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Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War
Abstract
The essay argues that modernity is best understood not as the cultural expression of capitalist modernization, but as a particular set of relations of present to past. It examines the varying attitudes toward the violent past of the civil war that have characterized Spain since the Franco dictatorship and continuing to the present day. The obsessive memorialization of the Nationalist war dead throughout the Franco dictatorship led, at the time of the transition to democracy, to a desire to break with the past; it was not, as is often argued, a determination to forget, but a decision not to let the past affect the future. Thus attempts toward the end of the Franco dictatorship to deal cinematically with this violent heritage were followed by a ten-year gap, until the appearance in the mid-1980s of a number of novels and films representing the civil war and their escalation since the late 1990s to create a memory boom, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of testimonies. The essay questions whether trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understanding the belated appearance of these memories, arguing that the reason is more likely to be a previous lack of willing interlocutors. Nevertheless, it concludes that the present urge to recount every detail of the past is less effective in communicating the horror of the war and its repression than are those accounts—in film at the end of the dictatorship and in fiction in the mid-1980s, with occasional more recent examples—which acknowledge the difficulty of narrativizing the violent past as well as the importance of transgenerational transmission.
... Franco's campaign against perceived enemies resulted in a holocaust 1 often referred to as the White Terror. The victims were rarely soldiers, and were targeted for being non-elites, republican loyalists, atheists, Jews, intellectuals, liberals, academics, protestants, anarchists, freemasons, socialists, Catalan/Basque nationalists, communists, homosexuals and trade unionists [3][4][5][6]. The bodies were dumped in mass graves all across Spain, their descendants and relations being forbidden from marking the graves, or from any public mourning [2,[7][8][9][10]. ...
... Jobs were awarded to fascist sympathisers, while the families and descendants of republicanists were marginalised [12]. Officially, however, the regime's narrative was one of national "rebirth", and rehistoricisation of briefly republican Spain [5,16,17]. In order to consolidate their power [18], the fascists made martyrs of the victims of Republican violence [9], raising monuments and buildings to their memory, and reburying them in the Valle de los Caidos [Valley of the Fallen], alongside Franco's tomb. ...
... Franco's persecutions caused the populace to adopt the 'forgetfulness' that has characterised Spanish political attitudes since Franco's death in 1975 [4,5,9,[18][19][20]. The new government swiftly moved to shield Spain's new parliamentary monarchy from any post-dictatorship retribution by granting amnesty for all crimes "of a political nature" [21] committed between 1936 and 1975 in the 1977 Amnesty Law known as the Pacto de Olvido [Pact of Forgetting] [12,17,22,23]. ...
Fascist dictator Francisco Franco was responsible for the torture, murder and covert burial of 150–200,000 civilians both during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This comprises one of the largest concentrations of mass graves and victims in the world, and efforts to exhume them have been strenuously blocked by subsequent governments. This research documents the 2017 exhumation of Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá and 27 other individuals executed between July and November 1939, and interred at the cemetery in Guadalajara, Castilla La Mancha. The analysis includes DNA identifications and an assessment of cultural (possessions) and bioarchaeological variables (age/sex, stature, palaeopathology) in order to contextualise studies of ante/peri-mortem trauma, and thus understand the decedents’ lives and the manner in which they were treated before and up to the time of their executions. Of the 24 burials in the main grave, 23 (95.8%) showed gunshot trauma (GSW), 7 (29.2%) showed blunt force trauma (BFT) and 1 (4.2%) showed sharp force trauma (SFT). Five of the main group (20.8%) showed healing lesions indicative of often extensive assault in the weeks leading up to their execution; one individual had sustained 27 fractures. GSW patterns are consistent with an organised firing squad, followed by multiple GSW at close range in the back/side of the head. This research elucidates unrecorded aspects of fascist dominion in 1936-9, adds to extant research on pattern and method in global atrocities, and demonstrates the human cost of the SCW to those who aim to trivialise it.
... Also, this approach has been ventured in relation to the Spanish context (Hansen 2012;Sánchez 2018;Ruiz Torres 2018), but it has also been contested. In 2007, the American critic Jo Labanyi asked whether trauma theory in general would provide an adequate model for understanding the memory boom in Spain 60 years after the civil war and twenty-five years after the death of the dictator (Labanyi 2007). Despite the fact that Labanyi herself argued that trauma aesthetics probably would be a more efficient way to communicate the horrors experienced during the repression, she rightfully also argued that the so-called "pact of silence" hardly could be understood as a traumatic latency period in a traditional, individual sense, but more likely was caused by pragmatic political reasoning and a lack of willing interlocutors. ...
... The testimonies of the descendants are therefore expected to showcase some of the characteristics of trauma narrative such as fragmentation, lack of chronology, omissions as an index of the non-expressible horror, and the preference for visual images rather than linguistic discourse, etc. (Caruth 1996;LaCapra 2005). The Spanish memory novel, however, follows mostly a linear and explicit narrative discourse, while the templates for traumatic writing are more likely to be found in Latin American memory culture (Labanyi 2007;Macciuci 2010). Furthermore, the fact that even some children and grandchildren of the winning Francoist side partake in the recuperation of the historical memory of the republican victims, indicates that an alternative to the trauma-based model of interpretation is needed (Hansen 2018). ...
... Las políticas de la memoria en la transición a la democracia española han sido descritas como la eliminación de la memoria histórica, que llevaron al olvido y silenciamiento del pasado (Morán 1991;Medina 2001;Labanyi 2007;Colmeiro 2011). Esto ha dado lugar en las últimas décadas a un debate en la España contemporánea a nivel social, cultural y político que pretende recuperar la memoria de los vencidos y completar los relatos no contados y la historia oculta del conflicto. ...
El objetivo de este volumen es ofrecer reflexiones sobre los numerosos retos y nuevos escenarios (físicos, tecnológicos y también sociales y culturales) que se les presentan a las actividades profesionales, de investigación, mediación intercultural y enseñanza-aprendizaje de la traducción y la interpretación. Las aportaciones se han agrupado en secciones que dan testimonio de áreas diversas, multidisciplinares, relativas tanto a modalidades como a instrumentos y metodologías, aplicaciones, o perspectivas teóricas e investigadoras de gran consistencia científica y calado práctico o conceptual. Así, este volumen pone a disposición de sus lectores una recopilación de trabajos relacionados con la formación, la evolución y la práctica profesional de la traducción y la interpretación en distintos ámbitos y desde diferentes enfoques.
