Throughout this text, in reference to the Second World War occupation, I will use the term Germans to denote the Nazis or the Third Reich, as this is the locution commonly used in Greece, both in official historiographic documents and in everyday discourse.
Chapter 1. 1963–2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography
The Bookseller
It was late one evening on a winter preceding the junta. The day the junta came to power was April 21, 1967, when I was about to turn nine years old. This incident happened two or three winters before, in 1964 or 1965. There was a knock on the door, and when my mother answered a middle-aged man (or so he seemed to me) was standing there, dressed in not tattered but certainly old-fashioned clothes, a dark suit and white shirt, no tie, with a light sweater underneath his suit jacket, no overcoat, but a scarf around his neck, and a leathery, deeply furrowed face, whose seriousness fell on me like a weight. He was holding two large, very heavy canvas bags, one in each hand, half holding them, half resting them on our doorstep. He looked at my mother and said, “I am selling books, madam.” He looked at me and said again, “Buy one, please, for your daughter.” My mother asked him to come inside, where, from her salary as a high-school teacher, she bought four books, two bound in green fabric, two bound in black fabric, all with golden letters on the spine and the front: Foivos Grigoriadis's To Andártiko (The Partisan Warfare), a four-volume history of the Greek organized armed resistance to the German occupation during the Second World War . The books were curiously numbered: the first volume had no number on the spine; the second, third, and fourth had their numbers. At some point, many years later, when I actually read the books I realized that the first, numberless, volume was really the fourth. That we had had no volume one, but two copies of volume four, one numbered, one not, all the result of a low-budget, clandestine production of the books, no doubt. This was by no means the first time that I had encountered a clandestine procurement of books. When I was even younger, from when I was four until I was six or seven years old (so, around 1962–65) my mother would take me with her to downtown Athens, to a basement apartment that served as a contraband bookshop, beneath the Opera House. She would carefully balance her high heels on the winding metal staircase descending to the shop, where we would buy copies of Nikos Kazantzakis's censored books. Walking to the shop, my mother would hold me by the hand and make me whisper to her what she had taught me to tell the police if they stopped us: “We are going to buy underwear” (nearby there was a shop that made underwear to order). We would buy one book at a time, as much as my mother's purse could accommodate, so as not to arouse suspicion. In this way we managed to get the complete works of Nikos Kazantzakis. I opened one of those books, The Fratricides, to read again recently. It is a novel that Kazantzakis wrote about the civil war in Greece. It was originally published in 1963, but ours was the second edition of 1965. Binding pages 13 to 18 my mother had left a bookmark, a cheap, utilitarian bookmark, which has, nevertheless, marked this book forever: she used a tailor's pin. This makeshift bookmark probably marks page 18, a page where Kazantzakis writes about the experience of the forced exchange of populations in 1922 between Greece and Turkey after the Treaty of Lausanne. The specific passage describes the last gesture that the villagers of this Greek-speaking, Christian village make before they have to leave it forever: they visit the cemetery, where they bid farewell to their dead.
I can't remember now when I learned who this man, Mr. Kosmás, was, but he continued to come around, once a month, selling books. At some point, though, during the junta, I came to know that Mr. Kosmás, the man selling books, like many other men selling books in the evening, “had been at Yioúra,” where my Uncle Stéphanos also had been. Although at the time we did not really talk about it as a common encounter in our lives (although maybe the adults did), a large number of “non-Leftist but democratically minded families [Ohi aristeroi, alla demokratikon pepoitheseon]” had the same experience. Only later did these bits of knowledge start becoming available and freely offered.
One day, a few years ago, at the house of a new friend, I saw a book that I needed, which my family used to own but which had disappeared from our library. I asked if I could borrow it for a few days.
As Aléka handed it to me, she said, “We had bought this from Mr. Kosmás.” She looked at me intently and added, “You know…”
I said, “from Yáros…” as she nodded, “Yes.”
I am certain that it was probably not the same Mr. Kosmás, but at the moment this was immaterial. Although this was the first time that I had been told openly by someone about the phenomenon of the traveling booksellers, the knowledge of their existence was both widespread and unspoken in the 1960s and 1970s.
