Persistent Memory

Desperate to escape an increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of persons from Nazi-dominated Central Europe-the majority of them Jews-found refuge in Latin America in the late 193os and the early years of World War II. Bolivia was a principal recipient of this refugee influx. In that Andean land the refugees began to reconstruct a version of the world they had been forced to abandon. Their own origins and social institutions had been diverse in Central Europe, ranging across generational, educational, and artistic backgrounds. But it was Austro-German Jewish bourgeois society that provided them with a model for emulation and a common locus of identification in Bolivia. Indeed, at the very time when that dynamic social and cultural amalgam was being ruthlessly and systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Jewish refugees in Bolivia attempted to recall aspects of it thousands of miles from their homes-in a country that offered them a haven, but in which many of them felt themselves to be mere sojourners. Concerned with shifts in the content of the refugees' dominant conceptions of their past and future, Persistent Memory treats particulars from their past existence that they selected and recalled in Bolivia in remembering Central Europe and its Jewish bourgeois life. It examines how the immigrants recalled, negotiated, and reshaped their memories of that European world in the institutions they created in Bolivia to serve their changing needs. It reflects on the culture and community they developed: on their economic, social, and religious organizations, their clubs, entertainments, schools, and publications, as well as on their political, occupational, and personal interactions. It explores the connection between their collective remembrance and the formation of a collective identity. And taking into account the contradictions involved for Jewish refugees who were excluded from Germany and Austria but who nevertheless constructed an identity molded by Austro-German cultural values, the essay interrogates the character of Jewish cultural assimilation in Central Europe, and assesses the reasons for its persistence in Bolivia. Photos taken at the Austrian Club in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1947, two years after the end of the war, show my mother, father, and friends at a Dirndl ball.' My parents and the others in the group are dressed in Austrian folk costumes-my mother and the women in full-skirted peasant dresses and tight bodices, and my father and the men 1. In the late 1930os, and until the end of the first year of World War II, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, fled to Bolivia to escape increasingly vehement persecution. Initially, soon after the Nazis came to power, wealthier, better-connected, or perhaps more prescient, emigrants acquired visas or fled to the socalled countries of choice-Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Palestine, Argentina, and Brazil. The tightening of immigration to these countries, however, virtually closed off entry for the large number of persons desperate to leave in the late 1930S. By the end of the decade Bolivia was one of the very few places that accepted Jewish immigrants. Some twenty thousand refugees from Germany and Austria arrived between 1938 and 1940-a number which, when calculated as a percentage of Bolivia's small non-Indian population at the time, gives some sense of how substantial the demographic impact of this Central European immigrant influx must have been. The new arrivals settled primarily in La Paz, 12,500 feet above sea level, as well as in Cochabamba, Oruro, Sucre, and in small mining and tropical agricultural communities throughout the land. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.203 on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 04:06:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spitzer * Central European Refugees 619 in lederhosen, white and tasseled Alpine kneesocks, and Tyrolean hats. They all seem happy, perhaps a little tipsy, and they are obviousy having a good time. Pictures of the same vintage arefrom an Austrian Club banquet. Scores ofpeople in semiformal dress, including my parents, are seated at long, set dinner tables, apparently enjoying the occasion with wine, plentifulfood, and smiling conversation. In the background one can clearly see the club's wall hangings: two Austrian flags, a lithograph of Old Vienna, and lampshades emblazoned with the Austrian republican coat of arms. No precise date is marked on the photos; the occasion being celebrated is not indicated. The attendant music can only be imagined. I see these photosfirst as visual examples -accessible, direct, even amusing-of the reproduction of 'Austrianness in Bolivia by refugees who hadfled or been expelled from their country in the aftermath of the Anschluss and Nazi persecution. I view them as photographic manifestations of cultural memory and identity -of nostalgic remembrance acted out in costume, cultural practice, and symbolic representation. They seem to record performances engendered by Heimweh and Sehnsucht, homesickness and longing, feelings commony expressed in refugee discourse. ret the photos also seem discordant to me: so removedfrom the Andean physical and cultural setting in which they were located as to appear almost quaint and ingenuous in their incongruity and diference. And they come laden with irony. Taken not very long after the conclusion of the war-after Auschwitz, the death camps, and confirmation of extensive Austrian involvement and collaboration in the Final Solution -their depictions of enthusiastic celebrations ofAustrian nationality strike me as disturbing and distressing examples of denial, f not amnesia. Over time, my initial responses to these pictures are not eradicated. But, in my eforts to contextualize the photos more precisely and to reread them historically, I realize that they also manifest a political dimension that is not immediately apparent. For the refugees within them to proclaim 'Austriannessto reclaim an identification with an Austrian republic after the Anschluss, Nazi rule, and the defeat of the German Reich -was also to reassert rightful belonging within a body politic and cultural tradition from which the Nazis had attempted to sever them. You havefailed, they seem to assert. survive. We have a claim on the best of the past, and we welcome the future! And beneath the surface comicality of the lederhosen, dirndl, and 7yrolean outfits, lurks the reality that Jews had been legallyforbidden to dress in national costume when the Nazis came to power. Nostalgic memory, cultural reconnection, ethnic mimicry -their surface readings--take on an additional dimension. Defiance, resistance, victory -these too are being proclaimed

Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Refugee · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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