... Este paradigma consolatorio, en el que prima la visión del pasado como algo cerrado y superable, es sugerente cuando hablamos de la memoria y de cómo el pasado nos afecta en el presente. En el caso de España y la Transición, la modernización y el proyecto democrático parecían implicar irremediablemente una ruptura con el pasado y una determinación de no dejar que éste influyera demasiado en el presente (Labanyi, 2007). ...
We analyze what we call the novel of mourning in opposition to the novel of historical memory. While both assume a critical position with respect to the violence of the 20th century in Spain, they differ in how they deal with the losses of the past. The novel of historical memory, influenced by the internationalization of memory discourses and movements, seeks to combat the imposed forgetting through a literary recovery of forgotten cases from the past. The novel of mourning, however, seeks to break this dichotomy between forgetting/memory, understanding that the losses of the past are unrecoverable and that a more just future is only achievable by recognizing the past’s tragic nature: more than a (re)opening or closing of wounds, it means living with them, also permitting a way of relating to other tragedies that would otherwise be foreign to us. As an example we analyze Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga’s Santo Diablo (2004).
... 8 The inability to directly address social trauma caused by the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship is reflected in literary and filmic representations of that period. Labanyi (2007) argues that mimetic depictions cannot accurately record the horrors of the war. Instead, allegorical approximations that rely on depictions of the supernatural -what Labanyi terms an "aesthetics of haunting"-are better able to reflect Spain's traumatic past and its lasting effects on the present. ...
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho detective novels comprise a seminal series, spanning eighteen novels from 1972 to 2004, that consolidated the novela negra as a popular, denunciatory genre in Spain. While much has been written about the early entries in the series, the latter novels, namely El hombre de mi vida (2000), Milenio I: Rumbo a Kabul, and Milenio II: En las antípodas (2004), have not received similar attention. Critics like Colmeiro, Balibrea, and Nichols have accurately read these novels as a denunciation of the most evident negative consequences of globalization at the turn of the new millennium, principally gentrification, displacement, and the exploitation of both labor and natural resources. Here, I expand this analysis to consider another of the deleterious effects of free-market rationality: The increasing personal alienation that has come to characterize modern neoliberal societies, a phenomenon recently analyzed by political philosophers like Brown (2015) and May (2012), and psychologists such as Verhaeghe (2014). I argue that, as the Carvalho character evolves throughout the series and neoliberalism achieves cultural hegemony, the depiction of the solitary protagonist in the final three novels denounces the growing isolation of the individual in a transnational society. This is reflected in the trope of the voyage, Carvalho’s nostalgic melancholia, and the progressively alienated condition of the marginalized detective as his relationships with others, tenuous in the best circumstances, begin to fully disintegrate.
... These monuments were not only intended to commemorate the war but also to promote a particular view of history and reinforce specific types of supremacist ideas (Ferrándiz, 2019;González-Ruibal, 2007). For this reason, many people argue that these monuments are not simply historical artifacts but rather symbols of oppression that promote inequality (Delgado, 2015;Labanyi, 2007). In recent years, there has been a growing movement to remove these monuments from public spaces and place them in museums or other locations where they can be studied in their proper historical context. ...
Gully erosion is a landform developed due to accelerated soil erosion rates. Gullies can be identified by human impacts on geomorphological processes, as well as hydrological and erosional systems. In Spain, the trenches or "trincheras" from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are considered of archaeological interest for several reasons. At Cerro de las Trincheras in Bailén (Jaén, Spain), a trench was built during the Spanish Civil War. In 2020, an archaeological excavation took place to restore the ruins, triggering the development of gullies and rills and a decrease in vegetation quality. We present a first approximation of the variations in vegetation cover and the decrease in quality (using NDVI, the normalized difference vegetation index) due to the trench acting as a gully (1956, 2005-2020) and the increase in rills and gullies after the excavation. We strongly advocate for future archaeological excavations to include a protocol (soil mapping, vegetation survey, and hydrological connectivity index) to reduce soil degradation and prevent damage to vegetation and associated ecosystems, thereby curbing the increase in soil erosion rates.
... Entre ellas, se pueden destacar los siguientes ejemplos, algunos adaptados al cine: Soldados de Salamina (Cercas, 2001), Los girasoles ciegos (Méndez, 2004), La noche del diablo (Dalmau, 2009), La ciudad de arena (Corral, 2009) y Ayer no más (Trapiello, 2012). Estas publicaciones, no tan generalizadas en España como en otros países occidentales, llamaron la atención de profesores de literatura española españoles y extranjeros que comenzaron a publicar artículos sobre estos señalando la exigua atención que habían atraído los crímenes franquistas en la sociedad española (Labanyi, 2007;Stafford, 2014;Luengo y Stafford, 2017;Lauge, 2018). ...
El presente trabajo explica en qué consiste la perspectiva historiográfica de los Perpetrator Studies, que ha motivado un «giro hacia el perpetrador» en los estudios sobre la violencia política y los crímenes de masas en Europa y América Latina en los últimos años y que también ha afectado al caso español. Igualmente, este artículo hace un recorrido por la atención que los victimarios franquistas han suscitado en la producción cultural española, fundamentalmente en el cine y la literatura, y se detiene a compilar y exponer en segundo término el tratamiento historiográfico que ha gozado este asunto hasta hoy. Concretamente, nos hemos centrado en una línea historiográfica consistente en el análisis histórico del discurso y la representación de los victimarios en diversas producciones culturales. La conclusión a la que llegamos después de este análisis y reflexión historiográfica es que la profundización en el estudio de los victimarios franquistas en todo su espectro, desde los altos mandos hasta los que «apretaron el gatillo», pasando por funcionarios intermedios, como jueces, ayudaría a comprender mejor los fenómenos represivos que acontecieron en España durante la Guerra Civil y el primer franquismo y la propia sociedad del momento. Y, por otra parte, que la línea de investigación que se ha abierto en España hace algunos años sobre el estudio de la representación de los perpetradores franquistas en la cultura, que además ha nacido aplicando con acierto la comparación con otras experiencias como la argentina, parece ser una de las más sugestivas y que más recorrido ha tenido hasta ahora.
