Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War

PA L G R AV E S T U D I E S I N C U LT U R A L H E R I TA G E A N D C O N F L I C T

PUBLIC HUMANITIES AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR C O N N E C T E D A N D C O N T E ST E D H I STO R I E S

E d i t e d b y A l i s o n R i b e i ro d e M e n e z e s , Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict Series Editors Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Britt Baillie Centre for Urban Conflicts Research University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts. Dr. Ihab Saloul is associate professor of cultural studies, founder and research vice-director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at University of Amsterdam. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conflict and trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), and Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Conflict and War at VU University Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence. Dr. Britt Baillie is a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a research fellow at the University of Pretoria. Baillie’s interests include the politicization of cultural heritage, heritage and the city, memory and identity, religion and conflict, t­ heories of destruction, heritage as commons, contested heritage, and urban resistance. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez Adrian Shubert Editors

Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War Connected and Contested Histories

Editors Alison Ribeiro de Menezes University of Warwick Coventry, UK

Adrian Shubert York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez Trent University Peterborough, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-319-97273-2 ISBN 978-3-319-97274-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950732 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: B&M Noskowski/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the conference out of which this book arises in Barcelona in June 2016. We are likewise grateful to Memorial Democràtic for hosting our event and welcoming us warmly. Joan Maria Thomàs provided constant support and advice, for which we extend our thanks. Barbara Molas kindly helped with indexing this volume. Finally, we thank all our authors for their contributions and support for our wider ambition of establishing a virtual museum of the Spanish Civil War.

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Contents

1

Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War 1 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

2

Sites Without Memory and Memory Without Sites: On the Failure of the Public History of the Spanish Civil War 19 Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert

3

The Spanish Civil War Archive and the Construction of Memory 45 Jesús Espinosa Romero

4

The Historical Memory Records Center: A Museum for Memory and the Recent History of Spain 69 Manuel Melgar Camarzana

5

Museums and Material Memories of the Spanish Civil War: An Archaeological Critique 93 Alfredo González-Ruibal

6

The Necropolitics of Spain’s Civil War Dead 115 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

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Thinking Outside the Grave: The Material Traces of Republican Lives Before the Spanish Civil War 139 Layla Renshaw

8

Visualizing Mass Grave Recovery: Ritual, Digital Culture and Geographic Information Systems 163 Wendy Perla Kurtz

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Digitally Mediated Memory and the Spanish Civil War 189 Paul Spence

10 The Spanish Civil War in the Classroom: From Absence to Didactic Potential 217 Maria Feliu-Torruella 11 Veiling and Exhuming the Past: Conflict and Post-conflict Challenges 239 Jordi Palou-Loverdos Final Reflections: The Way Forward 267 Index 271

Notes

on

Contributors

Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez is Professor of History at Trent University, Canada. He has specialized in the Franco dictatorship, mostly on Social and Cultural History of the period. Lately, he has also worked on Historical Memory and Digital Humanities. Among his most relevant works are: (ed.) Las cartas a Franco de los españoles de a pié (Barcelona, 2014); Franco: The Biography of the Myth (Oxon/New York, 2013); Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain (1936–1975) (Oxford, 2009); (ed.) Condenado a muerte (1939–1941) (Valencia, 2006); and Las políticas de la Victoria: la consolidación del Nuevo Estado Franquista, 1938–1953 (Madrid, 2000). Maria Feliu-Torruella holds a degree in Art History from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and a doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Barcelona, where she is currently a lecturer in Education. Her research centres on the intersections between education, heritage and patrimony, and she is a member of the DIDPATRI research group. She is an adviser for the Museum of the History of Cataluña. Alfredo González-Ruibal is an archaeologist with the Institute of Heritage Studies of the Spanish National Research Council. His research deals with the archaeology of the contemporary past, with a particular focus on the materiality of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. He has conducted archaeological research in trenches, battlefields, prisons, concentration camps and monuments. He is the author of Returning to the Trenches: An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil ix

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War (Madrid, 2016, in Spanish), an account of the war and the early dictatorship based on their material remains. Wendy Perla Kurtz holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores the performative aspects of mourning practices represented in textual and visual media pertaining to the current disinterment and reburial of mass graves from the Franco dictatorship. Wendy also earned a graduate certificate in the Digital Humanities from UCLA, and her research, teaching and project work demonstrate her commitment to using digital technologies to enrich scholarship. As a Research and Instructional Technology Consultant at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, Wendy has helped design and manage digital research and pedagogy projects for faculty and students. Manuel Melgar Camarzana  holds a degree in Geography and History from the University of Salamanca (1989). He is a civil servant of the Facultative Body of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists (Archives Section) since 1997. Having served at the Military Archive of Ávila as Technical Director, since 2010 he has worked the Historical Memory Records Center, first as Director of the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War and later as Director of the Center. He has also given courses and lectures related to military archives, sources for the study of repression and Francoism, access to contemporary records and, more recently, on archives and memory, and archives and human rights. His publications have covered contemporary records of the Military Archive of Ávila, archives and the memory of Francoism, and the Salamanca archive as memory resource. Jordi Palou-Loverdos is an Associate lawyer at Il•lustres Col•legis de l’Advocacia de Barcelona (Barcelona Bar Association) and registered at Consejo General de la Abogacía Española (General Council of Spanish Law Attorneys). He is accredited before the International Criminal Court (The Hague, Netherlands), and an attorney at the International Criminal Bar (The Hague, Netherlands). He has been Visiting Professor at Rutgers State University of New Jersey, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. A member of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, he is also a founding board member of the International Criminal Justice Commission of ICAB. He has been awarded the Valors Prize by the Il•lustres Col•legis d’Advocats de

Notes on Contributors   

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Catalunya 2015 (Catalonia Bar Association), for his contribution to universal justice, mediation and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Layla Renshaw  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied and Human Sciences at Kingston University. Her research interests include the role of archaeology in post-conflict investigations, the relationship between human remains and traumatic memory, and public and media perceptions of forensics. She trained with the United Nation’s International Criminal Tribunal for former-Yugoslavia, working on the exhumation and identification of war victims in postwar Kosovo. She has also worked in a consultative capacity for a number of UK police constabularies, working on human identification. She has conducted extensive research on the impact of the recent exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, publishing her findings in the monograph, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. Recent research concerns the recovery and commemoration of Australian and British World War I soldiers from Fromelles, Northern France, concentrating on the process of human identification, genetic testing, and the engagement of relatives in this process. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is founding Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on cultural memory in Spain, Portugal and Southern Cone Latin America. Previous books include Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (Tamesis, 2005), A Companion to Carmen Martín Gatie (with Catherine O’Leary, Tamesis, 2008), and Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has been awarded research funding by the Irish Research Council, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Union. Jesús Espinosa Romero has a degree in Modern History (UAM) and an M.B.A. in Cultural Management (USAL). An archivist, he has worked in various Spanish state institutions as well as on digital projects such as PARES and APE. He was Director of the Archivo de la Guerra Civil Española from 2013 to 2017, and is now Deputy Director of the Archivo General de la Administración. His research has focused on the history of Madrid and recently the role of the archives during Francoism and the beginning of democracy in Spain, as well as on archives as instruments to create public memory.

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Adrian Shubert is University Professor of History at York University. His books include A Social History of Modern Spain, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight, and Espartero, el Pacificador, a biography of the Spanish military and political figure Baldomero Espartero (1793–1879). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Killam Research Fellowship, and his work has been recognized by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his decoration by King Juan Carlos of Spain with the Order of Civil Merit. Paul Spence is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College, London. His research has covered four areas: digital textual scholarship, digital publishing, digital humanities pedagogy and global perspectives on digitally mediated knowledge production. He has led and managed digital humanities research on a number of major interdisciplinary projects, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AHRC, JISC, Leverhulme Trust and various European funding agencies. He is part of a multi-institutional team that was awarded £3 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2016 for the four-year ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’ project, which examines ‘how learning a language affords greater cultural understanding of the world through the multilingual and multicultural lens of Iberian languages, empires and contact zones’.

Acronyms

ADIF Administración de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias (Railway Infrastructure Administration) AFARE Comisión Administradora de los Fondos para el Auxilio de los Republicanos Españoles (Administrative Committee of the Spanish Republican Relief Fund) AGA Archivo General de la Administración or Central Administration Archive AGMA Archivo General Militar Avila (General Military Archive in Ávila) AHN Archivo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Archive) ARMH Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) CDMH Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory Records Center) CIFE Centro de Investigación y Formación Feminista (The Centre for Feminist Research and Training) COMEBE Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la Batalla de l’Ebre (The Memorial Consortium of the Spaces of the Battle of the Ebro) DERD Delegación Del Estado Para La Recuperación de Documentos (State Delegation for the Recovery of Records) DGS Dirección General de Seguridad (Directorate-General of Security) DNSD Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales Spanish (National Delegation of Documentary Services) EHRI European Holocaust Research Infrastructure EPL Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Liberation Army) EPR Eglise Presbytérienne au Rwanda (Presbyterian Church in Rwanda) ETA Euskadi Ta Askatasuna xiii

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Acronyms

FARC Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) FEDIP Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (The Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Internees) FET-JONS La Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET y de las JONS) FPR/EPR Front Patriotique Rwandais (Rwandan Patriotic Front) GIS Geographic Information Systems ICC International Criminal Court Statute ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia JARE Junta de Auxilio de los Republicanos Españoles (Spanish Republican Aid Board) LERU League of European Research Universities MIT Ministerio de Información y Turismo (Ministry of Information and Tourism) NPR National Parks Service OHCHR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights OIPA Oficina de Información y Propaganda Anticomunista (Anticommunist Information and Propaganda Office) PARES Portal de Archivos Españoles (The Spanish Archives Portal) PNV Partido Nacionalist Vasco (Basque Nationalist Party) PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) REF (UK) Research Excellence Framework RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army SIPM Servicio de Información y Policía Militar (Military Police and Information Service) TNA UK National Archives UC-ELN Unión Camiliast—Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Camilista Union—National Liberation Army) UN United Nations

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Ruins of Belchite (photograph the author) Street signs in new Belchite (photograph the author) Street signs in new Belchite (photograph the author) Ruins of Rodén with viaduct, seen from the site of the Bronze-Age settlement (photograph the author) Fuendetodos with unfinished modern construction of the Museum of Contemporary Engraving to the right (photograph the author) Abandoned monument in Franco’s headquarters in Coll del Moro. These unprepossessing monuments built during the dictatorship are typical of Spanish battlefields Objects without provenance from the Museum of Gandesa The professionally-designed museum of Elgeta Museum of Abánades Everyday objects from the trenches, with no indication of provenance or side to which they belonged at the private collection “La Trinxera” in Corbera d’Ebre One of the pillboxes recently restored by the autonomous government of Madrid in the so-called “Water Front” (because it surrounded the reservoirs that supplied the capital) “Mapa de fosas,” Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Justicia “Fosses i Repressió,” Generalitat de Catalunya

10 12 13 14 15 98 101 103 104 107 111 178 180

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Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5

“Visor de fosas de Navarra,” Gobierno de Navarra 181 “Las víctimas en fosas del franquismo,” El Diario.es 181 Virtual Cartographies, Wendy Perla Kurtz: www.virtualcartographies.com 183 Fig. 11.1 Transitional Justice Processes 242

CHAPTER 1

Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

Reaching Out For some years now, researchers in the United Kingdom have had to consider ways of bringing their scholarship to a wider audience than the narrow world of academia.1 A concern for what is termed public engagement (or impact in the idiosyncratic, distorted and distorting formulation of the Research Excellence Framework) is not, however, unique to the UK. Elsewhere, an interest in public humanities and public history represents a similar shift toward a belief that the academy can and should contribute to the cultural and intellectual life of the communities in which it is located and/or about which it writes. This is often allied to economic justifications of value or arguments around transparency in

1 Much

ink has been spilled on this topic, but see, for example, Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jonathan Bate, The Public Value of the Humanities (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

A. Ribeiro de Menezes (*)  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_1

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public spending.2 If there is, at times, a certain defensiveness in arguments that stress the public value of the humanities, there is also a constructive dimension to those that seek to expose the consequences of devaluing the contribution of the humanities, particularly in contexts where complex social and ethical issues are not easily resolved. As Peter Brooks argues in his exploration of the perceived crisis of the humanities in Anglo-American higher education, the crisis may truly lie elsewhere, in the marginalization of humanistic thought and analysis.3 Nevertheless, Judith Butler has pointed out that it is difficult not to respond to critiques of the irrelevance of the humanities with arguments that rely upon the same instrumentalist approach that is used to denigrate their contribution. She asks pointedly if instrumentality is the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference.4 A further problem lies in the fact that defenses of the humanities may appeal to their supposed ethical contribution, which is not always easy to identify or demonstrate. Characterizing humanities approaches as ethical practices—that is, practices of reading, interpretation, and engagement with the other—is Brooks’ answer.5 And yet this raises further concerns. If the act of teaching and discussing is taken to be a ventriloquizing of the other’s voice and position, as he suggests, then this act may involve not only the potential usurping of the voice of the other, but at the very least its refraction through the voice and vision of the teacher-as-ventriloquist. The researcher and teacher are both interpreters, and as such cannot be entirely neutral; here, ventriloquism is not mere transfer as if through a loudspeaker, but involves the reshaping of material via its communication to another in a particular context, and perhaps influenced by a particular academic hierarchy or power relationship. This is not to say that intellectual endeavor is inherently and only ideological; but it is to note that the positionality of the researcher affects the engagement with his or her material, and hence its presentation to students or readers. Indeed, if one were to follow the logic of impact 2 Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (New Haven, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17. 3 Peter Brooks, “Introduction,” in his edited volume, The Humanities and Public Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2. 4 Judith Butler, “Ordinary, Incredulous” in Brooks, The Humanities and Public Life, 15–38 (29). 5 Brooks, “Introduction,” 11.

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as outlined in the UK REF context, researcher positionality and perhaps even potential bias is one problematic dimension. The extent to which research impact, according to this agenda, truly engages with the subjects that it aims to have an impact upon (not to mention those—the likely the subjects of the original study—about whom impact outcomes are gathered and conveyed), rather than using them as instruments in Butler’s sense, ought to be a focus of ethical discussion and not just measurement strategies.6 In my experience, researchers engaged in impact as part of the UK REF exercise do not generally resort to strategies to engineer results, and genuinely believe in the value of establishing a dialogue with a wider audience than a purely academic one. One might prefer to call this public engagement, understood as an unquantified, softer version of impact. Furthermore, researchers’ intellectual contribution may well challenge current practice, in which case the policy impact of their research is not only hard to quantify but harder to achieve in the first place. Something of the same muddiness that occurs when intellectual endeavor encounters various readerships and publics lies behind Ralph J. Hexter’s discussion, from the perspective of the university administrator, of the difficulties of what he calls corporate reading, in which a collaborative and consultative approach to the formulation of institutional or corporate policy may lead, unwittingly, to the distortion and concealment of partisan or ethical positions.7 There is no more space in UK impact case study narratives for ethical self-reflection than there is in institutional policy statements. But what ought to be at stake, I would argue, is not so much the value of the humanities as their contribution—both as disciplines and as ways of engaging in intellectual endeavor—to current and future societal and cultural scenarios. This at least has the merit of evading consequentialist forms of justification.8 A focus on the process 6 Elenore Belfiore notes this in “‘Impact’, ‘Value’ and ‘Bad Economics’: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanities,” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14, no. 1 (2015), 95–110 (99). 7 Ralph J. Hexter, “Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator” in Brooks, The Humanities and Public Life, 83–91 (87). 8 Small, The Value of the Humanities, 6. As Gabriel Moshenska points out with regard to “public archeology,” the public dimension rarely in fact originates with the public; see “Contested Pasts and Community Archeologies: Public Engagement in the Archeology of Modern Conflict,” in Europe’s Deadly Century: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Conflict

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of contributing highlights a relationship of engagement and exchange rather than the fabrication of an instrumentally measurable end product. Without wishing to promote mysticism as a means of evading solid analysis, my position is perhaps akin to Paul W. Kahn’s when he outlines the contribution of the humanities as follows: The making of an interpretation—which can only be answered by another interpretation, in a potentially endless conversation—needs to be judged not only on its product but on how it is carried out. A belief in human dignity must be based not in sympathy for the suffering of others but in the shared mystery of human creativity.9

By bringing issues of dignity and of a shared creativity into the discussion, Kahn removes the one-way framing of impact (which measures effects upon certain individuals or groups), as well as the economic discourse underpinning value, while retaining a sense that both researcher and subject may be transformed by an exchange that should be conducted respectfully and reciprocally, with self-awareness of what is at stake in the encounter. The pressure to engage wider publics with academic research and intellectual debate is not, of course, necessarily detrimental to the humanities. David Cooper notes that the effect of the heavily introverted theorizing of the late twentieth century within cultural studies was to seal off the discipline from outside engagement: New culture critics can brilliantly deconstruct politics and power out of just about every text and every “artifact” of “cultural production.” Meanwhile they have very little to communicate to the larger public.10

This marooning of academic insight and critical intellect in a doldrums, worlds apart from the agitations of democratic culture and the felt public

Heritage, ed. Robin Page, Neil Forbes, and Guillermo Pérez (Swindon: English Heritage, 2009), 73–79 (73). 9 Paul W. Kahn, “On Humanities and Human Rights” in Brooks, The Humanities and Public Life, 116–22 (116). 10 David Cooper, Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life (East Lancing, MI: Michigan State University, 2014), 159.

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sphere, is productive neither for the humanities nor for civil society.11 I say this in full acknowledgment that how we might define and shape such terms as humanities, public sphere and civil society, as well as possible contributions to a public good, is far from universally agreed. Nevertheless, that does not disqualify humanities scholars from addressing particular problems, especially if self-reflexiveness around researcher positionality is brought to bear on the discussion. Standardly, academic research appeals to objectivity, though not always in full recognition that this is, as Thomas Nagel puts it, a method of understanding and thus a means by which the researcher positions him or herself in relation to the subject or field examined.12 This would seem to fly in the face of the decades of postmodern skepticism in which I and my generation of cultural studies scholars were trained; and yet, Nagel is right to argue that radical skepticism does not vitiate the pursuit of objectivity when this is understood as a method with advantages and limitations.13 Indeed, both González-Ruibal and Spence argue, in their chapters in this book, for the need for contextualized understandings of the past in the physical display and digital dissemination of Civil War artifacts, documents, and materials.

Engaging Constructively How, then, might one begin to think through the contribution of the Humanities with regard to contentious and contested issues about which there is little agreement, and which are therefore approached in subjective ways? The Spanish Civil War is an excellent example with which to consider the contribution of the humanities, and particularly history, to civic debate, as Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert argue in Chapter 2 below. The role of historians in uncovering silenced aspects of Spain’s past has been complemented recently by a plethora of cultural interventions, and perhaps most movingly of all, a heightened 11 Cooper,

Learning in the Plural, 156. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. One might also include here the work of Karan Barad, although she somewhat overestimates the longevity of the linguistic turn, which had already been left behind in cultural studies by the turn of the millennium. See her “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs, 28, no. 3 (2003), 802–31. 13 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 7. 12 Thomas

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focus on archeological work, particularly forensic archaeology. In Spain at present, the materiality of the country’s contentious past is very much to the fore with mass grave excavations and exhumations that have brought society into direct contact with the physical legacies of historical violence, as Layla Renshaw notes in her chapter. At the same time, paradoxically, these physical traces have served to signal enormous lacunae in Spain’s historical memory rather than to provide definitive knowledge of that past. In a sense, the void of the missing body has come to represent also a void in knowledge and understanding. We rightly hold enormous reverence for the material traces of the past, not least when they involve human remains. We also revere documents, objects, and other material traces of the past to an extent that we perhaps less readily acknowledge. Nevertheless, in Spain, even archives are contentious, as two contributions to this volume make clear: Jesús Espinosa Romero’s history of the Civil War Archive in Salamanca, and Manuel Melgar Camarzana’s analysis of its current structure and displays. There is, as Emily Robinson has noted, a deeply affective side to historical work,14 and yet historians are sometimes reluctant to turn attention to their own relationship to the past in the way that cultural scholars have begun to do.15 Historical research is emotive and tactile; the researcher experiences not simply the Benjaminian aura of the document as rescued and preserved object, but the tactile nature of engagement with that object as a talisman in the present. Hence Robinson rightly asks, what is the role of touching and feeling in the pursuit of knowing?16 This is particularly important not simply for the more traditional figure of the historian rummaging in the archive that Robinson discusses, but in light of the cultural turn to affect in the context of the increased commodification of history as heritage. History is, as Jerome de Groot argues, a socially constructed and consumed entity.17 And museums are perhaps a bellwether of shifting perceptions of the role of history in society, making their focus on visitor experience, interactivity, 14 Emily Robinson, “Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible,” Rethinking History 14, no. 4 (2010), 503–20 (504). 15 An excellent example is Rebecca Schneider’s, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 16 Robinson, “Touching the Void,” 508. 17 Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 5.

