20th Century Archives - Not Even Past

Contraception – Letters from French Women, 1960s-70s

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our vast library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Judith Coffin’s illuminating, powerful and moving article on contraception in France, which was first published in 2012. Given recent developments related to reproductive rights, we feel this article could not be more timely.

In 1967, Radio Luxembourg recruited Menie Grégoire, a well-known journalist and expert on “women’s” issues, to host an audience Q&A program on the airwaves. Radio Luxembourg was a privately-owned radio station; its shows were first produced in Paris and then cabled to and broadcast from Luxembourg. But the program reached deep into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners tuned in to listen to Grégoire, and her program displaced the advice-from-experts programs and old-school family radio dramas that Radio Luxembourg had carried since the end of World War Two. Remarkably for historians, Grégoire saved and classified all the letters her listeners sent the program (nearly 100,000 of them), and she took notes on their telephone calls (around 16,000). Those papers are now in the archives of the Indre et Loire, outside of Tours, in France. Historians who want to work in the collection need Grégoire’s permission to do so and they cannot reproduce any of the letters in their entirety or identify any of the correspondents. But the letters offer a remarkable portrait of France in the years before and after 1968, the more unusual for being focused on provincial France rather than Paris.

“Pregnant. Just had twins. Wants abortion”: One of the letters in Menie Grégoire’s collection, with her notes on the envelope, at the archives of the Indre et Loire. Photo courtesy of the author.

Listeners wanted to discuss any number of issues: work, housing (in short supply as the economy expanded), credit and debt, the struggles of family businesses, and everything having to do with sex. They asked about sexual dilemmas and crises, pregnancy, family life, parents or in-laws (helpful intrusive, or both), and children, but contraception and abortion topped the list of women’s concerns. (Men wrote as well: they, too, were and are implicated in fertility and reproduction.) In 1967, the same year that Grégoire began broadcasting, the Neuwirth law made it legal for the first time, to discuss contraception in public – and cautiously opened the door to approving the sale of selected oral contraceptives, IUDs, and diaphragms. The law had overwhelming public support, but met institutional resistance. The Pope struck back with a papal encyclical reiterating the Church’s opposition to contraception, startling public opinion in France and much of the world, which had expected the Church to soften its position. Some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for the pill and some doctors were reluctant to write them. Many women mistrusted “chemical” treatments. “Nature will take its revenge,” warned a French senator who had opposed the bill, stoking fear: “No cycle, no libido, no fantasies . . . breasts so painful that they can’t be touched, and psychic (sic) problems thrown in for good measure. And nature’s first revenge is that the partner becomes less interested [. . .]” (Gauthier 1999: 151).

*“Scandalized by the program (abortion). a bad influence on youth”: Grégoire’s notes on the envelope of another letter in her collection. Photo courtesy of the author.*

Small wonder that different contraceptive methods and their ramifications loomed so large in the questions listeners sent in to Grégoire’s program. Countless women wrote Grégoire asking where and how they could get a safe and legal abortion – which usually meant going to Switzerland. Grégoire could not provide that information directly, but other listeners often responded by passing on stories of their own experiences. (Abortion would be partially legalized in 1975.)

“Good letter on contraception, abortion, sex ed. but thinks that Gisele Halimi went too far by talking about pleasure.” Halimi, with Simone de Beauvoir, founded the organization “Choice.” Photo courtesy of the author.

The letters in the archive testify to women’s fears — of pregnancy, new forms of contraception, their parents, neighbors, or husbands. They also testify to women’s desire for reliable information, to the humiliations of having to depend on doctors for birth control, to the enormous complications that everyday sexual life created and strategies for dealing with them, and to the widespread wish among ordinary women to control their own decisions about reproduction.

February 13th, 1970:

I am 68, and while listening to you talk about contraception, I can’t help but think that these women are lucky – people are paying attention to them and they dare talk. (Fonds Menie Grégoire 66 J 30)

December 12th, 1967:

“Personal” written on the envelope.

Help me.

I am 17 ½ and like all girls I have my problems. My parents bought a pastry shop and café. We are open every day. I have to hurry home after school to work: wash the dishes, tidy the house, do the laundry, mop the floor, etc. My father works all night, and so he sleeps during the afternoon. My parents never have time: they only have work. They get along very well, but this is not a private life, and certainly not a family life.