... The control of all media outlets (Gunther et al., 2000), the educational system, and all kinds of cultural channels (Merino & Rabadán, 2002) remained unchanged throughout his life. There was a subtle form of covert self-censorship by journalists, authors, producers, and historians who knew what had to be done to adhere to the core values of the establishment (Gunther et al., 2000;Labanyi, 2007;Merino & Rabadán, 2002). However, the political system in Spain between Franco's death and the mid-1980s underwent a transition from authoritarianism to democracy. ...
Self-censorship in contexts of conflict: Theory and research
... Exemplarisch kann hierfür die erste vergangenheitspolitische Maßnahme des Erlasses einer Generalamnestie im Jahr 1977 durch das neu gewählte demokratische Parlament nach der Franco-Diktatur in Spanien stehen (vgl. Labanyi 2007). Diese rechtliche Absicherung des Nicht-Erinnerns sollte vor dem Hintergrund einer nicht mehr zu revidierenden Vergangenheit »die Versöhnung […] einleiten und so die nationale Einheit wiederherstellen« (Derrida/Wieviorka 2000: 12). ...
... Denuncian un relato hegemónico que naturaliza el pasado. asimismo catherine orsini remite a las palabras de Jo Labanyi (2007) y afirma que gran parte de las novelas de la memoria puede "reforzar la diferencia entre presente y pasado de modo que, al acabar la lectura, el lector experimenta alivio al reanudar con un tiempo libre de tal barbarie" (Orsini 2010: 55). Esta reivindicación, compartida también por los historiadores jesús izquierdo martín y Pablo sánchez león (2006) De hecho, el segundo fallo de la ficción de la memoria histórica que se identifica en el vano ayer por medio de la teatralidad es que tal atemporalidad crítica y nostálgica es heredera de la visión franquista (épica) de la historia. ...
Estudiamos un relato que piensa y deconstruye los modos realistas de la novela de la memoria en España, a partir del análisis de la metáfora del espectáculo teatral proteiforme y omnipresente en El vano ayer de Isaac Rosa, dialogando con el artículo de G. Champeau en esta revista. Exploramos las pistas de la categoría crítica de los "nuevos realismos" con una metáfora que asume un complejo gesto polémico y renovador en la obra: el vínculo entre este "nuevo" realismo y la escritura de la memoria; la renovación que emprende El vano ayer de la concepción de la mimesis; y la relación con la genealogía realista heredada de la historia de la literatura española. La metáfora del teatro será a la vez, en su modalidad degradada de la farsa, lo que plasma los fallos del discurso realista actual para contar el pasado, mientras que en su versión más reflexiva, brechtiana, busca exhibir la construcción del discurso y de los imaginarios sociales.
... Вслед за распространением практики путешествий с целью потребления атмосферы коммунизма развивается направление исследований туризма на постсоветских пространствах Ivanov, 2009;Light, 2000;Otto, 2008). Отчасти сходную проблематику рассматривают работы, посвященные «трудному наследию» (difficult/problematic heritage) и «темному туризму» (dark tourism) -практикам объективации мест, связанных с преступлениями против человечества, трагедиями, смертью и страданиями, событиями, вызывающими разногласия на политико-идеологической почве (см., например, Cohen, 2011;Labanyi, 2007;Logan, Reeves, 2008;Macdonald, 2009). ...
The article is devoted to narrative recollections, published in social media. The author analyzed messages about the district Shabolovskaya / Tulskaya (in Moscow) in 2018. Analysis was performed using concepts of memory scale and mnemonic media. The concept of scale, usually used in a topographical sense, is modifed and applied to the temporal depth. Mnemonic media allows tracing memories with different criteria of memory validity and have a variety of functions: identity, imagination, knowledge transfer. Topics of Great Purge and avant-garde are isolated subjects of narratives, not intersecting with other topics. Narrative triggers of “mememory”, such as old city photographs, were identifed to designate the positions of a unifed identity, e.g. owners of childhood memories in a Soviet city. Typical features of narratives referring to different places were analyzed. Work can be attributed to the felds of post-socialist research, approbation of memory research methodology, analysis of narrative recollections in social media, local memory investigation.
... Exemplarisch kann hierfür die erste vergangenheitspolitische Maßnahme des Erlasses einer Generalamnestie im Jahr 1977 durch das neu gewählte demokratische Parlament nach der Franco-Diktatur in Spanien stehen (vgl. Labanyi 2007). Diese rechtliche Absicherung des Nicht-Erinnerns sollte vor dem Hintergrund einer nicht mehr zu revidierenden Vergangenheit »die Versöhnung […] einleiten und so die nationale Einheit wiederherstellen« (Derrida/Wieviorka 2000: 12). ...
Das Thema »Verzeihen« wird in den Human- und Sozialwissenschaften viel diskutiert. Es kann als eine universale, anthropologische Konstante des menschlichen Zusammenlebens aufgefasst werden, die ihre Allgemeingültigkeit an die Fehlbarkeit von Menschen knüpft. Doch trotz seiner großen Reichweite ist das Verzeihen in der Soziologie eher wenig beachtet worden. Anhand zahlreicher historischer Beispiele von Gesellschaften, die von einer schweren Humankatastrophe getroffen wurden, stellen die Beiträger_innen die Unverzichtbarkeit dieser Kategorie für die Sozialtheorie heraus und betonen das bislang kaum systematisch ausgedeutete gesellschaftsfundierende Potenzial des Verzeihens.
... Este paradigma consolatorio, en el que prima la visión del pasado como algo cerrado y superable, es sugerente cuando hablamos de la memoria y de cómo el pasado nos afecta en el presente. En el caso de España y la Transición, la modernización y el proyecto democrático parecían implicar irremediablemente una ruptura con el pasado y una determinación de no dejar que éste influyera demasiado en el presente (Labanyi, 2007). ...
