In recent years, an important volume has appeared with works dealing in whole or in part with the Spanish post-war period. The realm of the Civil War was shifted to the period immediately following, cementing the vision of a new phase much more complex than that set out in its founding narrative. A post-infinite war emerges from literature and history, as before in the cinema or in comics. The long period of a broken and failed country occupies our collective imagination, if it ever left it.
The reasons for this phenomenon are not unique and, as Tony Judt pointed out in Postwar, lies in a general need to reconstruct family memory over official history. The past serves to oblige us to rediscover ourselves and comfort us with our society. The difference on this point is essential to understand the Spanish post-war boom, because in our case we are still searching for common memories.
A woman suffering from tuberculosis flees under an improvised canvas in Barcelona in 1951. Hulton Deutsch Collection (Corbi
The desire for a common starting point seeks to make up for the shortcomings of a story that necessarily ends in dictatorship as collapse or in transition as redemption, logical outcomes of a phase in which we have lost our way, the epicenter as a society. Therefore, ways are sought that build bridges to the knowledge of a past that we continue without wanting to look into its face. Twin stories silenced by hunger and tragedy. And for censorship. Decades of archival research sifting through mountains of paper have brought to light a deluge of sources and endless questions. A return, a search for the Grail, for a lost world that has been forbidden for years and that is ultimately only possible through books.
From the dawn of democracy, the study of civil war eclipsed everything else, forcing the vision of a backward and violent past. Our history was a struggle of consecutive civil wars. For example, his greatest challenge at the beginning of the 1980s was still the debate, the war of numbers, to overcome the fraternal and violent nature of the Spaniards. The local and regional research funded by the new regional cultural institutions continued to focus on victim counting as a basis for commemoration or commemoration events. They maintained a history of the two Spains that had to be equated to overcome, but above all not to harm anyone. There was a need to heal, forget and look to the future. A discourse that originated in the Franco regime and was adopted during the fall of the Wall and maintained in the academic world for decades. It was the time of moral condemnation of a violent past that in reality explained nothing. Nobody wanted to complicate their life with such a sensitive issue.
Novelists like Martínez de Pisón or Trapiello specify the heroic story in their new books
This more or less given script is respected to this day, although it is no longer applied as a universal rule for understanding the immediate post-war period. Research and comparative studies have successfully explored these other routes back in time. Readings that seemed impossible just a few years ago set the tone. Castillos de fuego (Seix Barral), the novel by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, is perhaps the latest warning that the distance separating both worlds, war and post-war, was only artificial. A choral drama about fear and loneliness before a society sunk and divided by the tragedy of the worst civil war. nothing more than the heroic memory of the time promoted just a decade ago. Its characters wander through the permanent imprisonment that Spanish society of winners and losers has become.
An oppressive climate, restored by a flood of archival images that also nourish Madrid 1945. The Night of the Four Ways (Destiny) by Andrés Trapiello. As a continuation of a work started 20 years ago, it shows the futility of suffering from the opposite perspective, from hiding and its ongoing destruction by Franco’s General Directorate of Security. Who would have thought that the councils of war, so despised until recently, would become an inexhaustible source for reconstructing our recent history?
The indelible mark that these years left on several generations, the trauma of those children who heard horrible stories in a low voice, was transformed into a kind of creative writing in which their own experience appears as real group therapy. Those ancient whispers come to life in a shared read against the hatred that permeates our days. History books arrived at the same understanding from different angles, clarifying a new post-war planimetry.
A generation of young historians, with a renewed methodology and continued commitment, is working on a set of hypotheses that have little or nothing to do with the historiographical framework of the 1980s. A look that leaves behind the lamentations about the end of the war, the biographies or the political memories that for a long time filled the political edifice of a post-war period that is meaningless today.
The city appears as a vast universe created, growing and expanding through pain. From La colmena to Tiempo de silencio, Madrid, the city of a million dead for which Dámaso Alonso bled in Hijos de la ira, remains an inexhaustible historical scene. After the siege, the heroic republican Madrid, the capital of glory that Juan Eduardo Zúñiga described, without a solution of continuity, it became the great metropolis of fascism. The work of Pablo del Hierro Madrid. (Neo)Fascist Metropolis (Crítica), which chronologically dates back to the early 1980s, analyzes from the bottom up the successive layers, from architecture to political and financial networks, that made possible this momentous step hand in hand with post-war neo-fascism . The goal is not to understand victory, which would be more of an endpoint, but to understand post-war reconstruction and the consolidation of the dictatorship itself. A dual process promoted by the greatest repressive efforts in contemporary Spain, which cannot be understood without the specific weight these networks had within the families of a regime already officially run by “technicians”. Although there is nothing left of it in public space today, it has left many traces in the urban, economic and social landscape of the capital.