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and edutainment all the more significant in the present context.18 Not all aspects of this shift can be equated with an increased focus on consumerism. Some of the late twentieth-century shift in museology derives from museums’ increased awareness of the ideological underpinnings of older models, allied to a reflexive interest in the processes of curating and displaying, and a generalized objective of greater enfranchisement of the visitor.19 It is perhaps too easy to fall back on the observation that this risks sentimentalizing the visitor.20 As Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell note, the idea of a “duped” public, consuming a sanitized and consensual national narrative via heritage and museum visiting, underwrote and continues to frame approaches to emotion in heritage and museum studies.21 And yet, in the context of the Spanish Civil War, the intersection between affective responses and contested claims cannot be easily dismissed. Appeals to empathy as a means to trigger a response that engages the imagination in such a way that visitors start to question what they know and understand is as open to misunderstandings and manipulations as an unreflective impact project or Hexter’s corporate document.22 It is perhaps the difficulty of sentiment allied to a lack of objectivity—in Nagel’s sense of a discipline-based, justified method—that leads to the uneasy relationship between heritage and potentially partisan readings of the past in Spain, a concern that Alfredo González-Ruibal raises in Chapter 4 of this book. The question is all the more pertinent if we consider that heritage, monuments and museums often reveal what González-Ruibal calls the bright side of history: monuments, works of art and places of heroic deeds.23 These can be recalibrated if located in the wider landscapes of conflict and topographies of terror to which they 18 De

Groot, Consuming History, 290. Groot, Consuming History, 293. 20 Tony Bennett, “Museums and the People,” in The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, ed. Robert Lumley (London: Routledge, 1988), 63–86 (63). 21 Laurajane Smith, and Gary Campbell, “The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect, and Emotion,” in A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kocktel (Chichester: Wiley, 2016), 443–60 (447). 22 Smith, and Campbell, “The Elephant in the Room,” 450. 23 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Topography of Terror or Cultural Heritage? The Monuments of Franco’s Spain,” in Page, Forbes and Pérez, Europe’s Deadly Century, 65–72 (66). 19 De

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relate. González-Ruibal proposes exactly this for the Valle de los Caídos, by analyzing it in juxtaposition with nearby civil war trenches and forced labor camps. He had proposed a similar plan for the now demolished Carabanchel Prison, through its connection to local battlefields and sites of Francoist repression, in both cases with the aim of producing a critical democratic memory of Spain’s recent past.24 Layla Renshaw extends these insights in the present volume with a call for an extended archaeology that will account for Republican lives before the Civil War rather than remaining fixated on mass graves and their exhumation. Renshaw’s wider perspective reminds us that historical memories are narratives, and that the construction of new memory horizons can lead to unexpected and inadvertent silences. This is a point that I also stress in my own chapter on the shifting necropolitics that have framed collective memories of Spain’s Civil War dead. A vigilant and contextualized reading of historical sites has much to teach us not only about biased versions of the past and dominant historical narratives, but also about our relationship to the past and our approach to memory in the present. Martin Brown refers to this as strange meetings in his study of archaeology of the Western Front in World War I. The landscape that Brown studies represents, variously: a former battlefield, with its craters and trenches; a site of victory, with its monuments and memorials; a source of livelihood for farmers who work the soil; and potential development land, as the controversy of a motorway extension in Belgium has shown.25 Gabriel Moshenska labels sites of this nature “memory arenas,”26 and there are, of course, a multitude in Spain. Belchite, in Aragón, is one such resonant landscape in which the

24 González-Ruibal, “Topography of Terror or Cultural Heritage?” 70–71. The use of forced labor to construct the Valle de los Caídos is discussed in Isaías Lafuente Esclavos por la patria: La explotación de los presos en el franquismo (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2002); Daniel Sueiro, El Valle de los Caídos: Los secretos de la cripta franquista (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2006), but the camps themselves remain unexcavated. 25 Martin Brown, “Strange Meetings: Archeology on the Western Front,” in Page, Forbes and Pérez, Europe’s Deadly Century, 59–64 (60). 26 Moshenska, “Contested Pasts and Community Archeologies,” 77. See also Laura MacAtackney, “The Contemporary Politics of Landscape at the Long Kesh/Maze Prison Site, Northern Ireland,” in Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archeology and Heritage, ed. Dan Hicks, Laura MacAtackney, and Graham Fairclough (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 30–54.

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entanglements of various historical epochs, political upheavals, and the warp and weave of changing daily life and historical memory are evident.

Changing Narratives and Technological Interventions Belchite is a small town to the south of Zaragoza, Aragon, with archeological remains dating from the Roman period and what were once splendid mudéjar constructions. These include the church of San Martín de Tours, which dates from the fifteenth century and saw later modifications in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Torre del Reloj, constructed in the sixteenth century. Nearby is the Santuario de Nuestra Señora del Pueyo, with a mudéjar tower built on the remains of a thirteenth-century church.27 Nevertheless, Belchite—or rather, old Belchite—is best known as a ruin from the Civil War era, standing beside a new town constructed in the postwar period. Belchite, along with its wider environs, the Campo de Belchite, is thus a significant arena of memory, and one that was interpreted as such both during and after the Civil War. Belchite was conquered twice during the War, falling to Republicans in 1937 and being retaken by Nationalists in 1938. That first conquest was part of an offensive by the Popular Army in August 1937 to distract Nationalist forces in the north of Spain by pushing toward Zaragoza. The Popular Army failed to take the provincial capital, but it did seize Belchite after a ferocious fourteen-day battle that included house-tohouse and hand-to-hand fighting.28 In March 1938, the Nationalists would regain control of the town, with a promise from Franco that on these ruins of Belchite a beautiful new town would be built in homage to her unequaled heroism.29 Belchite was raised to the status of myth, and the ruins came to symbolize Republican destruction and Nationalist heroism. This narrative, of course, disguised the reality of the war and postwar in the region: the waves of repression that Belchite suffered at the 27 The old town has been recognized as a Bien de Interés Cultural; for a lengthy discussion of the fate of Belchite after the war, see Stéphane Michonneau, Fue ayer: Belchite, un pueblo frente a la cuestión del pasado (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2017). 28 Harry Fisher, Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 78. 29 Quoted in Michonneau, Fue ayer, 89.

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Fig. 1.1  Ruins of Belchite (photograph the author)

hands of both sides during the conflict, the effects of migration and exile, forced labor by Republican prisoners, and rural depopulation and the impact of economic autarky.30 One of a small number of instances of glorious war ruins, along with the Alcázar of Toldedo, the Cerro de los Ángeles and Corbera d’Ebre, which Alfredo González-Ruibal mentions in his chapter, old Belchite (Fig. 1.1) stood metonymically for the Regime’s heroic, vengeful memory of the war. The resistance of 1937 was compared by Nationalist propaganda to the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo,31 and the town acquired the name, Belchite de Franco, in 1939.32 Yet Belchite was not 30 Michonneau, Fue ayer, Chapter 2; Hugh Smith, “Seventy Years of Waiting: A Turning Point for Interpreting the Spanish Civil War?” in Battlefield Tourism: History, Place and Interpretation, ed. Chris Ryan (Oxford: Elsevier, 2007), 99–110 (102); Alfredo GonzálezRuibal, Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la guerra civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 2016), 118–37. 31 Michonneau, Fue ayer, 42. 32 Michonneau, Fue ayer, 60.

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reconstructed, as Toldeo was, nor were its ruins properly preserved. It was left to crumble while a new town, which illustrated the Regime’s supposedly modernizing social vision, was built and inaugurated to great fanfare in 1954. The tension between the old and new in Belchite exemplifies what Stéphane Michonneau aptly calls the discordant historicities of this arena of memory.33 The two Belchites together stood for a before and an after, tradition and its destruction; the implicit comparison between them also suggested the promise of a New Spain rising from the nearby ruins of war. Or so the Regime had it. The heroic Nationalist resistance of 1937 was compared in Nationalist propaganda not only to the epic siege of the Alcázar of Toldeo, but to the pre-Christian legend of Numancia as well as to Iberian popular resistance to Napoleon during the War of Independence. The town was thus placed within a tradition of heroic defense against a foreign invader.34 Belchite was indeed the scene of a fierce battle in June 1809, and the name of the town is inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The town’s association with the War of Independence chimed well with Nationalist interpretations of the Civil War as a battle against an alien Spain, a line reinforced by the presence of International Brigades among the Republican forces who laid siege to Belchite in 1937. However, a second historical parallel was established by the nature of the ruins themselves. Comprising a significant mudéjar heritage, they conveyed a sense of the layers of history, with the glorious victory of the Civil War projected against a ghostly, skeletal reminder of the Reconquest, an earlier moment of national salvation according to Nationalist ideology. But if the mudéjar heritage suggests the incorporation of Moorish cultural influence, the Franco Regime did not intend any such sociopolitical or cultural bridge-building, and the parallel only runs so far. Indeed, it is perhaps the tragic limitations of cultural inclusiveness and of a sense of a cumulative heritage that old Belchite most evokes today. If I tell the story of Belchite, then, it is because the uses to which its history have been put are a reminder of the seminal role of perspective in the construction of historical narratives, and the strategic use that is made of memory discourses in different contexts.

33 Michonneau, 34 Michonneau,

Fue ayer, 16. Fue ayer, 125.

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Fig. 1.2  Street signs in new Belchite (photograph the author)

New Belchite is perhaps more striking in this regard. While the ruins of the old town are a current focus of archeological work and tentative heritage preservation,35 the physical fabric of the new town reflects recent shifts in Spain’s memory of the Civil War. Visiting Belchite in September 2015, I accidentally became lost in the small streets of the new town during a local festival. Resorting to my hire car’s navigation system, I discovered that it still used Franco-era street names. Technology confronted me unexpectedly with the layers of history: not Calle Portal de la Villa but Calle de la Victoria; not Calle Constitución Española de 1978 but, according to my SatNav, Calle 18 de julio (Figs. 1.2 and 1.3). As I looked more closely, I could see that some of the traditional azulejo tiles used to indicate street names were more recent than others, testifying to recent memory campaigns and efforts to remove remnants of the Francoist memorialization of Spanish history from the architectural fabric of Spain.

35 Michonneau

discusses this in detail in Fue ayer, Chapter 7.

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Fig. 1.3  Street signs in new Belchite (photograph the author)

Technology’s intersection with memory leads in other unexpected directions. Not far from Belchite lies another ruined settlement, the tiny hamlet of Rodén. With traces of habitation dating back to the Bronze Age, Rodén was also destroyed during the Civil War. The majority of its inhabitants fled to surrounding villages or to Zaragoza, with some returning later to inhabit the remains of the village. And as with Belchite, a new town was eventually built nearby, though without fanfare. Only in April 2017 was Rodén accorded listed status in an effort to preserve what remains of its mudéjar tower, and also to develop tourism. Rodén thus reminds us of our role as visitors in creating heritage against the ravages of time. And gazing across the Ebro Valley from the promontory on which the old town of Rodén perches, one cannot but be struck by the impressive viaduct carrying the high-speed train line between Madrid and Barcelona, a reminder to the visitor of a very different type of modernization to that of the Francoist new towns of the postwar era (Fig. 1.4). To the north-west lies the village of Fuendetodos, birthplace of the painter Goya and home to a contemporary structural ruin, the unfinished

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Fig. 1.4  Ruins of Rodén with viaduct, seen from the site of the Bronze-Age settlement (photograph the author)

Museum of Contemporary Engraving (Fig. 1.5).36 Begun in 2009, work on the museum was halted in 2014 due to a lack of funds. It stands as a reminder not only of the long-term effects of the 2008 economic crisis, but of the overambitious cultural heritage plans that many regions of Spain indulged in before the credit crunch halted this tourist investment. We thus come full circle, adding another layer to the questions of memory, memorialization and heritage in the Campo de Belchite area, namely the dangers of the commercialization of memory.37 Spanish anxiety about the extent to which memory “sells,” and can be used merely

36 P. Zapater, “Las obras del nuevo Museo del Grabado de Fuendetodos siguen paralizadas desde 2014,” Heraldo, 27 May 2016; Álvaro Sierra, “El museo de Goya, donde las grietas dibujan un cuadro de despilfarro,” El Español, 22 January 2017. 37 I am grateful to the University of Warwick Humanities Research Fund for supporting my field research in the Belchite area and to Alfredo González-Ruibal for allowing me to observe his team excavating in the area.

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Fig. 1.5  Fuendetodos with unfinished modern construction of the Museum of Contemporary Engraving to the right (photograph the author)

for profit motives, is an issue that I have addressed elsewhere.38 So while certain approaches to the past require caution, relevant here is also the potential of technology to open up new vistas for the development of public humanities.

Toward the Future? Technology, particularly in the digital area, has much to offer historical research and memory work. Wendy Perla Kurtz explores intersections between the digital and the performative in the context of exhumations, as well as the creation of virtual communities and the creation and dissemination of new historical memories through social and other

38 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, and Stewart King, “Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94, no. 8 (2017), 793–99; also my article, “Memory as Disruption: Entanglements of Memory and Crisis in Contemporary Spain,” in the same issue, 883–901.

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digital media. Such channels pose perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional forms of history and heritage curation, since the management of data and its presentation can become new forms of the dangers of decontextualization or miscontextualization that González-Ruibal has stressed in his work. But they can also enhance knowledge creation and dissemination, as Kurtz’s own initiatives demonstrate. Paul Spence, in his contribution to this volume, likewise tackles the digital as a means of mediating. Again, layerings emerge, as each new wave of digital and technological possibilities changes both the virtual and the physical memory arenas, and thus fundamentally alters the architecture of historical knowledge production. What is important is less the fact of this alteration than our awareness of it as an ongoing process that affects both academic work and public engagement, with this latter conceived as a dialogue and not a one-way transmission of information. A further dilemma derives from the fact that memory intersects not only with the past and the present, but also the future. Hence, the preservation and sustainability of digital data is fundamental if the digital is indeed to offer new ways of conceptualizing historical controversies through pluralist platforms that permit a productive dissensus. Education is, of course, also vital in this context. If Spain has, as Maria Feliu-Torruella argues, a historical void in the classroom, she also confronts a civic and legal void that Jordi Palou-Loverdos addresses comparatively through the lens of transitional justice. Spain, ironically, is too often seen as exceptional or different; twentieth-century European history has tended to focus on the stories of two hot wars and a cold war, and European memory studies have concentrated on the Holocaust. But the lessons of Spanish history, and the shifting configurations of Spanish historical memories over the past eight decades, contain important lessons not only about scholarly approaches to constructing the past, but also about the curation and transmission of that knowledge, and its role in the collective conceptualization of new futures. Public humanities are a vital point of intersection between scholarly research and a wider civic engagement that aims to promote critical reflection on the processes of coming to know, to do, and to live together, as Feliu-Torruella puts it. And a reflexive approach to public humanities demonstrates a scholarly commitment to exploring disciplinary norms and to pushing beyond established boundaries. This volume aims to chart some of the new directions that such work might take with regard to the Spanish Civil War.

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Bibliography Barad, Karan. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 802–31. Bate, Jonathan. The Public Value of the Humanities. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Belfiore, Elenore. “‘Impact’, ‘Value’ and ‘Bad Economics’: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanitites.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 14, no. 1 (2015): 95–110. Bennett, Tony. “Museums and the People.” In The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, edited by Robert Lumley, 63–86. London: Routledge, 1988. Brooks, Peter, ed. The Humanities and Public Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Butler, Judith. “Ordinary, Incredulous.” In Brooks, The Humanities and Public Life, 15–38. Cooper, David. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life. East Lancing, MI: Michigan State University, 2014. De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Fisher, Harry. Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la guerra civil española. Madrid: Alianza, 2016. Hexter, Ralph J. “Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator.” In Peter Brooks, ed. The Humanities in Public Life, 83–91. New York: Fordham, 2014. Hicks, Dan, Laura MacAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, eds. Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archeology and Heritage. Walnut Creek, CA.: Left Coast Press, 2007. Kahn, Paul W. “Humanities and Human Rights.” In Peter Brooks, ed. The Humanities in Public Life, 116–22. New York: Fordham, 2014. Lafuente, Isaías. Esclavos por la patria: La explotación de los presos en el franquismo. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2002. MacAtackney, Laura. “The Contemporary Politics of Landscape at the Long Kesh/Maze Prison Site, Northern Ireland.” In Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archeology and Heritage, edited by Dan Hicks, Laura MacAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, 30–54. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007. Michonneau, Stéphane. Fue ayer: Belchite, un pueblo frente a la cuestión del pasado. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2017. Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Nussbaum, Martha. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanitites. New Haven, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

18  A. RIBEIRO de MENEZES Ribeiro de Menezes, Alison. “Memory as Disruption: Entanglements of Memory and Crisis in Contemporary Spain.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94, no. 8 (2017): 883–901. Ribeiro de Menezes, Alison, and Stewart King. “Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 94, no. 8 (2017): 793–99. Robinson, Emily. “Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible.” Rethinking History 14, no. 4 (2010): 503–20. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Sierra, Álvaro. “El museo de Goya, donde las grietas dibujan un cuadro de despilfarro.” El Español, 22 January 2017. Small, Helen. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Smith, Hugh. “Seventy Years of Waiting: A Turning Point for Interpreting the Spanish Civil War?” In Battlefield Tourism: History, Place and Interpretation, edited by Chris Ryan, 99–110. Oxford: Elsevier, 2007. Smith, Laurajane, and Gary Campbell. “The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect, and Emotion.” In A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Ullrich Kocktel, 443–60. Chichester: Wiley, 2016. Sueiro, Daniel. El Valle de los Caídos: Los secretos de la cripta franquista. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2006. Zapater, P. “Las obras del nuevo Museo del Grabado de Fuendetodos siguen paralizadas desde 2014.” Heraldo, 27 May 2016.

CHAPTER 2

Sites Without Memory and Memory Without Sites: On the Failure of the Public History of the Spanish Civil War Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert

After Memory The debate over remembering and forgetting the Spanish Civil War began in the academic realm with the publication of Paloma Aguilar Fernández’s magnificent book, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española, in 1996.1 At the time nobody had any real idea of its significance and it would be a number of years before Historical Memory became a fashionable topic. Two decades later, her conclusion that the democracy created after the death of Francisco Franco was based on a 1 Paloma

Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 1996); English-language edition, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (New York: Berghan, 2002).

A. Cazorla-Sánchez (*)  Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada A. Shubert  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_2

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“pact of forgetting” about the Civil War continues to be a contested idea, to the point that—to Aguilar’s regret—for some scholars and politicians it has become more an opportunity to insult the transition to democracy—and to attack fellow academics who do not share their views—than to engage in the serious intellectual debate that she invited. For her own part, Aguilar has recently qualified some of the opinions set out in the book.2 The early years of the twenty-first century have been a golden age for Historical Memory in many parts of the world, and certainly in the West. This trend seemed to apply to Spain up to 2011.3 However, for Spanish historiography, in the debate over memory, the term itself was too often used without clear definition and was confused with others such as collective memory, or even with more straightforward traditional genres such as personal testimony and historical narrative.4 As a result, 2 Paloma Aguilar, and Francisco Ferrándiz, “Memoria, Media and Spectacle: Interviú’s Portrayal of Civil War Exhumations in the Early Years of Spanish Democracy,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2016), 1–25. 3 Santos Juliá, Víctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1999); Memoria de la guerra y del franquismo (Madrid: Taurus, 2006); Michael Richards, “From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War,” History and Memory 14 (2002), 93–120; Paloma Aguilar, and Carsten Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity in the Spanish Democracy: The Legacies of Francoism and the Civil War,” History and Memory 14 (2002), 121–64; Angela Cenarro, “Memory beyond the Public Sphere: The Francoist Repression Remembered in Aragon,” History and Memory 14 (2002), 166–88; Sebastiaan Faber, “Entre el respeto y la crítica: Reflexiones sobre la memoria histórica en España,” Migraciones y Exilios 5 (2004), 37–50; Francisco Ferrandiz, “The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain,” Anthropology Today (June 2006), 7–12; “Exhumaciones y políticas de la memoria en la España contemporánea,” Hispania Nova (2007), http://hispanianova.rediris.es/7/dossier/07d003.pdf; Pedro Ruiz Torres, “Los discursos de la memoria histórica en España,” Hispania Nova (2007), http://hispanianova.rediris.es/7/dossier/07d001.pdf; Jo Labanyi, “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008), 157–75; José M. González, “Spanish Literature and the Recovery of Historical Memory,” European Review 17, no. 1 (2009), 177–85; Jo Labanyi, “The Languages of Silence: Historical Memory, Generational Transmission and Witnessing in Contemporary Spain,” Journal of Romance Studies 3 (2009), 23–35; Ricard Vinyes, ed. El Estado y la memoria: Gobiernos y ciudadanos frente a los traumas de la historia (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2009); Carlos Jerez-Farran, and Samuel Amago, eds., Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2010). 4 For a critique of the confusion around the term memory, see Noa Gedi, and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory—What Is It?” History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996), 30–50.

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everything from serious historical studies to the most uninformed opinion, and everything in between, could suddenly become not only memory but rather Historical Memory, with capital letters. In any case, one topic stood at the center of the controversy: the repression and mass graves in which the remains of Republicans murdered by the Francoists lie. Bodies as the focus also generated a debate over, first, who should pay to recover this memory and, second, who should administer it (see Chapter 6 by Ribeiro de Menezes). We are not going to rehearse here what was said in those years, much of which was deplorable.5 On the one hand, there were the insults hurled at the families of the victims, and even at the victims themselves, and on the other, the baseless accusations that historians, corrupted by the so-called Regime of 1978, had neglected to study the repression until the self-proclaimed prophets of memory arrived to bring it to our attention. And if in the past barbarians burned books, those years also saw them use the media, books included, to broadcast outrageous comments using demagogic language. As if the situation were not confusing enough, the electoral victory of the conservative Popular Party in 2011 brought an official amnesia that affected memory in a premeditated and measurable way. Mariano Rajoy, the new President of the Government, or Prime Minister, did not abolish the existing laws on the subject, not even the “Law on Historical Memory” passed by the previous Socialist government in 2007.6 Instead, he simply defunded it and ignored the topic as if it did not exist, leaving his subordinates in the party, in parliament, and even in the government with the job of explaining this policy. Worse still, instead of explanations, some of those speakers engaged in verbal abuse against the Government’s critics and even victims’ relatives.7 The effect of the severe economic crisis that wracked Spain starting in 2008 did the rest. Today few people talk about memory. At one time the press published 5 For a fine summary, see Paloma Aguilar, and Clara Ramírez-Barat, “Reparations without Truth or Justice in the Spanish Case,” in Transitional Justice after War and Dictatorship: Learning from European Experiences (1945–2013), ed. Nico Wouters (Antwerp and Oxford: Intersentia, 2014, 199–252). 6 The full name is the “Ley por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura.” 7 For example, in December 2014, Rafael Hernando, the Popular Party’s main spokesperson in the Congress and party whip, said on television that the victims’ relatives “only remember [victims] when there are subsidies to be had.” El Mundo, 23 December 2014.

