Missing: Persons and Politics

297 Pages·2011·2.338 MB·English

by  Jenny Edkins

MISSING

MISSING
PERSONS AND POLITICS
Jenny Edkins
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in
any form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2011 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edkins, Jenny.
Missing : persons and politics / Jenny Edkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5029-7 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Missing persons—Identification—Political
aspects. 2. Mass casualties—Identification—
Political aspects. 3. Dead—Identification—Political
aspects. 4. Missing in action—Identification—Political
aspects. 5. Disappeared persons—Identification—
Political aspects. I. Title.
HV6762.A3E35 2011
362.87—dc23 2011022286
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally
responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent
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Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Missing Persons, Manhattan 15
2. Displaced Persons, Postwar Europe 38
3. Tracing Services 58
4. Missing Persons, London 84
5. Forensic Identification 107
6. Missing in Action 131
7. Disappeared, Argentina 155
8. Ambiguous Loss 175
Conclusion 194
Notes 199
Bibliography 243
Index 267

Preface
Just before the end of my work in the archives
of the postwar period, I came across an extraordinary file. Among reports of
the efforts of the tracing services in the face of the overwhelming millions
lost, often without trace, in concentration camps and on death marches, there
is a record of a train accident.1 On May 30, 1945, a transport of displaced
persons from Hildesheim near Hannover was halted outside Rheda station
in Westphalia. At about ten minutes past midnight, it was hit by another
train. Four people were killed and several more injured, one badly. The badly
injured person, who was taken to the American Hospital, was identified as
Serge Rafalovich, born on August 24, 1909, at St. Petersburg, Russia, and a
resident of Paris. One of the four killed was identified. Three were not: a
man of about thirty years old, a woman of about forty, and a boy of seven
or eight years old. The four bodies were taken to the Catholic Hospital
and were to be buried on June 6, 1945. The personal belongings of those
killed were turned over to the police and kept by the burgomaster. Further
inquiries as to the identity of the three had been made without any success.
For each person a form had been completed, giving a personal description
and details.
In the file in the United Nations archives in New York are photographs of
the faces of the three unidentified persons, with cards on which their finger-
prints have been impressed and, pinned carefully to other specially designed
cards, small pieces of fabric, each about an inch square, snipped from every
item of clothing that they wore.
Coming across this file was extraordinarily moving. These little pieces
of material, preserved in case they might one day prove useful for future
identification, were here, now, in the present, hidden deep in the archive. Out
there in the world was someone, maybe, for whom those traces would have
significance. This was not what I found most striking, though. What struck
me deeply was that in the midst of the overwhelming chaos of displaced
persons, concentration camps, forced marches—people objectified, racialized,
murdered in their masses—someone, somewhere, had taken the trouble to
vii
viii PREFACE
produce these records: records that could potentially serve to identify three
particular persons, persons who mattered only to those who knew them,
three persons among forty million. Wisława Szymborska writes:
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed.2
But here, in this archive, that one counts, as a person, not an object, on the
assumption that someone, somewhere, may be looking for them.
This book was prompted by an anger at the way prevalent forms of politi-
cal or biopolitical governance both objectify and instrumentalize the person.
Contemporary systems of political management are based on the administra-
tion of populations; they treat people as objects to be governed, with the aim
of safeguarding populations as a whole.3 They are heartless and impersonal at
best; at worst, they can be genocidal. The person is produced as an object of
governance: as something without political standing, as something that has no
voice, as disconnected and individualized. Contemporary politics does not
see the person-as-such, only the person as object.
The way this objectification works becomes starkly obvious when people
go missing: our systems of administration and governance cannot see the
problem. When people go missing, their relatives demand action. A particu-
lar, unique, irreplaceable person has disappeared, and they want that person
back. No one else will do. However, for the authorities who are supposed
to act, there is really no such thing as an irreplaceable person: one person is
for most purposes equivalent to another of the same sort. If a family has lost
its breadwinner then some form of compensation might be in order, but the
demand for the return of a particular breadwinner is incomprehensible.
The demand that the missing be traced inevitably challenges the produc-
tion of the person as object, and it can be seen as something more: it can be
seen as a demand for a different form of politics, one in which the person-as-
such is acknowledged. But what is this person-as-such? When someone goes
missing those left behind examine the traces that remain to try to fathom
what may have happened, to try to work out what the missing person was
thinking and feeling and what may have led that person to disappear. It turns
out that in some profound sense the person was in any case unknowable and
unknown. And that who people are is very much bound up with who they
are in relation to others. It is impossible to specify what it is that makes a
person irreplaceable—it is not this or that characteristic that is missed, this or
that function that is no longer performed, but something singular, something
unfathomable: maybe even the person’s unfathomability in relation to our
PREFACE ix
own. The person cannot be pinned down: the person is missing. It is in a sense
that very “missingness” that makes the person irreplaceable.
In any case attempts to govern the person always break down. The person-
as-such always escapes attempts at categorization or governance. We can see
this in the ways in which the disappeared return to haunt the authoritarian
systems that disappeared them in the first place. The seemingly diabolically
effective tactic of disappearances rebounds in devastatingly unexpected ways.
We can see it too on a more everyday level, in the ways in which the reach of
systems of governance and objectification comes up against its limits in the
quotidian actions of persons who insist on continuing to treat each other as
such. In the New York archive, for example, that one counts.
Chapter 1 of this book looks at the search for those missing in the after-
math of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan in
2001, focusing on relatives’ attempts to find out what had happened to family
members, and the production of posters appealing for information about the
missing. The chapter introduces many of the themes that are developed in
later chapters—the contrast between the efforts of relatives and the response
of the official authorities, how as persons we are in some sense already “miss-
ing” in contemporary politics, and the way in which the search for the miss-
ing became a demand for a different form of politics. The posters remained
on display in New York for many weeks after the collapse, a reminder that the
lives lost were irreplaceable lives—lives disregarded by those who organized the
events of 9/11, but also in a sense lives rendered invisible by the objectifying
imperatives of corporatism and public policy, lives in a sense already disap-
peared. Some were doubly disappeared: those who were not even supposed
to be in the towers, the undocumented. But maybe even the documented
existed only as objects of administration or as employees hidden behind an
architecture designed to impress rather than to protect. The persistence of
the missing posters constituted a demand that these lives—the lives of the
missing—be recognized as such, not appropriated as heroes to justify revenge,
not reduced to nothing but their ordinariness nor subsumed in numbers, but
recognized as persons-as-such, singular lives, political in their uniqueness and
irreplaceability.
Though the number of people missing in New York after 9/11 is daunt-
ing, it becomes small when set against the numbers missing after the Second
World War; the end of hostilities in 1945 left tens of millions of people, many
of whom had lost touch with family members, destitute and wandering from
place to place. Chapter 2 recounts how following the Second World War