I had known about my Uncle Stéphanos for years, around the time that Mr. Kosmás started coming to our house, certainly ever since I was old enough to understand that the whispers and muffled comments, the concealed eye contacts and the sighs of my grandmother held not a tantalizing, juicy secret (like my other uncle's sexual escapades, which also burdened her) but something of a profound sadness, a secret that implicated in different and perplexing ways various strands of my family that had never known or imagined they could be entangled, a skein of relationships whose last strands I was able to pull apart only in the early years of the twenty-first century.
But how can I lay all this open for you, so that you can sense what this thing we call a “civil war [Emphýlios Pólemos]” really means on the ground, for children who are not old enough to understand that there is a realm in their lives called politics (let alone that this politics organizes their lives in brutal and inexplicable ways) and for adults who find themselves in the vortex that produces a political DNA of sorts , which organizes not only their lives but also the lives of generations to come and has been organized by kinship lines that extend into the past? How can I lay out for you the intricacies of meaning in “being a Leftist” (even when simply “democratic”) in Greece of the twentieth century, which have organized the meanings of political being in the twenty-first century? I can only pick a point and call it a beginning.
For opposition to Kazantzakis's books in Greece, see Antonakes 1996.
When I interviewed the Greek historian Antonis Liakos in March 2006, he also commented that, when he was a child, he and his friends would flock around the parents of friends, primarily fathers, returning from extended periods of exile or prison not so much because of the excitement of their return as for the oddity of their appearance. “They would wear these suits with oversized lapels and high-cut vests, which we had never seen before because they were in vogue before we were born.”
Of course, the occupation was by the Germans, the Italians (until 1943, when Mussolini collapsed), and the Bulgarians, but the locution commonly used implicated only the Germans, referring only occasionally to the Italians and, at least in southern Greece, almost never to the Bulgarians. Nikos Doumanis (1997) has dealt with the different ways in which the occupation by the Italians has been remembered in the Dodecanese, especially in relationship to the memory of the Germans. He argues that the Italian occupation has been passed on as a relatively peaceful encounter, whereas the memory of the German occupation has been the exact opposite: as the most brutal, savage, barbaric, and fearful experience in modern Greek history. This is also my experience as a subject of this history: the stories told about the Italian occupation have usually been rather innocuous and sometimes humorous.
One such story was told me by a man who grew up in Crete, Manolis. Manolis was born after the war, but the story, he says, is one that his mother would often recount as he was growing up to make him laugh: “Our house had been taken over by the Italians as a Commandatura. My mother and my father were confined to one bedroom and the Italians had the rest. The Commandante was a very gentle man, a classicist, who spoke perfect ancient Greek and who usually communicated with my mother in his own version of modern Greek. One day he went to my mother and, in Greek, asked for a kochliarion [the ancient Greek term for “spoon”]. My mother said 'But, Giovanni, you know, I don't speak Italian.' To which he responded, 'Ma donna mia Margarita [in Italian], Hellenika milo, koutali thelo [in modern Greek].' [“But dear Mrs. Margarita, I speak Greek, I want a spoon”].”
The incident is of importance mainly because it is an example of what theories of language ideology describe, where the deployment and reception of specific registers of a language circumscribe the political and social position of the speaker. On language ideology in general, see Woolard and Schieffelin 1994. On language ideology within the specificity of the Greek example, see Tsitsipis 1999. But the incident is equally important as yet another example of the relationship of Western Europeans, in general, to modern Greece. For them, modern Greece usually exists only as the symptomatic site of Greek antiquity (see Herzfeld 1982a; Danforth 1984; Gourgouris 1996; Leontis 1995; Panourgiá 1995, 2001, 2004a). Importantly, too, my Cretan friend was told this experience from the Italian occupation as a funny story. By contrast, being Cretan and remembering accounts of the Battle of Crete in 1941 and the brutal retaliations of the Germans throughout the occupation, he always shivered at the thought of the Germans.