An underground analysis that Daniel Oviedo also uses in El enemigo a las puertas (Comares), a detailed study of the accusatory practices and denunciations that shaped the war and the post-war period. Its great virtue, its enormous difficulty, is to transform a painstaking work on the figure of the informer, the gatekeeper, into a sustained effort to seek survival and power within the popular classes. A need that Baroja already noticed in life on the edge of the early 20th century and that reached its limits in the 1930s and 1940s. A book that starts from the need, common in the historiography of other countries, to assess the breaks and continuities both in coercive apparatuses and in denunciations and other accusatory practices beyond purely dictatorial periods.
The symbol of the Falange and the word Deutschland illuminated at the headquarters of the Movement’s General Secretariat in Madrid in 1943 to mark the fourth anniversary of the end of the Civil War. Wolfgang Weber (ullstein bild / (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
The collaboration, the deep relationship with the Axis came from afar; In reality, it started from a map that is like us, bringing us closer to similar processes across the European scenario. So far the history of Spanish fascism has remained linked to the ephemeral blue phase of Francoism; Stage obliterated and blurred, like the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy or the Roman salute, as the Allies advanced on all fronts. Marco da Costa in Nazi Spain. Chronicle of an Ideological and Intellectual Collaboration, 1931-1945 (Taurus), analyzes this relationship on an intellectual level. Like the previous works, it uses a range of documentary evidence to examine the origins of a relationship that could not be mentioned and was subsequently banned. That had never happened before. Beyond the ideological borrowings or adaptations of political language that we knew and promoted above all by the almighty Serrano Suñer, the author dives into the black and deep waters of national spirits, through a totalitarian dream more deeply rooted than usual. who appeared to be behind the ideological facade of an inherently anti-political regime.
Up until the German defeat at Stalingrad, Franco’s Spain was clearly pro-Hitler.
One of the great insights of this work is showing that Franco’s Spain was clearly more pro-Hitler than pro-Nazi until the German defeat at Stalingrad. From that point on, a new situation began, in which the Spanish regime adopted other ideological denominations, such as “organic democracy”, which would allow it to survive in post-war Europe, showing its neutrality at all costs and trying to forget those Cooperation with the Axis. A wash of images carried out by the same intelligentsia that, just a few years earlier, had proudly assumed responsibility for disseminating National Socialist ideology in the press and science of the time.
A role played by journalism and counter-revolutionary, Falangist and traditionalist intelligentsia, able to create their own scapegoats to assimilate the ideology of the Third Reich in Spain through literature and thought within the same framework of the thirties and forties , to interpret and to disseminate. A cleansing, a cleansing that could be prolonged and deepened through the cleansing of teaching and the university world. Especially for those who, thanks to the Study Extension Committee, had lived with that German scientific environment that ensured normality, from the most diverse areas, such as racial politics, the legal defense of the community or the destruction of the Inner Enemy, the rise and consolidation of National Socialism. A relationship that became more than close in the vast tactical and technological testing ground that the Spanish War opened up for Hitler’s plans.
The history of Spain taught in class does not fully address these and other aspects that recent research has demonstrated. The traditional version of the story has cracked, but it hasn’t completely changed. Internalizing these changes requires confronting an inherited family memory of which we are in fact completely unaware. At least up to my generation, it was common and commonplace to hear that “it wasn’t talked about back then”. Little by little, interest has grown over time and many gaps related to the post-war period and daily life during the dictatorship have been filled.
Interior detail of the book “Madrid, 1945” by Andrés Trapiello. Special Information No. 48 Crimes Against State Security.Editorial Destino
Through a story lined up with the least painful or least interesting of the official versions, we committed ourselves to a story without really knowing anything about our past together. That may have been the ultimate price for forgetting, but it wasn’t the only one. The landscape has changed, but the post-war era is still completely unknown to most of us. In all areas, both public and private, a reinvention of the past was imposed, the consequences of which are still latent today.
Poor memory is not just a contemporary evil, it is universal and, as post-war Spain shows, contains an element of social survival. When all that chaotic past resurfaces in the present in interesting ways, societies succumb and return to their place of origin, to their deepest tragedies. His analysis took many decades to get back to the light of the sources and historical knowledge. A world that, regrettably until now, has not yet been examined out of its own context and is still teetering between reckoning and liberating its protagonists’ consciences. As true and disinterested as their testimonies were, they had no intention of analyzing their time but, in hindsight, to rank it in their favor. As Delibes warned, the wars of our ancestors destroy societies, shape their images, their memories and shape the post-war period. Its remains appear on the surface today.
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo is a historian. Author of books such as “The Internal Exile” or “Human Geography of Franco’s Oppression”.
Ignacio Martinez de Pison
Seix Barral, 2023
704 pages. 22.90 euros
Andres Trapiello
Destiny, 2022
512 pages. €23.90
Iron Paul
Flashback, 2023
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Daniel Oviedo Silva
Comares, 2023
340 pages. €31.35
Marco da Costa
Taurus, 2023
648 pages. €23.65
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