Analizamos lo que denominamos la novela de duelo frente a la novela de memoria histórica. Pese a asumir ambas una posición crítica respecto a la violencia del siglo XX en España, difieren en el modo de lidiar con las pérdidas del pasado. La novela de memoria histórica, influenciada por la internacionalización de los discursos de la memoria y el movimiento memorialista, intenta combatir el olvido impuesto por medio de una recuperación literaria de casos olvidados del pasado. La novela de duelo, en cambio, busca romper con esta dicotomía entre olvido/memoria, entendiendo que las pérdidas del pasado son irrecuperables y que un futuro más justo se conseguirá solo con el reconocimiento del carácter trágico del pasado, más que (re)abrir o cerrar heridas, convivir con éstas, posibilitando también un modo de relacionarnos con otras tragedia que, de otro modo, nos serían ajenas. Como ejemplo analizamos Santo diablo (2004) de Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga.
El final del segundo milenio ocasionó una explosión mundial de novelas que representaban el fin de la civilización humana y las posibles realidades posteriores, fenómeno del que España no se veía excluida. No sorprende que estas preocupaciones estuvieraníparticularmente presentes en la ciencia ficción (cf), género dedicado en gran parte a imaginar futuros. A diferencia de la cf (pos)apocalíptica finemilenial anglosajona o de otros paises hispanoparlantes, en la española se aprecia una mayor presencia de la religión, la cual suele representarse de forma institucionalizada, jerárquica, y hegemónica. Dicha presencia resulta casi paradójica en un género basado en la ciencia (si bien esta es especulativa y prospectiva), e inevitablemente da lugar a un conflicto (implícito o explícito) entre una cosmovisión espiritual y otra materialista. Se analizarán tres novelas que siguen este patrón, Punto Omega (2001), de Enrique del Barco; Mentes de noche y hielo (2001), de Eduardo Vaquerizo; y Tiempo prestado (2005), de José Miguel Pallarés y Amadeo Garrigós, a través de la lente de tres narrativas históricas tradicionalmente aceptadas como explicación oficial y definitiva de la realidad histórica española: las “Dos Españas”, “Spain is different” (el excepcionalismo), y el mito fundacional de la democracia Española: la Transición. Entrelazar las dos cosmovisones contradictorias sirve cognitivamente para interrogar estas metanarrativas a fin de entender mejor la historia y actualidad de la España finemilenial, y para sublimar el trauma todavía sin resolver de la Guerra Civil y el Franquismo, trauma silenciado y reprimido en nombre de la Transición a la democracia.
This study examines the memory of Turkey’s 1968 political generation by exploring their perceptions of the international left, particularly focusing on influential icons or heroes of socialist movements. Through interviews with participants in the 1968 protests, the research reveals a predominant reverence for the Soviet icons, despite their acknowledged flaws. This idealization of Soviet figures aligns with a broader pattern in which collective memory in Turkey connects with global revolutionary narratives that emphasize universal ideals of revolutionary movements, solidarity, and social justice, independent of national contexts. However, in Turkey, these global narratives are often centered around the Soviet Union, which is framed as an “evil ideology” within official history. The study further explores how ideological divisions within the global left—such as between Soviet and Maoist communism—shaped local memory practices.
Pedro Almodóvar’s film Tacones lejanos/High Heels (1991) portrays the interconnectedness between past and present in early 1990s Spain, when the country had seemingly become a modern nation and left the Transition behind. While in the 1980s Almodóvar had famously mentioned that he preferred to make films as if Franco had never existed, this work suggests otherwise. Tacones lejanos portrays a protagonist suffering a traumatic personal experience in her childhood during Spain’s dictatorship and its enduring impact on her present life in the early 1990s. The film employs cinematic devices such as flashbacks, memory triggers and dialogic relations with earlier films as tropes of memory. By studying individual memory to understand the workings of collective memory and national identity, I argue that Tacones lejanos provides an analogy to comprehend an unprocessed trauma and constitutes a symbolic illustration on how Spanish society at that time was dealing with its past, depicting it as something eventually inescapable which must be addressed.
The Dark Room (2001), the most critically acclaimed and award-winning novel by Rachel Seiffert, a British writer of Australian-German parenthood, has drawn the attention of scholars within the fields of postmemorial and German post-generational literature, trauma and Holocaust scholarship. These have principally focused on the role of photography as a means of accessing the inexpressible “real” and the hidden truths of German family participation in the horrors of genocide. Without abandoning a postmemorial viewpoint, this chapter explores the novel through a Bachelardian phenomenology of architectural and domestic imagery, and through Antoni Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” (1982). Reading it through this lens reveals how this post-generational narrative discloses two intertwined phenomena: First, the anxieties of estrangement, the rupture of familial and community bonds and displacement during the final days of World War Two in Germany. And second, the uncanny experience of homelessness and contemporary haunting that continues to reverberate through European memory. This chapter ends by suggesting that the narrative ultimately speaks to a reconciliation with the past once unveiled and a metaphorical return-home, thus proffering an inkling of hope and a return to meaning in our post-generational era of contemporary haunting, placing it within an aesthetics of reconstructive postmodernism.
The Basque pro-independence terrorist group ETA (an acronym for what translates to ‘Freedom for the Basque Country’) announced a definitive ceasefire in 2011. A year later, I began a PhD on how the Basque conflict could be understood from the life stories of ETA activists. After completing my research, I asked myself: What kind of tensions emerged during the interview process with ETA activists who collaborated in my research taking into account my family background and my Spanish identity? Instead of just appearing as a bidirectional relation between the narrator and the interviewer, inter-subjectivity reveals more powerful mechanisms as it helps reveal hidden collective traumas of the Spanish population where I, as the historian, become part of the story.
