Preliminary Programme

This paper – especially centred on Maoist oppositions during the sixties and seventies – seeks to analyse the tension arising between the repressive dynamics of the Portuguese dictatorship of New State (1932-1974) and the types of behaviour – expected and effective – under torture and police inquisition, thus relating the work of ‘making people talk’ and the desire for heroic assertion of a significant silence. I thus confront narratives of fear, clandestinity and heroism in the extreme left wing oppositions, highlighting the lines of continuity and rupture with regard to the Communist terrain. At the same time, I aim to show the solidarity and conflicts which existed among detainees in the light of the political options held by prisoners, but also of the instances of complicity woven in the context of prisons. Recovering one of Michel Foucault’s concepts, the task is, therefore, that of ascertaining how ‘disciplinary mechanisms’ produce not just disciplinary silences, but also modalities of subjective and inter-subjective resistance.

In addition to consulting written sources, my research was substantially anchored in treating oral histories. Engaging with the living memory of that time is key to writing a history of activism and repression under the New State which can turn emotions and convictions also into objects of analysis, as, in any event, has been the case of academic output which has studied different repressive contexts – Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag, political prisons – in the light of victims’ voices, thus making it possible to ascertain the dynamics which arise between silence, oblivion and rememoration. (Show less)

In this paper I will examine in detail two life history interviews with the same interviewee conducted by two different interviewers.

Both interviews were conducted as part of the ‘AJR Refugee Voices Audio-Visual Testimony Archive’ (UK) and it was because of a technical problem with the image that the interview with this 84 year-old woman, born in Berlin and low living in London, was conducted twice by different interviewers within a short time-span. These interviews provide us with a unique opportunity to analyse the relationship between the interviewers and their questioning and the interviewee’s narrative.

In this paper I will address how the life history of the interviewee, which deals with her childhood in Berlin, her preparation for emigration, her journey of the ‘Kindertransport’ to the UK, her settling in Britain, and her coming to terms with the death of her parents and sister, is shaped by the questioning of the two different interviewers and by their different personas. I will also investigate how the different interactions with the two different interviewers shape two different narratives.

This analysis will raise interesting questions about the nature of memory and life history, contextualised in two different interview situations. (Show less)

This paper will focus on a documentary project about a Communist oriented Youth Group of Austrian Émigrés in New York. As two of its members became spies for the Soviets and imprisoned in 1953, many members of the group were interrogated during the McCarthy era. The paper will show who difficult it was to get information behind the “real” story in interviews. (Show less)