70 years of SCI postcard, 1990

by Heinz Gabathuler (Mar 18, 2017)

2020, when the first one hundred years of SCI will be celebrated, is moving closer, so it is time to remember another anniversary event: In November 1990, SCI celebrated its 70th anniversary in Verdun, France - as we all know, the first international voluntary service had started in November 1920 to reconstruct the village of Esnes in the surroundings of Verdun that had been devastated by German troops during the First World War. The anniversary celebration was combined with the 54th statutory International Committee Meeting (ICM). Another celebration event took place in India in the same month.

For this occasion, SCI (probably it was the French branch) printed 3000 numbered copies of this cute postcard de collection. The two copies on this picture carry the numbers 1769 and 2195. One of them I recently got for new year from a friend who might have been there (in 1990); she sent me this stating how nice it was when we sent postcards around; well, some people still do so.

The other one I found in the Archives, and the then Archives coordinator and former International Secretary Ralph Hegnauer had received it from his successor as International Secretary, Thedy von Fellenberg. Thedy states in the few lines he wrote on the back of the postcard that he is sending back the files the Swiss security services had collected on Ralph and Idy Hegnauer. P26 and P27 refer to recent revelations of secret "armies" the Swiss government had maintained during the dark days of the Cold War. These words remind us of the fact that 1990 was not only the year when Germany has been re-unified, and SCI faced the challenge of strategically re-orienting its work in Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former communist block. It was also the year after the discovery of a big political scandal in Switzerland, both Thedy’s and Ralph’s home country: Hundreds of thousands of citizens had been observed (and 'filed') by state security services – by defending Western freedom and democracy against the communist enemy, even neutral Switzerland had developed practices of observation that resembled those in the heavily criticised communist countries. And among the observed citizens there were also a large number of pacifists, including SCI activists, and even the Swiss branch of SCI itself had been observed. The respective files nowadays fill two boxes in the Archives (No.30250 and 30251).

Ralph's additional notes on the back of the postcard also make its connection to the SCI conference in Verdun / F, 22.-26.11.1990 apparent. What is less apparent, though, is the drawing on the front page (by Schangi, Marckolsheim): A European-looking man and a woman with grey skin and light hair plastering a wall in the middle of a desert. Next to them an African-looking woman carrying a bowl on her head. In the back an oasis with palmtrees, and a bold mountain. And high above in the sky a white dove with a drawing of the earth on its body. Does the artist want to tell us that SCI has emancipated itself from its purely European origins, and that it has become a meeting place of people from different continents and colours, doing development work in remote places of blue sky and sunshine? Is there a connection between the French origin of the designer and the long and shameful tradition of French colonialism in Africa? Or, in other words, would a British artist rather have painted a South Asian scene, a German artist an Eastern European one? We don’t know – but what is striking is the fact, that the 'carte postale', designed and printed in France, states its message solely in English: Voluntary Service for Peace and Reconciliation in the front, Deeds not Words: Learning, Living and working in S.C.I [sic] workcamps and voluntary services in the back. As I had recently demonstrated with the international leaflets printed in the 1980s (http://archives.sci.ngo/international-leaflets-1980s.html), SCI had just become a monolingual, English-speaking organisation.

 

Heinz Gabathuler, International Archives Coordinator

 

Reference:

In the International Archives, documents related to the 70th Anniversary event in Verdun are filed under No.30117.2. Don’t ask me why Ralph chose to file them under SCI France, and not under SCI International.