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numerous news and articles and carried on extensive and bitter debates on the matter. Now there are only occasional items on an individual mass grave or the damage done to one monument or another. While there is still some news, public debate has all but disappeared. The movement to recover memory has not died, but it has fallen well down the list of things that concern most Spaniards. At the time, one of us argued that memory in Spain—and elsewhere—was, in part at least, something of a consumer good nourished by good economic times. It appears as if subsequent developments have borne out that opinion.8 Fortunately, the wave of memory has not swept the beach clean in the way some conservative sectors would have liked. It is very difficult to gauge what and how much has remained in the minds—should we say Historical Memory?—of Spaniards, but it is clear, to give the outstanding example, that one cannot ignore that the remains of tens of thousands of the disappeared from the Civil War are still unrecovered, that we know where many of them are located, and that there is a strong social consensus that they should be given a dignified burial. It is also obvious that the absurdity touted by the dictatorship that the Valley of the Fallen, which was built between 1940 and 1959, represents the collective pain of all Spaniards, is entirely false. Franco built this monument for himself and for the dead from his side. Only a few Republicans were interred there at the last moment and almost all of them without their families’ permission. Spanish society, now democratic and free of the lies of the Franco Regime, has assumed the revelation of the bodies of the victims as a moral imperative. Spain is not unique in this. Over the last few decades the suffering of victims has become a central theme in many countries, and not solely due to the emergence of the Holocaust as the central historical fact of the twentieth century or the affirmation of what we have called the humanist paradigm.9 Put another way, the relation between Spanish society and the violence of the past, and especially the victimization of one part of the population during the Civil War and the dictatorship, is 8 Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008), 231–46. 9 For an introduction to what it meant to be a victim of the Holocaust before and after this became a widely acceptable narrative, see Peter Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–1965,” Past and Present 54 (1997), 181–222.

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now defined similarly to that relationship in other countries and forms part of a transnational phenomenon in which respect for human rights is the centerpiece (see Chapter 11 by Jordi Palou-Loverdos).10 This is bad news for those who, from a conservative perspective, want to anaesthetize the past, but also for those who, from very different ideological positions, still believe that Spanish democracy is nothing short of a sham. What had been gained in terms of memory might have become blurred since 2011 but, fortunately, it has not disappeared entirely. Now the problem is what Spaniards should do with the knowledge and the awareness they have acquired. The situation is complex, and there are three reasons for this. First, Spain continues to have too many sites without memory of its recent violent past. Second, there are also too many memories which have no place in which to be firmly grounded and usefully transmitted to society. These lead to the third factor: the weakness of Public History in Spain.

Sites Without Memory and Memory Without Sites Let us start with an example, one of the many described so powerfully by Alfredo González-Ruibal in his book Volver a las trincheras. It is about a place and a horrifying set of events that he calls “the murder of the innocents.”11 The place has the beautiful name of Valdediós—the Valley of God—and is famous for its Romanesque church, but something horrible happened there in the autumn of 1937. Shortly after the Mountain Batallion of Arapiles, a unit of the Francoist army composed of troops from Navarre, occupied the area, some of the soldiers forced the nurses from the local psychiatric hospital to take part in what was supposedly a party. They were raped and then, after having being made to dig their own graves in the nearby woods, they were killed. The unit’s chaplain did nothing more than to give the victims absolution. In 2003, 10 Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, “From Anti-Fascism to Humanism: The Spanish Civil War as a Crisis of Memory,” in Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realm of Oblivion, ed. Aurora G. Morcillo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 21–50; Francisco Ferrándiz, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben, eds., Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Francisco Ferrándiz, El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la guerra civil (Madrid: Anthropos, 2014). 11 Alfredo González-Ruibal, Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 2016), 142–44.

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an archaeological dig found a ditch containing seventeen skeletons. González-Ruibal ends his account this way: the Arapiles battalion is still a part of the Army of Spain. There was an exhibition about the unit in Pamplona in 2014 in which the atrocities it committed during the war were not mentioned. The Delegate of the government said only that “in 250 years of history all the world goes through different phases, some better than others.”12

There are many Valdedioses in Spain, places where what happened is forgotten, or even denied (see Chapter 8 by Perla Kurtz). In these places, memory and knowledge—now that almost all the witnesses are dead, mostly of old age—fail to meet. In such cases, educators, and historians in particular, as citizens of a democratic society, have the moral obligation to discover the truth and publicize it. And they have this obligation despite, or even because of, those who advocate forgetting for the sake of a false pardon, which is nothing other than the one Franco already gave us. Those who lived under the Franco dictatorship could not be expected to do this, but for those who live in a free society, this is an imperative born from both traditional religious values, such as honoring the dead and telling the truth, and from modern, humanist-based values of treating the lives, and therefore the deaths, of everyone as equal. In recent years—or should we say until a few years ago?—there were numerous efforts to bridge this gap between sites and memory. The overall result, however, has been disappointing (as Layla Renshaw argues in Chapter 7, the lack of official memory is even more glaring for Republican, non-Civil War-related sites). Commemorative plaques have been installed; dozens of mass graves and thousands of corpses have been identified; and small museums and interpretative centers have been created. But what ought to be the mission of the state—central, autonomous or both—and of civil society which was first reduced and then almost eliminated by the reversal of 2011? Those who should be promoting knowledge have favored silence, or at most the occasional jibe, but it must be made absolutely clear that this approach is not in line with the values of the immense majority of Spanish society. A study of public opinion carried out 2008 showed that 83 percent of Spaniards

12 González-Ruibal,

Volver a las trincheras, 144.

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agreed that all victims of the Civil War should be recognized equally.13 In a democracy this level of consensus constitutes near unanimity and makes it hard to believe the sincerity of those who say that memory will tear the scabs off wounds that have healed. This pathetic argument contradicts what Spanish society is more than ready to accept, because Spanish society now looks at the horrors of the past in much the same way and with very similar expectations as the rest of the Western world. The difference lies not in what society is prepared to demand and accept but rather in what one of the two traditional governing parties, the Popular Party, is prepared to ignore. One can easily create a long list of examples of this divorce between places of memory and social values, but the clearest example of this divorce, be it active or passive, is the Valley of the Fallen. Unlike the mute and hidden horror of Valdediós, this place calls attention to itself and speaks loudly. The problem is that it tells an incomplete, twisted, falsified, and tendentious story. In other words, the Valley of the Fallen is what Primo Levi would call a fossilized lie. Located just a few kilometres from Phillip II’s monastery-palace of El Escorial, by means of the smallest details of its location and architecture, it uses the language of Christian charity to proclaim a cynical vision of the meaning of the Civil War intended to hold the collective pain of the Spanish people hostage to the goals of the Franco dictatorship. In the almost forty years since the restoration of democracy in Spain much could have been done to refute this pervasive lie, but successive governments have not acted. As late as February 2017, Spain’s Supreme Court refused a request by the renowned former judge, Baltasar Garzón, to order both the exhumation of Franco’s body and the conversion of the Valley into a place of “democratic memory.”14 The government has also ignored a similar resolution by the Spanish parliament regarding Franco’s body in May 2017. This inaction by the government led to a new round of public debate about what to do with the Valley.15 In sum, the state, the supposed guarantor 13 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Estudio 2760 (Abril 2008), Memoria de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo (Madrid: CIS, 2008). 14 Reyes Rincón, El Supremo rechaza la petición de Garzón sobre el Valle de los Caídos,” El País, 1 March 2017, http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2017/02/28/actualidad/ 1488272286_301542.html. 15 “El Congreso aprueba sacar los restos de Franco del Valle de los Caídos,” Huffington Post, 11 May 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.es/2017/05/11/el-congreso-insta-algobierno-a-exhumar-el-cuerpo-de-franco-del_a_22081257/.

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of the Constitution of 1978 and therefore of the principles of human rights which inform it, has done nothing beyond softening the monument’s bloody lie. Here is what the website of Patrimonio Nacional, the public organization which has responsibility for the Valley of the Fallen, says of its history: This monumental complex was designed by Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez and built in the years following the Civil War. The granite cross in the middle of the great pine forest on the rocks of Cuelgamuros near San Lorenzo de El Escorial is its most visible feature. The cross is adorned with sculptures by Juan de Ávalos. The Basilica is carved out of the rock. The mosaic on the dome that covers the transept of the Basilica is the work of Santiago Padrós. The Benedictine abbey is located behind the Basilica, in a wide esplanade. The Basilica is the resting place of 33,847 people killed during the Civil War. General Franco, Head of State between 1939 and 1975, is also buried there. The Foundation of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen was created by the Decree Law of 23 August 1957 and is overseen by the Board of Directors of the Patrimonio Nacional. This will change when the measures set out in Law 23/1982, which regulates the Patrimonio Nacional, come into force. Both measures anticipate that the Government will revise the legal status of this Foundation. As the administrator of this Foundation, the Board of Directors of the Patrimonio Nacional is responsible for the maintenance, preservation and management of public visits to the site.16

Even the data in this statement is factually wrong and implicitly proFranco: nobody really knows exactly how many people are buried in the Valley’s crypt because the process of collecting human remains was chaotic and heavy-handed. In any case, what would we say about a Nazi concentration camp, maintained with public money, if the only information we were given was about the architecture or the engineers who designed it? What if the information displayed accepted without comment explanations given by the Nazis at the time of construction and described Adolf Hitler as “Head of State between 1934 and 1945”? How would we describe this supposed detachment? Would it be unjust 16 “Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen,” Patrimonio Nacional, http://www.patrimonionacional.es/real-sitio/monasterios/6258.

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to call it a whitewash, a justification clearly complicit with the Nazi dictatorship and its crimes? This is why we believe that while the Valley of the Fallen, the most emblematic site of the Civil War and of Francoism, remains unconnected with knowledge, memory, and the contemporary values of Spanish society, the black hole at the center of Spaniards’ relationship to the horrors of the past will persist. Scholars can continue to produce mountains of studies about the Civil War and the dictatorship, but the evident lie of the Valley of the Fallen will, from its highly visible perch, continue to undermine Spain’s humanist society and its educators, and erode the realization of what almost all citizens desire. Smaller versions of the shadow of the Valley of the Fallen fall on many, perhaps hundreds, of places across the country that the Francoists condemned to a false forgetting. This shadow obscures the past and prevents these places from being connected to memory, and in doing so it trivializes the former and helps dissolve the latter. It would be a sinister paradox if the memory that, held silently in the minds of the witnesses, resisting the official lies of Francoist propaganda for forty years, but recently recovered and given voice by the work of historians, ended up reduced to a narrative that is once more buried—this time in libraries. The joke is even more macabre since we live in times when the image prevails over the word, and especially the written one. In other words, we are still fighting the battle for the recovery of Historical Memory when we should be creating a history that can be communicated to the public and can also attract them to memory and an understanding of the past. The time lost since 2011 is piling up. One might say that all this amnesia, ridicule, cynicism, guilty complicity, and so on is nothing new and that the unpaid bill dates back to 1978, when Spain should have come to terms with its past in a very different way. After all, is this not how other European societies settled accounts with their own fascist pasts? Actually it is not, and there is an abundant literature on the torturous and far from glorious history of European memory.17 Moreover, people who say this are also overlooking the immediate challenges Spaniards faced during the transition, including the awareness of the past which was dominant in the national and 17 Since France has always been the reference point and goal of our Iberian Jacobins, the interested reader will find no better place to start than Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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international contexts until the 1990s. To explain briefly: at that time, the violence of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship were analyzed through the lens of social needs and social demands, which were very different from those of today. It was barely two decades ago that Spaniards regarded as dangerous such issues as building a democratic and federal state, with the accompanying threat of a military coup and the daily violence of terrorism, especially from ETA. Finally, there was a seemingly eternal economic crisis accompanied by massive unemployment. And it is no coincidence that when economic crisis returned in 2008 it had devastating consequences for the question of memory. These were real and present problems, unlike the Civil War, which was equally real but in the past. In addition, there was the very different dominant worldview that was set by the parameters of the Cold War. This view often produced an analysis of history that valued ideological affinities more than human rights, certainly much more than is the case today. This ideological vision of the world produced many cases of double standards. For example, the Spanish Left cried over the crimes committed by General Pinochet after 1973, and rightly so, but why did it take so long for it to begin to criticize the dictatorship of Fidel Castro? And who today remembers the widespread, albeit at times justified, cynicism when President Jimmy Carter elaborated his doctrine of human rights as the guide to US foreign policy? Finally, as we mentioned earlier, it was only about twenty-five years ago that the humanist paradigm, with its emphasis on remembering victims and providing legal and/or symbolic reparations, became dominant in Western societies. To demand that the Spain of 1978 have acted as we would have liked, in accord with the values and needs of the twenty-first century, is a historical anachronism. But it is also more than that: it is to judge the Spaniards of that time, starting with politicians and historians, unfairly. Whether historians, the state, and civil society have served the needs of Spaniards as well as they might have is a completely different question. We are not referring here to a transcendent or existential need but much more prosaically to the task of promoting and looking after the desires of Spaniards to learn and to consume history. Here the question is less about the message which, since the restoration of democracy, has never strayed far from the rest of Western society but rather to the format, its execution, and, finally, the imagination and ambitions of we who produce the discipline of History. Our question is whether historians and other public actors have served the public as well and as extensively as in

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some other Western countries. The answer is no, but not a categorical no. However, the question itself implies that what has been done elsewhere is uniformly and by definition better and more imaginative than what has been done in Spain, and while this is sometimes the case, it is often not.

The History Which is Read, Taught, and Seen—or Not Before returning to the Valley of the Fallen, which is the most flagrant example of what has not been done (by the state), let us consider what we historians have done. The answer is simple: quite a lot. In addition to teaching what we know in classes and lectures, we have written much on the political violence of the 1930s. This is the historian’s traditional job, but the stark absence of any extra-academic dimension is problematic. Spanish historians are like their German colleagues, and to a certain extent their French and Italian ones, in their inability to write for a broader public. In this, they are very different from their colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom. Their work is, in the best cases, directed at other academics, or simply at building up their curriculum vitae. As a result, historians of the Civil War and Francoism find it difficult to understand and meet the needs of what the British call the educated reading public. The field they have left open has been filled by a few foreign “hispanists,” and, more significantly—and more dangerously—by a number of pseudohistorians who have devoted themselves to countering the work of serious historians by producing, in the worst cases, neo-Francoist narratives which recycle crude arguments used by the dictatorship in simplistic language. However, their books do have at least one redeeming characteristic: they know what their potential readers want and they deliver it.18 By limiting themselves and their work to the purely academic realm, serious historians have helped create a vacuum of knowledge in Spanish society which other forms of transmitting historical knowledge have not filled. We are referring here to two above all: the teaching of History

18 Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, “Las Historias que no escribimos: Una reflexión,” in El Franquismo desde los márgenes, ed. Oscar Rodríguez Barreira (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida and Universidad de Almería, 2013), 45–56.

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in elementary and secondary schools and Public History.19 The way Spain’s history of violence is taught, or rather not taught, in schools is the subject of another chapter of this book (see Chapter 10 by FeliuTorruella) and we will not go into detail here, but we do want to relate one recent anecdote that we think is revealing of both what is missing in the pedagogy of the Civil War in Spain and what is present in other countries. At the conference held in Barcelona in June 2016 which brought together historians and specialists in Public History of the Civil War and which gave rise to this book, both the Director of the Guernica Peace Museum,20 which was launched with public funds given mostly by Socialist governments starting in 1989, and the Director of the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica in Salamanca,21 which was created by the Socialist government as part of the Law on Historical Memory, commented on the very small number of visits they get from Spanish school children. In contrast, both institutions receive much larger numbers of French high school students. It would seem that at least in pedagogical and Public History terms, the Spanish Civil War is more important in France than in Spain. As these examples indicate, the educational apathy in Spain toward the Civil War and the dictatorship, at least as far as extracurricular activities goes, is part of a much more sweeping estrangement which also affects Public History due to the shortage of museums and educational projects directed at the general public. The Valley of the Fallen, which does not even have an official guidebook to help visitors interpret the monument, is only the most visible and most significant example of our point. There are many more. Another notable case of forgetting is the Alcázar of Toledo, both as it was until a few years ago and in its current incarnation, housing part of the Museum of the Army.22 19 Many North American, particularly United States, universities have degree programmes in Public History, most often at Masters level. The programme at Western University in London, Ontario defines it as “how history is understood by and communicated to the public, whether at museums, archives, historical sites and national parks, in films, fiction, or on the web, in policy making, historical consulting, and in academic teaching and research”: “MA in Public History,” Department of History, Western University, http://history.uwo.ca/public_history/. 20 “Information,” Gernika Peace Museum Foundation, http://www.museodelapaz.org. 21 “Portada,” Centrol Documental de la Memoria Histórica, http://www.mecd.gob.es/ cultura/areas/archivos/mc/archivos/cdmh/portada.html. 22 Museo del Ejército, Ministerio de Defensa de España, http://www.museo.ejercito.es/en/.

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This museum, which opened in 2010, is another example of the forcible distancing of the public from an educational narrative of the Civil War, through both what it does not say and the lack of connection among the items on display. The Alcázar of Toledo, a stronghold of the rebel army besieged by the Republicans during the first months of the war, was almost completely destroyed in 1936 and rebuilding began almost immediately after the conflict ended. The reconstructed building became a museum whose central message was the heroism of the Francoist army (even though the vast majority of the men who defended it were Civil Guards) and of the perfidy and impotence of the “Reds.” At the heart of this sanctuary of the dictatorship was the office of the commander of the besieged garrison, Colonel José Moscardó, who, years later, also happened to be accompanying Franco the day he “discovered” the site where the Valley of the Fallen would be built.23 For many years, people who visited the Alcázar could, or were expected, to listen to a reconstruction of the supposed conversation between Moscardó and his son Luis, who had been taken prisoner by the Republicans. They wanted him to convince his father to surrender but, speaking heroically, father and son agreed that it was worth sacrificing Luis’ life if it helped to save Spain. Luis went to the firing squad shortly afterwards.24 This melodramatic story has disappeared from the new Museum of the Army but the shadow of Francoism remains. Moscardó’s office is still there, just as it was after the battle. So is the telephone which he used in his (supposed) conversation with his son, although the reconstruction of the conversation is gone. But now the office is located in one wing of the extremely modern museum space, unconnected to the exhibits that surround it, and lacking a plaque or text that explains what it is. This Orwellian combination of amnesia and presence informs all the exhibits devoted to the twentieth century, especially the Civil War and the dictatorship. There is not a single reference to the murders, executions, or the repression, let alone any indication of who was responsible for them. The images and artifacts relating to Franco and some of his most bloodthirsty followers, like General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, mention 23 Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, El Monumento de Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1959), 5–7. 24 For more on the myth of the Alcázar and other myths of the Civil War, see Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la Guerra Civil. Los mitos de la tribu (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1999).

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none of these things. It is hard to imagine what the large number of people who visit this impressively modern and well-endowed museum might learn about anything beyond the strictly military aspects of the Civil War, but after our visit in June 2016 the two of us, historians who have spent our careers studying the twentieth century, left the building confused—and annoyed.25 The story is much the same at the important and much visited Naval Museum, which is located in the heart of Madrid.26 Its section on the Civil War and the dictatorship features a photo of Francisco Franco, identified as the Head of State and Commander of the Navy. This absence of explanation speaks for itself, but there are details which only specialists will pick up on which are even worse. For example, the crimes committed by both sides in Málaga before and after the city was conquered by Francoist troops in February 1937 are presented in an apparently impartial way. There is nothing wrong with this, but in a museum full of models of ships, there is no mention of the Francoist navy’s merciless bombardment of up to 200,000 defenseless and terrified civilians who fled the city of Málaga along the road to Almería, killing around 5,000 people.27 In this way, the glorious Spanish navy escapes with its honor intact.

25 During the dictatorship, Spanish school children were taught that Moscardó’s gesture was similar to and a continuation of that of the governor of Tarifa, Guzmán el Bueno, in 1296, who supposedly also refused to save his son by handing the city over to the “Moors.” The comments of General Antonio Rajo Moreno, who took over as Director of the museum in February 2017, are interesting in this regard. He called the Alcázar a “crib of heroes”: “heroes,” ABC, 17 November 2017. 26 “History of Spanish Navy,” Armada Española, http://www.armada.mde.es/ ArmadaPor tal/page/Por tal/ArmadaEspannola/ciencia_organo/prefLang_es/ 01_ciencia_museo. 27 We visited the museum in June and December 2016. The massacre horrified contemporaries. The Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, who treated the refugees, immortalized it in the pamphlet, The Crime on the Road Malaga-Almeria: Narrative with Graphic Documents Revealing Fascist Cruelty (SL: Publicaciones Iberia, 1937), which included photographs taken by members of his team.

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Pedagogy of Memory—or Not The Army and Navy museums both attract many visitors, but the numbers pale in comparison to those who go to the Valley of the Fallen: more than 254,000 in 2015, a 5 percent increase over the previous year.28 There is a clear public interest in history, but, with the exception of the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica in Salamanca (see Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, by Espinosa Romero and Melgar Camarzana), what the national government provides is seriously inadequate. This is not due to any shortage of sites of memory—many of these are open to visitors—but rather because these sites do not provide the information required to help educate these visitors impartially and in accordance with even the most elementary pedagogical principles. Sites of memory either lack interpretation altogether, as in the case of the Valley of the Fallen, or, as in the case of the military museums, what they offer is vague, confusing and full of significant gaps. On top of this, as we have already mentioned, there are the many places which have not been officially recognized as sites of memory. These shortcomings in the national government’s handling of the Historical Memory and Public History of the Civil War have, to some extent, been compensated for by the governments of some autonomous regions and cities. With regard to the former, it is those regions with a long history of being governed by nationalist parties or by the Left that have funded ongoing projects to popularize these topics, with a special emphasis on the victims of the Civil War. This is the case of Memorial Democràtic in Catalonia,29 and Memoria Democrática in Andalucía,30 as well as the Museum of Peace in Guernica, with its more complex history. Other regions such as Galicia and Extremadura have financed research projects led by university professors into political violence with a focus on victims, but because of their very limited diffusion these cannot really be considered as Public History. Finally, some municipalities, especially those which were the sites of important battles, have created small 28 It also generates 2 million Euros of revenue for the state: “Cada vez más visitantes al Valle de los Caídos,” ABC, 4 January 2016, http://www.abc.es/espana/madrid/abci-cada-mas-visitantes-valle-caidos-201601042222_noticia.html. 29 “Memòria,” Generalitat de Catalunya, http://memoria.gencat.cat/ca/inici. 30 “Memoria democrática,” Junta de Andalucía, https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/temas/ cultura-ocio/andalucia/historia-tradiciones/memoria-historica.html.

