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Portraying mass wartime rape in the documentary: Befreier und Befreite and Calling the Ghosts.

Article Excerpt
Within the last two decades mass rape in wartime has received international attention. The phenomenon is nothing new: since the beginning of history, rape has accompanied war. Historians have long portrayed it as a "natural" consequence of war, as the price females pay for belonging to the conquered party. Feminist scholarship on rape in general and mass rape in wartime has specifically explored sociological, psychological, and political factors that perpetuate sexual assault against women as a strategic means of control, advancing in the process both discussion and awareness of wartime rape. Contributing to this discourse are two documentaries on mass rape in wartime that appeared in the 1990s. Through different lenses they offer complementing insights into feminist positions on wartime rape, and illustrate both advances in women's rights, as well as ongoing issues. Because the documentaries espouse different methodological approaches to their examination of wartime rape, they serve to summarize key arguments in feminist scholarship on wartime rape that evolved in the nineties, owing in part to a critical examination of the mass rapes in the Balkans.

The first, Helke Sander's groundbreaking film BeFreier und Befreite (The Liberators Take Liberties) (1991), documents the 1945 mass rape of German women and girls by the advancing Soviet army. The second, Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic's award-winning documentary on the Omarska (Bosnia) death and rape camp entitled Calling the Ghosts (1996) focuses on the mass rape of Muslim and Croatian women and girls by Serbian forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.

The mass rape of German women in 1945 and of Bosnian women in the early nineties as represented by these documentaries interrelate in many ways. Both deal with mass rapes in European wars separated by only half a century. At the time Sander's film on the rape of almost two million German women and girls was being shown and discussed, the systematic rape and torture of an estimated 20,000 Bosnian women and girls--approximately 10% of the Muslim population of 2.2 million--had begun (Gutman xii). These documentaries remind us of the historical span from Nuremberg to The Hague, the first international war crimes tribunal of the twentieth century and the first international war crimes tribunal after World War II, respectively. Whereas in Nuremberg, rape crimes were mentioned but not prosecuted, the Bosnian rapes became the first rapes to be tried as crimes against humanity in an international tribunal. They also signify the progress made in public awareness of women's rights. Whereas the rape of almost two million German women was virtually silenced, the mass rapes in the former Yugoslavia captured international attention. BeFreier und Befreite is a testimony to the fact that rape crimes against women have historically been neglected: it demands public recognition of the collective rape experience of German women in 1945; Calling the Ghosts also documents rape crimes; moreover, it seeks justice, aiming to bring perpetrators to trial. While Sander endeavors with her documentary to break fifty years of virtual silence on the subject of the mass rape of German women, Jacobson and Jelincic submerge themselves in a contemporary battlefield, giving voice to women still struggling to piece their lives together. The directors of both documentaries underscore that rape is not unique...

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