scholarly journals Prison Letters: Spain Confronts Its Past

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB80-LWFB87
Author(s):  
Martyn Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Face

In post-Franco Spain, the families of the regime’s victims, as well as other republican supporters, have not only struggled to recover the bodies of victims of the repression, but also have tried to recover a lost historical memory after years of imposed silence. Véronica Sierra Blas’s new study of Franco’s prisoners (there were approximately 280,000 of them) aims to give recognition and some human dignity to their obscure fate. This article offers a critical discussion of her study of a corpus of about 1500 letters written by prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist repression. They include petitions to the authorities, messages secretly smuggled out of jail, and the ‘chapel letters’ written by condemned prisoners on the eve of their execution. Many of the latter were designed to be made public for propaganda purposes. This article suggests that as those condemned to execution reviewed their lives, their final farewells constituted a form of life writing in the face of certain death.

scholarly journals Unrecovered objects: Narratives of dispossession, slow violence and survival in the investigation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-446
Author(s):  
Layla Renshaw
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Mass Grave ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.

scholarly journals Studies on Anticlericalism in Contemporary Spain

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Pérez Ledesma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Spain

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

scholarly journals International Academic Conference Soviet-Spanish Relations during the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1939 (Moscow, 12–14 September, 2018)

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-150
Author(s):  
Екатерина Гранцева ◽  
Ekaterina Granceva
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
World History ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Academic Conference ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In September 2018, the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of World History, together with MGIMO of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, ADAR and the Association of Russian Diplomats, the Council of War and Labor Veterans, arranged the International Academic Conference Soviet-Spanish Relations during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. The participants discussed documentary evidence and the most crucial issues related to the study of this period, as well as preservation of historical memory in Russia and Spain.

scholarly journals Federico García Lorca : el 75 aniversario de su muerte

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Eszter Katona
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Birth Date ◽  
Federico Garcia Lorca ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
The Family ◽  
Almost All

The anniversary of Federico Garría Lorca's death and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War is closely intertwined in the Spanish public awareness. The poet's birth date is equally an important date in the his toy of the Iberian nation, as Spain has lost its last colonies in 1898. Besides these two memorable dates, we also have to highlight 2007, when the Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica) was enacted, aiming to rehabilitate the victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime. This measure has launched such an avalanche on Spanish public life, that affected almost all the society in some way. The family of Garcia Lorca also had to take a commitment as the resting place of their world-famous relative was still unknown. In addition to the identification of the body of the dead poet, Lorca's homosexuality is a constant topic in literary and historical arríes. Today, Spanish society accepts the sexual orientation of the poet, but it remains disputed whether it had a real effec t on Lorca's poetry. Lorca's Hungarian popularity began in 1947 when Gypsy Ballads was issued then the premier of Bernarda in 1955, and has remained unbroken ever since. In connection with this year's anniversary, this study aims to present these three topics — the location of Lorca's resting place, Lorca's homosexuality, Lorca's reception in Hungary.

No Barrier Can Contain It

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Mae Lambe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Cuban Government ◽  
The Face ◽  
General Strike ◽  
At Home

Vividly recasting Cuba’s politics in the 1930s as transnational, Ariel Mae Lambe has produced an unprecendented reimagining of Cuban activism during an era previously regarded as a lengthy, defeated lull. In this period, many Cuban activists began to look at their fight against strongman rule and neocolonial control at home as part of the international antifascism movement that exploded with the Spanish Civil War. Frustrated by multiple domestic setbacks, including Colonel Fulgencio Batista’s violent crushing of a massive general strike, activists found strength in the face of repression by refusing to view their political goals as confined to the island. As individuals and in groups, Cubans from diverse backgrounds and political stances self-identified as antifascists and moved, both physically and symbolically, across borders and oceans, cultivating networks and building solidarity for a New Spain and a New Cuba. They believed that it was through these ostensibly foreign fights that they would achieve economic and social progress for their nation. Indeed, Cuban antifascism was such a strong movement, Lambe argues, that it helps to explain the surprisingly progressive turn that Batista and the Cuban government took at the end of the decade, including the establishment of a new constitution and presidential elections.

Postscript

2019 ◽  
pp. 207-220
Author(s):  
Ariel Mae Lambe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Fidel Castro ◽  
The 1950S

Taking a longer-term view, the postscript examines the legacy of antifascism and the Spanish Civil War in Cuban politics and historical memory during the early years of the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959. The postscript returns to Teté Casuso during the struggle of the 1950s, when she helped Fidel Castro, and afterward, when she broke with the Revolution and left once again for exile in the United States. It addresses selective memory and forgetting of Cuban antifascists such as Casuso in revolutionary Cuba’s official accounts of antifascism and the Generation of the Thirties. Also, it connects Cuban antifascism to the present by discussing the Antifa movement across time and space.

scholarly journals Spanish Literature and the Recovery of Historical Memory

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
José M. González
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Of

This article analyses the recovery of the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War in the last decade, after so many years of silence, forgetfulness and oblivion. Four points are developed: first, how this recovery is achieved by the civil society in general and by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in particular. Secondly, there is a brief allusion to the quarrel between historians and philosophers about the place of memory and remembrance for the construction of the history of Spain. Thirdly, a reference to the recent Historical Memory Law is made, and finally there is a point about the important role played by literature in recovering the memory of many painful facts of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship from the point of view of the victims.

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