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museums or interpretation centers, although these vary greatly in terms of their scientific rigor and quality. This is the case, for example, with the small centers devoted to the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and largest of the war, in Corbera d’Ebre (Tarragona) and Fayón (Zaragoza).31 These are worthy undertakings but they have few resources, as is also the case of the museum in Tajuña de Morata (Madrid), which is full of artifacts from the Battle of Jarama and housed at the back of a restaurant.32 There are also tourist routes of the front lines, and especially the trenches. These are most numerous in Catalonia and Madrid. What is clear from even this very brief description is that there is a direct relation between contemporary politics and how, or whether, the Civil War and its legacy are discussed. Both the national government and the governments of some autonomous regions have avoided the subject, creating deliberate ignorance. It is striking how Galicia and, especially Valencia, two places where the Popular Party governed for decades, have invested immense amounts of money in spectacular cultural centers that have had a huge media impact but have not felt it necessary to spend anything on Public History. In the case of Valencia, the City of the Arts and Sciences, which cost more than one billion euros, was conceived as only part of an even bigger, more lavish project which was killed off by the economic crisis that started in 2008.33 In Galicia, the somewhat more modest City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela cost at least 400 million.34 In both cases, when the economic crisis brought the construction fever to a crashing halt, what was left behind were monumental complexes which are underused and very expensive to maintain. And if the connection between politics and Public History needed to be made any clearer, the replacement of the Popular Party in the government of

31 “Información,” Centro Expositivo Fayón, Ebro 1938 La Batalla, http://www.labatalladelebro.com/museo/informacion-museo/. 32 M.J. Alvarez, “Un gran museo de la Guerra Civil en la puerta trasera de un mesón,” 22 June 2014, ABC Madrid, http://www.abc.es/madrid/20140622/abcp-gran-museo-guerra-civil-20140621.html. 33 V.X.C. Valencia, S.G. Dénia, M.A. Sagunt, “Proyectos faraónicos, ostentosos e imposibles,” 2 October 2011, Levante-EMV, https://www.levante-emv.com/comunitat-valenciana/2011/10/02/proyectos-faraonicos-ostentosos-e-imposibles/844541.html. 34 FCO. Pelayo, “El despilfarro español: diez proyectos con dinero público repletos de sobrecostes,” 15 April 2013, 20 minutos, https://www.20minutos.es/ noticia/1755390/0/despilfarro-espanol/proyectos-publicos/sobrecostes/.

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the Valencian Autonomous Region by a left-wing coalition in June 2015 was followed by the passage of a Law of Historical Memory.35 The irony is that for far less money a museum of the Spanish Civil War could have been built. The spectacular abbey behind the Valley of the Fallen, which is now practically unoccupied, could have been repurposed to house such a museum.36 This would immediately draw in the quarter of a million people who visit Cuelgamuros each year and presumably would attract its own visitors. El Escorial, which is nearby, itself receives more than 500,000 visitors a year. In any case, the decision to do this, which was proposed by the Socialist government during its last years in office, is very far from the priorities of the current Popular Party administration. Moreover, a number of historians, intellectuals and leftwing citizens have argued against recycling the Valley of the Fallen and have even said that it should be destroyed, as if the stones themselves carried some intrinsic truth, or as if they contained lies and horrors of Francoism, which can never be uprooted but only destroyed. This is misguided: monuments are created for a purpose and so long as the reason for their creation is remembered there is no fundamental obstacle to putting them to other uses, including those in direct conflict with the original ones. This is particularly so for monuments created by dictatorships to impose their logic and the violence of arbitrary power on society. Democratic societies owe nothing to the plans and intentions of autocracies or to their monumental legacies. Dictatorships try to possess the past, but the past is something to which only democracies have a right. One of the best ways to reject the meaning of Francoism would be to convert its principal monument into an affirmation of the democratic and humanist values of today’s Spain. This is what Spaniards are doing (when “consuming” Public History) in other countries. For example, there were 55,000 Spaniards among the 1.5 million people who visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 2014.37 There they were 35 Cristina Vázquez, “El gobiero valenciano exhumará las fosas comunes de la Guerra Civil,” El País, 11 November 2016, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2016/11/11/valencia/1478866881_335930.html. 36 A proposal to create an information center at the Valley of the Fallen, launched by the Basque Nationalist party (PNV), was rejected by the Popular Party’s controlled Senate in April 2017. See “El Senado rechaza convertir el Valle de los Caídos en un centro de interpretación de la Guerra Civil,” Eldiario.es, 3 April 2017, http://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/ Senado-Valle-Caidos-Guerra-Civil_0_629237810.html. 37 Państwowe

Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu, http://www.70.auschwitz.org.

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able to confront and read about the horrible Nazi crime of the Shoa. This is an experience they cannot have at home on the subject of the Civil War and dictatorship that killed hundreds of thousands of their ancestors. Instead of investing in teaching democratic culture, the Spanish State currently practices forgetting. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that another victim of the political change of 2011 was the school subject called “Education for Citizenship.” The abandonment of Public History by the Spanish State and the limited capacity of Spain’s civil society to launch significant projects stands in marked contrast to the situation in other, but not all, Western countries. The poverty of resources about the Spanish Civil War would shock the American public who enjoy— and take advantage of—an impressive historical offering about their own Civil War. Take, for example, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which in July 1863, was the site of a short but bloody battle which produced 50,000 casualties, including 7,000 dead. Each year some 1.2 million tourists visit this town of fewer than 8,000 people to see its magnificent museum and walk various routes around the battlefield, which is administered by the National Parks Service (NPS).38 Those who want to visit other Civil War sites can consult the internet portal run by the American Civil War Trust, the product of collaboration between the NPS and private organizations.39 In contrast, anyone who tries to visit the sites of the Battle of the Ebro, which claimed twice as many lives as the Battle of Gettysburg, has to make do with the modest museums like those at Corbera d’Ebre and Fayón, and a much less sophisticated website administered by the Consorci Memorial Dels Espais de la Batalla de L’Ebre, which was created in 2001.40 Of course, the United States has its own historical demons: while there have been efforts to desensitize such major attractions as Colonial Williamsburg, there is still no national museum of slavery and the only one that exists, which opened only in 2015, was the work of a private individual.41 And with regard to 38 “Gettysberg:

A new birth of freedom,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ gett/index.htm. 39 American Battlefield Trust (website), https://www.battlefields.org/. 40 Espais de la Batalla de l’Ebre Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la batalla de l’Ebre, http://www.batallaebre.org. 41 Dan Eggen, “In Williamsburg, the Painful Reality of Slavery,” Washington Post, 7 July 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/july99/williamsburg7. htm; David Amsden, “Building the First Slavery Museum in America,” New York Times Magazine, 26 February 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/

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the Civil War, the contention relating to the Confederate flag remains very much alive.42 What we have said about the US Civil War can also be applied, to a certain extent, to Europe. In recent years, European countries have made major advances in educating their citizens about aspects of their national histories that go beyond triumphalist visions. Even so, there remain very large elephants in the room. For example, there is very little Public History dealing with empire, starting with Great Britain and France. And if the United States still has not fully come to terms with its history of slavery, Europeans have yet to do so when it comes to the slave trade.43 On the other hand, while there is an enormous offering on World War I, which is seen as a “clean” war among states and thus permits national narratives free from messy complications and connects easily with a traditional religious narrative, World War II is a very different story. That conflict, which had a strong element of civil war, is commemorated in a much more problematic and disjointed way. The Resistance and the Holocaust, that is the heroism and the victimization of the people, are stories that can be told much more comfortably than those about collaboration with the invaders or local perpetrators of the Shoa. There are building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html. See also “Why America Needs a Slavery Museum,” video by The Atlantic, 25 August 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/video/ index/402172/the-only-american-museum-about-slavery/. See, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, https:// nmaahc.si.edu/. 42 “Battle over Confederate Flag Unravels across the South,” Huffington Post, 23 June 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/23/battle-over-confederate-f_n_7649710.html; Jeff Wilkinson, “Why Does the Confederate Flag Hurt the SC Confederate Relic Room?,” The State, 18 February 2017, http://www.thestate.com/ news/politics-government/article133636504.html; Brian Hicks, “South Carolina’s ProConfederate Flag Secessionists Lost, and Now They Need to Get over It,” The Post and Courier, 19 February 2017, http://www.postandcourier.com/columnists/hicks-column-south-carolina-s-pro-confederate-flag-secessionists-lost/article_ae4a1948-f527-11e68c55-b39d09be2f51.html. 43 James McAuley, “France Confronts Slavery, a Demon of It’s Past,” The Washington Post, 28 May 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-confrontsslavery-a-demon-of-its-past/2016/05/28/0bf61b3e-2128-11e6-b944-52f7b1793dae_ story.html; Stefan Simons, “French City Confronts Its Brutal Past,” Spiegel Online, 24 April 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nantes-opens-memorial-toslave-trade-a-829447.html. See also National Museums Liverpool, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/index.aspx.

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many museums across Europe devoted to the former but Public History says very little about the latter.44 There are other examples of how to do critical Public History of the national past and affirm the values that unite society today. The most notable case is Germany, which has built a discourse of national identity and unity precisely by rejecting the Nazi past and accepting the guilt for its crimes. This means that Public History related to the Shoa receives enormous support from both the state and civil society, which is manifested in any number of ways artistically and pedagogically.45 In the middle of Berlin, the national capital, there is a Jewish Museum and a memorial, whose official title is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Every year the Nazi concentration camps are visited by millions of tourists who are told about what happened in there. There are also well-developed internet portals.46

Forgetting and Islands of Public History—a Balance Sheet Two decades and a half after it began, the debate over Historical Memory has left Spain with a number of realities: museums, information centers, databases, and academic studies, but above all the thousands of remains disinterred from the mass graves and sometimes identified, 44 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Susan Suleiman, Crisis of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Nathan Bracher, “Remembering the French Resistance: Ethics and Poetics of the Epic,” History & Memory 19, no. 1 (2007), 39–67. An overall, if slightly dated, vision is offered in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 45 James E. Young, At Memory Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 46 For the story of the Holocaust memorial see, James E. Young, “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem-and Mine,” The Public Historian 24, no. 4 (2002), 65–80. For the Berlin museums, see Museum of Jewish Heritage, http://www.mjhnyc.org/. For the camps, see “Concentration Camps: Visitors Information,” Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/visiting-the-concentration-camps. In 2010, the German Historical Museum even held an exhibition called Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime, which drew huge crowds: Deutsches Historisches Museum, http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/hitler-unddie-deutschen/en/ausstellung.html.

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as well as the amnesia imposed by Francoist assassins. Dignity has been restored to only a few thousand of the disappeared and their families. There also remain many places where the memory of what happened has been erased, or at best hidden. Moreover, since the last survivors of the war are dying or have died or been separated from the places which so marked their lives, what we call memory is becoming more a matter of knowledge and less one of experience. This presents both historians and society with various challenges. The most important are how to preserve and transmit the experience of our ancestors to new generations, how to educate people in order to understand what happened, why it happened, and what conclusions we can draw from it. Confronting these challenges means having school curricula that reflect what we know and what we believe in, but it also means taking high-quality History into the streets where it can be seen. Public History must play a key role in this process, which, as the experience of countries further along the road demonstrates, is neither easy nor free from polemics.47 The challenge in Spain is not only to reunite memories and places but also to spread knowledge. The point of departure is quite meagre. Despite the efforts of municipalities and autonomous regions, and the occasional contribution of the national government, the Public History of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath is characterized by the physical and institutional isolation of the entities that exist. The situation can be described as one of the islands of Public History which hardly collaborate with each other, although in some cases they have extensive contacts and engage in joint activities outside Spain. In part due to this isolation and in part due to their relatively small public presence, they have been unable to capture the imagination of Spanish society. This is not surprising: Spain does not have a Public History center where, if not millions then hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and foreign visitors can go to see, touch, and learn about the violence of Spain’s past. There is no equivalent to Gettysburg, to the Public History institutions in Berlin, or to the concentration and extermination camps with their interpretation centers. The monument to the Valley of the Fallen receives hundreds of 47 Madge Dresser, “Politics, Populism, and Professionalism: Reflections on the Role of the Academic Historian in the Production of Public History,” The Public Historian 32, no. 3 (2010), 39–63; Mary Stevens, “Public Policy and the Public Historian: The Changing Place of Historians in Public Life in France and the UK,” The Public Historian 32, no. 3 (2010), 120–38.

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thousands of visitors but, as we have seen, rather than a site of Public History, it is a site of shameful forgetting that, at best, can lead only the most curious visitors to ask questions, even though they will have to search for the answers on their own. One possible route is obvious: turn the Valley of the Fallen into a genuine site of Public History. This should include creating a museum but also a research center devoted to studying Spain’s political violence and understanding it as part of the violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such a project is feasible and well within the financial capacity of the state. It would be a step toward taking Spanish Public History out of the remote islands where it currently resides. It would take a political decision, and one in which pressure from civil society, starting with the historical profession, which until now has shown a marked timidity, should play a key role. Put differently, in all the professional controversies in recent years, which have often focused on secondary issues and even on personalities, Public History has scarcely been mentioned, and this has only benefited those who prefer to turn a blind eye and even resort to insults when they are asked to let us look at the past. Until the state, civil society, and historians agree, the Public History of the Civil War will go down other roads. The most promising is Digital Public History, something which has made significant progress in other countries (see Chapter 9 by Spence).48 A digital museum of the Spanish Civil War would help bring together the resources of the various institutions, museums, and databases that exist and make them accessible to a variety of publics, from the casual historical tourist to the serious scholar. And, of course, to meeting the pedagogical needs of primary and secondary schools. In this way, for example, each virtual “room” (or spaces as they are called in virtual museums) could connect with information about a specific topic in every possible format: written documents, personal testimonies, photographs, movies, and artifacts, located in geographically dispersed “bricks and mortar” institutions which rarely collaborate with each other. These “rooms” would resemble the thematic exhibitions that museums put on from time to time, but at a much lower cost and with a global reach. It would be open 24/7 and admission would be free.

48 Anne Lindsay, “Virtual Tourist: Embracing Our Audience through Public History Web Experience,” The Public Historian 35, no. 1 (February 2013), 67–86.

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Digital Public History has advantages but it also runs the risk of getting lost in the swamp of the internet and hence of being forgotten. There are many different experiences in this regard. It is a challenge which will demand imagination and patience, and it will undoubtedly have to count on the support of academics and civil society and not wait until, one fine day, the Spanish State assumes its responsibilities toward the past and toward the values of its citizens. These are two roads which do not have to separate but which can coexist if necessary: what historians and other citizens can do, and what the state has not done. And we should never forget that this is not exactly a historical novelty.

Bibliography Aguilar Fernández, Paloma. Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Alianza, 1996. ———. Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley. New York: Berghan, 2002. Aguilar, Paloma, and Carsten Humlebæk. “Collective Memory and National Identity in the Spanish Democracy: The Legacies of Francoism and the Civil War.” History and Memory 14 (2002): 121–64. Aguilar, Paloma, and Clara Ramírez-Barat. “Reparations without Truth or Justice in the Spanish Case.” In Transitional Justice after War and Dictatorship. Learning from European. Experiences (1945–2013), ed. Nico Wouters, 199– 252. Antwerp-Oxford: Intersentia, 2014. Aguilar, Paloma, and Francisco Ferrándiz. “Memoria, Media and Spectacle: Interviú’s Portrayal of Civil War Exhumations in the Early Years of Spanish Democracy.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2016): 1–25. Bracher, Nathan. “Remembering the French Resistance: Ethics and Poetics of the Epic.” History & Memory 19, no. 1 (2007): 39–67. Cazorla-Sánchez, Antonio. “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 231–46. ———. “Las Historias que no escribimos. Una reflexión.” In El Franquismo desde los márgenes, ed. Oscar Rodríguez Barreira, 45–56. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida and Universidad de Almería, 2013. ———. “From Anti-Fascism to Humanism: The Spanish Civil War as a Crisis of Memory.” In Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realm of Oblivion, ed. Aurora G. Morcillo, 21–50. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Cenarro, Ángela. “Memory beyond the Public Sphere. The Francoist Repression Remembered in Aragon.” History and Memory 14 (2002): 166–88. Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Estudio 2760 (Abril 2008): Memoria de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo. Madrid: CIS, 2008.

42  A. CAZORLA-SÁNCHEZ AND A. SHUBERT Dresser, Madge. “Politics, Populism, and Professionalism: Reflections on the Role of the Academic Historian in the Production of Public History.” The Public Historian 32, no. 3 (2010): 39–63. Faber, Sebastiaan. “Entre el respeto y la crítica. Reflexiones sobre la memoria histórica en España.” Migraciones y Exilios 5 (2004): 37–50. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain.” Anthropology Today (June 2006): 7–12. ———. “Exhumaciones y políticas de la memoria en la España contemporánea.” Hispania Nova (2007), http://hispanianova.rediris.es/7/dossier/07d003. pdf. ———. El pasado bajo tierra. Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la guerra civil. Madrid: Anthropos, 2014. Ferrándiz, Francisco, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben, eds. Necropolitics. Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Gedi, Noa, and Yigal Elam. “Collective Memory—What Is It?” History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 30–50. González, José M. “Spanish Literature and the Recovery of Historical Memory.” European Review 17, no. 1 (2009): 177–85. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. Volver a las trincheras. Una arqueología de la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Alianza, 2016. Jerez-Farran, Carlos, and Samuel Amago, eds. Unearthing Franco’s Legacy. Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2010. Juliá, Santos. Víctimas de la guerra civil. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1999. ———. Memoria de la guerra y del franquismo. Madrid: Taurus, 2006. Labanyi, Jo. “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain.” Special issue, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 157–75. ———. “The Languages of Silence: Historical Memory, Generational Transmission and Witnessing in Contemporary Spain.” Journal of Romance Studies 3 (2009): 23–35. Lagrou, Peter. “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–1965.” Past and Present 154 (1997): 181–222. Lindsay, Anne. “Virtual Tourist: Embracing Our Audience through Public History Web Experience.” The Public Historian 35, no. 1 (February 2013): 67–86. Mosse, George. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pérez de Urbel, Fray Justo. El Monumento de Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1959.

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Reig Tapia, Albert. Memoria de la Guerra Civil. Los mitos de la tribu. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1999. Richards, Michael. “From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War.” History and Memory 14 (2002): 93–120. Rousso, Henri. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Stevens, Mary. “Public Policy and the Public Historian: The Changing Place of Historians in Public Life in France and the UK.” The Public Historian 32, no. 3 (2010): 120–38. Suleiman, Susan. Crisis of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Vinyes, Ricard, ed. El Estado y la memoria: Gobiernos y ciudadanos frente a los traumas de la historia. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2009. Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Young, James E. At Memory Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem—And Mine.” The Public Historian 24, no. 4 (2002): 65–80.

CHAPTER 3

The Spanish Civil War Archive and the Construction of Memory Jesús Espinosa Romero

2016 marked the 80th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War and the year saw numerous conferences, seminars, encounters, and publications. These commemorative events will continue through 2019, and then give way to remembrance of the key experiences that characterized the dictatorship’s first phase: repression and hunger. 2017 saw the anniversaries of both military and political events of great significance, such as the battles of Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, and Belchite; the fall of Malága and the Northern Front; the bombing of Guernica, Jaen and Almeria; the May Days in Barcelona, and the FET-JONS Unification Decree, as well as the establishment of the first of the institutions that played a crucial role in the insurgents’ structures of repression. The Anti-Communist Information and Propaganda Office (Oficina de Información y Propaganda Anticomunista, or OIPA in Spanish), created in April 1937, was the first body purposely devised for classifying information captured from the enemy in the government zone, giving rise to a documentary depository that was soon sustained and managed by other organizations. This archive has proven essential for the J. E. Romero (*)  Archivo General de La Administración, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_3

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study of the political, labor, and social organizations of the Republican rearguard and, by extension, of the Civil War itself. Forty years later, in the autumn of 1977, after the first democratic elections of the contemporary era, the Documentary Services of the Presidency (Servicios Documentales de Presidencia de Gobierno), the last institution to manage this depository during the dictatorship, was abolished by the government of Adolfo Suárez. Two years later, the archive created at the height of the war became the cornerstone of the Salamanca Civil War Archive (Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española), which is currently integrated into the Historical Memory Records Center (Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, or CDMH) and is also celebrating its tenth anniversary (for more details of the archive’s collections, see Chapter 3 by Melgar Camarzana). This archive, built up through confiscations and requisitions, jealously guarded the documentation in order to use it in repressing the enemy, even many years after the end of the conflict. In contrast, the Spanish Civil War Archive contains the written memory of the defeated and, since 1979, has been open and accessible to all Spaniards. Such a linear narrative about the use of the archive seamlessly leads us from the war to democracy, from dictatorship to freedom, from repression to compensation through the pensions awarded to Republican veterans. However, this history had a turning point in the 1960s, when the dictatorship deemed the archive to be an indispensable tool in building a new narrative about the war as well as a means to explain to Spaniards the whys and wherefores of the political regime that governed them. This chapter will describe three well-differentiated periods in the history of the archive. The first refers to its origins during the war and in the immediate postwar period. The second explains the changing uses of this archive by the dictatorship: from being an archive essentially linked to Franco’s information services and their punitive actions, it went on to play a strategic role in the Regime’s propaganda machine during the 1960s, providing the material with which to update its foundational values and impose a new narrative of the civil conflict based on the coexistence between Spaniards. The third and final period starts in 1979, when the Salamanca archive was incorporated into the National Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico Nacional, or AHN in Spanish). Since then, for the Spanish social imaginary, it became the quintessential documentary reference of the Spanish Civil War, surpassing others such as the then Military Historical Service in Madrid (Servicio Histórico Militar

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de Madrid), whose documentation is more closely linked to the operations of war. This function was reinforced by its role as a key element in the process of reparations begun by the post-Franco democratic governments for the benefit of both Civil War and dictatorship victims. In the wake of the so-called reparation laws, any Spaniards who fought in and suffered the ravages of the conflict, or their closest relatives, became potential beneficiaries of such reparations.1 Another development that helped to give the Salamanca Archive visibility was the boom in historiography that occurred during the early years of the transition to democracy. As a result, the Salamanca Archive has become a privileged space of Spain’s historical memory.