[. . .] When I was young, if a pregnant woman came into the store my mother always sent me out — to fetch a broom, or something. They have never explained anything to me. Even last week, when the radio was talking about the pill during the news, my mother turned it off . . . . I can see she is afraid of having this conversation and I don’t want to upset her. (66 J 37, 925)

December 12, 1967th:

Letter from a woman 25, who has been married for four years and has a three-year-old girl. That birth was very difficult, and neither she nor her husband wants more children.

[. . .] every month is nothing but fear and anxiety, fear to find myself pregnant for a second time. That’s my life, always worrying about that fear I can’t describe but that gets inside me and makes me look at everything differently. . . . Of course I have heard talk of means of contraception, but I don’t know who to go to. I am ashamed to go to my doctor and tell him my little problems. I’m afraid he’ll make fun of me. (66 J 230)

February 11th, 1974:

Letter from 45-year old woman.

I’m afraid I am pregnant. We have always used withdrawal. But now my husband is having problems, and so sometimes he isn’t careful. I think you’re going to find me old fashioned . . . . But I have to tell you that we have always dealt with doctors who are quite cold, and we haven’t dared raise the subject. (66 J 231)

December 21st, 1967:

Letter from a regular listener. One of countless stories about extra marital pregnancies and how women and men dealt with them.

When I was 15, I ‘frequented’ a boy one year older. I got pregnant. His parents refused to let us marry. So I had my child, and continued to work on my family’s farm. The boy came back, I got pregnant again, and I agreed to marry him. We lived with my parents. Living with my father was nearly impossible. My husband worked in a bakery, where he worked all night. Since I had two children, I had very little time for him. A combination of that and the “scenes” with my family drove him away, leaving me with my two children. For the next five years, I worked as a maid while my grandmother took care of the children. I only got to come home on the weekends to see them.

[. . .] Then I married a man, a widower with 3 children. We have two children together. I didn’t love him at the beginning but I am learning to. Today many people admire me for marrying a man (who I didn’t love). I have put my life back together. (66 J 37, #932)

December 8th, 1967:

Letter from a 30-year-old.

Please send me the list of the books that you provided during your show last Saturday on sexual education and contraception. Send me the publishers too, so I can order them by mail. Can you include the list from the week before? I wrote down “the pill: yes or no,” but I didn’t get the rest down.

Here’s the problem. [. . .]

I am 30. I have been married nine years. Both of our parents were divorced. This was difficult for me, less so for him.

I am shy. I got married. We had our first child, a daughter. A sunny household. [Ménage sans nuage.] Then my health started to fail. I have thyroid problems and irregular periods. [. . .]

In the summer of 1965, fate descended on us. We didn’t want a child and one was coming.

My husband was transformed. He felt betrayed. He closed himself off. . . . I refused all sexual relations. I love him but I am afraid. I gave in once, and when my period was late, I was seized by the darkest fear. It was only my thyroid.

We still have no sexual relations.

I can’t talk about this with my family doctor – he always just wants another baby. When he comes to our house, he asks whether we have “ordered up a little brother for our girls.” I just stand there. I don’t know how to answer him. (66 J 40, #1805)

July 17th, 1971:

Letter from 27 year old, responding to another young woman’s story on Grégoire’s program.

I don’t know how to tell you about this, I’ve never spoken about it (except to my husband).

I got pregnant just before we were married. We went to a doctor who gave me a shot to bring back my period [these were hormone shots], and nothing happened, I was pregnant. Horrible.

[She was the third of five girls, she said. She couldn’t tell her parents.]

My mother has a lot of principles (for her, an unwed mother ‘une fille mere’ is a bitch ‘une chienne’) and she calls herself a Christian. My father is very strict. Everyone knows him in the village, and everyone likes him, but he is completely rigid with his family. When I was working, I wasn’t allowed to go out at night. [. . .]

I had an abortion. That cost us 100,000 francs. I was incredibly lucky to have an elderly nurse who didn’t massacre me. Then I had a D and C.

After that, I used a diaphragm for three years. Then I had a baby.