El presente trabajo se enfocará en el primer tomo de la trilogía de Josefina Rodríguez Aldecoa, Historia de una maestra (1990), la historia gira alrededor de la vida Gabriela y en esta primera parte se relata la experiencia vivida durante la Segunda República, la Guerra Civil española, la dictadura de Francisco Franco en la peninsula Ibérica. En esta investigación indagaré especialmente en el desarrollo del “Yo” de Gabriela como protagonista principal en su historia, en donde expone su pasado y al mismo tiempo sus traumas a lo largo de sus memorias. Finalmente, es importante subrayar que hay elementos históricos y familiares que ella mismas eligen compartir, los cuales son expuestos y analizados en este trabajo.
This chapter argues that the poetic documentary film Tempestad (2016) by Tatiana Huezo explores the female body, haunting, and the uncanny as mechanisms for expressing the traumas of gendered violence in Mexico. Tempestad uses audio voiceover narration, juxtaposed with images of everyday life, to imply that disappearance of women is not only a daily occurrence but also could happen to anyone. The film illustrates absence and trauma by using non-indexical images to accompany voiceover narration, and haptic imagery and acousmatic sound to comment on the haunting of those who are left behind but who are traumatized by gendered violence in Mexico. Finally, evoking psychological trauma and haunting as sociological effects of prosthetic memory, Tempestad shocks the viewer with an uncanny sensibility of the body. This creates ruptures in hegemonic signifying that allows the ghosts of trauma to “speak,” and it works toward the “getting closer,” reciprocity, and love that Sara Ahmed describes as a function of “affective economies, where feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation” [Ahmed, S. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge (2004), 8].
Through a qualitative content analysis of an ideologically representative sample of influential media outlets in Spain, this article identifies three principal discursive frameworks surrounding Franco’s exhumation. These frameworks expressed not only deep disagreements over the direction of Spain’s regime of remembrance, but reflected deeper anxieties over the state of a democracy in crisis. More broadly, this analysis responds to calls to engage with journalistic sources in the memory studies literature, while illustrating the role of collective memory in collapsing past, present, and future in the articulation of political identities.
El presente artículo estudia la novela española con temática guerracivilista publicada desde el año 2000 con una doble finalidad: evidenciar el tratamiento literario y escasez cuantitativa de novelas en que el soldado miembro del bando sublevado tiene una importancia constitutiva —tanto en protagonismo como en profundidad del personaje— y señalar los retos ético-políticos a que se enfrenta el tratamiento de su perspectiva: el riesgo de empatía e identificación con el victimario, la superación de esquemas reduccionistas y la posibilidad de refrendar ideas antidemocráticas. Con esto se pretende contribuir al estudio de la novela reciente española y específicamente de una de sus vetas más productivas, el tratamiento literario de la guerra civil española.
El esperpento, más allá de la concepción literaria acuñada por Ramón
María del Valle-Inclán, conforma una estética que puede ser transferida
a otras artes, como es el caso del cine. El esperpento cinematográfico,
que asimila sus principales características al medio audiovisual, no ha
tenido un recorrido histórico claro dentro de la cinematografía española,
condenado a transitar entre las tierras del llamado cine disidente y el
cine continuista. Como respuesta a tal problemática, el objetivo de este
trabajo es analizar La vaquilla (Luis García Berlanga, 1985) como ejemplo
paradigmático del esperpento cinematográfico español, película
que no ha sido considerada como tal por otros autores o incluso se ha ignorado.
A través de dicho análisis, se observará la funcionalidad estética
del género y se indagará en las singulares conclusiones derivadas de un
acercamiento sistemáticamente deformador respecto a un evento tan
traumático para la memoria histórica nacional como fue la Guerra Civil
española. De este modo, se reivindicarán tanto las posibilidades narrativas
del esperpento cinematográfico como la necesidad de otorgar un
lugar propio al género dentro de la historia del cine español.
Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre / Black Bread (Villaronga 2010) is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral and aesthetic complexity that resists the politics of consensus and avoids essentialist views on queer identity, the Catalan resistance to the Francoist state and the treatment of the past as a mere ideological commodity in the contemporary politics of memory in Spain.
This chapter analyzes the work of three of Mexico’s most famous filmmakers: Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón. The discussions observe the impact that these Mexican directors have had on the global film industry and take as an example their visualizations of Europe and its socioeconomic challenges. This chapter explores how the films selected for analysis demonstrate a preoccupation with an unstable European society. The chapter takes into account representations of a problematic situation of conflict and social instability from Europe’s past, present and future context.
El Nuevo Cine Español empleó frecuentemente la mirada de los niños para mostrar los efectos traumáticos de la guerra civil y la postguerra en la sociedad española. La crítica vio en estos niños figuras propicias para construir alegorías políticas en las que esos niños, como la propia España, crecían marcados por el pasado represivo y, simultáneamente, representaban la esperanza de un futuro emergente. Un rasgo prominente de este discurso es que asume que estos filmes son historias de “niños inocentes”. En este ensayo, argumento que ese discurso se ha convertido en dominante a expensas de aspectos de la subjetividad de los niños protagonistas como su sexualidad, que queda silenciada al privilegiar el mito de la inocencia infantil. Apoyándome en las herramientas de la teoría queer, analizo tres filmes que cuestionan las implicaciones heteronormativas de este concepto de inocencia infantil. En Cría cuervos (1976), Carlos Saura esboza un retrato queer de la “niña inocente” al presentar su sexualidad no necesariamente unida a la lógica reproductiva que sustenta el orden heterosocial. En la última sección, analizo cómo Jaime de Armiñán ofrece en El amor del capitán Brando (1974) y El nido (1980) un replanteamiento de las relaciones intergeneracionales alejadas del espectro del abuso infantil (y de las narrativas góticas de villanos y víctimas) con las que estas relaciones son típicamente conceptualizadas. Al cuestionar el modelo secuencial de desarrollo sexual, estos dos filmes presentan a los niños como sujetos deseantes con voluntad para expresar y negociar sus impulsos sexuales y sus afectos.
The Argentinian territorialization of the queer perspective articulated the academy with social, TLGB and human rights movements. Empowered by trans/transvestite policies against police and institutional repression, the queer critique made visible the hierarchy produced by the sex-generic differences through the social maps traced by the class, ethnic and age stratifications. The law that expanded marriage irrespective of the sex of its partners (2010) and the Gender Identity Law (2012), among others, challenge and impact the institutional implementation of Integral Sexual Education in the face of the tension between the identitarian normalization of differences and the systematic questioning and disassembly of (a)normalization dynamics. This work proposes a political genealogy of the first territorializations of the queer perspective in Argentina to reflect on the articulation of activism and social movements with the institutional mechanisms of production, legitimation and circulation of knowledge in a sex-generic key.
