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O triunfo do fracasso: Rüdiger Bilden, o amigo esquecido de Gilberto Freyre

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2351978

1527-1900

Nil Castro da Silva,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

Rüdiger Bilden seems to be a rather inconspicuous character. Born in 1893 in Eschweiler, Germany, he immigrated to the United States in 1914, where he died in 1980. He graduated in political science and history from Columbia University, where he established close academic and personal ties with scholars keen on Latin American history, slavery, and racial relations such as Franz Boas, Francis Butler Simkins, Gilberto Freyre, and his PhD supervisor William Robert Shepherd. In the 1920s, although highly regarded among his peers, Bilden was not able to complete his doctoral thesis, which he intended to be an ambitious and revolutionary work on the influence of slavery on Brazilian development. Despite his long life, he did not achieve a tenured academic position and only published a handful of virtually unknown articles.O triunfo do fracasso: Rüdiger Bilden, o amigo esquecido de Gilberto Freyre is a biographical work that aims to lift Bilden from ostracism. The task seems to have been extremely challenging, complicated by scarcity of data, undocumented periods in Bilden’s life, and the fact that he lived through tempestuous times, from World War I to McCarthyism. On the other hand, the accurate research carried out by the book’s author seems to have benefited from serendipitous incidents, such as the fortunate discovery of Helga Bilden, Rüdiger Bilden’s niece.No one else but Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke could be so apt to address the task of recovering Bilden’s achievements. First, the biography of Bilden demanded familiarity with the underlying issue of reception and circulaton of ideas as well as with the methodological tools of cultural history, both of which have been an obsession for Pallares-Burke for a long time, as can be seen, for instance, in her interviews with leading cultural historians gathered in As muitas faces da história: Nove entrevistas (2000). Furthermore, Pallares-Burke published a profoundly innovative, impressively erudite, and highly acclaimed biography of Gilberto Freyre, Gilberto Freyre: Um vitoriano dos trópicos (2005), in which Bilden is investigated as a “forgotten interlocutor” of Freyre. Under estimated by Freyre’s critics, Bilden allegedly influenced Freyre considerably to write Casa-grande e senzala, published in 1933. The relationship between the two former Columbia classmates is also mentioned in the book Pallares-Burke published with her husband Peter Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (2008).The starting point for Pallares-Burke for investigating Bilden’s life was his friendship with Freyre, mentioned in her previous books. Bilden’s project of exploring the role of slavery in the development of Brazil, in which he was deeply immersed in the 1920s, shared similarities with the then-forthcoming Casa-grande e senzala: the importance of Portuguese traditions in the colonial heritage, the profound influence of slavery in the private life of Brazilians, the positive view of racial and cultural mixing, and the substitution of the concept of culture for the concept of race in analyzing societies. Although Bilden never wrote his book, it is possible to argue, as Pallares-Burke does, that it would have focused on economic aspects and been written with strict scientific rigor, contrasting with Freyre’s more artistic project.Important though his relationship with Freyre was, Bilden’s life deserves to be studied in itself, as Pallares-Burke convincingly demonstrates. In the 1930s and 1940s, Bilden developed an intense agenda of political activism for blacks’ rights in Harlem and other areas, mainly by giving courses and seminars about the role of the black people in Western culture. Moreover, he tried unsucessfully to implement an institute dedicated to the comparative study of regions characterized by African heritage, such as the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Nothing is known about Bilden from 1956 to his death in 1980.“I am I and my circumstance” is the famous maxim by José Ortega y Gasset. Bilden’s projects, such as his book on Brazilian slavery and his institute, did not succeed, because of both personal and circumstantial reasons, including his unmeasured intellectual ambitions, his academic perfectionism, and the fact that, as a German in the United States, he suffered heavily from prejudice and xenophobia, particularly during the First and Second World Wars. Nonetheless, many of the ideas he supported, such as the burial of racism based on scientific fallacies and the end of official racial segregation in the United States, triumphed after a long battle.O triunfo do fracasso shares many of the abundant virtues Pallares-Burke demonstrated in Um vitoriano dos trópicos. The author’s remarkably wide cultural references convert into remarkably wide results, such as a brilliant introduction on the meaning of winners and losers in history and a magnificent capturing of the psychological atmosphere of the decades Bilden witnessed. This book conciliates flawless historical accuracy with a reasonable degree of imagination, so that history seems closer to fiction and the reader has the impression of having a well-written, involving novel at hand. The result is a work that satisfies both the academic expert and the unspecialized public.