I hope my child will have a different experience. (66 J 22)

July 5th, 1971:

Letter from a school teacher, married for three years to another school teacher, who is just finishing his military service. She refuses to describe herself in the clichéd terms of women’s magazines. She isn’t “a woman disappointed by marriage” and her husband isn’t “cheating.”

You give such good advice on the radio that I don’t hesitate to write you to tell you my problem.

[. . .] I’m pregnant again and my second baby is going to be born just about a year after the first. [. . .]

I know that lots of women “manage” [‘débrouillent’] as we say, to get rid of a pregnancy that they don’t want. But aren’t they worried about their own lives? I only see one solution – legal abortion done by a doctor, but — where do you go? Who can give you information? There’s a lot of talk about the subject these days, but even so, I think that it is hard for you to find an address for me. I thought about Switzerland. Do you think you could find at least some information? I am only two months pregnant, and I want to do something now. (66 J 228)

May 5th, 1971:

Letter from a woman, 25, married for 7 years. She is unapologetic and angry, and her husband shares her feelings.

I’m writing you about abortion. I am Catholic, though not practicing. So you understand that I would be against, if my case were not so complicated.

I am five months pregnant with my fifth child, and the oldest will be seven years old at the end of the year. I can tell you, if I had been able to find a doctor who would have accepted to give an abortion the right way, I would have been fully willing, despite my principles. But in France there is no possibility, except clandestine and dangerous.

You are going to say that I could have controlled these births. Of course! I took the pill for 18 months, and then something was irregular and I went eight days without taking it and thought I was protected, which only helped me get pregnant.

So I am for abortion in certain cases, though only if under medical supervision. I hope that these Messieurs who make laws will think. I am strong and helped by my husband, and he helps hold me up, but how many other women. [. . .] (66 J 228)

This article is connected to but does not draw from my recent book, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir. For more on that book, see

https://notevenpast.org/ihs-book-talk-sex-love-and-letters-writing-simone-de-beauvoir-by-judith-g-coffin-university-of-texas-at-austin-history-faculty-new-book-talk/

https://notevenpast.org/an-intimate-history-of-the-twentieth-century/

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750540/sex-love-and-letters/

Recent works on the history of sexuality in Europe and the US:

Beth Bailey, “Sexual Revolution(s)” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, edited by David Farber (1994).

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994).

Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 (2004).

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011).

Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (2010).

Elaine Tyler May, America and The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (2010).

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks. — *The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke, to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading: losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph. — *Marjory Collins, photographer.* Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second, and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follow the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

José and His Brothers

Pampa Unión, today, is a ghost town lost in the Atacama Desert, a mile high and halfway between the Chilean mining centers of Antofagasta and Calama. Founded over a century ago as a medical way station, it quickly became a resting place for nitrate miners on their days off, complete with all the supplies and entertainments that working men required. With two main streets and just one tree, the 2,000 stable inhabitants entertained a floating population of up to 15,000. The town was abandoned in 1954. All that is left today are the ruins of adobe walls with broken bits of signage and a cemetery.

Diego was the one with the artistic inspiration. They were humble ideas, at the beginning, but he took them seriously. He could move heaven and earth to make something out of whatever it was he had in his head.

So, he went up to the pampa with fifteen classmates and a couple of movie cameras, the best they could get their hands on. It was quite the production. For Pampa Unión. The idea was a short feature about a young man who goes there to meet his ghosts, the hidden history of his rootless family, buried in the toxic sands of an abandoned mining town.

Pampa Union — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons)

They even had a visit from Diego’s baby sister. She couldn’t stay, of course, but she went for the day. They dressed her like a doll from the nineteenth century and they filmed her with flowers in her hand wandering around among the tombstones. It was traumatic for her, because some of the graves had been disturbed. For art’s sake. The point was that suffering ran deep in Chilean veins. We were a nation of exiles, slaves, and survivors. Or something like that. It would be disconcerting to be from a ghost town, I guess.

The boys went up there to rough it, but they also went to have a good time. The desert is enchanting. It has a magic that wakes up all your neurons. When you are from the city, the purity of color, light, and shadow connects your soul with the depths of life and death, past and present. I drove up to see them, about the fifth day of their odyssey. They said, whatever else I brought, to please bring water. They were running out.

A mausoleum that exhibits years of decay — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons.)

