Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography

By Sebastiaan Faber

The ability to forget the violent twentieth-century past was long seen as a virtue in Spain, even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted as increasing numbers of Spaniards want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War shows how historiography, fiction, and photography have shaped our views of the 1936-39 war and its long, painful aftermath.

Faber traces the curious trajectories of iconic Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour; critically reads a dozen recent Spanish novels and essays; interrogates basic scholarly assumptions about history, memory, and literature; and interviews nine scholars, activists, and documentarians who in the past decade and a half have helped redefine Spain's relationship to its past. In this book Faber argues that recent political developments in Spain--from the grassroots call for the recovery of historical memory to the indignados movement and the foundation of Podemos--provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to engage in a more activist, public, and democratic practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826504050

Sebastiaan Faber

Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College, is the author of several books, including Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War and Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (both published by Vanderbilt University Press).

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MEMORY BATTLES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

MEMORY BATTLES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

History, Fiction, Photography

Sebastiaan Faber

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

NASHVILLE

© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2018

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LC CONTROL NUMBER 2016058489

LC CLASSIFICATION NUMBER DP269.A56 F333 2017

DEWEY CLASSIFICATION NUMBER 946.081072

LC RECORD AVAILABLE AT lccn.loc.gov/2016058489

ISBN 978-0-8265-2178-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2179-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2180-4 (ebook)

To Aart Faber (1941–2012)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Joining the Battle: Spanish History and Academic Engagement

PART 1: MEMORY AND THE VISUAL ARCHIVE

1. Memory as Montage: Spanish Civil War Photography

2. On Revelation: What Can We Learn from the Mexican Suitcase?

PART 2: HISTORY AND MEMORY

3. ¿Usted, qué sabe? History, Memory, and the Witness

4. Memory and the Law: Exceptionalist Temptations

PART 3: REFRAMING THE PAST

5. The Thirst to Understand: Historians of the Spanish Civil War

6. In Search of Spain’s Disappeared

PART 4: INTELLECTUALS AT WAR

7. Treason of the Intellectuals: Andrés Trapiello’s Civil War

8. An Epidemic of Mediocrity: Spain According to Gregorio Morán

9. Oh, Behave! Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Pleasantville

PART 5: FICTION AS MEMORY

10. The Spanish Civil War Retold: The Novel as Affiliative Act

11. Postmemory and Other Premises

12. The Irresponsible Novelist: Javier Marías

13. Javier Cercas, or, The Triumph of Kitsch

Epilogue: The Past Belongs to Everyone

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT EXIST without the infinite generosity of the many friends and colleagues who, over the years, have been willing to listen and talk, read drafts, and make suggestions. I’m afraid my debt to them is too large to repay. I owe the good qualities of this book to them. I would particularly like to thank Noelia Adánez, Palmar Álvarez-Blanco, Montse Armengou, Manuel Aznar Soler, Mari Paz Balibrea, David Becerra, Kata Beilin, Peter N. Carroll, Almudena Carracedo, Francie Cate-Arries, Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez, Simon Doubleday, Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Carolina Espinoza, James D. Fernández, Francisco Ferrándiz, Teresa Férriz, Joseba Gabilondo, Pedro García-Caro, Pedro García Guirao, Sonia García López, Marina Garde, Baltasar Garzón, Jorge Gaupp, Anthony Geist, Olga Glondys, François Godicheau, Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, Jordi Gracia, Helen Graham, Gina Herrmann, Jesús Izquierdo Martín, Gabriel Jackson, Ariel Jerez, David Jorge, Jo Labanyi, Germán Labrador, Susan Larson, Fernando Larraz, José Ramón López, Miguel de Lucas, Ana Luengo, Steven Marsh, Mario Martín Gijón, Rebecca Haidt, Jordi Marí, Guillem Martínez, Marshall Mateer, Alberto Moreiras, Cristina Moreiras, Luis Moreno-Caballud, Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Gijs Mulder, José María Naharro-Calderón, Robert Newcomb, Fraser Ottanelli, Esther Pascua, Antonio Pedrós-Gascón, Óscar Pereira Zazo, Paul Preston, Joan Ramon Resina, Aaron Retish, Berta del Río, Jacobo Rivero, Juan Rodríguez, Isis Sadek, Juan Salas, Benita Sampedro, Gervasio Sánchez, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Antolín Sánchez Cuervo, Pablo Sánchez León, Ignacio Sánchez-Prado, Yvonne Scholten, Bécquer Seguín, Emilio Silva, Carles Sirera, Rosi Song, Steven Torres, Michael Ugarte, Isabelle Touton, Noël Valis, José del Valle, José Luis Villacañas, Ángel Viñas, William Viestenz, Félix Zamora, and Trisha Ziff, as well as Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (1926–2013) and Michael Ratner (1943–2016), who spent their lives fighting the good fight and are sorely missed. I would also like to thank my students at Oberlin College, as well as my colleagues Claire Solomon, Patrick O’Connor, Ana Cara, Jed Deppman, Erik Inglis, Wendy Kozol, Geoff Pingree, Steven Volk, Kristina Mani, and deans Sean Decatur, Joyce Babyak, and Tim Elgren. I have been fortunate to enjoy the hospitality of Spanish editors willing to publish my rabble-rousing and sometimes experimental texts and podcasts: Alfonso Armada at FronteraD; the editorial team at Contratiempo; Magda Bandera at La Marea; and Miguel Mora at CTXT: Contexto y Acción.