In light of this historical experience, the current relationship of the Cretans with the Germans—and the other way around—becomes particularly interesting. When visiting Crete, on a number of occasions I have repeatedly been shown locations of remembrance of Greek and German encounters, such as the German cemetery, the place where the Commandatura had been, and the famous “bird,” a small statue of an eagle sitting atop a pillar whose beak had been broken because, my interlocutor said, “people believed that the Germans had hidden golden sovereigns there.” She continued, “When Manolis [her grandson] goes to school I want him to learn German,” a desire that I also heard voiced by a number of other Cretan women.
When I asked her daughter-in-law, a young woman from Athens, about this, she shrugged her shoulders, saying, “I have no idea; don't ask me. This is her own thing.”
To engage with this fully would require its own research, but I can at least mention here that all the women who expressed this admiration for the German language and wanted their grandsons to learn it came from Right-wing families.
Crete is also the primary destination of German tourists, and German tourists are considered by most Cretans to be the best tourists they can have. As one hotel owner mentioned to me a few years back, they are clean and orderly, they pay their bills, and they never make noise. In light of that, however, one should also consider the following story, recounted by Eleni, who visited Rethymno with a group of Athenian friends a few years ago: “I had not been in Crete in a few years, and I had never stayed at a resort before. This time we were participating in a conference, and early one morning we were woken up by the voice of a German physical education coach yelling “Schnell, schnell” as she coached a group of German tourists doing gymnastic exercises on the lawn outside my window. It reminded me of all the films about the war and the occupation that we were watching as children.”
This dissonance between the experience of the two occupations cannot be dismissed as making the Italian occupation an object of nostalgia as opposed to the barbarity of the German occupation. First of all, it is now widely understood (as seems to have been the case at the time, too) that the Italian soldiers who fought during the war and became occupying forces did so under duress, having been conscripted into the army by and under the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini. This knowledge was widely shared at least by the Leftists and the anti-Metaxas Greeks, in connection with the knowledge that the Italian Leftist and Communist movement had suffered as harshly under Mussolini as their Greek counterparts had under Metaxas. Therefore the Italian occupying forces, by and large, were encountered as themselves existing in fear of fascism, unlike the German forces, who are still viewed as willing participants. Had the Italian occupation been the only one, we would probably hear about Italian atrocities more often. But by contrast with the Germans, who occupied Greece at the same time, the Italian presence in occupied Greece became a refuge for memory. What I mean by “refuge for memory” is that, in light of the German barbarity, the brutality of the Italian occupation (accompanied by a high level of inefficiency, incompetence, and haphazard operations that drew the scorn of the Germans) came to be a mnemonic space of humanness, with all its frailties and weaknesses. It came to be a space where memory could take a breath, where memory could seek refuge from the atrocities that have been burned onto it. In all of my interviews and encounters with the different generations of Greeks who experienced the war and the occupation, I have not come across even one narrative of Italian brutality, although Philip Deane (pseudonym for Philip Tsigantes) mentions that his uncle, Ioannes Tsigantes, the leader of Midas, one of the minor Resistance groups under the direct guidance of the British Foreign Office, was brutally executed by an Italian patrol detail when he was caught burning incriminating evidence of the organization in his stove.
Such stories are rare, however. More typical is a story told by a woman whom I interviewed in the winter of 2004. She had been born in a small village on the mainland of Greece in early 1942. As she recounted: “My mother said that in '43 (it must have been '43 because I was just crawling)—my parents had bought the house just a couple of years earlier—they [occupying soldiers] came to the village looking for an andártēs [a partisan] who had been hiding there. So they came in and looked for him, the Italian soldier first. We were just standing and crawling there, and my father was behind the door, my mother next to him. As the Italian came in, my father picked up a piece of wood to hit him behind the head, but my mother pulled him away. The Italian saw him and turned his gun on him, right on his forehead, and then said, in Italian it must have been, pointing toward us, 'Bambino, bambino,' meaning that he would have killed him had we not been there. The Italian left, and not half an hour later the Germans came in and burned our house.” I have encountered narratives of Italian arrogance, as when the Italians decreed that in Athens schools would teach Italian in fulfillment of the foreign language requirement, or when they requisitioned the house of a family friend, who came from a long line of revolutionaries of the 1821 War of Independence, then took all the relics that had been left in the house and had not already been taken by various museums (letters from the government, the great-grandfather's sword, all sorts of documents).