There was a scene with a hot-air balloon. The protagonist needed to send a message, an urgent, desperate call for help. Like when someone lost at sea might send a message in a bottle, but airmail. As if everyone just had a hot-air balloon stashed in their billfold for emergencies. As if wind-born balloons ever made it to their intended addressees. The story didn’t have to be realistic, comrade, just visually pleasing.

Hot-air balloons were a thing, right about then, in the artistic community of Santiago. The dictatorship had been over for almost a decade, and even Plaza Ñuñoa had become a center for a new species of night life that posed as politically aware. Starving artists, the kind Neruda called, anarcocapitalistas, would show up with marionettes, walking on stilts or pointlessly lifting off hot-air balloons, in exchange for pocket change from passers-by, and demanding that a Ministry of Culture be created to fund the fog of marijuana smoke in which they floated. Diego got his hands on three hot-air balloons, bright red and white, and he took them up to Pampa Unión.

All three had to look the same, so that his team could film the scene three times from different angles and create the illusion of just one balloon. And they had to film at dawn, because that was the only time of day that the wind wouldn’t abduct their temperamental prop and send it tumbling sideways across the desert. There were about fifteen minutes of quiet just as the sun came up. After that, the wind began to swirl around like the noxious gas on the surface of Jupiter until the sun went down.

Two men stand between two walls. The walls have faded painted advertisements — Photo via the author.

It was the first time that all fifteen of them had ever gotten up that early. Some had hardly slept. To buffer the dopamine, they drank at night. Not a good idea, not in that climate. Alcohol dehydrates you. But it was tradition. Sebastián, nicknamed el Perro, would crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering, If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I will never drink again. It was like the folksong from Carnaval in Bolivia, the one that says, they were nice boys, but they just couldn’t stop drinking.

The scene with the hot-air balloons was a success. They spent the rest of the day in the cemetery, where they got to know the whole town: names, nationalities, dates of birth and death. People died young. There were cemetery ghettos of Croatians, English, Mapuche, and even Chinese. I brought their dirty clothes home to wash. Imagine, fifteen twenty-year-olds, no showers, drinking at night and filming in the cemetery during the day. They reeked of sand, sweat, alcohol, and cadaver.

José and his brother, Francisco, went with me. They weren’t from Santiago. They were from Antofagasta. Well, they weren’t from Antofagasta, either, comrade. Their father and grandfather had grown up on the pampa. They were desert people from way back.

Walking around in the ruins, it was easy to figure out which was the street with the hardware stores, and which one had been for cantinas and bordellos. Most of the roofs had fallen in, but there were still signs painted on the walls of the once-thriving businesses. And there was junk on the ground. Kitchen middens of the future, an archeologist’s dream that we were disturbing. There were spoons and saucers, most of them bent or broken. There were wine bottles, shattered with the cork still in. There were tin plates, costume jewels, bits of clothing and other residue of a forgotten humanity from almost a century ago.

Two men stand between two walls — Photo via the author.

Among all the junk, we found some bent pieces of tin, one shaped into a star, another that looked like a ship, and one that was shaped like a child. The boys from Santiago, smart as they were, had no explanation. José picked one up, as if to examine it in the light, the very bright desert light, and he said, this is a toy. My grandfather used to make these. A loaded silence of amazement descended over the boys from Santiago. José had given himself away. He had revealed his roots and the endless desert sand into which they sank, publicly claiming the pampa as his own. For him, this was no short feature film. For him, la pampa was the real thing.

Though the original population in Pampa Unión had been inordinately skewed toward masculinity, there were females. Children were born. Sometimes, they survived the diarrhea and the diphtheria. They got old enough to need something to play with.

Supplies came up from down below. There was wine and aguardiente. There was beef, kept on the hoof, as there was no refrigeration. There were satin dresses for the prostitutes and Victrola Talking Machines to create a romantic ambiance for fantasy love affairs. But it never occurred to anyone to send up a doll, a stuffed bear, or a toy truck.

So, grandparents would take their tin shears—they had those—and try to make something nice to stimulate the imagination of the toddlers who had never known anything other than the infinite horizon, the blinding clarity of midday and the starlit dark of night. In la pampa, grandparents were often no older than about thirty-five. Anyone who lived to be forty got the hell out of there.