I am grateful to Radboud University, particularly Brigitte Adriaensen, Maarten Steenmeijer, and dean Margot van Mulken for allowing me to spend six months in Nijmegen as part of the Excellence Initiative, and to the members of the research group on memory and materiality for their feedback. My thanks, too, to the editors of the venues that published earlier versions of these chapters for allowing me to include them in this book. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (vol. 36, no. 1, 2012) and a special issue of the Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies (vol. 5, 2007) edited by Javier Krauel; and parts of Chapter 4 were first published in a volume of Hispanic Issues Online edited by Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini (vol. 11, Fall 2012). Some of the interviews in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 were originally featured in The Volunteer, the quarterly magazine published by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and part of the conversation with Pablo Sánchez-León appeared in CTXT: Contexto y Acción. A version of Chapter 7 appeared in Ínsula (no. 809, 2014). Versions of Chapter 8, Chapter 13, and Chapter 14 came out in FronteraD (respectively on Sept. 24, 2015; Feb. 12, 2015; and 28 Oct. 2013). Different parts of Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 first appeared in a chapter of the Companion to the Twentieth-Century Spanish Novel edited by Marta Altisent (Tamesis, 2008), in Pasavento (vol. 2, no. 1, 2014), and in Contornos de la narrativa española actual (2000–2010), edited by Palmar Álvarez-Blanco and Toni Dorca (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010). An earlier version of Chapter 9 was published in ALCES XXI (vol. 1, 2013), and a version of Chapter 12 appeared in Allí donde uno diría que ya no puede haber nada, edited by Maarten Steenmeijer and Alexis Grohmann (Rodopi, 2009).

The staff at the International Institute for Social History and Leiden University were extremely helpful. Thanks, too, to the International Center of Photography, particularly Cynthia Young, for permission to reprint images by Robert Capa and Gerda Taro; to Ben Shneiderman and Helen Sarid, for permission to reprint images by David Seymour; to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam for permission to reproduce materials from its archive; and to John Heartfield and the Heartfield Community of Heirs for permission to reproduce a montage by John Heartfield. I deeply appreciate the expert support from Michael Ames, director of Vanderbilt University Press, and his staff, as well as Andrea Thornton’s careful copyediting. My deepest thanks go to my family: Kim, Jakob, and Maya. I can’t imagine life without them.