State Delegation for the Recovery of Records (Delegación Del Estado Para La Recuperación de Documentos, or DERD) In parallel to the successive failures of Franco’s Army to take Madrid, which culminated in their defeat at the Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, the insurgent military proceeded to build a State. This process included creating a criminal justice system. The repression of the enemy was ultimately given judicial form within the new legal framework built under Decree no. 108, which outlawed all parties, unions, social organizations, and persons associated with the Popular Front or opposed to the self-proclaimed National Movement. Despite the expeditious nature of the urgent summary procedures, the justice of the insurgents was subject to the Code of Military Justice, in which any incriminatory document had an objective legal value for sentencing enemies regardless of any oral testimony. This is why article two of the abovementioned decree 1 Between March 1976 and October 1984, the Spanish State established different measures to financially compensate the defeated in 1939. These represented a considerable disbursement from the State budget, which in 1980 amounted to 60 billion pesetas; Santos Juliá, Elogio de historia en tiempo de memoria (Madrid: Fundación Alfonso Martín Escudero-Marcial Pons Historia, 2011), 41. The results of this effort are the online databases, “The Military and members of the law-enforcing authorities of the Republic (1936– 1939)” and “The dead, maimed and missing from the Army of the Republic” on the website of the Historical Memory Records Center (CDMH), http://www.mecd.gob.es/ cultura-mecd/areas-cultura/archivos/mc/archivos/cdmh/bases-de-datos.html. A critical review of the Historical Memory policies is provided in Bartolomé Clavero, España 1978: La amnesia constituyente (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2104).

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provided for “the seizure of as many movable and immovable assets, effects and documents as belong to the mentioned parties or groupings, with all of them passing into the ownership of the State.”2 The seizure of documentation from the enemy thus became a key aspect of the punishment meted out. It was also to become a powerful instrument for anti-communist propaganda. General Franco’s Private Secretariat, headed by his brother Nicolás Franco, began to centralize this seizure of documents through an initial body, the Anti-Communist Information and Propaganda Office (OIPA). Founded during the breakup of the Vizcaya front through a decree issued by the Generalissimo’s General Secretariat on 20 April 1937, the OIPA was located in the Army Headquarters. Its mission, both in the conquered area and in those yet to be occupied, was to gather documentation that would provide proof of “Marxist activities in Spain and in particular the documentation of masonic associations, the Human Rights League, Friends of Russia, International Red Aid, etc.”3 However, the Carlist Marcelino Ulibarri (1880–1951) would be charged with organizing two new services that very quickly replaced the OIPA. Ulibarri was an old acquaintance of Franco’s from the days when the latter was the director of the General Military Academy (Academia General Militar) in Zaragoza. But above all, he was a friend of Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and the all-powerful Interior Minister. After having efficiently executed a political cleansing in Navarre 2 From a legal viewpoint, the famous War Proclamation acquired widespread publicity when it was signed on 28 July by the then highest representative of the perpetrators of the coup, General Cabanellas, president of the Spanish National Defence Junta (Junta de Defensa Nacional de España), and when it was published in the Journal of the National Defence Junta two days later, on 30 July, the only and exclusive content of which was the mandate itself. The vicious Decree 108, signed in Burgos on 13 September 1936 by Cabanellas, was published three days later in the same journal. 3 CDMH, DNSD, Secretariat, Recovery, 22, 1. On the OIPA and successive bodies, see Antonio González Quintana, “Fuentes para el estudio de la represión franquista en el Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección ‘Guerra Civil’,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie V, Historia Contemporánea 7 (1994): 479–508; Jesús Espinosa Romero, and Sofía Rodríguez López, “El Archivo de Guerra Civil de Salamanca: De la Campaña a la Transición,” in Paseo documental por el Madrid de antaño, ed. Juan Carlos Galende Díaz, and Susana Cabezas Fontanillas (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid-Fundación Hospital San José de Getafe, 2015), 131–55; J. Espinosa Romero, “La Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos en Madrid,” in Una ciudad en guerra: Madrid, 1936–1948, ed. Daniel Oviedo Silva and Alejandro Pérez-Olivares (Madrid: Catarata, 2016), 133–58.

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in the summer of 1937, Ulibarri took on the mission of confiscating documentation from the enemy and of shaping an information service that fed into various bodies of the New Spain. The first of the services he coordinated, the “Special Section” (Sección Especial), focused on dealing with the documentation seized from masonic and theosophical or evangelical societies. The second department was “Document Recovery” (Recuperación de Documentos), specializing in selecting and classifying the documents of organizations linked to the Popular Front. In April 1938, by now under the ministerial mantle of Serrano Suñer, both departments were unified under the title of the State Delegation for the Recovery of Records (DERD).4 While the conflict lasted, the DERD was subject to military authority, including Colonel José Ungría’s Military Police and Information Service (Servicio de Información y Policía Militar, or SIPM), created in November 1937. It was also subject to demands for information from the Central Office for Military Prosecution (Auditoría de Guerra) located in Zaragoza. It managed a vast archive on individuals accused of leftwing political offenses, and was constructed through the espionage network organized by the Nationalists in the French Basque Country. The DERD had a copy of this material.5 The DERD had to deal with the vast flow of documents that Franco’s military advances put at its disposal. The DERD’s front-line delegate offices, headed by Captain Manuel Martín Sastre, were established as Republican defenses collapsed. The Castellón office collected 4 Franco’s first government dates from 31 January 1938 and Serrano Suñer was appointed the secretary of that Government on 2 February. He thus inherited the competences managed by Nicolás Franco, who became the diplomatic representative of the rebels in Lisbon. The most sensitive affairs were therefore transferred from Franco’s brother to his brother-in-law. On Ulibarri, see Fernando Mikelarena Peña, Sin Piedad: Limpieza Política en Navarra, 1936 (Arre: Pamiela, 2015), 251–62. 5 This civil intelligence network was known as the Information System for the Spanish Northeastern Border (Sistema de Información de la Frontera Nordeste de España, or SIFNE), one of the mainsprings of the SIMP. When it was transferred to San Sebastián and came under the control of the military, its information was called the “Catalan File” after Catalan right-wing refugees, fundamentally traditionalists and members of the Lliga and their families, who constituted a hugely valuable source of information on their fellow countrymen who were loyal to the Republic. One of the most recent studies is Sofía Rodríguez López and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, “Blue Angels: Female Fascist Resistants, Spies and Intelligence Officers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939,” Journal of Contemporary History online first (2016), 1–22.

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documentation seized on different fronts and forwarded it to the DERD archives. These were already being organized into two major sections according to their nature. If they were sectarian they were stored in the Special Section (Sección Especial) or the Freemasonry Section (Sección de Masonería), or in the Politico-Social Section (Sección Político-Social), a great melting pot that gathered together the documentation of Popular Front organizations and Republican governmental and military institutions. The politico-social documentation was grouped together geographically: seizures made in the Aragonese, Vinaroz, and Lérida zones comprised one set of materials, while the compilers waited to take custody of the imminent seizures that would be made when the Catalan offensive was unleashed. A few days after Barcelona fell, Ulibarri, the DERD chief, travelled to the Catalan capital to personally direct operations.6 The experience gained in Barcelona improved the work in the cities of Madrid, Valencia, and Alicante when the Republic surrendered two months later. All this seized material was gradually transferred to Salamanca, more specifically to a number of buildings ceded by the Jesuits. The documentation on freemasonry was located in the Jesuit’s Clerecía church and the politico-social documentation in their Novitiate, which did not prevent documents from also being stored in the Dominican convent of San Esteban. For his part, Ulibarri had his office in the diocese’s Seminary and his staff was accommodated in the Colegio de San Ambrosio, the current headquarters of the CDMH. Not all the material arriving in Salamanca did so exclusively through the DERD. The SIPM, which had also built up a large amount of information confiscated from the Republican enemy, transferred its archives to other bodies of the New State when it was disbanded in September 1939. The Second Bureau of the Army General Staff (Segunda Sección del Alto Estado Mayor) and the Directorate-General of Security (Dirección General de Seguridad, or DGS), headed by Ungría himself from January 1939, were its main recipients. The order to disband the SIPM provided for any documentation of interest to the police to be delivered to the DGS. We find an example of this in the documentation seized from the home of the socialist Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza. Ulibarri’s henchmen made the usual visit to his home, 6 Josep Cruanyes, Els papers de Salamanca: L´espoliació del patrimoni documental de Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2003).

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but the search did not turn up anything, given that the documentation had already been seized by the SIPM. In the autumn of 1939, the DGS received Galarza’s papers and proceeded to send them to Salamanca.7 The approval of the special laws of Political Responsibilities (Responsabilidades Políticas) and Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (Represión de Masonería y Comunismo) further reinforced the position of the DERD archive within the dictatorship’s punitive system and it became a key element in the information system underpinning the New State’s judicial structure. The first of these, promulgated before the end of the war, in February 1939, declared the political guilt of persons who from October 1934 had contributed “to creating or worsening subversion in Spain” or who, during the war, had taken up the defense of the Republic or had shown an uncooperative attitude to the insurgents. Its article two ratified the abovementioned Decree 108 of September 1936. The Law against Freemasonry and Communism was published a year later, in March 1940. In contrast to the 1939 Law, which had imposed disproportionate economic sanctions, confinement, and disqualification, this later legislation imposed severe prison sentences on those found guilty under its provisions. The vast majority of summary offenses tried by these tribunals contained reports on political and/or masonic records drafted by the DERD, enacted either in its own name or at the request of a judge.8 “Justice” meted out to the enemy was placed under Franco’s direct authority. The Salamanca archive, which was indispensable in the legal processes against political opponents, suffered the same fate. The DERD disappeared as a department of the Ministry of the Interior on 30 September 1944 but, of course, this was not the case for its functions, 7 This was one of the many transfers of documents from the SIMP to the DGS, General Military Archive in Ávila (Archivo General Militar Avila, or AGMA), C.2962, 14/1. 8 On 9 February 1939 and 1 March 1940 these new special jurisdictions were promulgated against the enemies of the State, following the Nazi and fascist models. In the case of the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (Tribunal Especial de Represión contra la Masonería y Comunismo), the DERD was both judge and participant because Ulibarri was in charge of drafting the sentences during his first year. See Manuel Álvaro Dueñas, Por ministerio de la ley y voluntad del Caudillo: La jurisdicción especial de responsabilidades políticas (1939–1945) (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 2009); Guillermo Portillo Contreras, La consagración del derecho penal de autor durante el franquismo: El Tribunal Especial de Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Granada: Comares, 2010).

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which were now performed by a new body, the National Delegation of Documentary Services (Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales Spanish, or DNSD). Created by confidential decree, it reported to the office of the Ministry of the Presidency (Presidencia de Gobierno). This decree, which was never published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, or Official State Bulletin, prescribed continuity in documentary classification tasks to provide records of a military, political, social, and secret nature on organizations and people. The decree stated that Franco, and above all his right-hand man, naval captain and undersecretary of the Government, Luis Carrero Blanco, would be the two people ultimately responsible for the Salamanca Archive as well as for the Second Bureau of the General Staffs of the different armies, the Civil Guard and the Politico-Social Brigade (Brigada Político-Social) within the DGS.9 Not only that: the setting up of a national identity document system to control the Spanish population as a whole required that its identification department ask the DNSD for as much information on a person’s political background as it had available.10 Colonel Francisco Javier Planas de Tovar was placed in charge of the DNSD and remained at its head until he died in 1964. The service he directed did not essentially change, but it did not just limit itself to informing on the Regime’s enemies; it also did so on persons involved in the dictatorship. An example of this were the purges undertaken by Franco’s single political party, the FET y de las JONS, in 1945. Its chief, José Luis Arrese, received from the DNSD the reports on its grassroots as well as its most prominent leaders, such as his predecessors as chief, Serrano Suñer and Fernández Cuesta. Years later, in 1956, the DGS also took an interest in the past of those repatriated individuals who had been evacuated to the Soviet Union by the Republic as children. In any event, the Salamanca Archive was “an admirable source for successive [Police] services.”11 9 Copy

dated 1 January 1945 in CDMH, DNSD, Admin, 5, 74. of 2 March 1944 creating the national identity document; see Martí Marín Corbera, “La gestación del Documento Nacional de Identidad: Un proyecto de control totalitario para la España franquista,” in Novísima: II Congreso Internacional de Historia de Nuestro Tiempo, ed. C. Navajas Zubeldia and D. Iturriaga Barco (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2010), 323–38. 11 Espinosa Romero and Rodríguez López, “El Archivo de Guerra Civil de Salamanca,” 131–55. 10 Decree

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In 1958, the Politico-Social Section of the DNSD became integrated into its namesake at the DGS and disappeared from the DNSD administrative structure.12 The dictatorship was beginning to write a new chapter in its history. The Law of Principles of the National Movement (Ley de Principios del Movimiento Nacional) was promulgated and access to international financing was gained with participation in the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Opus Dei technocrats were mastering the ins and outs of exercising power and advocated a less divisive version of the past. Francoism was embracing controlled modernity. In 1963, Carlos Robles Piquer, Director-General of Information at the Ministry of Information and Tourism (Ministerio de Información y Turismo, or MIT), stated in the context of the propaganda campaign celebrating “25 Years of Peace” that since 1939 “the government has been directed toward two main objectives [:] to creating a habit of coexistence among Spaniards and to [reformulating] a suitable economic and social structure that permits that coexistence.” He then recalled that during the Republic such an understanding had been impossible due to the huge number of politicized issues and that after the war this had increased due to the tensions that had built up over the three years of the conflict. A period of calm was therefore imposed on former enemies, that is to say, “a de-politicising cure […] twenty-five years later, we Spaniards have become accustomed to coexisting in peace and to therefore accept […] a simple difference of opinion.”13 While the country was beginning to change, the various forms of opposition to the dictatorship, which did not, in fact, accept simple differences of opinion, were also changing. Exiled publishers such as Ruedo Ibérico effected one of these transformations. As opposition publishers, they had three objectives: to recover the immediate history and memory of Spain, to attack the Regime at its ideological foundations, and

12 The Private Documents Collection holds this type of documentation. While the archive of the geographer Gonzalo de Reparaz was returned in 2016, after having been offered in 1955, the heirs of the great jurist Rafael Altamira also received the documentation that had been taken from his home in El Campello (Alicante). CDMH, DNSD, Correspondencia, 1954 and 1955. 13 Carlos Robles Piquer, Así nos gobernamos (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1964).

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to propose an alternative vision of the future.14 The Salamanca Archive very soon became again one of the cornerstones of dictatorship politics, a first-rate weapon for a war that in this case was cultural: the interpretation of the Spanish Civil War on which the dictatorship’s legitimacy was based.15 On this occasion, it was not going to be waged against international communism, but against the young, mostly, English-speaking historians of contemporary Spain who published in exile presses.16

The Salamanca Archive, Again at War… A Cultural War In May 1965 the Foreign Minister, Fernando María Castiella, provided the Spanish Council of Ministers with photocopies of the appendices of Gabriel Jackson’s book, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, a volume that, in his judgement, was seriously damaging to the country’s image. Manuel Fraga, the Francoist Minister of Information and Tourism reacted immediately. That same month he created a section of Studies of the Spanish War (Estudios sobre la Guerra de España), attached to his ministry.17 The man in charge of this office, who specialized in the 14 On the changing nature of Spain, see Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Cichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Francisco Rojas Claros, Dirigismo cultural y disidencia editorial en España (1962–1973) (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2013), 113; Albert Forment, José Martínez: La epopeya de Ruedo Ibérico (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001); Beatriz García, “Ruedo Ibérico: Contra la estrategia del olvido, el dedo en el gatillo de la memoria,” in Nuevas tendencias historiográficas e historia local en España. Actas del II Congreso de Historia Local de Aragón, ed. Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer and Carmen Frías Corredor (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios AltoaragonesesUniversidad de Zaragoza, 2001), 389–400. 15 Javier Muñoz Soro, “Política de información y contrainformación en el Franquismo (1951–1973): El Ministerio de Información es tan importante como el de la Guerra,” Revista de Estudios Políticos 163 (2014): 233–63. 16 On the propaganda use of the Salamanca Archive during the war and as a source for constructing the canonical histories of the Military Historical Service, see Espinosa Romero and Rodríguez López, “El Archivo de Guerra Civil de Salamanca.” 17 Order of 21 May 1965, Boletín Oficial del Estado [BOE], no. 135, 5 June 1965. This new office has been widely studied in academic literature, among others by Alberto Reig Tapia, Ideología e Historia: Sobre la represión franquista (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 74 and ff.; Jesús Izquierdo Martín, and Pablo Sánchez León, La guerra que nos han contado, 1936 y nosotros (Madrid: Alianza, 2006); Paloma Aguilar, Memory and amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 67 and ff. In 1964 Fraga succeeded in eliminating the preeminence of military censorship for publications on the Civil War, which had been in force since 1941; see Francisco Rojas Claros, Dirigismo cultural, 41–42.

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study of the Civil War, was Ricardo de la Cierva. He presented a report to his minister in November 1965,18 in which he recognized that the dictatorship faced a problem: Spaniards had access to contraband editions of books published abroad which questioned the Francoist version of the war. These included Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, Herbert Southworth’s The Myth of Franco’s Crusade, and Stanley Payne’s Falange, all translated and published by Ruedo Ibérico. These works not only questioned the legitimacy of the dictatorship but also the intellectual and methodological weakness of Spanish historiographical production and, consequently, the narrative of the past proposed by the dictator. For example, Manuel Aznar’s military history lacked scientific apparatus, and the young Gabriel Jackson had effectively dismantled its argument. Southworth had done the same with Rafael Calvo Serer and, lastly, Carlo Seco Serrano had plagiarized whole pages of Arrarás’ History of the Crusade, and even copied, with its misprints, the bibliography provided by young Thomas in his book. The Studies of the Spanish War section was, in fact, configured as a university institute that imparted a seminar and assessed more than 300 books and hundreds of pamphlets and articles. Furthermore, seven doctoral theses were written on key aspects of the period. According to De la Cierva, to attain maximum competence, his research staff had to include a serviceman who was a specialist on political subjects, such as Lieutenant-Colonel José María Gárate Córdoba of the Military Historical Service. Commenting on the documents gathered in Salamanca, De la Cierva ended his report by stating that “when we have that triple collection we will undoubtedly have the first documentary ensemble in the world on the Spanish war and further acquisitions would only be accessory to it.” The Salamanca Archive would, therefore, be placed at the heart of the cultural offensive that the dictatorship would unleash from the mid-1960s onwards. In his first publication, A Hundred Basic Books on the Spanish War, published in 1966 by Editora Nacional, De la Cierva thanked Admiral Fontán, the director of the DNSD, and Pedro Ruiz de Ulibarri, secretary-general and head of its archive, for the access provided to their collection. This book set the new tone of the Regime toward the war. The documentation seized thirty years earlier acquired a new dimension for 18 Urgent information [from Ricardo de la Cierva] on the use of the Spanish War theme as a historical base for high-level propaganda against contemporary Spain in 1965, 16 November 1965, AGA, 3, 49, 21, 48803.

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the dictatorship in which the “War of Liberation” came to be known as the “Spanish War,” “one where one should not condemn but explain and therefore appease and reconcile people.”19 Fraga, Robles Piquer, and De la Cierva sought to increase the institutional range of their initiatives. Throughout the second half of 1965, they worked on a project for a decree that was ultimately not approved by the Council of Ministers, where the hardliners, who held more traditional historical views, had a majority. The MIT proposed to create a Study and Documentation Center on the Spanish War (Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra de España), an institute to gather together and coordinate “the numerous dispersed archives, the important, already established libraries, the different graphic and filmic elements available and the documentary collections, both official and private, that exist in various places around the country” in order to “promote the undertaking of studies aimed at clarifying for History the origins, development and consequences of the war events that occurred in our homeland between the years 1936 and 1939,” while at the same time guaranteeing the transmission “to future generations a historical heritage of unparalleled significance.”20 In any case, the red lines of the dictatorship’s founding principles had been overstepped. The use of the term Civil War to describe the 1936–1939 conflict was rejected by the Government, which only would accept the use of the phrase, “War to Liberate Spain.” Robles Piquer responded to this by maintaining that the original denomination, “Spanish Civil War,” should be retained to prevent misunderstandings abroad and among Spaniards.21 But when Fraga took the decree to the Council of Ministers on 26 January 1966 it was rejected. Ricardo 19 Thus declared the acknowledgment in the introduction. The quotation is from the opening conference of the course in Universidad de Madrid, delivered by Vicente Palacio Atard, “¿Cómo puede plantearse, a nivel universitario, el studio de nuestra Guerra?,” in Aproximación histórica a la Guerra española (1936–1939), ed. Vicente Palacio Atard, Ricardo de la Cierva, and Ramón Salas Larrazábal, (Madrid: Universidad de Madrid, 1970), 33–55. 20 Fraga reorganized the Directorate-General of Information (Dirección General de Información) in October 1962, putting Franco’s brother-in-law in charge along with the brother of a Spanish exile in Venezuela, Eduardo Robles Piquer; see Francisco Rojas Claros, Dirigismo cultural, 45–65. Draft of the Decree for the creation of a Civil War Studies and Documentation Center, undated, AGA, 3, 49, 21, 48803. 21 Observations on the Decree draft, 1 December 1965, AGA, 3, 49, 21, 48803.

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de la Cierva remained as head of the Spanish War Studies Section, publishing monographs and reviewing third-party publications in the Boletín de Orientación Bibliográfica while waiting to be promoted within the MIT.22 For its part, the Salamanca Archive would not be moved to Madrid, as the failed decree contemplated, but would remain in Salamanca under the authority of Carrero Blanco (even so, the office of the DNSD director was in Madrid, in the Office of the President of the Government on Paseo de la Castellana). Nevertheless, this would not prevent the young de la Cierva from taking the documents and books so jealously guarded in Salamanca to the country’s capital when he needed them.23 In October 1966, a few months after the failed decree, Robles Piquer submitted a report entitled Information Policy on the Spanish War.24 In this, he recognized the impact that foreign bibliography was having on the international community. He argued that he had set himself the task of generating a new attitude among national and foreign public opinion, given the growing interest in the matter among young Spaniards.25 With regard to international influence, various biographies of Franco had

22 For a succinct biography and historiographical study of Ricardo de la Cierva, see Gonzalo Pasamar Alzuria and Ignacio Piero Martín, Diccionario Akal de historiadores españoles contemporaneos (Madrid: Akal, 2002), 189 and 190; Aránzazu Sarría Buil, “El Boletín de Orientación Bibliográfica del Ministerio de Información y Turismo y la editorial Ruedo Ibérico,” in Centros y periferias: prensa, impresos y territorios en el mundo hispánico contemporáneo—Homenaje a Jacqueline Covo-Maurice, ed. Nathalie Ludec and Françoise Dubosquet Lairy (Pessac, Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3, PILAR 2004): 233–53. 23 The relations between De la Cierva and Salamanca can be seen in CDMH, DNSD, Correspondence, File 2062. A large part of the National Library’s photographic collection associated with the Republican side came from the Spanish War Studies section, but before being sent to Madrid they were in the Salamanca Archive. 24 Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), 3, 49, 21, 48803. 25 For Robles Piquer, Hugh Thomas’s book was, unfortunately, the best-known international compendium on the Civil War. The interest of Spanish readers and the publishing world was evident in the 870 publications that saw the light in the country in 1965. For more on the view that generations of Spaniards had of the Civil War, see for example, Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memory and amnesia; François Godicheau and Julio Aróstegui, eds., Guerra civil: Mito y memoria (Madrid, Marcial Pons, Casa de Velázquez, 2006); Michael Richards, “El régimen de Franco y la política de memoria de la guerra civil española,” in Arostegui and Godicheau Guerra civil, 167–200; also Richard’s more recent After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge: University Press, 2013).