In Antofagasta, José’s grandfather kept making toys out of empty tin cans. A long time ago, few toys made it there, either. No toys, no fruit and no conjugated verbs. People with money took trips to Santiago if they wanted something nice. Poor children did without. Raising children was not the objective, there. You had to get the ore out of the ground. You had to get it down the mountain, onto ships, into trains and out of there. That was all. Playful little brats were slag, byproducts of some miner’s love affair on his day off.

Even so, grandfathers found tender spots for toddlers and got busy with their tin shears. Compared to X–boxes, the tin-can toys might have seemed like nothing at all. But, compared to nothing at all, comrade, well, that was another story. They were the first thing that delighted the eye of virgin innocence. For the semi-abandoned babies of the desert, tiny tin toys were shining treasures, an opportunity to imagine the garbage dump where they lived transformed into burgeoning beauty. They were a chance, maybe their only chance, to ever contemplate the world as it might have once been, as it could someday become. Those toys did tend to have sharp edges and pointy places. They were dangerous toys that prepared children for life in the Norte Grande, a life with lots of rough edges.

The guys from Santiago grew quiet. José’s revelation gave them pause. They realized the deficiencies of their own elitist upbringing. José became silent, too. He understood, in that moment, the cultural and geographical abyss that separated him from the sons of wealth, privilege, and power. He had played with those toys. Francisco had, too.

More From Nathan Stone:

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Miss O’Keeffe

For further reading, see Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novel about Pampa Unión, Fatamorgana de amor con banda de música. (Santiago: Planeta, 1998)

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter Judson (2016)

By Jonathan Parker

This excellent work by historian Pieter Judson shows how the Hapsburg empire was a modernizing force that sustained a complex but often mutually beneficial relationship with the various nationalist movements within its borders. To support this argument, Judson synthesizes an impressive number of existing works on narrower topics into a cohesive narrative history of the empire from the late eighteenth century until its demise at the end of World War I. Judson claims that the empire was hardly doomed prior to 1914, arguing against long-standing nationalist histories of the empire’s inevitable collapse. While The Habsburg Empire is not without its flaws, it will surely remain required reading for anyone interested not only in the empire itself, but more broadly in the history of state-building, modernization, and nationalism in the nineteenth century.

The Habsburg Empire is not intended to be a blow-by-blow account. Instead, it tries to build an updated framework for thinking about the empire over its final century. Judson achieves this by borrowing from works on peasant life and the lives of oil workers in Galicia, on Slavic nationalist movements in what would later become Yugoslavia, and on industrialization and its consequences in Bohemia, Moravia, Lower and Upper Austria, and Silesia. He also draws on the complex political history of Vienna and Budapest, as the nature of the Habsburg state was debated, negotiated, and repeatedly hammered out over the course of an entire century. Consequently, Judson covers a lot of ground while touching on a limited number of key issues.

The discussion of industrialization is a good example. Despite the leadership’s conservative commitment to monarchy and its rejection of the French Revolution in the decades between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1848 revolutions, the empire underwent dramatic economic and social change. The imperial government was deeply suspicious of any potentially revolutionary or democratic activity, and yet it was also strapped for cash and resources. New technologies and techniques, including the building of railroads and capitalist institutions, encouraged not only economic growth, but also a kind of civil society as private middle-class and noble actors sought to address problems the government could not or would not face. As Judson argues, this period was not one of economic stagnation that laid the groundwork for so-called “East European backwardness,” but rather one in which subjects and citizens took an active role in social and economic change. In other words, this period of political conservatism saw grassroots development of democratic institutions and market forces. This point meshes with Judson’s broader argument that Habsburg imperial citizens took an active role in government and society, and that the empire held intrinsic value as a vehicle, rather than an obstacle, for public improvement.