That narratives of Italian compassion are more common than narratives of brutality is especially noteworthy given that there are no narratives of compassion by Germans (although there is at least one account, in Skroubelos's Bella Ciao, of a German who collaborated with the Greek andártes and procured ammunition for them). This might seem to invite explanation by attributing to Greece an Italophilia and Germanophobia before the war. But we have no evidence of this. Quite the contrary, the well-established philhellenism of the Germans had produced an affinity for Germany among at least the economic and intellectual elite of the country (aided, one would imagine, by the ties of the royal family of Greece to the German royal families). Indeed, many Greek intellectuals and academicians had been educated in Germany in the interwar period and were completely baffled by the German invasion. On the issue of German and Greek intellectual relations before, during, and after the war, see Fleischer 2003: 87–121.
“The people got up from the graves, with soil still clinging to their hair and faces; they found their courage; they opened their arms and held one another, as if they wanted to comfort one another; without thinking, they started serenely, slowly, to dance around the graves; and their eyes filled with tears that ran down to their necks” reads the paragraph that straddles pages 18 and 19 (my translation).
1959: High Heels. Private photograph.
Yioúra (either in the feminine, hē Yioúra, or in the neuter plural, ta Yioúra) is the name used by the interned, their families, and anyone who had any connection to anyone interned on the island. Its official name is Yáros, which is also the name used by everyone during the last phase of internment there, during the junta. I use both names here: Yioúra largely for the first period of internment and Yáros for the second. It is not entirely clear why the generation of the junta detainees used the official name of the island, but one can determine, with a great degree of certainty, whether a title of an article or a book by one of the actors refers to the first or the second period depending on which name is used. All books that come from the first period use Yioúra, such as the 1950/1951 Yioúra Hypomnema Kratoumenon Pros ton Hypourgo Dikaiosynes tes Kyverneses Plastera (Yioúra Memorandum of the Detainees to the Minister of Justice of the Plasteras Government), sent to the government to expose the conditions of detention on the island; the 1952 Yioúra Matōménē Vivlos (Yioúra Bloodied Bible [or Book]); the 1964 Apagorevetai: To Hēmerológio tēs Yioúras (Forbidden: The Diary of Yioúra), by Andreas Nenedakis; the 2005 Yioúra “To Áparto Kastro” ston Emphýlio kai tēn Junta (Yioúra “The Indomitable Castle” in the Civil War and the Junta), by Demetres Manousos. The 1969 book by Tzavalás Karousos about his detention there during the junta is entitled Yáros, as is the photographic album put together immediately after the fall of the junta.
I have used pseudonyms for all names of persons whom I interviewed except where otherwise noted. In deciding what pseudonyms to use, I have kept in mind class, religious affiliation, and place-of-origin markers. Obviously, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out (in Panourgiá 2002), when people read what we write, people try to match pseudonym with true name, and I have no illusions that no matter how diligently I employ pseudonyms and mix up lines of descent, the identity of some characters will be obvious to their prototypes.
My grandmother was suffering because this particular political adventure of Stéphanos was causing immense heartache for her sister, Stéphanos's mother-in-law. My uncle Stéphanos was married to my father's first cousin on his mother's side. My father's mother and Stéphanos's mother-in-law (my great-aunt Eleni) were sisters. Eleni married a man from the Cyclades, a Catholic who had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and they had four children, two boys and two girls: Rosa, Marios, Marinos, and Lucia. My uncle Stéphanos was married to Lucia and had two daughters, roughly my age. There were many children in the neighborhood, all of us cousins of varying degrees, and most of us about the same age. For a detailed account of the naming patterns in Athens, see Panourgiá 1995; on naming patterns in Greece in general, see Herzfeld 1982b.