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actually been published with relative success. Domestically he boasted of having shaped “the thinking of intellectuals and of historiography” through the creation of the section for Studies of the Spanish War, whose first result would be a repertoire of The Documents of the Tragic Spring, a beginning through which history was objectified.26 However, a further initiative was the publication in instalments of a work on the Spanish War. In late 1965, the MIT learned that Codex publishing house, based in Buenos Aires and with offices throughout Spanish America, intended to publish a graphic and documentary history of the war. The publisher’s original idea was to base its discourse on Thomas’s book, “an apparently objective work but undoubtedly hostile to national Spain.” More serious still was that, in writing it, Codex wanted to use a group of Spanish exiles who were resident in Mexico and Argentina and advised by General Vicente Rojo, the former head of the Republican army. Also collaborating with Codex was the Institute of Studies on the Spanish Civil War based in Montevideo. The MIT initiated an operation that ended radically modifying the initial spirit of the editorial project. In their own words: Codex’s trust, which we have gradually won, has led to the publishing house dispensing almost entirely with outside advice, and so we have succeeded in almost totally turning around the original project. By common accord we agreed not to let the work of the Ministry seem apparent [,] thus increasing the credibility of its conclusions both in Spain and abroad. […] Moreover, the final draft written by Codex is carefully revised by the Bibliographic Orientation Services of the Directorate-General for Information, which have frequently removed fragments or illustrations that looked unsuitable, as a preliminary measure to authorizing the sale of the instalments in Spain and always taking care not to remove the general appearance of objectivity that, in any good propaganda technique, is absolutely indispensable for the series to be acquired and accepted by the Spanish.

They added: Obviously, the Chronicle on the Spanish War is not a rigorous piece of research but one intended for widespread dissemination, one that conveys an image of the war that can be assimilated by our compatriots who did 26 Robles Piquer added that the MIT had funded the documentary Franco, ese hombre by José Luis Sáez de Heredia. It was released in 1964.

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not participate in or witness that heroic deed. To achieve this, the work is printed and produced outside of Spain (specifically in Buenos Aires), thus contributing to its appearance of impartiality and helping to make it reach and convince even quite a few Spanish exiles. Inevitably, numerous testimonies from the red zones are featured, but the aim is for them never to acquire conclusive value but simply to be portrayed as anecdotal, testimonial, serving to increase the narrative’s general credibility.27

The work was published in 102 instalments between 1966 and 1968 in Buenos Aires, and was distributed at news stands around Spain. On 27 November 1967, Carrero Blanco authorized the abolition of the DNSD and integrated its activity into the Undersecretariat of the Presidency (Subsecretaría de Presidencia) as a section for Documentary Services (Servicios Documentales), with Admiral Fontán remaining at its head. Even though it would continue to serve the dictatorship’s mission of persecuting its enemies, this new office would essentially become an archive that gradually, and quite arbitrarily, opened itself up to academic research—albeit always under the watchful eyes of its gatekeepers, Fontán, Ruiz de Ulibarri, and De la Cierva himself.28 It would only be at the end of 1972 that the secretary-general and director of archives of Documentary Services, Pedro Ruiz de Ulibarri, would issue a set of guidelines for accessing and consulting the archive.29 For his part, Ricardo de la Cierva prospered in the administration and was appointed chief of MIT’s Contemporary History Studies Office (Gabinete de Estudios de Historia Contemporánea) and, in 1971, director of Editora Nacional, the official Government publisher. That year he reported that: we set ourselves a double positive goal. First, to write a history of the Republic and of the civil war that would be better than those written by our enemies. Second, to coordinate the scattered efforts of Spanish authors from our side and at the same time break into foreign academic circles on which we could base our historical conceptions of Spain for the foreseeable 27 Ricardo de la Cierva’s previous report had noted that the Codex instalments were being drafted [italics added]. 28 On Payne and access to the archive of the Government Records Services, see Francisco J. Rodríguez Jiménez, “Stanley G. Payne: ¿Una trayectoria ejemplar?” Hispania Nova: Revista de historia contemporánea 1 (2015), 24–54. 29 CDMH, Secretariat, Personal file of Pedro Ruiz de Ulibarri.

60  J. E. ROMERO future. […] It so happens that a man in our informal but very closeknit team is the top expert on historic-military themes, [Col. Martinez José Manuel] Bande, and on themes relating to the popular army, [Gen. Ramón] Salas, and on themes relating to sources, Vicente Palacio, etc.30

That same year of 1971, De la Cierva published his Illustrated History of the Spanish Civil War. The censors described it as enjoyable, original and fully documented, even though they were shocked by the denominations of “Government” for the other side and “rebels,” “nationalists,” and sometimes “Francoists” for the Nationalist side.31

The Salamanca Archive During the Transition to Democracy With Carrero and Franco dead and the transition to democracy underway under the stewardship of Adolfo Suárez, an archival policy was set in place with the aim of collecting and storing the documentation that belonged to the dictatorship’s most representative institutions in the State’s network of archives. Thus documents relating to the General Cause (Cause General); the archives of administrative bodies that had disappeared, such as official unions, the Women’s Section (Sección Femenina) of the Falange, and delegations of the National Movement; and even documents from other institutions that continued to exist, such as the Directorate-General for Security (DGS) and the Civil Guard were integrated into the State’s historical archives. In this way, argued Mata Castillón, Deputy Director of Archives and former head of archives for the Francoist Trade Union (Organización Sindical), not only would the documents be better conserved, but the State could succeed in “preventing inappropriate consultations, since access by researchers to this documentation is subject to rules established in the protocol for deposit.”32

30 Report of 29 June 1971, “Note for the Honourable Minister (via the Technical Secretary-General) positive (and urgent) suggestions for an editorial attack policy based on a renewed National Publisher,” AGA, 42, 8822, 01. 31 Censorship file on the Historia Ilustrada de la Guerra española, by Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces, AGA, 66,06302, File 11933,70. The work was published with an initial print run of 5,000. Danae publishing house produced at least nine editions up to 1979. 32 Report by José Manuel Mata Castillón, Archives of the National Movement, 5 April 1982, AGA, 66, 21604, 1964, Folder 107.

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It was in the context of dissolving the dictatorship’s institutions in the autumn of 1977 that the democratic government abolished Records Services.33 The Salamanca archives would henceforth be attached to the newly established Ministry of Culture.34 At the end of that year, the order was given to transfer the files on (previously illegal) political and union activities and organizations held in the archives of the DGS and the Civil Guard to this Ministry, with the aim of assessing their administrative value and selecting those that should be conserved due to their historical importance.35 In the case of Salamanca, a commission chaired by General Salas Larrazábal was created, comprising representatives of the municipal government of Salamanca, the Provincial Government (or Diputación Provincial), the University of Salamanca and the Ministry of Culture. In all likelihood, Ricardo de la Cierva was consulted on this nomination as he, since early 1978, had been Suárez’s adviser on cultural matters.36 The work was completed in the spring of 1979 when a ministerial order was published which assigned the Salamanca collection to the National Historical Archive as an independent division. The new unit lacked an official name.37 This documentation should have been sent to Madrid 33 Royal Decree 2761/1977 of 28 October which reorganized the Presidency of the Government. 34 The Minister of Culture was Pío Cabanillas, former undersecretary of the MIT. 35 Order on the administrative disablement, reserved archiving and expurgation of the archives of the Directorates-General of Security and the Civil Guard of the records on legally recognized political and union activities, BOE, no. 11, 13 January 1978. The Archive of the General Cause was incorporated into the National Historical Archive in 1980. See José Ramón Urquijo Goitia, “Archivos e historia contemporánea,” Ayer 61 (2006), 311–25; of particular relevance are Antonio González Quintana, “La política archivística del gobierno español y la ausencia de gestión del pasado desde el comienzo de la transición,” Hispania Nova 7 (2007), 24–54, and his “Los archivos de los ‘servicios de seguridad de los Estados’ en los procesos de transición política de la represión a la reparación,” in Guerra civil: documentos y memoria, ed. María Dolores de la Calle Velasco and Manuel Redero San Román (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2006), 111–30. 36 Francisco Umbral, in his column “Diario de un snob” in El País, described the appointment of De la Cierva as adviser as a huge error and was horrified at what “this alcohol-free Fraga at the head of intelligence and even of intelligentsia could be,” El País 22 February 1978. 37 Order of 7 May 1979 which provides for the documentary collection of the abolished Documentary Services Section to be assigned to the National Historical Archive to form an independent division within it, BOE, 148, 21 June 1979.

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but was not because of the lack of storage capacity in the AHN building. With this decision, the coherence of the organizational structure of the AHN’s collection was fragmented. For a long time, the archive headquarters in Madrid retained a section called “Contemporary Collection” to deal with the documentation coming from the State administration as well as the judiciary. In keeping with archival coherence, here is where the Salamanca holdings should have been integrated, as the AHN director, Luis Sánchez Belda stated in November 1979.38 However, Suárez’s adviser, Ricardo de la Cierva, became the new Minister of Culture in early 1980, and thus controlled State policy on archives. It was during his tenure as minister that the independent section of the AHN in Salamanca became known as the Civil War section, following the creation of the Trust for the Civil War Section of the National Historical Archive. De la Cierva’s tenure holding the Culture portfolio was short. He was never comfortable with the new democratic system and he was dismissed from his post in September 1980. This prevented him from inaugurating the major exhibition, The Spanish Civil War, which took place in Madrid in October 1980 and which his department had prepared using material from Salamanca. Ramón Salas Larrazábal, a conservative general and historian, and Ángel Viñas, a diplomat and progressive historian, curated the show. Behind them stood the politically centrist, respected historian and, at the time, senior civil servant in the Ministry of Culture, Javier Tusell. Following a model proposed by De la Cierva, the exhibition presented the public with abundant documentary and iconographic sources. It included 2500 objects in total, and visitors had to walk 500 meters to complete the circuit.39 The exhibition also included plentiful visual material from the NO-DO newsreel archive and the National Film Archive (Filmoteca Nacional). It was a great success: 200,000 people visited it in Madrid before the exhibition moved to Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, and Sevilla (where it closed in January 1982). However, the show had some serious shortcomings: it avoided presenting the causes and consequences of the conflict, deliberately fudged an account of the violence in the rearguard, and presented both vanquished and victors as victims of the conflict. As Javier Tusell explained, this exhibition was

38 ABC, 39 La

14 November 1979, 23. Vanguardia, 15 July 1981, 28.

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“an exorcism to avoid another civil war.” Such an approach may seem timid today, but at the time it earned wide applause even among progressive commentators.40 While the exhibition was on, Spaniards could also watch on television two historical documentaries, Tribuna de la historia and La víspera de nuestro tiempo, which dedicated 11 of their 48 chapters to the Second Republic and the Civil War. These programmes mixed testimonies from notable witnesses of those events with analysis provided by a number of professional historians, both foreign and Spanish. The participants represented a wide array of political views.41 After the exhibition closed in 1982, the Salamanca archive ceased to be a vehicle for the generation of an official memory of the war, and its main role altered: it would provide historical documents to researchers, and to former Republicans and their relatives who sought the State compensation, normally in the form of a pension, that the dictatorship had denied them and which now was made possible by a number of laws passed by the young democracy.42 However, during the next few years, the cultural outreach of the archive was very limited. In 1988 it hosted a small exhibition, with talks and movie screenings, on the relationship between the Second Republic and the Soviet Union. The show was barely noticed outside Salamanca. A 1989 exhibit on the role of women in the Spanish Civil War later travelled to Málaga and Oviedo. In 1992 another exhibit, which was visited by 15,000 people, displayed pictures taken by renowned photographers Robert Capa and Kati Horna.43 The relative public obscurity of the archive was suddenly reversed in 1995 when the Felipe González government decided to return to Catalonia documents originally belonging to the Catalan Government (Generalitat) that had been confiscated by Francoist troops following 40 El País, 26 October 1980. This paper dedicated a leading article to the exhibition, congratulating the Ministry’s Directorate-General, professor Javier Tusell since April 1979, for the spirit of the exhibition on a period that should act as a lesson and chastisement. 41 María Antonia Paz Rebollo, and Julio Montero Díaz, “Usos públicos de la historia en la transición española: Divulgación histórica y debate en televisión española (1978 a 1985)”. Historia y Política 33 (January–June 2015), 275–302. 42 In 1987, three years after the adoption of Law 37/84 that recognized the rights and services for people who fought for the Republic, the archive had received 13,900 requests to document claims. That year 1029 researchers visited the archive; see Memoria actividades del Archivo de 1988. 43 Data extracted from the anual report of the Archive conserved at the CDMH.

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the fall of Barcelona in 1939. This decision created a popular outrage in Salamanca—55,000 people participated in a demonstration against the transfer of documents—that was fanned by the opposition Popular Party. When the Popular Party, led by José María Aznar, took power in 1996, it immediately blocked the restitution of Catalan documents. In 1999, the conservative Government remodeled the archive, leading to a removal of papers from the National Historical Archive and the creation of a General Archive of the Spanish Civil War (Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española), establishing in parallel a Center for the Study and Documentation of the Civil War (Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra Civil).44 In 2002, the new center organized two exhibitions, a second show of Kati Horna’s photographs, which was visited by 7,000 people, and— in a gesture of balance between the opposing sides—a show of images by Albert-Louis Deschamps, a photo-journalist who had covered the advance of Franco’s troops. This second show attracted 47,000 visitors. The same year the center opened a permanent exhibit on the Civil War. This included objects related to the war but it lacked any explanation of the conflict. The exhibit even avoided mention of the Franco dictatorship. Such a lack of official interest in explaining the war contrasts with the semi-official support given that same year to a controversial book, Pío Moa’s Los orígenes de la Guerra Civil española. Governmentcontrolled Spanish television devoted ample prime-time attention to this revisionist (though some would call it quite simply pro-Franco) account of the war. The book was praised by conservative historians such as Carlos Seco Serrano and Stanley Payne, and was also endorsed by powerful Catholic Church media and outlets ideologically close to the Popular Party. Similar attention was paid in 2003 to Moa’s subsequent book, Los mitos de la Guerra Civil.45 Both volumes became instant bestsellers.

44 Real Decreto 426/1999, de 12 de marzo, de creación del Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española. BOE, 13-03-1999; Orden ECD/1555/2002, de 17 de junio, por la que se establece el funcionamiento y las competencias del Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra Civil Española. BOE, 25-06-2002. 45 See Javier Tusell, “Bochornosa TVE,” El País, 22 February 2003, and his “El revisionismo histórico español,” El País, 8 July 2004; Alberto Reig Tapia, Anti Moa (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2006) and Revisionismo y política: Pío Moa revisado (Madrid: Akal, 2008); Por Carlos Rilova Jericó, “‘¿Qué te parece Pío Moa?’ Dos notas sobre el revisionismo y la guerra civil española,” Hispania Nova 7 (2007) 24–54.

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In March 2004, the Socialist Party won Spain’s general elections. When parliament passed the Law of Historical Memory in 2007, it also changed the relationship between the State and the country’s memory of its recent past. The Salamanca Archive became now integrated into a new Historical Memory Records Center. This occurred during a political and social paradigm shift at the turn of the millennium, in which the recovery of the remains of the victims of the Civil War had become a key objective of historians, civil groups and some public administrations. As a result, the dead had ceased to be mere numbers. Their stories also ceased to be mere documents stored in an archive that was created to victimize them.

Bibliography Aguilar Fernández, Paloma. Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, translated by Mark Oakley. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Alvaro Dueñas, Manuel. Por Ministerio de la Ley y voluntad del Caudillo: La Jurisdicción especial de responsabilidades políticas (1939–1945). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 2009. Arostegui, Julio, and François Godicheau. Guerra Civil: Mito y Memoria. Madrid: Marcial Pons, Casa de Velázquez, 2006. Cazorla-Sánchez, Antonio. Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Clavero, Bartolomé. España, 1978: La amnesía constituyente. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2014. Comín Colomer, Eduardo. Investigación Social: La Pesquisa Policial En La Actividad Subversiva Contra El Estado. Madrid: Policía Revista TécnicoLegislativa, 1948. Cruanyes, Josep. Els papers de Salamanca: L’ espoliació del patrimoni Documental de Catalunya. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2003. Espinosa Romero, Jesús. “La Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos en Madrid.” In Una ciudad en guerra: Madrid, 1936–1948, ed. Daniel Oviedo Silva and Alejandro Pérez-Olivares, 133–158. Madrid: Catarata, 2016. Espinosa Romero, Jesús, and Sofía Rodríguez López. “El Archivo de Guerra Civil de Salamanca: De la Campaña a la Transición.” In Paseo Documental por el Madrid de antaño, ed. Juan Carlos Galende Díaz and Susana Cabezas Fontanillas, 131–155. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de MadridFundación Hospital San José de Getafe, 2015.

66  J. E. ROMERO Forment, Albert. José Martínez: La epopeya de Ruedo Ibérico. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001. García, Beatriz. “Ruedo Ibérico: contra la estrategia del olvido, el dedo en el gatillo de la memoria.” In Nuevas tendencias historiográficas e Historia local en España: Actas del II Congreso de Historia local de Aragón, ed. Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer and Carmen Frías Corredor, 389–400. Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses-Universidad de Zaragoza, 2001. González Quintana, Antonio. “Fuentes para el estudio de la represión franquista en el Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección ‘Guerra Civil.’” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie V, Historia Contemporánea 7 (1994): 479–508. ———. “Los Archivos de los ‘servicios de seguridad de los Estados’ en los procesos de transición política de la represión a la reparación.” In Guerra Civil: Documentos y Memoria, ed. María Dolores de la Calle Velasco and Manuel Redero San Román, 111–130. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2006. ———. “La política archivística del gobierno español y la ausencia de gestión del pasado desde el comienzo de la transición.” Hispania Nova 7 (2007): 24–54. Izquierdo Martín, Jesús, and Pablo Sánchez León. La Guerra que nos han contado: 1936 y Nosotros. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006. Juliá, Santos. Elogio de historia en tiempo de memoria. Madrid: Fundación Alfonso Martín Escudero-Marcial Pons Historia, 2011. Marín Corbera, Martí. “La gestación del documento nacional de identidad: Un proyecto de control totalitario para la España franquista.” In Novísima: II congreso internacional de Historia de nuestro tiempo, ed. C. Navajas Zubeldia and D. Iturriaga Barco, 323–338. Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2010. Mikelarena Peña, Fernando. Sin Piedad: Limpieza política en Navarra, 1936. Arre (Navarra): Pamiela, 2015. Muñoz Soro, Javier. “Política de información y contrainformación en el Franquismo (1951–1973): El Ministerio de Información es tan importante como el de la Guerra.” Revista de Estudios Políticos 163 (2014): 233–63. Palacio Atard, Vicente. “¿Cómo puede plantearse, a nivel universitario, el estudio de nuestra guerra?” In Aproximación histórica a la guerra española (1936– 1939), ed. Vicente Palacio Atard, Ricardo de la Cierva, and Ramón Salas Larrazábal, 33–55. Madrid: Universidad de Madrid, 1970. Pasamar Alzuria, Gonzalo, and Ignacio Peiró Martín. Diccionario Akal de historiadores españoles contemporáneos. Madrid: Akal, 2002. Paz Rebollo, María Antonia, and Julio Montero Díaz. “Usos públicos de la historia en la transición española: Divulgación histórica y debate en televisión española (1978 a 1985).” Historia y Política 33 (January–June 2015): 275–302. Portilla Contreras, Guillermo. La consagración del derecho penal de autor durante el franquismo: El Tribunal especial de represión de la masonería y el comunismo. Granada: Comares, 2010.

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Reig Tapia, Alberto. Ideología e historia: Sobre la represión franquista. Madrid: Akal, 1986. ———. Anti Moa. Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2006. ———. Revisionismo y política: Pío Moa revisado. Madrid: Akal, 2008. Richards, Michael. “El régimen de Franco y la política de la memoria de la Guerra Civil Española.” In Guerra Civil. Mito y Memoria, ed. Julio Aróstegui and François Godicheau, 167–200. Madrid: Marcial Pons/Casa de Velázquez, 2006. ———. After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-making Spain since 1936. Cambridge: University Press, 2013. Rilova Jericó, Carlos. “‘¿Qué te parece Pío Moa?’ Dos notas sobre el revisionismo y la guerra civil española.” Hispania Nova 7 (2007): 24–54. Robles Piquer, Carlos. Así nos gobernamos. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1964. Rodríguez Jiménez, Francisco J. “Stanley G. Payne: ¿Una trayectoria ejemplar?” Hispania Nova: Revista de historia contemporánea 1 (2015): 24–54. Rodríguez López, Sofía, and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez. “Blue Angles: Female Fascist Resisters, Spies and Intelligence Officials in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.” Journal of Contemporary History online first (2016). Rojas Claros, Francisco. Dirigismo cultural y disidencia editorial en España (1962–1973). San Vicente del Raspeig: Univ. de Alicante, 2013. Sarría Buil, Aránzazu. “El ‘Boletín de Orientación Bibliográfica’ del Ministerio de Información y Turismo y la editorial Ruedo Ibérico.” In Centros y Periferias: Prensa, impresos y territorios en el mundo hispánico contemporáneo – Homenaje a Jacqueline Covo-Maurice, ed. Nathalie Ludec and Françoise Dubosquet Lairy, 233–253. Pessac: Université Michel de MontaigneBordeaux 3, PILAR 2004. Tusell, Javier. “Bochornosa TVE.” El País, 22 February 2003. ———. “El revisionismo histórico español.” El País, 8 July 2004. Umbral, Francisco. “Diario de un snob.” El País, 22 February 1978. Urquijo Goitia, José Ramón. “Archivos e historia contemporánea.” Ayer 61 (2006): 311–25.