This paper examines Antonio Altarriba’s presentation of his deceased mother’s life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author’s personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain’s 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender.
El auge de los estudios de la memoria en las ciencias sociales y las humanidades, además de la llamada "moda de la memoria" en la producción cultural contemporánea española —con una presencia marcada de obras sobre los episodios violentos del siglo xx y su legado en el presente— ha dado lugar a una auténtica oleada de trabajos académicos sobre esa producción cultural —novelas, películas, documentales— por especialistas en cultura y literatura ibéricas contemporáneas. Muchos de los análisis se inspiran en cuerpos teóricos ajenos, o al menos contiguos, al campo: la filosofía y los estudios sociales (desde Maurice Halbwachs, Reyes Mate y Paul Ricoeur hasta Paloma Aguilar y Elizabeth Jelin) y los estudios humanísticos del Holocausto, incluida la teoría del trauma y de la postmemoria (desde Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman y Dominick LaCapra a James Young y Marianne Hirsch). A la vista de esta producción reciente de críticos literarios y culturales, este ensayo se propone dos tareas: cuestionar hasta qué punto el análisis de textos y películas individuales puede contribuir a nuestra comprensión de fenómenos sociopolíticos generales como la memoria colectiva y la justicia transicional; y clarificar algunas diferencias fundamentales entre la memoria histórica de las víctimas de la Guerra Civil y del franquismo, por un lado, y la memoria de las víctimas del Holocausto, por otro. Diferencias que hacen que una noción como (post)memoria afiliativa no tenga el mismo significado en ambos contextos.
The first literary manifestations to emerge in the context of the Spanish Civil War endeavored to create a legitimizing discourse for each of two contending Spains, the National Spain and the Republican Spain, by means of poetic appropriation of urban spaces. Nevertheless, this was not a Spain divided only in two, between leftists and rightists or Socialists and Cedistas, but rather a territory comprised of many parallel wars sparked prior to 1936. According to historian Enrique Moradiellos, the nuclei of three disparate and opposing political agendas arose from the physical foundation of these two Spains, ‘the reformist-democratic, the reactionary-authoritarian and the revolutionary-collectivist [agendas] that responded to the same triad of models that emerged in Europe in the wake of the devastating impact of the Great War of 1914 and that competed to achieve political and institutional stabilization’ (2004: 125). This ‘reform, reaction and revolution’ triangle that acted as the protagonist of the Great War would also settle into the fratricidal spaces of Spain and its cultural products. In this context, my essay will analyse the mechanisms of appropriation of Madrid’s spaces employed by each of these three political agendas as they are presented in Madrid, de Corte a Checa (1938) by Agustín de Foxá. Following the map of the capital we will see how both, the agenda of a modern anti-traditional space driven by the Second Republic and the anti-bourgeois revolutionary agenda that stood for the destruction of the status quo and the implementation of a Communist Orthodox regime, present a threat to the conservative ideal that represented the monarcho-Catholic centralism of the third agenda. This threat is manifested in the dismantling of Madrid through the ‘de-Hispanicization’ (Foxá) of the mythical spaces of the sacred (churches and convents), historic (statues and palaces) and domestic (house interiors) cityscapes.
This paper aims to address the conceptual and ethical problems that arise when scholars of contemporary European history resort to the notion of collective trauma. Different historical works on the reconstruction of Europe in the second half of the 20th century have relied on the notion of trauma to grasp the evolution of the memory of violence. More specifically, however, this paper focuses on the problems that arise from defining the Spanish Civil War as a collective trauma by examining the antagonistic ways in which the traumas derived from this conflict have been embodied.
In the same moment that the Spanish government passed the Ley de memoria histórica, recognizing the rights of those persecuted during the Civil War and dictatorship, the Spanish Church escalated its own project of remembering, more than doubling between 2007 and 2013 the number of beatifications of clergy killed during the war. This discordant combination of circumstances has been reflected in cultural production where cinematic representations of the Civil War dead have often reanimated tropes of the Catholic popular imagination. While these films mark a broader cultural move away from the Church rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom and towards human rights frameworks as a way to deal with past traumas, their reliance on the culturally charged motifs of traditional hagiography has meant that contemporary martyr narratives remain entangled in older national myths. Taking examples from Emilio Martínez Lázaro's 2007 film Las 13 rosas, Mikel Rueda's Izarren Argia (2010) and Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida (2011), this article will demonstrate how the interpenetration of opposing discourses both undermines the films’ contribution to the project of historical memory while also offering powerful moments of reflection and empathy at the intersection of traditional martyrology and cosmopolitan memory practices.
Aldana Reyes takes a timely look at Barcelona Gothic as marketed in the twenty-first century. Examining Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series (2001–16), he shows how Ruiz Zafón retrojects his stories to the years during and following the Spanish Civil War to present an innovative and controversial corrective to popular touristic representations of the city. With special reference to The Shadow of the Wind (2001), this chapter considers the complexities of Ruiz Zafón’s Gothicisation of Barcelona to suggest that his novels may be best understood as a conscious attempt to produce a regional form of the urban Gothic and as an exploration of the legacies of the Spanish Civil War in one of the cities most affected by it. The chapter shows how the retrojection of the narrative trappings of the Gothic to a dark version of Barcelona deliberately associates the modes' interest in barbaric codes of behaviour with Franco’s oppressive ruling and its ghosts with the war’s forgotten victims.
