New Left Review 91, January-February 2015

Jeffery R. Webber

REBEL DAWN

As an historian, journalist, and filmmaker, Osvaldo Bayer considers himself a ‘chronicler with opinions’. [1] Julio Ferrer, Osvaldo Bayer Íntimo: Conversaciones con el eterno libertario, Ediciones Continente: Buenos Aires 2012, ar$169, paperback 333 pp, 978 9 507 54359 3 Such a perspective was decidedly out of fashion when he returned in 1983, at the age of 56, to newly democratic Argentina after years of forced exile in Germany. Despite having several books of national acclaim to his credit, and decades of experience as a journalist between the 1950s and early 1970s, he was spurned by the mainstream newspapers. Meanwhile, the discipline of History, as practiced in his country of birth, had likewise been gutted of progressive political commitment. Once a craft open to militants, a studied air of academic neutrality was now all-pervasive. For a time unemployable, Bayer eventually found a new home in Página/12, the dissident left-wing newspaper established in 1987 by the most important friend in his life, Osvaldo Soriano, a writer and journalist who had also fled to Germany during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–83)—in which a virulently anti-Communist dictatorship, run by a military junta, was responsible for the death and disappearance of approximately 30,000 trade union and human rights activists, left-wing partisans, and a range of other, unlucky civilians. With a steady platform over the next quarter century in Página/12, Bayer resumed his position among the most important Argentine public intellectuals of the twentieth century.

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