The Hofburg, 1897 (via DPLA)

How then does Judson explain the final collapse of the empire, if it really was not doomed long before the First World War? In his final chapter, Judson argues that the imperial state lost a great deal of its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens during the war. Prior to the war there had been a sense in many quarters that the empire essentially served its citizens, and that even nationalists and Marxists could promote their agendas through its institutions. However, shortly after the war began, martial law was declared and many democratic governmental organs were suspended along with citizens’ rights by conservative, anti-democratic forces in the military. Combined with shortages of food and other essentials as well as catastrophic tactical failures on the battlefield (which virtually wiped out the empire’s entire corps of professional soldiers within the first months), these actions severely undermined faith in the empire’s ability to provide for its people. Even though democratic rule of law was restored half-way through the war, the damage had already been done. Nationalist organizations were then able to capitalize on the situation by organizing welfare relief, vastly improving their own legitimacy in citizens’ eyes and in contrast to an apparently failing state. Judson goes further and claims that the “doomed long ago” narrative was promoted by nationalists and arch-conservative imperialists alike, one in order to legitimize the post-war order of nation-states, and the other to put the blame for the empire’s sudden collapse on someone else. With this book, Judson offers a corrective.

In The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Pieter Judson has set a standard for general histories of the empire and produced a framework with which future specialist monographs can productively engage. This eminently readable book will be appreciated by students and scholars of European history as well as the general reading public.

More By Jonathan Parker:

The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring

Historical Perspectives on Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (2011)

IHS Panel: From the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution

The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Communist Revolution in China. Beginning with the unreserved embrace of Western values by “enlightenment” intellectuals, the three decades following World War I in China witnessed dramatic transformation on all fronts, ending in the establishment of a communist government that would rule China to the present day. To make sense of the impacts and legacies of these two historical events as well as the ironies and contradictions that were intrinsic to them, our panelists will discuss the impact of the May Fourth movement on social and intellectual life in Republican China, the opportunities and dilemmas that confronted Chinese women in their involvement in the Communist Revolution, and the strategy and tactics behind Communist success in the Civil War in 1949.

Featuring:

“Rethinking of the May Fourth Discourse: Family, Marriage and Women in the Chinese Revolution”
Xiaoping Cong
Professor of History
University of Houston

“The Making of “Youth” in Modern China: Reflections on the May Fourth Movement”
Iris Ma
Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

“From 1919 to 1949: The May 4th Movement and Communist Strategy and Tactics in China’s Civil War”
Harold Tanner
Professor of History
University of North Texas

Huaiyin Li, moderator
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

IHS Panel: Brexit in Global and Historical Context

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union would seem to mark an abrupt and unexpected break with post-WWII efforts to bring about greater European integration. Yet like most sudden historical breaks, a look beneath the surface reveals longer-term processes. This panel will discuss how Brexit can be understood from several angles: a) long-term developments in the UK and between the UK and continental Europe, b) Brexit’s challenge to the EU and its impact on internal national debates elsewhere in Europe, and c) Brexit in light of the recent upsurge of global populism.

Featuring

“Brexit: How Did We Get Here and What Awaits Us?”
Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Associate Professor, Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/zs3955

“The Political Economy of Brexit, in the UK and the EU”
James K. Galbraith
Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
lbj.utexas.edu/directory/faculty/james-galbraith

“The Janus Face of Brexit: UK-Europe Relations from Napoleon to Nigel Farage”
James Vaughn
Assistant Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jv8775

Miriam Bodian, moderator
Professor of History, and
Director, Institute for Historical Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/mb35382

Other IHS Talks:

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919
Debt: A Natural History

African Catholic Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church by Elizabeth A. Foster (2019)

by David Whitehouse

(This article was originally posted on Imperial and Global Forum)

On July 1, 1888, Charles Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order, gave a speech to a packed Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris in which he denounced the evils of slavery in Africa. The event was a public relations triumph, with African children who had been repurchased from slavery being paraded by the Fathers, clad in white burnouses with red fezzes on their heads, on the church steps. In the late nineteenth century as in the 1950s, slavery was used by the Catholic Church to galvanize public opinion and to raise funds. Lavigerie was not an isolated forerunner of post-war Catholic radicalism. He trained a generation of missionaries to enter the field as convinced anti-slavery activists, as well as supporting a series of military operations against slavery in Africa, with varying degrees of success. And yet until now Catholic missionaries have usually been relegated by historians to the status of obedient cogs in colonial state machines. Elizabeth Foster’s new book offers a major challenge by showing how missionary leaders like Lavigerie and his successors had aims that were often in clear conflict with those of the colonial state – a conflict between French Catholic missionaries and the colonial powers that resurfaced in a big way after the Second World War.

