Volume 37

Ein Paradies auf Erden

In January 1959, the world was abuzz with news of the Cuban Revolution. Three years later, Ernesto »Che« Guevara sent a group of young men from Havana to South America to spread the revolution on the subcontinent. They went on to establish the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo, the People’s Guerilla Army, in northern Argentina, which attempted an armed insurrection. The operation failed and most of the organization’s members were arrested. It was later discovered that the self-declared revolutionaries had condemned two of their comrades to death and executed them in the jungle. Both of the victims were of Jewish background. Proceeding from these events, Lukas Böckmann examines the iconography, political semantics, and liturgical symbolism of the Cuban Revolution and the Argentine guerillas in order to reconstruct the salvation history with which these revolutionary movements were charged. He demonstrates that their political and military actions can be decoded as expressions of religious, especially Roman Catholic ideas. The work thus contributes an empirical dimension to the often overly theoretical debates about secularization and thereby opens up a broad view extending far beyond the case study in question.