I do not invoke the notion of DNA lightly. Although a trope, the deployment of a metaphorical DNA as index of the political experience of exclusion ought not to be taken as simply a trope, because it attempts to capture the segmentary classifications, produced in Greece, that separate the “Communists” (and the “Leftists”) from the nationalists within a constructed context of both symbolic and actual kinship. What I mean by this is that the Greek state has, from the beginning of the Leftist movement, articulated a thought about the Left that rests, on the one hand, upon understanding kinship as a purely biological category and, on the other, on a notion that social and political behavior are overdetermined. In other words, the Greek state expressly expected members of families (nuclear and extended) to share social and political ideologies, an expectation that is reflected in all legislation concerning social dissidence from 1871 (the Law on Brigandage) on. It is also reflected in the surprise that was expressed when such expectations did not materialize (as, for example, when the child of a Right-wing family grew to be a Leftist, or the child of a Leftist became Right wing).
Kyriakos Athanasiou, a biologist and the son of a Communist who died in 1948 at the age of 32, having been lynched by the paramilitaries while in government custody during the civil war, has written an account of being the “son of a brigand [Yios Symmoritou].” Athanasiou mentions how, of all the slurs that his neighbor at his village would hurl at him and his brother when they were little boys (“bastards [bástarda],” “criminals [kakoúrgoi],” “dirty Communists [vrōmokommounistés]”), the one that hurt him most was “dirty Communists.” “Maybe because I understood that it hid a truth,” he writes. “I felt it as a heavy curse. Something that you get in your genes. But what nonsense am I saying? 'Genes.' As if one could have heard the term at six years old. Even Watson himself probably did not know it at the time. Maybe it was during those days that he first uttered it. Somewhere at Cambridge. There, where Europe, in the mid-fifties, was entering a new epoch, when humanity in general was entering its new epoch. But not Mavromati [his village]. Not Greece” (Athanassiou 2003: 10).
This medical metaphor, which organizes the experience of his history, recurs in his life. During the junta he was drafted into the army to fulfill his obligation for military service. He was summoned to the Office of Security and Indoctrination (the infamous A2). There, with his file open in front of him, the officer in charge asked questions: What did his mother do? Where was his brother right now? What had he studied? At some point, Athanasiou mentions, he had “optical contact with a particular point in the file… 'Son of a brigand,' 'dead,' or 'executed,' or something of this sort. It's as if you are being told that from birth you carry the microbe of cholera. And that they know it. That was the first time in my life that I realized that each human [ánthropos] is not only what he appears to be, what he thinks he is. You are not only what you have done by yourself for yourself, what they taught you or you have learned in your life… You are always something else. You carry within you some others. Your kin [tous dikous sou]. What they were. What they did or what was done with them. You also carry what happened to them and what they went through… My father's torturers had also killed a part of me… I will always be a constant threat to the security of the country [khōra]. I have always been a miasma, the son of a brigand, the nephew of brigands” (ibid.: 24–25).
If the position of the state has been that Communism is something that is carried within one's line of kinship, the Left has produced a different narrative of itself as a political subjectivity. The Left's position has been that one becomes a Leftist, engaging in a process of becoming and self-inauguration in the Foucauldian sense of subjectification, where the formation of the subject always includes the experience of the body (in other words, the formation of the Leftist as a social and political subject is always already circumscribed by the experience of the violence of the state upon the body of the Leftist). As Dimosthenis Dodos mentioned in a message sent to the Electronic List for the Study of the Civil War in Greece, “one decides to belong to the Left through torturous personal trajectories and positionalities” (February 7, 2007; used with the kind permission of Dodos; my translation).
I do not make the distinction between Leftists and nationalists lightly, recognizing full well that what for the Greek state between the 1920s and the 1980s was axiomatically accepted as truth—namely, that “communist” and “nationalist” were mutually exclusive self-ascriptions—was simply not so for the Communists, who considered themselves to be both internationalists and nationalists. On the meaning of the term dikos (“my own, member of my family, someone beloved, someone with whom I identify”) see Panourgiá 1995.