CHAPTER 4

The Historical Memory Records Center: A Museum for Memory and the Recent History of Spain Manuel Melgar Camarzana

The Historical Memory Records Center (Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica) in Salamanca is the most recent step in the institutional evolution of a number of agencies created by Franco. This process began with very different objectives from today’s Center. It started during the Civil War, when its main goal was the seizure of records, books, objects and other effects in order to provide information to the different repressive bodies that operated during the Regime. With the transition to democracy, these entities changed their names and functions, as they made these records available to researchers and the public. Today, the Center has become an important instrument for providing economic and moral reparation to the victims of war and dictatorship (see Chapter 3 by Espinosa Romero). The institutional evolution of the Center began with the creation of the Office for Investigation and Anti-Communist Propaganda (Oficina

M. Melgar Camarzana (*)  Centro Documental de La Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_4

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de Investigación y Propaganda Anticomunista, or OIPA) on 20 April 1937. Its main objective was the compilation of enemy propaganda material and the organization of counterpropaganda campaigns. In May of that same year, the National Delegation on Special Affairs (Delegación Nacional de Asuntos Especiales) was set up in order to seize records, objects and other materials of organizations seen as being associated with Freemasonry, Rotarianism, or militant secularism. A decree, dated April 1938, created the State Delegation for the Recovery of Records (Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos, or DERD). However since the previous summer, in the northern front, recovery teams had begun to seize records and other materials from different archives, libraries, institutions and bodies relating to the Republican authorities. These included public records belonging to political parties, trade unions, associations, foundations and companies, as well as papers taken from private homes. At the beginning, delegations were established in different areas of Spain, but the final destination of this confiscated material was the city of Salamanca, which had by then also hosted the headquarters of the Generalísimo for some time. In 1944 the abovementioned delegations were merged into a new institution, the National Records Management (Delegation Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales, or DNSD). Its main role would be to continue with the organization and classification of records that had been seized, and to provide the information contained therein to various agencies in order to carry out missions of a repressive nature. These included the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (Tribunal Especial para la represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo), Military Courts, and Political Responsibilities Tribunals. In 1968 the National Records Management Delegation changed its name to Government Records Services (Servicios Documentales de Presidencia del Gobierno). Government Records Services was abolished in 1977, in the period of transition to democracy. In 1979 the Salamanca archive incorporated the Civil War Section of the National Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico Nacional). The holdings were placed under the control of the Ministry of Culture. In 1999 the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War (Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española) was established as an independent body, and it kept that name until it was integrated in 2007 into the new Historical Memory Records Center.

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The Institution The Historical Memory Records Center, based in the city of Salamanca, was created by Royal Decree in 2007.1 The Spanish State owns and manages the Center, which reports to the General Department of State Archives (Subdirección General de los Archivos Estatales); this in turn reports to the Directorate-General of Fine Arts and Cultural Assets and Archives and Libraries of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Bienes Culturales y de Archivos y Bibliotecas del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte). With the creation of the Center, the Ministry wanted to expand the record holdings of the Salamanca Archive (Archivo de Salamanca) by integrating other records (either originals or duplicates) from other centers and from public or private institutions. The new mission also included extending the chronological scope to the process of transition and consolidation of democracy in Spain in the late 1970s. The tasks entrusted to the new Center were the custody of the General Archive of Spanish Civil War records and their development and preservation. This development consists of recovering, assembling, organizing and preserving original records, including oral testimonies, as well as secondary sources associated with the Second Republic, the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, political repression, exile (including the internment of Spaniards in Nazi concentration and extermination camps) and the transition to democracy in Spain. The ultimate goal of the Center is to make records available to all citizens. For some, that can make a difference to their lives. For example, the archive contains hundreds of thousands of personal files that often are requested to claim compensation for wrongdoings committed by the Franco dictatorship. For others, the Center offers clues to discover what happened to their disappeared loved ones. For still others, the Center may simply satisfy curiosity or facilitate research. The Center plays a dynamic role in fostering research and in contributing to the dissemination of results through the organization of scientific and cultural events, such as conferences, seminars, book 1 Royal Decree 697/2007, dated 1 June 2007. This Decree developed the second additional provision of Law 21/2005, of 17 November 2005, on restitution to the Generalitat of Catalonia of the records seized during the Civil War held in the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War.

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presentations, exhibitions and so on. These activities are complemented by the dissemination of key findings in research via the web, mailing lists and social networks. The Center encourages the active participation of its users. This includes organizations such as historical memory associations, which have been the real engines in seeking the implementation of policies to recover testimonies from the recent historical past, as well as moral and economic reparations for the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. In that context, the Historical Memory Law and other supplementary provisions are of paramount importance.2 That Law directs that the Center should advise and support the victims of repression and cooperate in locating records and information to enable them to exercise their rights for moral or financial compensation. Article 20 of that Law strengthened the legal framework for establishing the Center. It also decreed that the Center should hold all original records or reliable duplicates of documents relating to the Civil War and the political repression in museums, libraries and State-owned archives. The Law also dictated that the Center Administration should make all necessary efforts for the signing of agreements with other public or private archives or institutions—whether national or international—for the collection of oral testimonies that are relevant to this historical period, whether in their original version or through reproductions. Likewise, in order to promote knowledge of this historical period, the Law identified all the records kept in public or private archives as Documentary and Bibliographical Heritage, thus guaranteeing the right of potential users to access and to obtain copies or reproductions. Finally, the Law urged all public entities to adopt the necessary measures to ensure the protection, integrity and description of those records, with particular emphasis on the ones at greatest risk of deterioration. The abovementioned activities carried out by the Center are complemented by a series of pedagogical actions, mainly addressed to young people, to raise awareness on the most recent stages of Spanish history, from dictatorship to democracy.

2 Law 52/2007, of 26 December 2007, recognizes and extends rights and measures in favor of those who suffered persecution and violence during the Civil War and the dictatorship.

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Infrastructure and Exhibition Areas The Historical Memory Records Center has two locations in the city of Salamanca: the historic building at Gibraltar Street and the new premises at Los Bandos Square, which opened in 2015. There is a project for a third building, in the Tejares neighborhood, which will be devoted primarily to storing record holdings and museum objects, and to providing restoration workshops and technical treatment rooms. The Gibraltar Street building is a Baroque edifice, designed by the famous architect Joaquín Benito de Churriguera as a hospice around 1719–1720. Its north façade is quite remarkable from an artistic point of view, with a central section that stands out rather like an altarpiece. During the process of secularization this building was owned privately until 1903, when it was purchased by the San Ambrosio Foundation to house a school. In 1938, in the middle of the Civil War, the school trustees allowed the building to be used by Records Recovery. In 1968 it was acquired by the State and in 1979 work began to adapt the building to the minimum requirements for an archive. Full refurbishment of the building was completed by 2002. This building houses the administrative offices, the technical treatment and research rooms, as well as three exhibition areas on the ground floor: a permanent exhibition on the Civil War, a permanent exhibition on Freemasonry, and a recreation of a Masonic Lodge. Adjacent to this building, an annex was built in the late 1990s to accommodate some of the Center’s repositories. The building at Los Bandos Square was the headquarters of the National Institute for Social Security (Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social) until 2007. It was rehabilitated between 2011 and 2015 and the fin de siglo façade has been restored with Villamayor sandstone combined with granite. The functional layout of the building is as follows: records repositories in the basement, reading room and library on the third floor, work areas in the low-deck, and areas where permanent and temporary museological interventions are planned on the ground, first and second floors. The exhibition halls are complemented by other areas for public engagement and educational activities, such as an auditorium, provided with audiovisual equipment for the organization of cultural events. Additional spaces are used for the consultation and conservation of bibliographic material, record holdings and museum or heritage collections in the custody of the Center.

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Cultural Heritage: Record Holdings and Collections Record holdings and collections kept in the Center are made up of those from the Government Records Services, the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism of the Franco era, and the various record holdings and collections that have been incorporated since 1979. 1. Record Holdings and Collections from Records Services With the records, books and objects that were confiscated from various institutions, entities and individuals, two sections were formed: a Special Section (Sección Especial) and a Political-Social Section (Sección Político-Social), to which the records produced by the Record Services in their daily management should be added. The Special Section groups together records related to Freemasonry and other movements and associations that were rejected and repressed by Franco’s Regime, including Rotarianism, among others. They were collected with the aim of identifying individuals, groups and institutions belonging to these organizations in Spanish territory. This section is organized according to different criteria: personal or institutional files, issues, activities and recovery. The tool used by the Record Services to locate those files was the card index. The Special Section also includes a large amount of bibliographic and hemerographic holdings and collections, also the result of seizures, and many of them on Masonic and theosophical topics. Numerous books on occultism and other religions are currently kept in the Center’s library. The Center also holds a significant number of objects and pieces of great historical value, which were confiscated from those organizations, such as bands, aprons, collars, swords and jewelry, among others. The Political-Social Section consists of records of many types which belonged to the Republican administration and institutions, military units, political parties, trade unions, foundations and associations which supported the Republican Government, as well as records from companies, private businesses and private families and individuals. Several “series” were formed with this large volume of records, most of them with geographical criteria, according to the area where these records were seized—Alicante, Aragon, Barcelona, Bilbao, Cadiz, Cartagena, Castellón, Extremadura, Gijón, Jaén, Lérida, Madrid, Santander, Valencia and Vinaroz—that is, territories that remained loyal to the

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Republican authorities. Other series are not classified according to a geographical criterion, and come under such headings as Particular, Militar and Prensa y Propaganda. This Section also includes books, newspapers and periodicals, and official publications on politics, trade unionism, ideology, history, and literature, all of which are kept in the Center’s library. During Franco’s Regime they were classified in a card index, in alphabetical order, so that repressive bodies could have easy access. With the end of the dictatorship and the arrival of democracy in Spain, those files have been instrumental in identifying and/or compensating the victims of the repression, as well as for research and scientific purposes. 2. Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism The Archive holds the records produced by the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism. This was a special court created by the 1940 Law on Repression of Masonry and Communism, which was abolished in 1963 and replaced by the Law and Order Court. However, a liquidation commission continued in existence until January 1971, when the records holdings were transferred to the Salamanca Archive. The archive consists of records on judicial proceedings against freemasons and communists, as well as volumes containing, inter alia, sentences, records of meeting and so on. 3. Records Holdings and Collections Incorporated after 1979 The collections have been added at different times, including some of the following, which are of a public nature: – Documentation from the Information Section of the General Staff of the Army of the Republic, produced to assist in decision-making processes; they were transferred to the Archive in 1988. – The Causa General archive. The decree of 26 April 1940 granted broad powers to the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court to pursue potential suspects of crimes committed during the Second Republic and the Civil War. It was superseded by a 1969 decree-law which excluded criminal liability for actions committed prior to 1 April 1939, the date when the Republican army surrendered to Franco’s forces putting an official end to the Civil War. The Causa General records are categorized into eleven sections, but the archive

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contains also records produced by the Republican courts which are not included in those eleven pieces. – Political Responsibilities. The National Court of Political Responsibilities was created by a 1939 law that outlawed all Republican political parties, trade unions and social organizations, and provided the seizure of their properties and records. The National Court (Tribunal Nacional) was the highest court dealing with certain exceptional cases and, although it was abolished by a 27 June 1945 order, it survived in the form of a liquidation commission until its final dissolution in December 1966. – The Court for Public Order (Tribunal y Juzgado de Orden Público, or TOP), was established in 1963 with general jurisdiction over crimes committed throughout the country against the basic principles of the Francoist State and against law and order. It operated from December 1963 until January 1977, when the Law of Political Reform (Ley de Reforma Política) was enacted. These records were transferred to Salamanca from the General Archive of the Administration (Archivo General de la Administración) in 2008. – Concentration camps and labor battalions. These records, which cover the period 1936–1969, were transferred by the Fiscal Court (Tribunal de Cuentas) to the Archive in 2010. It is estimated that between 367,000 and 500,000 Republican soldiers were part of forced labor battalions, involved in the building or rebuilding of Spanish infrastructure, such as railways, ports, canals and dams. – Purges of railway staff. These files were transferred to the Archive in 2010, on the basis of an agreement signed between the Ministry of Culture and the Railway Infrastructure Administration (Administración de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias, or ADIF). There are some 200,000 files and 60,000 cards. – Telegrams sent from Franco’s Headquarters to his representative in London, the Duke of Alba, which were held in the Library of the Cervantes Institute in London. – The Nacho Enea National Office (Oficina Nacional Nacho Enea), which acted as diplomatic representation for the Franco Government in Saint Jean de Luz (France) and became the main training center for propaganda and espionage of Franco’s supporters in France.

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Other records of great interest include those from associations and private institutions: – The Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Internees (Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos, or FEDIP). Founded in Toulouse (13 October 1945) it had the primary task of managing the French and German Governments’ pensions and allowances for the families of Spaniards who had been in French concentration camps and in Nazi death camps, especially Mauthausen. – The League of Amputees and Invalids of the Spanish War (Liga de Mutilados e Inválidos de la Guerra de España). Based in Madrid in 1937 until the end of the war, the League represented Republicans injured and incapacitated by the Civil War. These former soldiers— unlike pro-Franco veterans—were excluded by the dictatorship from any compensation. This changed only in 1980 when the democratic government passed a law of redress for this injustice. – The Center for Feminist Research and Training (Centro de Investigación y Formación Feminista, or CIFE). Created in 1992, its records are essential for the study of the origins and evolution of the feminist movement in Spain. – The Spanish Republican Center (Centro Republicano Español) in Buenos Aires, including both records from the Center itself and from other centers in Argentina, which affiliated to it over time. The following records and collections held at the Center came from individuals through various channels: – Bruno Alonso files. Alonso was a Political Commissar of the Republican Fleet who fled to Algeria in 1939 and then to Tunisia. Upon arrival at the port of Bizerte (Tunisia) he was interned in the prison camp of Maknassy. In late 1942 he was exiled from Oran to Mexico City, where he remained until his death in 1977. Alonso’s personal archive consists of reports, orders, newspaper articles, correspondence and pictures. – Dionisio Ridruejo archive. Dionisio Ridruejo was an early Falangist who eventually became a democrat and an enemy of the dictatorship. The archive consists of personal and family records, generated in the exercise of his public and private activities, patrimonial

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records and collections. His personal papers include original manuscripts and typescripts of almost all his works, as well as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, articles and photographs. – Carlos Esplá files. These records come mainly from Esplá’s exile in Mexico. Records concerning the Spanish Republican Aid Board (Junta de Auxilio de los Republicanos Españoles, or JARE) and the Administrative Committee of the Spanish Republican Relief Fund (Comisión Administradora de los Fondos para el Auxilio de los Republicanos Españoles, or (AFARE) are particularly significant. There is also abundant correspondence with other Republican politicians in exile, such as Indalecio Prieto, José Giral, Diego Martínez Barrio and Álvaro de Albornoz. – José Mario Armero Collection. Armero was a lawyer and journalist. His collection is made up of photographs, postcards and objects, including military items and a collection of 853 posters from both war zones. – Luis García Cerdeño collection. Its core contents refer to the social and political activity of Spanish exiles in Mexico and they offer a view of Spain and the Franco Regime from abroad. It consists of records of the institutions of the Republic in Mexican exile, the Executive Committee of the PSOE, and the Pablo Iglesias Cultural Association, as well as records from the Spanish Republican Aid Board in Mexico and Masonic records of the Spanish Great Orient Lodge. The Center holds important photographic collections. Besides photographs kept in the Special Section on Freemasonry and in the Political-Social Section, a series of significant photographic archives and collections have been transferred to the Center over the past 35 years. This collection is nothing short of impressive. Among others, the Center holds works by: – Robert Capa, who recorded the defense of Madrid by Republicans and the fall of Barcelona, as well as the exiles in French concentration camps.3

3 Robert Capa (1913–1954) is considered the first correspondent and photographer to specialize in war. These images were given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1992.

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– Kati Horna, who documented scenes of everyday life in the rearguard.4 – The Mayo Brothers, who reflected the political, social and cultural life of exiles in Mexico.5 – Albert-Louis Deschamps, who photographed the fighting in the area of Huesca, the Battle of the Ebro, the advance of Franco’s troops toward the sea, the parade along the Paseo de Gracia after the capture of Barcelona and the first days of the surrender of Madrid. – Images taken by the German photographer Erich Andres, which offer a perspective of places and people taken by Franco’s Army.6 – Agustí Centelles, one of the leading Spanish photojournalists, whose snapshots of the events of July 1936 in Barcelona, the bombing of Lleida in 1937, and the images of the concentration camps at Bram in France, are true icons of the war and its consequences.7 – Vicente Nieto’s images offer a visual tour of Spain during the Civil War and the postwar decades.8 – Guillermo Fernández Zúñiga photographed the fronts at Madrid, Valencia and Catalonia; Emil Vedin accompanied Russian tanks as a physician and at the same time took photographs of the front and the rearguard, as well as Spanish child refugees in France.

4 Kati Horna (1912–2000) was Hungarian and moved to Spain in 1937, where she worked as a graphic editor of various anarchist journals, including Umbral. In total, there are about 270 photographic negatives taken between 1937 and 1938. 5 There are 3,861 print copies, the negatives of which are held in the General Archive of the Mexican Nation (Archivo General de la Nación de México). They include pictures taken in Spain during the Civil War, but others focus on meetings of the Government and the Courts in Mexican exile, rallies and acts by political and trade union organizations and major Republican figures. 6 The photographs reflect the atmosphere of the cities in the Francoist rearguard, major monuments of the cities Franco visited and combat scenes. 7 Considered by many as the initiator of photojournalism in Spain, Agustí Centelles’ historic images consist of more than 12,000 negatives that were purchased by the Archive in 2010. The images are an extraordinary source of graphic documentation for any researcher of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. 8 There are about 6,000 photographs reflecting a true portrait of a good part of the Spanish society of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

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– Virgilio Muro, whose testimony represents firsthand evidence of the events experienced in Madrid on dates of paramount importance for Spanish history. Other sources of great interest are the Center’s audiovisual and sound materials. They include: interviews with American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and about the Spanish exile in Mexico; BBC Radio recordings containing testimonies of the war through interviews conducted by Michael Portillo; the oral history archive donated by the La Poza (Pozuelo de Alarcón) Cultural Association, with 95 oral testimonies; many other records resulting from different projects related to historical memory funded by the Ministry of the Presidency (Ministerio de la Presidencia). A considerable effort has also gone into acquiring copies and reproductions of other records kept in public or private institutions which complement the Center’s collections. A recently digitized microfilm copy of the Francisco Franco Foundation files, a digital copy of the International Committee of the Red Cross files on the war in Spain and the situation of the refugees in Europe, Comintern records relating to Spain and a digital copy of Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín’s archive attest to the Center’s ongoing effort to expand its holdings.

Exhibitions and Cultural Activities There are currently three permanent exhibitions at the Historical Memory Records Center: a permanent exhibition on the Spanish Civil War, a permanent exhibition on Freemasonry and the reconstructed Masonic Lodge. 1. Records from a War: Spain 1936–1939 The Center maintains a permanent exhibition on the Spanish Civil War, its background and consequences. It displays over a hundred records and objects related to the main aspects of the conflict: the political ideas of the different contenders, the battlefront, the rearguard, everyday life, foreign intervention, population movements, repression and exile. These exhibits are samples that aim at informing the general public, and

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particularly younger generations, about a fundamental component of our collective history. The exhibition includes the following panels9: – Political ideas: records reflecting the political ideas of the two opposing sides. Perhaps the most interesting piece relates to a so-called anti-fascist school textbook, which was used by the Republican authorities with the double aim of teaching illiterate militiamen to read and instilling in them ideological and political messages. – Battlefront: records relating to life at the battlefront. This panel includes Robert Capa’s famous photo of a dying militiaman, which earned the reporter an international reputation and became, along with Picasso’s Guernica, one of the icons of the Civil War. – Rearguard: this panel contains a poster with drawings on how to proceed in case of bombing, addressed to the civil population, including illiterate people. Other records reflect various aspects of life in the rearguard. – Daily life: materials reflecting daily life during the war. The scarcity of basic foodstuffs, such as bread, sugar or meat, forced the government to ration them. – Foreign intervention: the Republican government tried to attract the support of Western Europe, but European democracies did not respond. The establishment of a Non-Intervention Committee a few weeks after the start of the war did not prevent some countries from supporting one or other side, as these records show. – Population movements: many people were forced to abandon their homes and flee to other areas during the war. Several thousand children were sent to countries as distant as the Soviet Union. This panel reflects some of these population movements. – Collectivism: during the Civil War, anarchists and other organizations, such as some trade unions, tried to bring about a social revolution through the forced collectivization of agriculture and

9 In addition to the panels, the exhibition displays a selection of objects related to the Civil War from the Republican and Nationalist zones: collections of cards, a bracelet of the International Committee of the Red Cross, belts with the Republican flag, model soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, a plate with the faces of main characters of the military uprising, a bookmark, cut-outs of children parading in fascist uniform, etc.