MEMORY BATTLES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

INTRODUCTION

Joining the Battle

Spanish History and Academic Engagement

AT A LIVE RADIO DEBATE on the day before the start of the campaign for the June 2016 elections, a sixteen-year-old Spaniard confronted a representative of the ruling Partido Popular (PP) with a provocative question. Do you feel proud, he asked, to belong to a party that has ignored the almost 100,000 people who are buried without their family members knowing where? The young man, who referred to mass graves from the Spanish Civil War that continue to litter the country eighty years later, went on to recall several dismissive comments about the victims and their families from prominent members of the PP. When he was done formulating his question, the audience erupted in a spontaneous ovation that lasted twenty seconds. Let’s see, the PP representative, Ignacio Echániz, replied when the applause had died down. In 1975, we Spaniards worked very hard to close the wounds of the past . . . [and] to forget the past and work for the future. . . . The only thing we have said . . . is that we should not open up new political fronts that may fracture Spanish society because it’s very important to continue to work for the future so that our children and grandchildren . . . can have a country that lives in peace and liberty (Cadena Ser 2016). The reply was not surprising; Echániz spewed clichés that the Spanish Right, along with a portion of the Left, has been repeating for decades. What was surprising was the reaction from the audience: it scoffed. The ability to forget the past was long seen as a virtue in Spain—even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted. The duty now is no longer to forget but to remember. Younger generations want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. And the means available to acquire and interpret this knowledge are not limited to history books. They include archeology, anthropology, sociology, and law, as well as film, photography, and fiction.

How have history, fiction, and photography shaped Spanish memory? How has democratic Spain dealt with the legacy of the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the Transition? And how have academics, writers, filmmakers, photographers, and journalists in Spain and elsewhere engaged with a collective process that is central to the country’s future as a unified, functioning democracy? These are the three main questions that inform this book. They are also questions that have unleashed a spirited series of battles in the Spanish public sphere, particularly since the emergence around the year 2000 of what is often referred to as the memory movement or, rather more disparagingly, la moda de la memoria: the memory fad. The connotations this last word conjures up—a trivial and passing obsession—are misplaced. In fact, Spain’s memory battles helped prepare the ground for the convulsive changes that have reshaped the country’s political landscape in the wake of the Great Recession, the 2011 rise of the indignados movement (known in Spain as el 15-M), and the creation of Podemos, a new political party, in 2014.

Between the late 1990s and Spain’s devastating economic crisis of 2009, the country witnessed the birth and rapid growth of a grassroots network of citizens’ associations that formulated a broad set of social and political demands. It called for the identification of thousands of mass graves dating from the Civil War, but it also demanded more attention to the rights of victims of right-wing repression since 1936 and a revision of the terms under which Spain transitioned to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, this grassroots phenomenon spawned a broad set of initiatives ranging from political rallies to volunteer-led exhumation projects, court cases, and formal appeals to the United Nations. In its wake rose a tidal wave of media productions about the Civil War and Francoism: novels, documentaries, history books, photography exhibits, feature films, soap operas, drama series, and thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines.

Difficult questions have been at stake in this process. How does one properly represent Spain’s violent twentieth-century past? How do we know what happened, how do we to tell that story, and who should tell it? How should today’s Spaniards relate to that past? Do they owe it a moral debt? Should the present be judging the past, or might the past be judging us? Should these judgments take place in a court of law? And how does a commitment to historical memory inform political change in the present? Thanks to the groundswell of citizen activism, Spain doesn’t think and speak about its conflictive history as it did fifteen years ago. The debate has moved from the private and academic into the public, political, and judicial spheres. Journalists, victims, and their family members have displaced historians and other intellectuals as the main sources of public discourse about the past. And in this discourse there is a new focus on notions of judgment, honor, and shame; an emphasis on personal or collective experiences; and an explicit attempt to read the Spanish case in connection with World War II, the Cold War, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, and recent developments in international law.