An emphasis upon political transition from colonial regimes to independent states dominates the literature on African decolonization. But decolonization, defined by Foster as the “ending or limiting of European hegemony” that involved power systems that were clearly outside of state apparatus, was a much broader process (p. 11). The book effectively uncovers the conflict between colonial state and Catholic mission in Africa in the 1950s. Foster sees the emergence of a more robust Catholic Left in France against a backdrop of colonial crisis as a key development. Catholicism in France, Foster argues, had previously been the almost exclusive property of the conservative Right. The Catholic Church hierarchy therefore struggled in an “awkward dance” in the 1950s as it sought to reconcile conservatives with radical anti-colonialists (p. 14). To make its provocative case, the book draws on a rich supply of archival sources in France, Italy, and Senegal, as well as a wide range of periodicals.

Charles Lavigerie (via Wikipedia)

Another main strength of the book lies in its illumination of the bifurcation between European and Christian identity that Catholic missionary work in Africa entailed. Catholic intellectuals such as Joseph Michel sought in the 1950s to “reclaim and reorient the church as a defender of the oppressed, colonized populations” of the French Empire (p. 100). As Foster argues, the Catholic church was considerably more successful in keeping its adherents in post-colonial Africa than in Europe. World War Two looms large as a turning point here, complementing other recent scholarship. According to Darcie Fontaine, for example, the war is similarly seen as the turning point in the development of French Catholic thinking about the colonies, as Christian theology was used in France as a basis for resistance to Nazism.[1]This can, however, lead to obscuring the continuity of missionary agendas and practice.

In Foster’s account, racial hierarchy keeps its orthodox place as a guiding paradigm of missionary thinking.[2] Foster argues that racist disdain for évolué Africans was common among missionaries and that blatant Catholic racism only became institutionally unacceptable in the 1950s. The new generation of post-war missionaries had more enlightened attitudes than the old guard they replaced. Missionary longevity in the field, the assumption appears to be, solidified racism. This begs the question of why Catholic missionaries would want to work among “unredeemable” and “inferior” peoples for so long.[3] For Lavigerie, setting Africans free from slavery and building the kingdom of Christ in Africa were intended as achievements that would fully match or surpass the establishment of Christianity in Europe. Why would these goals have resonated with peoples who were considered as inherently inferior? Foster’s book begins to provide answers.

Foster’s focus is on the period of decolonization, and the chronological gap between her discussion of Lavigerie and the 1950s paves the way for a new field of research. So, too, would the addition of Protestant missionary sources. After all, Foster makes quite clear the French hostility to American Protestant missionaries. Protestants usually answered back, and denominational rivalry was itself a potential driver of more polarised political stances taken by missionaries on the ground in Africa. Foster’s work thus raises big questions about how Catholic missionaries’ anti-slavery agenda shaped developments and denominational conflict in the first half of the twentieth century across the vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa in which Christian missions operated. This important book starts the process of giving radical missionary currents their due place in models of colonialism and decolonization.

David Whitehouse is a freelance editor at the Africa Report published by Jeune Afrique in Paris and a PhD candidate at Exeter researching the impact of missionaries in Rwanda and Burundi 1900-1972.

[1] Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[2] For example, Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[3] Adas has even argued that that Europeans in the early centuries of expansion into Africa and Asia rarely used race to explain what they saw as their superiority, but rather Christianity and, much later, technological accomplishment. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014).

IHS Panel: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: 100 Years Later

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, causing the death of 50 to 100 million people worldwide. This panel will be a wide-ranging discussion of the 1918-1919 outbreak and subsequent episodes from a historical, sociological, and medical perspective.

Featuring:

“Improved Approaches to Combat a Future Pandemic”
Robert Krug
Professor Emeritus, Molecular Biosciences
University of Texas at Austin

“The Flu in Texas”
Abena Osseo-Asare
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

“One Hundred Years Later: Unknowns of the 1918 Flu Epidemic”
Sahotra Sarkar
Professor of Philosophy, and Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Bodian, moderator
Professor of History, and
Director, Institute for Historical Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
Revolutionizing the Way We Fight Disease

Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)

In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. As she traces Japanese-American relations and birth control activism throughout the century, Takeuchi-Demirci finds that state governments’ racial fears and desire for international dominance eclipsed Sanger’s and Shizue’s feminist goals. Rather than provide women more control over their own reproduction, Japan and the United States harnessed eugenics discourse to demonstrate their cultural and scientific advances and reduce “undesirable” populations.