The Policeman Speaks: Novel Polyphony and Democratic Debate in Some Spanish Novels about Francoism and the Transition
In recent years a new orientation in the Spanish political memory (a shift from the tendency towards forgetting conflicts to the claims for recognition for all victims) can also be noticed in a significant number of literary works. Many novels offer a broad coverage of social discourses and engage in the process of negotiations over a critical period in the 20th century history of Spain, namely the “Transition” from the late francoism era to democracy. This paper analyses fragments of three contemporary novels (La caída de Madrid by Rafael Chirbes, El vano ayer by Isaac Rosa, and El día de mañana by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón) whose authors give voice to an ambiguous character -- a policeman from the Francoist period. He makes attempts to justify his work and his support for the regime. These fictional utterances are studied from the perspective of certain theories of literary dialogism and literary poliphonic devices. The final question is whether it is reasonable to expect any social impact of such literary representations of “democratic” dialogues.
Due to its long duration, the Republican Exile in Mexico built communities. This closed society was amalgamated through figures, sites of belonging and public representations which sustained their identity and memory. The public celebrations, specifically the one of April 14th, build a memory of the Civil War, participating in the formation of an exile identity, and collaborating in a historiographical construction of resistance in exile and the anti-francoism outside Spain.
RESUMEN
En los primeros años de la posguerra española, la fotografía cobró una extraordinaria importancia a la hora de reconstruir la geografía íntima de las familias republicanas quebrada por la prisión, el exilio o la muerte. En este contexto, los retratos de los derrotados son preciosos tanto por su escasez como por el espacio exiguo en que fueron creados y, ante todo, por los afectos y expectativas depositados en ellos. Partiendo de estas particulares circunstancias, el presente ensayo analiza varios retratos familiares de colecciones privadas bajo el prisma del concepto benjaminiano de aura. Por cuanto describe perfectamente los rasgos materiales anacrónicos de las imágenes, el uso de dicho concepto debe ser capaz de iluminar otras dimensiones, antropológicas o perceptuales, especialmente las relacionadas con su valor de culto y el carácter inaccesible que traslucen, invitándonos a leerlas como lugares donde refugiarse de los azares de la historia; como si el acto fotográfico ofreciese la posibilidad única de suspender el tiempo y habitar la imagen.
In the second half of the 19th century Spain was rather isolated from the rest of Europe, although there was remarkable scientific activity. In the midst of this scenario, the fig-ure of Cajal emerged on the scene.
During a visit to the laboratory of Luis Simarro in Madrid in 1887 Cajal became ac-quainted with a paper published by Golgi in 1873 dealing with his famous method. Ca-jal immediately recognized the value of this method and applied it with much success to the study of the nervous tissue.
In the triennium 1887-1889 Cajal's discoveries were so sensational that he decided to attend the meeting of the Anatomische Gesellschaft (Germany Anatomical Society) in Berlin in 1889 in order to present them abroad. The trip proved a great success and he was able to establish close relations with the president of the society, Alexander von Kölliker, who, in turn, mediated contacts with further renowned scientists such as Retzius, His, Waldeyer, van Gehuchten etc.
Prior to his trip to Berlin, he had already contacted Golgi, but the fact that Cajal's neu-ronal theory conflicted with Golgi's reticular theory not only prevented a normal rela-tionship between them, but also was even - especially on Golgi's part - the source of bitter rivalry between them.
Kölliker immediately recognized and admired Cajal's stature as a scientist and gener-ously helped him to publicize his ideas throughout the scientific world and to attain the recognition he deserved. Kölliker's relationship with Golgi was of a different nature and could be described as sincere friendship. Kölliker, in fact, proposed both Golgi and Cajal as candidates for the Nobel Prize in 1906, which was subsequently awarded to them jointly. Thanks to Kölliker, Cajal's great mentor, the neuronal theory entered the scientific world through the main door and continues to occupy a prevailing position.
This article examines the construction of the most influential myth crafted by the Spanish dictatorship during its last decades. Through its metaphorical construction of the word “development” (desarrollo) and its catachrestical use of “peace” (paz), the Francoist regime naturalised a contradictory understanding of history which conflated the economic development that Spain underwent in the 1960s with political liberalisation. Additionally, by analysing Spanish hegemonic discourse, this article maintains that the ideology embedded within the Francoist myth continued to operate during the so-called “transition” (transición) through the conceptualisation, this time, of Spanish “democracy” (democracia). “Democracy”, very much like “peace”, became an empty signifier that named the absence it totalised, and in the process presented – and still presents– Spanish history as forward-looking yet unchanging, while disguising the weight of the Francoist past upon the present.
Este ensaio estudia os contextos da novela de Carlos Casares Deus sentado nun sillón azul (1996) e analiza en que medida esta narración é un intento de abordar as cuestións centrais do debate contemporáneo sobre a memoria. A través dos recursos da ficción e da voz dunha antiga estudante do protagonista, o autor reconstrúe a contorna cultural e política dunha cidade provincial durante os primeiros anos do réxime de Franco, en certa maneira, como un relato contrafactual. Finalmente, o Deus de Casares, un dos primeiros e máis sólidos achegamentos aos emerxentes traballos sobre a memoria, é tamén unha avaliación crítica da responsabilidade dos intelectuais, a través da análise das linguaxes e da traxectoria dun profesor ficticio.
New Approaches on Translation, Conflict, and Memory: Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship is a collection of essays that endeavours to establish a new dialogue between translation, conflict, and memory studies. Focusing on cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship, it explores the significance and the effect of translation within Spain and beyond. Drawing on fictional and non-fictional texts, reports from war zones, and audiovisual productions, the contributors to this volume examine the scope of translation in transmitting the conflict and the dictatorship from a contemporary perspective. Narratives produced during and after the Civil War and the dictatorship both in Spain and abroad have led to new debates arising from the reassessment of a conflict that continues to resonate.
A CONTRIBUTION TO A COMMON EUROPEAN MEMORY | Since 1975 Spain has been engaged in the recuperation of the memory of the past. Yet there seems to be an agreement that it is only over the course of the last ten years that an open and genuine debate has started. The purpose of this article is to re-think the argument, stating that what is at stake is really a change of form in the memory debate. Drawing on theories from Astrid Erll (2011) and Michael Rothberg (2009), the article aims to show how the novel Sefarad by the Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina could be read as a literary manifestation of a multidirectional memory, in which different memory scenarios in dialogue inscribe the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship into a common European memory context. Moreover, the article argues that Sefarad positions itself as a paradigmatic example of a global cosmopolitan memory discourse which tries to transcend traditional Manichean divisions between “us” and “them”. In the context of Spanish contemporary politics, it is hard to imagine how a cosmopolitan approach should be implemented without risks of political (ab)use. In that respect it will be argued that the literary discourse, seen as a reconciliatory discourse, takes precedence over other discourses in the ongoing memory debate by emphasizing a collective and transnational responsibility for the past.