For those of us who study contemporary Spain, particularly in Europe and the Americas, the explosion of attention to the past could not have come at a better moment. The field—long called Hispanism but now more often referred to as Peninsular, Hispanic, or Iberian Studies—was going through an identity crisis. Our once-comfortable institutional status was under threat. The rise of Latin American Studies, the general relegation of the humanities to the margins of the university, and a dwindling of international interest in things Spanish meant that it was harder to argue for our relevance. So we were delighted to see that the memory movement put Spain back on the map, spawning regular articles in the New Yorker and the Guardian, and even an editorial or two in the New York Times. At universities in the United States and elsewhere, the rise of the Spanish memory movement created opportunities to reach out to neighboring disciplines, including Latin American Studies, memory studies, political science, and law. As a result, the field has lived something of a moda de la memoria in its own right. Since I received my PhD in 1999, I happily hitched a ride on the memory bandwagon.

A decade and a half later, we can look back at what has been accomplished and assess the work that lies ahead. The impact of the memory movement has gone far beyond narrow historical questions. In the first decade of the millennium, Spain’s re-engagement with its violent past led many Spanish citizens to question the very foundations of the country’s young democracy. They called for a revision of the master narrative of post-Franco Spanish history, which presented the transition of the late 1970s as an unequivocal success story. Their indignation reached boiling point in the years following the economic meltdown of 2009 and culminated in the massive occupation of public spaces in May 2011. The foundation of Podemos and other political organizations in 2014 and 2015 led to a major shift in Spanish politics. This is the end of a cycle that we can call post-Francoism, the pollster Jaime Miquel said after the June 2016 elections: the last throes of a period during which the political parties in government interpreted their mandate "as a license for bossism (caudillaje). For forty years, he added, two political families have administered a social body that, for obvious reasons, had a very limited education and lived far removed from power. Spaniards born after 1973, however, are no longer willing to put up with this kind of tutelage. Better educated than their parents, they are ready to take responsibility for the public good" (TV3 2016). Under their leadership, the country has moved from what had been in effect a top-down two-party system to a political landscape that is more volatile and more diverse, but also markedly more democratic. For those of us who engage with Spain through scholarship, even from abroad, these developments have also created an opportunity—if not an obligation—to re-examine some of the assumptions underlying our work. In fact, they may even compel us to question the very institutional foundations of our practice as scholars of the humanities. This book is meant as a strong nudge that direction.

SINCE I STARTED WORKING on Spanish historical memory more than a decade ago, I have formed some fairly well-defined convictions that inform this book throughout. They can be roughly synthesized into three overarching points. First, the place that Spain assigns to the unspeakable violence unleashed by the Civil War and institutionalized under the Franco dictatorship is more than a mere problem of narrative. It is a political problem that requires a democratic solution. As Paloma Aguilar writes in Memoria y olvido (1996, published in translation in 2002 as Memory and Amnesia), a community’s historical memory consists of three elements: the selection of events or experiences from the past that are deemed worthy of commemoration; the representation of those events or experiences; and the lessons the community derives from them (Aguilar 2002, 1–24). Yet whether to tell the story of the Second Republic, the Civil War, and Francoism; how to tell it; and to determine what there is to learn from it—that is, how to relate that past to the concerns of the present—are questions that cannot be left to historians, judges, or politicians to resolve. Precisely because they are questions that concern a whole country, answering them requires the involvement of civil society. This is not to say that there is no role in the process for experts—even experts who are not themselves Spanish, or who don’t live and work in Spain. There is a role, and it is an important one. But when it comes to the past, historians, judges, politicians, and other authorities cannot dismiss the voice of civil society from a position of presumed superiority. As the members of the Colectivo Contratiempo in Madrid like to put it, "El pasado es de todos"—the past belongs to everyone (Adánez 2014, 4).

My second point speaks more specifically to the role in this process of humanists and social scientists who study Spain from abroad. For cultural and historical reasons that I have outlined in an earlier book (Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War, 2008), the study of Spain in the West has a long history and still enjoys a significant academic presence. For political and historical reasons, moreover, foreign experts of Spain have received more attention and respect in Spain itself than, say, experts of France or England have in those countries. What role might someone like me—a Dutch academic working on contemporary Spain from the United States—play in Spain’s coming to terms with its past? This question prompts others that my colleagues and I seldom ask. For whom do we write and with what purpose? Does it make sense for an academic expert of Spain to write about the country in jargon-laced English for a small group of colleagues in the United States and the UK? Should we try to reach an audience in Spain? If so, should that audience be primarily academic, or should it include non-experts as well?

