Single Review on past events

When Nina Schneider first visited Brazil as a 16-year-old exchange student, she wondered why none of her teachers ever spoke about the authoritarian regime that ruled the Latin American country until the mid-1980s. From Germany she was accustomed to the contrary: at school you were taught about the Nazi past many times. This experience of surprise was one of the reasons why she decided to dedicate her scientific career to Brazilian history. In her Jour Fixe presentation Nina Schneider talked about her new research project with the preliminary title: “Resisting Restitution? Historicizing the struggle over historical justice in post-authoritarian Brazil from a global human rights perspective”.

Between 1964 and 1985, the civilian-military regime tortured approximately 50.000 Brazilians and forced 10.000 into exile. One key moment for civil-society was in 1985 when the “Brasil Nunca Mais” report was published which first provided evidence about the regime’s systematic human rights crimes. Although the democratic State initiated a two step-reparation program in 1995/2002 and launched official memory projects from 2006 onwards, it took nearly three decades until a Truth Commission was finally established in 2012 mandated to systematically investigate the State’s widespread use of violence against political opponents.

But not only the Truth Commission seeks the “truth”, also Nina Schneider: In 2012/13, she paid several research trips to Brazil and the US to research the archives and to conduct interviews with both victims and key persons involved in the reckoning process, such as members of the Truth Commission. On the basis of these sources she tries to find answers for her research questions: How are international and Brazilian human rights protagonists and ideas connected? What role should she as a researcher assume in Brazil’s process of reckoning with its violent past, and how should she write about human rights? Currently, her work focuses on identifying and retrieving the most important and best available sources, and on contacting key actors. Moreover, she is pondering how to narrow down the project (as she realized that it might be too broad), and continuously monitors the work of the Truth Commission.