In this chapter, Egea uses Spanish film as a case study to test Rick Altman’s (1999) hypothesis on the usefulness of genre theory “to help us think about nations.” To do so, he analyses several films that return to the Spanish civil war and its historical trauma. Egea discusses how Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001) revisit that historical event and subject it to what he calls a process of “en-gerement” by which the Spanish civil war film enters a new framework but also new markets. Ultimately, Egea proposes reversing the terms of Altman’s hypothesis and asks how, in a time of globalized cultural industries, the nation itself can help us think about genre theory.
This book's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. The book shows that—at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities—Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. It demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.
The traditional interpretation of the crisis of the Spanish Old Regime is to see it as a revolution carried out by an ascendant bourgeoisie. Professor Cruz challenges this viewpoint by arguing that in Spain, as in the rest of continental Europe, a national bourgeoisie did not exist before the second half of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the model of bourgeois revolution proves inadequate to explain any movement toward modernisation before 1850. Historiography based on the bourgeois revolution theory portrays Spain as an exceptional model whose main feature is the 'failure' produced by the immobility of its ruling class. This work re-examines that understanding, and relocates Spain in the mainstream for industrialisation, urbanisation and democratisation that characterise the history of modern Europe.
Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. The Context of Self-Sufficiency: 1. Civil War and self-sufficiency: the Francoist reconstruction of nation and state 2. Purifying Spain (i): the elimination of dissent 3. Purifying Spain (ii): degeneration and treatment 4. The 'verticalisation' of Spain: the state and work Part II. The Practice of Self-Sufficiency: 5. The politics and economics of autarky 6. The wages of autarky (i): self-sufficiency and industry 7. The wages of autarky (ii): the myth and reality of rural life 8. Austerity and resistance Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.
Patrick Maynard (Review of Hirsch, Family Frames) teaches philosophy at the University of Western Ontario and is the author of The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Cornell UP, 1997), coeditor of Aesthetics (Oxford, 1997), and guest editor of "Perspectives on the Arts and Technology," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1997). His most recent publication is an essay on children's drawing, in Philosophical Topics 25 (1998).
History & Memory 14.1/2 (2002) 165-188
In the last decade several monographs on the Francoist repression at the local and regional levels have been published. The consolidation of democracy has resulted in the appearance of books and articles about some of the most painful episodes of recent Spanish history. But there has been no clear relationship between the blossoming of democracy which crystallized in a new democratic state in 1977 and the recovery of some particular aspects of the last civil war. Indeed, the numerous research projects on the violence unleashed by the rebel rearguard during and after the Civil War have been carried out by young scholars in the early stages of their careers, in the context of flourishing universities and some local institutions well disposed to backing such research projects. Therefore, the recovery of the darkest episodes of the Spanish recent past has not been sponsored by the state. The task has been demanded by civil society, and historians have been the leaders in this process.
The case of Aragon is a good example of this phenomenon that has taken place throughout Spain. The book, El pasado oculto: Fascismo y violencia en Aragón, 1936–1939, by a research team coordinated by Julián Casanova, was a pioneer in the process of recovering the names of all the men and women who were assassinated by the rebel army from July 1936 onward and of their dates and places of death. The compilation of a huge appendix listing the victims in the three Aragonese provinces (Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel) was accompanied by several analytical as well as descriptive articles on the military coup d’état of July 1936, the mechanisms, phases and social consequences of violence, the return of conservative and right-wing politicians to the local institutions, and the indoctrination process carried out by the Catholic Church. Although the primary sources were located mainly in local archives, registries of deaths and the local press, the authors conducted several oral interviews with some of the victims’ relatives. The testimonies provided a wealth of information on the rituals of repression, but they were also crucial for understanding the experiences of the defeated during and after the Civil War. Some of these will be analyzed in the following pages.
It is remarkable that the book was unexpectedly well received by Aragonese society, to the extent that the first edition, issued by a national publisher (Siglo XXI, 1992), went out of print within a few years. Since the book was in great demand in bookshops and local libraries, a local publisher decided to launch a second edition, whose 1,500 copies were sold out in one year. The third edition was issued last year (2001). This success was a symptom—as well as a consequence—of Aragonese society’s need to know more about the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War. More specifically, the great demand for this book indicates the interest in remembering the tragic end of thousands of Aragonese people who were killed by the rebels. Since these episodes had been silenced throughout four decades of dictatorship and during the transition to democracy, the memory of the victims and their families had been lost. The book thus satisfied a demand that emerged “from below” and was also the main instrument for recovering the memory of the victims and their families. As I demonstrate in this article, although this demand was never articulated or channeled through a collective social movement, the appearance of the book created the conditions for stimulating the complex process of affirmation (and, in some cases, creation) of the victims’ identity in relation to their experiences in the war.
The erosion of the memory of those who suffered in the Civil War and the postwar period is not peculiar to Spain. This phenomenon is quite common when the construction of the state and national identity calls for highlighting patriotism, victory and cohesion, on the one hand, and for concealing uncomfortable episodes, especially those related to violence, on the other. Nevertheless, the Spanish case has several unique features. First, it was the only state in which...
A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political uses. Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for ââ¬Åthe disappearedââ¬? in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance. Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelinââ¬â¢s work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory. Elizabeth Jelin is professor at the University of Buenos Aires and research director at the Institute of Social and Economic Development. $17.95 paper ISBN 0-8166-4284-2
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de la guerra civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy)
- Santos Juliá
Pío 2003Los mitos de la guerra civil (Madrid: La Esfera)
- Moa
de Salamina (Spain: Lola Films/Fernando Trueba)
- David Trueba
José María 2004Los horrores de la guerra civil (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori)
- Zavala