In my case, these questions arose in part from a personal sense of frustration. The reason that I write about Spain is, in the end, a simple one: I care about it and want other people to care about it as well. In this light, it is dispiriting to realize that, say, a sophisticated academic article about contemporary Spanish culture that I’ve written in English for a US journal is not actually read in Spain, not even by university colleagues. If the word impact had not been co-opted by academic corporate-speak, I would use it to describe what I think all who invest a large part of their lives in a particular project aim for. We want our work to matter. I’m afraid, though, that much of the work done on Spain from universities abroad actually matters very little. Four or five years into my first academic job, as I began moving into topics that felt particularly current or relevant, the vacuum that surrounds much academic writing became all the more painfully obvious. Since then, I’ve tried to break out of it with varying levels of success.

Most of the texts in this book are the result of a search for relevance. They are an attempt to escape the relatively sterile formats, venues, and stylistic habits of academic writing about Spanish history and culture. This has led me to genres—the interview, the polemic, the review essay—that are more about exchanging points of view and provoking dialogue than about delivering complex academic monologues to a possibly nonexistent audience. I hope these texts are more entertaining and accessible than standard academic writing. I like to think they are no less rigorous—but they are certainly less risk-averse. (Excessive hedging is one of the many ways in which academics repel audiences.) These texts did get me in trouble on a couple of occasions, sparking indignant responses from academics and writers in Spain. While I haven’t avoided conflict, I’ve done my best to keep my own responses in these exchanges measured and conciliatory. Whether I’ve succeeded in that effort is a different question.

The truth is that I didn’t set out to become a polemicist. I turned into one in Cádiz, in the middle of a pleasant family vacation in the summer of 2009. One afternoon I strolled to the square that offered free public Wi-Fi to check my email, and I found a note from the editors of the Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies. A year or so earlier, they had published one of my first pieces on the memory debate in Spain. We have a problem, they now wrote. One of the senior historians I had discussed in my piece, Santos Juliá, had come across my text and written an angry letter to the editors. He had not liked my analysis. In fact he all but accused me of libel. Juliá, who has been writing regular newspaper columns for decades, took issue with a number of different passages. But he was particularly piqued at the way I had described his relationship to the media conglomerate for which he works as a columnist. This relationship, I wrote, is mutually beneficial: his status as an academic benefits the conglomerate, and the exposure the conglomerate gives him increases his prestige and market value. This is a symbiotic relationship, in other words, that implies an exchange of both economic and cultural capital. I had also dared to suggest that his insistent claims to scholarly disinterestedness were in tension with his status as a highly visible figure in a politicized and commercialized media landscape. Finally, I had argued that his repeated dismissal of the memory of Spain’s violent past in favor of history (as represented by his own work and that of other academic historians) could be read as a dismissal of the victims’ voices—voices that after years of silence were finally being heard as part of the broad, civil-society push for a recovery of historical memory.

Juliá was livid. He wrote that my piece contained a great number of errors and falsehoods. My suggestion that his critical position on memory, as opposed to history, could be read as dismissive of the victims, he said, was a calumny (Juliá 2009). To be sure, Juliá made some good points. I had said, for instance, that he regularly appeared on television, which was an overstatement. In fact, Juliá’s presence has been largely limited to print media. Still, the aggressive tone of his letter took me aback. It was my first experience with what Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca has dubbed discursive machismo: the tendency among certain intellectuals in Spain to take criticism personally and respond with indignation and ad hominem counterattacks in a style swollen with certainty (2016, 13). It wouldn’t be the last one. A couple of years later, I wrote a critical—but, I thought, measured—review of a book by the novelist Andrés Trapiello about Spanish intellectuals’ behavior during the Civil War. It sparked an incensed reply in which the author accused me of giving him un paseo: Civil War slang for shooting someone without trial.

