebuilding

The re-building of the Twin Towers has already generated a great deal of controversy -- what the design should look like; what sort of structure it ought to be; what the memorial component might entail; whether or not to rebuild at all; whose design ought to prevail, etc. etc. Now, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg will be following the reconstruction process in a new TV documentary series. The structure, previously called "Freedom Tower" (some other time, I will reserve a post just for this name!), is slated to be completed in 2013, so stay tuned for further posts on this front. I've included a few recent YouTube videos that illustrate the current state of the site (second video includes rather Hollywood-esque soundtrack):





From: BBC News

Spielberg to make Ground Zero doc

Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg is to produce a TV documentary series on the rebuilding of New York's World Trade Center, to be shown in 2011.

Rebuilding Ground Zero will chronicle the engineering and building of the skyscraper being built on the site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.

It will also pay tribute to those who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said the series would tell "a compelling story of remembrance and renewal".

He said Spielberg's involvement as executive producer would ensure "the story will be brought to life for people around the world for generations to come".

The Science Channel series will use 3D, time-lapse cameras, computer modelling techniques and other methods to chart the construction of One World Trade Center.

Formerly known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot (541 meter) skyscraper will be the tallest building in the US.

Work on the building officially began in 2006 and is scheduled to be completed in 2013.

Rebuilding Ground Zero will be produced by the Science Channel, a division of the Discovery network.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8460887.stm

Published: 2010/01/15 10:39:06 GMT

Hacer clic aquí para leer la noticia en español

On Teaching Memory

As I stated in the initial post to this blog, I am teaching an honors seminar on memory this semester (which begins on Monday). At my institution, only first-year honors students may register for the class, but it is later opened to all honors-eligible undergraduates. There are three seminars offered this semester, on a variety of topics. Professors may choose to teach the course one day a week for the entire semester, or two days per week, with the class ending at midterm. Due to the thematic nature of our class, I chose to offer the seminar twice a week. The class is only a one credit hour course, and we will have just two hours per week together. Still, I am absolutely thrilled to be teaching this class (in fact, I volunteered to do so).

I have just completed the course syllabus, and I would like to share that document with anyone who might be interested. Please feel free to comment, suggest additional readings, or share pedagogical insights if you have taught any of these, or similar, texts. I'd be more than happy to read your remarks and respond to them here.

One of the challenges I encountered in planning the syllabus was the sheer volume of material that is available out there regarding memory and amnesia. We always have to choose texts carefully for classes we'll be teaching, but especially when the course is going to be so brief. As I state in the course description, I opted to focus less on the traumatic historical events themselves -- that is, what happened -- and more on how those events were (and are) remembered, both by survivors and subsequent generations. Interestingly, I thought I would dedicate a rather large portion of the class to the Spanish Civil War, because that is what my research is in. However, in the end, the syllabus kind of took on its own life, and we'll spend a decent amount of time on 9-11. Perhaps, this is only natural. I just received a copy of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, and I also re-watched Man on Wire over break.

In any case, I'll be reporting on the class from time to time here. Students may also have the opportunity to post articles and commentary on this blog.

Book on Art and Memory

Contemporary Art and Memory
Images of Recollection and Remembrance
Joan Gibbons

I.B. Tauris, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84511-619-4, ISBN10: 1-84511-619-4,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 344 pages, 30 b/w illus.,

Description: Contemporary Art and Memory is the first accessible survey book to explore the subject of memory as it appears in its many guises in contemporary art. Looking at both personal and public memory, Gibbons explores art as autobiography, the memory as trace, the role of the archive, revisionist memory and postmemory, as well as the absence of memory in oblivion.

Grounding her discussion in historical precedents, Gibbons explores the work of a wide range of international artists including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Doris Salcedo, Keith Piper, Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and new media artist George Legrady. Contemporary Art and Memory will be indispensable to all those concerned with the ways in which artists represent and remember the past.

Joan Gibbons is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham and Course Director, MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice. She is the author of Art and Advertising (I.B.Tauris).

Documentary Film: "Man on Wire"

I recently had the opportunity to see Man on Wire (2008, dir. James Marsh) for a second time, the award-winning documentary film which chronicles the exploits of Philippe Petit, who walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

As a child, I was fascinated with stories of daredevil acts, like the guy who rode over Niagara Falls in a barrel and came out alive, or Harry Houdini's exploits to break out of chains underwater. I am not old enough to remember Philippe Petit's stunning, illegal high-wire act, but I was able to visit the Twin Towers just one year before 9-11 (though I never went inside). It truly boggles the mind to contemplate what it meant to walk, essentially on air, not once, not twice, but eight times back and forth in the two hundred or so feet between the towers. And to lie down, and look down, as Petit did!

Perhaps the most extraordinary feat of Man on Wire is the complete omission of any direct reference to 9-11. While the director has stated that he did not include 9-11 on purpose -- "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" -- a 2008 review of the film in the Times Online (U.K.), questioned whether this film about a high-wire daredevil may actually be the "best 9/11 work of art so far" (see "Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?"). Again, what is not stated, or what remains silent, is a powerful driving force of this film. We will discuss this movie further here after we view it for class.