Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones)

Abstract

This chapter deals with Eldorado, a small city in Northeastern Argentina. It stems from a highly emotional encounter I had with a photograph in a town museum (a framed photograph of a resident of Eldorado who volunteered in the German armed forces during the Second World War and died on the Russian front in 1942), and attempts to reflect on the place of memories of Nazism and of anti-Semitism today. Eldorado’s history is marked by a significant community of German origin, with important links with Germany, especially during the rise of Nazism and the war. What went on during the more than seventy-five years since the war to prompt the exhibition of this photograph? How is it possible to exhibit something that can be taken as a Nazi symbol in a public place in Argentina today? Memories, silences, half-words, uneasiness, and an absence of collective reflection about the past are the rule. This dive into history aims to encourage a shift in the conceptualization of centers and peripheries, insofar as the “local” is not defined as what is left over or left out of the “center.” Rather, the “local” is part of an interrelated world, a decentered center from which the world can be looked at. The aim is to show that from this decentered center, the history of “Europe” becomes not a history of place but one of flows, interconnections, and webs/networks—of people, of political, and institutional links, of economic interests, of personal and family ties, of traveling photographs.