The unexpected run-in with Juliá in 2009 had a fortunate side effect. I had stumbled on an effective method to break out of the isolation I’d been feeling as a US-based scholar of Spain. A great way to engage with writers and academics, I found, was to express as clearly as I could why I disagreed with them—and to do so in Spanish, in the Spanish media. I quickly realized I had some advantages. The fact that I don’t work in Spain makes me immune to the kind of retaliations that critical texts like mine would provoke for someone working at a Spanish university—a risk that Sánchez-Cuenca believes helps explain the weakness of public debate in Spain (2016, 21). And I can draw on the tradition of spirited but respectful public disagreement in the English-language public sphere, for example in the letter sections of the New York Review or the Times Literary Supplement.

This rabble-rousing strategy is not without risk, of course. Joining in a public debate about a topic like the Spanish Civil War and its memory implies aligning oneself with some and against others. Scholarly objectivity as such is not, I think, a goal to strive for in this context. To be honest, I don’t see this as a problem. What matters for me in scholarship are rigor, clarity, and intellectual honesty. These values do not imply a commitment to objectivity. In fact, when it comes to the Spanish Civil War, invoking objectivity has often been an excuse to look at the war from a position of presumed neutrality that rejects both pro-Nationalist and pro-Republican accounts as partisan and therefore skewed. This is one of the strange anomalies plaguing scholars who study the Spanish past. As several of the historians I have interviewed point out, no one would think of calling World War II expert Richard Evans a pro-Allied historian. In the end, the objectivist view of the Spanish Civil War serves to confirm a kind of exceptionalism that detaches Francoism from the regimes that brought it to power: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

It should be clear by now that this book is not meant to be a standard academic monograph. I wrote it because I think that the search for relevance, for a greater variety in formats and a new kind of engagement with a larger audience, should be a central part of our collective response to the so-called crisis of the humanities. If the academic humanities are interested in the way that cultural forms—art, literature, film—reflect on the human experience, then it should certainly be possible for us to pay more attention to the forms in which we articulate our insights. And I am convinced that it is not necessary to exclude non-specialist audiences to the extent that we do. If a fundamental task of criticism is to explain our culture, Jeffrey Williams writes, then scholarship needs better means of exposition than it usually employs and that enjoins an audience beyond a narrow academic field (2014, 1).

But let me get back to the three main convictions that inform this book. The need for articulation—in its double sense of clear exposition and meaningful connection—is also central to my final point. I belong to a generation of scholars still trained in the analysis and history of literary texts. But I was also steeped in the growing awareness that the study of literature for its own sake was no longer sufficiently interesting or relevant to warrant serious academic investment. This is why books, journals, graduate programs, and conferences that used to deal almost exclusively with poetry, essay, theater, and narrative prose now tend to occupy themselves with a much broader set of questions ranging from race and gender to politics, history, ethics, and justice. In my field, issues like identity and historical memory have surged, too. Yet often the primary objects of analysis are still literary texts. This would not be a problem if it were clear that literary texts have a crucial impact on socio-political processes, or that the texts are an important channel for them. But that is not a given. This means that the question of relevance is not limited to the connection between our work and our audience. Also at stake is the relation between the broad socio-political ambitions of our arguments and the narrow, literary nature of the objects we study. Do you want to make an argument about the role of women in the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War? Wonderful—but don’t assume that a mere close reading of three novels, however interesting they might be as texts, will get you there. In other words, we can’t simply assume the social impact of literature. If we think it exists, we should account for it.

Starting from these three convictions, this book takes a diverse, even eclectic approach to Spain’s memory battles. It deploys different genres to engage with a broad range of texts, images, and people, from the anthropology of exhumations to the adventurous lives of war photographers. By engaging with the work of scholars, activists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers, I want to show how each in his or her own way has helped narrate the changing stories that Spain tells itself and the world about its complicated past. But what I hope my book also makes clear is how this process has itself shaped each of these different practices. Over the past decade and a half of civic mobilization, historians and anthropologists, activists, writers, and filmmakers have all had to adapt their ideas about Spain and its history, but they’ve also had to adapt the ways they go about their own work. These changes naturally have affected me as well. This book is therefore meant as more than a mere analysis. I hope it can also be an example of the different ways in which scholars trained in the humanities might fruitfully join in the memory battles of a country that is not their own.