Takeuchi-Demirci begins by highlighting Sanger’s trip to Japan following World War I. Already infamous in the United States for her birth control activism, Sanger’s decision to move her work abroad allowed her to escape the frustrations she experienced in her domestic efforts. The Japanese government saw in Sanger’s call a way to resolve a host of social problems by limiting the population, while an active women’s movement, well aware of her work, welcomed Sanger as a fellow woman dedicated to reproductive rights. Moving from the post World War I moment to the tense years leading up to the Second World War, Takeuchi-Demirci shows that Sanger and Shizue maintained a connection throughout the conflict, albeit with tensions, and reframed birth control as a way to obtain international peace by balancing the world order. Anti-Japanese feelings in the United States ultimately inspired an immigration ban. Fearing “The Yellow Peril,” the U.S. government became concerned that Japanese migrants, who supposedly reproduced at alarming rates, would overrun the white population. The U.S. government also blamed Japan’s “aggressive” imperialism on Japanese women’s robust fecundity. Around the same time, Sanger began to temper her radicalism and joined forces with eugenicists interested in population control. Despite the fact that these men wanted to promote reproduction in white women while reducing it among non-white, Sanger nevertheless saw the alliance as an opportunity to promote birth control as a benefit for women.

In U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, caution about population control following the Nazi genocide did not prevent the U.S. from promoting birth control behind the scenes or from claiming that these efforts were indigenous-led. In particular, Takeuchi-Demirci argues, the United States hoped reducing the population and enhancing its quality would defend against communist infiltration. When birth rates did in fact decline, the U.S. envisioned replicating their approach throughout Asia. Takeuchi-Demirci shows how the Japanese continued these efforts and linked them to “New Japan,” the empire’s more modern, progressive successor. Sanger participated in these activities by pushing to develop new birth control technologies using Eastern countries, and people, as a testing ground. Japan hesitantly accepted this offer, but insisted on leading the project to mitigate any Western exploitation. The Japanese eventually lost interest in the population control movement as birth rates continued to fall, to the distress of the United States, which remained intent on preventing communism’s spread through modified populations.

Ishimoto Shizuko in 1922 (via Wiki Commons)

Contraceptive Diplomacy travels uncharted territory by investigating transpacific attempts to bolster state power through a combination of birth control and eugenics. Takeuchi-Demirci’s work reminds us that U.S. eugenics projects did not exist in isolation, but on the world stage during a century fraught with international conflict. In working together to promote population control, Japan and the United States actually competed to demonstrate their cultural and scientific superiority. Feminist-led initiatives became, as Takeuchi-Demirci calls it, “a tool for patriarchal control and world domination” (210). Born in an anti-imperialist and socialist climate during the first World War, birth control traveled in imperialistic ways to facilitate international diplomacy. Takeuchi-Demirci shows the different ways discourses can be manipulated to serve dominant desires, and how even those who initially resisted this co-option, such as Sanger, become complicit. While the argument that eugenics served state goals is not particularly new, Takeuchi-Demirci does shed light on previously ignored Japanese-American projects. Her work makes this scholarly oversight appear all the more glaring given Sanger’s extensive involvement with the Japanese government and women’s groups.

Not all of Takeuchi-Demirci’s goals are achieved, however. Her stated intention to trace her narrative through Sanger and Schizue does not materialize; in fact, Schizue seems confined to the first few chapters, before disappearing as Sanger steals the show. While the women’s understated presence may make sense in light of the state’s tightening control over birth control, Sanger’s continued appearance seems to privilege the Western activist. Nevertheless, Takeuchi-Demirci’s has produced a fine book, as well as a relevant one. Her epilogue notes continuing twenty-first century eugenics projects and renewed fears about non-white reproduction outstripping that of whites (one thinks, for example, of United States anxiety over supposed Mexican “anchor babies.”) Contraceptive Diplomacy will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in international relations, twentieth-century United States or Japanese history, gender history, and the history of medicine.

Kellianne King is a graduate student pursuing a dual-title in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her areas of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry.

Notes from the Field
The “Knock Knock Who Is There” Moment for Japan
Racing the Enemy

When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By Jimena Perry

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.