The structure of the book reflects this purpose. The first part, consisting of two chapters, dives into the archives for a close look at representations of the Spanish Civil War in the visual media, particularly photography. Susan Sontag famously wrote that the conflict in Spain was the first war to be witnessed (‘covered’) in the modern sense by journalists and filmmakers armed with newly portable cameras (2004, 21). As a result, it spawned an unusually rich visual archive of still and moving images—dramatic, violent, touching—that have long held a particular fascination among scholars and the general public. This interest has surged in the last ten years thanks to the memory movement, the controversy surrounding the archive of the Catalan war photographer Agustí Centelles, and the discovery of the so-called Mexican Suitcase (a long-lost archive holding the almost pristine negatives of thousands of Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour). The Suitcase in particular invites us to reconsider the years of the Spanish Civil War as an extraordinary confluence of three phenomena: an expanding, transnational media and cultural industry; a heightened sense of political engagement and duty in the face of fascism; and a dizzying degree of innovation in the forms and methods of visual production and circulation. The photographic archive of the Spanish Civil War, in which even the apparently most documentary images underwent some form of manipulation, confronts us with fundamental questions about history, memory, and truth. I explore these questions by tracing how particular images acquired different meanings and different kinds of value as they circulated through newspapers, magazines, and montages. Rather than understanding these images through a set of binary categories—modernism versus realism, avant-garde versus middlebrow, journalism versus propaganda—I suggest it makes more sense to focus on the points of tension, interaction, and overlap.

The two chapters that make up the book’s second part revisit a series of debates that took the Spanish public sphere by storm in the first years of the new millennium. What is the function of academic historians, given the still unsettled and controversial nature of the narratives and legacies associated with the Second Republic, the Civil War, Francoism, and the democratic Transition? How did the grassroots call for the recovery of historical memory push academic experts to reconsider their work and public role? How did historians relate to the victim, the witness, the judge, and the citizen activist? While some of the debate’s terms may seem outdated—with historians making un-ironic claims to objective truth, for instance—they are worth analyzing because they are wielded in ongoing struggles over authority, power, and prestige.

Next, breaking up my monologue, I speak with five practicing historians of Spain (Chapter 4) as well as a social anthropologist, a documentary filmmaker, a war photographer, and a citizen activist (Chapter 5). How has their work shaped the history and memory of the Spanish Civil War? And how have developments over the past fifteen years compelled them to rethink their role? Do they feel a tension between the demands of rigor and objectivity and the need for political or social commitment?

The fourth section of the book shifts to intellectual history with review essays on three polemical texts by Andrés Trapiello, Gregorio Morán, and Antonio Muñoz Molina on the role of Spanish intellectuals during the war, in the period 1962–1996, and over the past decade. The Spanish Civil War deeply politicized Spanish culture. It also produced a split—or a series of forking paths—in the country’s histories of art, literature, and ideas. During the war, some intellectuals chose sides and some remained neutral. After the war, thousands of writers, academics, artists, and professionals went into exile while others stayed in Franco’s Spain. How to articulate the relation between the bodies of work of these disparate and dispersed populations is a challenge for historians of Spanish literature and culture. How should political considerations—such as the changing positions adopted by writers vis-à-vis the Franco regime, liberalism, the monarchy, Communism, or the idea of national reconciliation—figure into these narratives? Can and should cultural historians avoid moral or political judgments?

If Parts 2, 3, and 4 deal with the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath as a problem for cultural or political historians, the last section considers how narrative fiction might serve to connect the past with the present. After a brisk overview of the Spanish Civil War novel since 1936, I look at a handful of recent examples. Writing about the war and the dictatorship, I argue, has turned into an affiliative act in which authors place themselves in a political line of descent and invite their readers to join them. Toward the end of this section, I investigate some common assumptions in Spanish memory studies. Literary analysis, I argue, does not always allow us to make broad