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industry. Private ownership of land and industry was abolished and property rights were transferred to the proletariat in those sectors. – Repression: repression against hostile elements was carried out by both sides of the conflict, to try to achieve political and ideological control over their respective territories. – Exile: the dictatorial regime imposed after Franco’s victory and the fear of reprisals led thousands of Spaniards into exile to countries such as France, Mexico, the Soviet Union, among others. A large number of whom never returned. – Posters: a collage of 28 smaller than life-size poster reproductions from both sides to the conflict. Political posters were used during the war as a popular means of propaganda. – Robert Silver’s Guernica: a composition produced with photographs from the war, which represents Picasso’s famous anti-war painting inspired by the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937, by the German Condor Legion in support of Franco. The air attack, which killed or wounded a good number of civilians and destroyed numerous buildings, became a symbol of Fascist brutality. The exhibition is accompanied by an audiovisual presentation on the history of the Archive, its records, and their use under Franco as a source of information at the service of dictatorship repression. It includes images of the general card index, made up of some 3 million cards containing the names of supporters of the Republican authorities from all parties or organizations who were automatically considered as enemies by Franco’s Regime. 2. Freemasonry Exhibition This exhibition displays more than a hundred pieces from the Center’s documentary, bibliographic and iconographic holdings, such as records, books, brochures, posters, prints, photographs, jewelry, swords, bands, aprons, collars and maps. The display is divided into the following subject areas: – Ideological bases of Freemasonry: with the Moral Code and the General Charter of the Order, which had to be distributed to all

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freemason candidates, and Anderson’s Constitution of 1723, establishing the rules and ceremonies to be followed. – The lodge: freemasons develop their activities in a lodge, which is both the meeting and the place where the meeting takes place. – Masonic principles: these records reflect the moral values which rule freemasons’ lives. One of the most important is fraternity, which involves the obligation of mutual aid in case of need. – Masonic symbolism: the symbolic language that freemasons use to communicate among themselves is also used in ceremonies and rites, in jewels and clothes, and in the decoration of the lodges. – Freemasonry in Spain: a map produced by one of the main Spanish Obediences reveals the scope and extent of Freemasonry at one of its moments of splendor.10 – Masonic attributes: central showcases are devoted to the main masonic attributes, which are the objects that members use to represent the doctrines and rituals of their Order such as aprons, collars, jewels, swords. – Persecution and repression: these pieces represent a major example of the persecution to which the Lodges have historically been subjected. This repression intensified considerably after the Spanish Civil War, when legal and police operations were launched against the movement by Franco’s Regime. The approval of the Law and the creation of the Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism in March 1940 meant that thousands of Spaniards were prosecuted and sanctioned on charges of Freemasonry, on the basis of many records kept at this Center. Besides, counterpropaganda activities to discredit the Lodges and their members were carried out by the dictatorship through the publication of numerous anti-Masonic works. The Freemasonry exhibition also includes a documentary which provides general information about the Order, its origins, purposes, philosophical principles and symbolism.

10 Obediences

represent a voluntary federation of lodges that accept the same authority.

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3. Recreation of a Masonic Lodge The Masonic Lodge is a showroom with original objects seized from the Masons by Franco’s troops during the Civil War. It has been kept as it was recreated under Franco, intended originally as an anti-Masonic museum to ridicule Freemasonry. An audio presentation explains Masonic philosophy and symbolism, describing the history of the collection and the meaning of its objects. The visit to the Lodge begins at the “Room of the Lost Steps,” where showcases display jewelry, aprons, collars, as well as portraits of some illustrious Masons. The second step in the visit is the “Chamber of Reflection,” a cubicle where the candidate has to reflect before the initiation ritual. That Chamber contains a series of symbolic objects: a skull reminding the “neophyte” of the ephemeral nature of earthly life; an hourglass, which reminds him of the passing of time; a pen, an inkwell and a sheet of paper, on which the future Mason must state how he intends to pass through this world. On the walls, several phrases remind the “neophyte” that he should not continue if he approaches Masonry for curiosity, profit or power. The gateway to the temple itself is surrounded by two columns that resemble the Temple of Solomon. The ceiling represents the sky and the universal nature of the Lodge. It suggests that the Sky surrounds all humankind from East, West, North and South. The floor, covered in black and white tiles, represents the Earth and symbolizes good and evil, light and darkness. The link between the Sky and the Earth is represented by columns with the twelve months of the year and the signs of the Zodiac, linked by a chain which symbolizes the union that should exist between all Masons. At the back of the lodge, the officers who run the meetings are represented at a rostrum: in the center, the Venerable Master, president of the lodge, and on the sides, the Secretary and the Speaker. Among them, Venus, Hercules and Minerva, symbolize beauty, strength and intelligence. Above the Venerable Master, a canopy contains the initials of the motto, “To the glory of the Great Architect of the Universe,” which is a concept that refers to the “Creation Principle” and “Shining Delta,” which symbolizes divinity and nature. At the feet of the Venerable Master two stones, one unpolished and the other of a pyramid shape, represent how, according to Masonic philosophical principles, man should aspire through instruction and knowledge to become a carved stone. In the center of the lodge appears the altar, on which different objects are placed depending on the ceremony. It currently shows a ballot box, necessary for

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certain decisions, a compass, as a symbol of spirituality and of the equidistance man has to keep with his fellows, and a square, which symbolizes righteousness, equity and the balance that must govern Masons’ lives. Freemasonry has been banned and persecuted in the past by different political regimes around the world. Today it is legal in many countries, including Spain. The lodge recreated in the Center offers a distorted image of Masonry, trying to overwhelm potential visitors by putting together an excessive number of objects and symbols and by showing Masons in grim black hoods and robes, which were actually used only in certain ceremonies.

The Exhibition Project: Memory and the Recent History of Spain (1931–1981) The new headquarters of the Historical Memory Records Center, inaugurated in 2015, hosts a permanent exhibition tracing the history of Spain from the beginning of the Second Republic in 1931 to the transition to democracy in the 1970s and early 1980s.11 This project requires a visitor-friendly and scientifically based narrative, combined with a museographical presentation designed to meet the expectations of a wide range of potential audiences. 1. Structure and Contents The exhibition narrative is structured into subject areas which, in turn, are subdivided into blocks and thematic units (along the lines of scientific research) in order to present texts, collections and exhibition spaces in a coherent manner. Although the exhibition aims to offer a permanent collection of materials according to chronological order, it is intended to be complemented by other temporary or mobile displays, along cross-thematic lines.12 The subject areas of the permanent display are: 11 Many historians regard the adoption of the Spanish Constitution on 6 December 1978 as marking the end of this period, while others believe that the transition process ended with the 1982 electoral victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). 12 Three cross-thematic lines are proposed by Dr. Cuesta: Women: from the conquest of the vote to the reconquest of liberties Wandering Spain: exiles and emigrants Schools and Education: secularism, National Catholicism and technocracy.

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– The Historical Memory Records Center: an explanation of the history of the Center and its duties, together with an appealing audiovisual presentation. – The Second Republic (1931–1936): Spain’s Republican modernizing experience in the 1930s. It is divided into the following blocks and units: 1. Toward the Republic (a) Crossroads of reforms, dreams and conflicts (b) Spain in the 1920s (c) The proclamation of the Second Republic 2. Provisional Government (1931) (a) A devastating panorama (b) Political alliances (c) The 1931 Spanish Constitution 3. First Biennium (1931–1933) (a) The reform impetus (b) Political struggles 4. Second Biennium (1934–1936) (a) Political division (b) The slowdown of reforms (c) The 1934 Revolution 5. Front (1936) (a) The 1936 elections (b) Conflict and Civil War (c) Interruption of the Republican experience. Around eighty pieces from the Center’s holdings (various records, bibliographic sources and museum pieces) have been selected to illustrate this period: a portrait of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, dictator of Spain between 1923 and 1930, dressed in military uniform; a picture of King Alfonso XIII (1902–1931) on horseback; a picture of the crowd celebrating the proclamation of the Second Republic in the city of Madrid; a leather-bound book on the Constituent Assembly of the Spanish Republic of 1931; a propaganda poster of the Republic with fragments of the 1931 Constitution; a picture of a group of people cheering for a Republican-Socialist candidate; a first edition of the Law enacting the 1932 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia; a postcard on

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agrarian reform; pictures of a Republican school; a pamphlet proclaiming freedom of worship and divorce laws; pictures of women checking their names on the lists of a polling station in the 1933 elections; a picture showing copies of newspapers thrown in the streets on the occasion of a general strike; a flyer celebrating the Asturias Revolution in October 1934; a propaganda flyer of the Popular Front; pictures of right-wing leader José Calvo Sotelo’s murdered remains. – The Civil War (1936–1939): the Spanish conflict was the most terrible collective experience that the Spanish people have endured in the course of contemporary history. This subject area is divided into the next blocks and units: 1. Tempests of fire, pain and hatred: a dramatic collective experience 2. The early stages of the war (a) The military coup (b) Total war (c) A divided civil society (d) An international war 3. Cabinets and rulers during the Civil War (a) Politics in the Republican zone (b) Politics in Francoist zone 4. The military dimension of the conflict (a) The development of the war (b) Military operations (c) The brutality of war (Guernica) 5. The end of the war (a) Exile, repression and destruction (b) Memory of the war. Some 264 pieces have been selected for this subject area, among them: Centelles’s 1936 famous picture of fighters behind a barricade built with dead horses in the streets of Barcelona; pictures of the insurgent troops entering a small town near Toledo in 1936; a picture of two militiamen walking in Madrid’s University City; an image of bodies of civilians killed in Irún after fighting against General Mola’s military offensive; a picture of a parade in Salamanca commemorating the presentation of credentials by the German ambassador; images of General

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Franco and Colonel Moscardó visiting the Toledo Alcázar ruins after the siege; an International Brigade album and a gramophone; Miguel Hernández’s Fifth Regiment ID card; Centelles’s picture of a woman, “Mater Dolorosa,” crying over her child’s dead body; posters of the rearguard and the battlefront; books with bullet holes from the war; a 1939 calendar with the slogan “Franco, Franco, Franco, ¡Arriba España!” and letters from the children evacuated to Russia. – The Franco Dictatorship (1936–1975): the main consequences of the war were political repression, lack of freedom, hunger, exile and a long dictatorship until the death of General Franco in 1975. In addition, Spain’s strong ties with the Axis countries in the World War II resulted in its international ostracism in the early years after the war, although this situation changed with the Cold War and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in 1953. This subject area is divided as follows: 1. The ideological legitimacy of Franco’s Regime (a) The dictatorship: authoritarianism, fascism and totalitarianism (b) The Regime’s supporters 2. The hard postwar (a) The political construction of the Regime (b) Postwar calamities (c) Repression 3. Autarky (a) The economy of self-sufficiency (b) The international political isolation (c) Opposition to the Regime 4. Economic development in the sixties (a) Economic growth (b) Structural changes (c) Toward a political modernization of the Regime 5. The final years (a) The agony of the Regime (b) Franco’s death 6. The meanings of Francoism: democratic memory.

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Around 130 pieces will be shown to illustrate this period, inter alia: pictures of Franco presiding over the first victory parade in Madrid on 19 May 1939 with the Regime’s generals and leaders; pictures of prisoners of the war, images of exiled Spaniards in Mexico taken by the Mayo brothers; a photograph of the meeting of Hitler and Franco at Hendaya on 23 October 1940; a Christmas gift sent by the Caudillo to the Blue Division in Russia; a paper sculpture of a Spanish prisoner with a large stone on his back at the Mauthausen concentration camp; pictures of the demonstration of national self-assertion at the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid; a photo of Franco’s farewell to President Eisenhower after his official visit to Spain on 22 December 1959; Republican President Manuel Azaña’s (1936–1939) file from the Political Responsibilities archive; file no. 1001, of 1972, from the Court for Public Order, an investigation of the Comisiones Obreras leadership; and pictures of Franco with Prince Juan Carlos. – The Transition (1975–1982): the Spanish transition to democracy began after Franco’s death on 20 November 1975 and ended with the failed putsch led by Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero coup on 23 February 1981.13 The blocks and units of this area are: 1. Recovering the lost democracy: a seamless transition 2. The beginnings of the transition (a) 1975 Spain (b) Arias Navarro’s Government 3. Adolfo Suarez’s Governments (a) Access to power (b) The 1977 elections and the first democratic government (c) The Moncloa Pacts (d) The 1978 Constitution (e) A time of transformations (f) The 23 February coup

13 Many historians believe that the adoption of the Spanish Constitution on 6 December 1978 marks the end of this period, while others think that the transition process ends with the 1982 electoral victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).

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4. The ending of the transition (a)  The governments of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo and Felipe González (b) (Re) Interpreting the transition. Some 90 pieces have been selected to better understand this period, including: stickers with phrases such as The Constitution of Harmony, Juan Carlos I King of Spain or National Referendum14; images of Adolfo Suarez (1976–1981), newly elected as Prime Minister, in the Zarzuela Palace; pictures of attacks perpetrated by terrorist groups; the 1976 Court Order against Santiago Carrillo (General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party) and others for conspiracy15; a 1977 brochure with the full text of the so-called Moncloa Pacts on economic and political issues; a sound recording of the attempted coup d’état on 23 February 1981. 2.  Museographic Features – Functional distribution and structuring of spaces: the ground floor will house spaces to give visitors an overview of the Center with relevant images, including digital and audiovisual pieces of its holdings and collections. The first floor will host the permanent exhibition, and temporary exhibitions will be on the second floor. – Textual and graphic information: the historical significance and the rich heritage held by the Center require scientifically sound and user-friendly explanations and images. Appropriate fonts, sizes and colors as well as their aesthetic integration within the building will be taken into account for the design, which should above all ensure readability of textual and graphic information. – Audiovisual, interactive and virtual tours: The large number of digitized records allows the use of digital resources to better disseminate the exhibition contents. Interactive resources will meet the needs of both children and adults. Audiovisual material from such a recent historical period will also be used in the exhibition. 14 The Center keeps over two thousand stickers, which were one of the main means of propaganda during the transition period. 15 Included with this file is the gray wig used by Santiago Carrillo to enter Spain from France clandestinely; nevertheless, he was arrested in Madrid on 22 December 1976.

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A virtual tour should allow online visitors to explore the spaces of the Center’s new premises, and its permanent exhibition on the website or via download on mobile or other technical devices or apps.16

Bibliography Díez de los Ríos San Juan, María Teresa. “Estado actual de la sección Guerra Civil del Archivo Histórico Nacional.” Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea 3 (1985): 129–35. González Quintana, Antonio. “Fuentes para el estudio de la represión franquista en el Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección Guerra Civil.” Espacio, tiempo y forma 7 (1994): 479–508. Jaramillo Guerreira, Miguel Ángel. “El archivo de la Guerra Civil de Salamanca.” Anuario de Castilla y León, 423–27. Valladolid: Ámbito, 1989. Turrión García, María José. “El papel de los archivos en la memoria: el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica.” Patrimonio cultural de España, 157– 71. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Subdirección General de Publicaciones, Información y Documentación, 2009.

16 Further readings: María Teresa Díez de los Ríos San Juan, “Estado actual de la sección Guerra Civil del Archivo Histórico Nacional,” Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea, 3 (1985), 129–35; Antonio González Quintana, “Fuentes para el estudio de la represión franquista en el Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección Guerra Civil,” Espacio, tiempo y forma 7 (1994), 479–508; Miguel Ángel Jaramillo Guerreira, “El archivo de la Guerra Civil de Salamanca,” Anuario de Castilla y León (Valladolid: Ámbito, 1989), 423–27; María José Turrión García, “El papel de los archivos en la memoria: el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica,” Patrimonio cultural de España (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Subdirección General de Publicaciones, Información y Documentación, 2009), 157–71.

CHAPTER 5

Museums and Material Memories of the Spanish Civil War: An Archaeological Critique Alfredo González-Ruibal

Introduction: Archaeology and Memory Although archaeology is often associated with the study of the remote past and lost civilizations, it is, in essence, the study of human societies through material culture or, according to a more recent definition, of the relationship between people and things.1 The temporal dimension is no longer important for the definition, at least in the traditional sense, which understood that temporal proximity made the discipline redundant. The recent past and even the present have been part of archaeological scrutiny for years.2 1 Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2012). 2 Victor Buchli, and Gavin Lucas, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 2001).

A. González-Ruibal (*)  Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Santiago de Compostela, Spain © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_5

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This may not come as a surprise in the case of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, since images of archaeologists conducting exhumations of victims of political repression have become part of the collective imagination of Spaniards during the last 15 years.3 However, if the association between archaeologists and deep time is inexact, so too is the notion of archaeology as a mere technique for recovering corpses and documenting violence on their bodies. If we understand archaeology, first and foremost, as the study of materiality, then we will agree that its possibilities for investigating the history of the twentieth century increase exponentially. Archaeologists can, of course, dig mass graves, but also concentration camps, battlefields, military bases and many other sites. Furthermore, archaeologists do not only dig, but also work on the surface, both when their object of study is the twentieth century and the remotest prehistory. The discipline has been studying for years how social relations, power and memory are spatially constructed. In the same way that we can analyze the funerary landscapes of the Neolithic, we can approach the study of the landscapes of terror created by the Franco dictatorship.4 Archaeologists, however, not only construct narratives from material remains. They also discover them (literally or metaphorically) and expose them to the public. Archaeological research, from this point of view, is both the study of the past and of the present, or, more precisely, the effect that the material world of the past has in the present. The discipline, then, is a key actor in both the production of memory and its critical analysis. Here I will offer a critical review, as an archaeologist, of the forms of remembering the Civil War that are based on materiality, emphasizing their political, epistemological, museographic and pedagogic shortcomings. I will argue that archaeology can help produce more complex narratives using things from the past than those that are available at the moment.

3 Francisco Ferrándiz, “Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-Century Spain,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (2013), 38–54. 4 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francoist Spain,” in Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present, ed. Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink (London: Routledge, 2017), 93–117.

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Telling History Through Things The preservation and transmission of the past is most effective when it is materialized. This materialization can take many shapes: museums, memorials, monuments and heritage sites. The temporality, the purpose, and the political rationale behind each of these memory devices vary, but the frontiers between them are becoming blurred. Thus, museums are no longer archives of the excellent, the exotic, or the temporally distant. Many collections now display ordinary objects, the lives of marginalized populations, the experience of the victims of history, or episodes from the recent past. Banal materiality, which was the preserve of museums of antiquities or of remote cultures, is now part of exhibitions dealing with the recent past of Western societies. Examples abound and include such prominent institutions as the Museum of London, the Museum of Amsterdam City, and the Oakland Museum of California, where the galleries devoted to the last hundred years of history include a large amount of ordinary material culture. Museums portraying the daily life of the contemporary past, or recent traumatic events, such as the Holocaust museums, problematize the divide between history and memory. They are often contentious, but their effectiveness as repositories of collective memory cannot be underestimated. It is thus obvious to think of a museum, either physical or virtual, as the space to visualize the history of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. However, unlike other countries with a recent traumatic history, from Rwanda to Chile,5 Spain lacks an institution aimed at telling the history of the conflict to the public. This might seem surprising, since the war is recent but not as much as other divisive historical events that have been already memorialized, such as the Argentinean dictatorship.6 It is not so surprising, however, if we think that a national museum requires a master narrative, particularly so when the national past is traumatic.7 5 Maira Mora, “Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos: Una apuesta estético-política de legibilidad de la experiencia dictatorial,” Cátedra de Artes 11 (2012), 63–76; John D. Giblin, “Post-conflict Heritage: Symbolic Healing and Cultural Renewal,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 5 (2014), 500–518. 6 Emilse B. Hidalgo, “Argentina’s Former Secret Detention Centres: Between Demolition, Modification and Preservation,” Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 2 (2012), 191–206. 7 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2004), 620–639.

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This narrative has to be based on some minimal shared content, values and interpretations, which are accepted by wide sectors of society, in relation to how a certain historical phenomenon occurred. It also requires some basic agreement as to the distribution of responsibilities. This by no means implies total consensus, which is unattainable and probably undesirable8: museums and heritage sites related to war and political violence are usually conflictual. In the case of Spain, the creation of a museum of war and dictatorship is hampered both by the absence of a historical master narrative and of a national master narrative. The tensions between centripetal and centrifugal nationalisms make it difficult to create anything that claims to address Spain as a whole. Proof of this is the fact that the Museum of the Spanish People (Museo del Pueblo Español), which was inaugurated in Madrid during the Second Spanish Republic in 1934 has been closed to the public for over 40 years with no prospect of ever being reopened, despite its incredibly rich ethnographic collections. Yet no politician would dare to open a museum that claims to display an anthropological narrative of the country. Likewise, a museum with the ambition to become a house for the collective memory of all the citizens of the State in relation to the most traumatic episode of the country would create frictions along the political right-/left-wings and in relation to the balance between center and periphery. The difficulty is that, while a memorial or museum is not established at a state level, there are other material memories that display for the public a particular vision of the war. These include the remnants of Francoist commemoration and new heritage initiatives.

From Ruins to Monuments At the beginning of the dictatorship, the Regime played with the idea of ruins and museums as vehicles to tell the history of the war. Some proposals for turning ruins into heritage sites occurred already during the conflict or immediately afterward. Thus, there was a proposal to preserve the ruins of the University City (Ciudad Universitaria) in Madrid as they stood at the end of the war and make them into a place of memory where one

8 Jens Andermann, “Showcasing Dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 4, no. 2 (2012), 69–93.

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could take tours guided by wounded veterans.9 Although the option was ruled out, the ruins of the university became a sort of heritage site for a while: signs were installed, reading “Us” and “Them,” which explained the front (and the war more generally) to visitors in a brief and bold way.10 Even before the end of the war, in 1938, the pro-Franco propagandist Luis Bolín took the initiative of organizing guided tours through the battlefields of the northern front.11 Only the ruins of Belchite, however, survived the first phase of commemoration of the Regime, which was obviously impregnated with the politics of presence characteristic of fascism and its fixation on ruins.12 Battlefields were, at best, remembered with monoliths or other unimpressive monuments and never became lasting places of pilgrimage or dark tourism, unlike the scenarios of World War I in Western Europe (Fig. 5.1). Although there were plans for the creation of a “Museum of the Crusade” in Burgos (the Nationalist capital during most of the war), these never came to fruition.13 An interesting and equally unsuccessful case is the War Museum of Bilbao that was planned in 1937 to showcase the war in the north. The exhibition was never opened, although the scheme was largely developed: We have a list of objects that were going to be displayed, including the underpants of the first Nationalist soldier to cross the Bilbao estuary. The project ended up as a temporary exhibition in the Kursaal of San Sebastián, which displayed basically the weapons captured from the Republican Army during the campaign in the north.14 The role of a national museum was partially and unsatisfactorily played by the Museum of the Army (Museo del Ejército) in Madrid (and now in Toledo), with its fetishistic displays of 9 Alfredo González-Ruibal, Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Alianza, 2016), 82. 10 Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 80. 11 Sandie Holguin, “‘National Spain Invites You’: Battlefield Tourism during the Spanish Civil War,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005), 1399–426. 12 Rik Peters, “Actes de présence: Presence in Fascist Political Culture,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 362–74; Mark Featherstone, “Ruin Value,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 3 (2005), 301–20; Stéphane Michonneau, “Belchite: Between Place of Memory and Place of Recognition (1937–2013),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 3 (2015), 117–31. 13 Luis Castro Berrojo, Héroes y caídos: Políticas de la memoria en la España contemporánea (Madrid: Los libros de la Catarata, 2008), 162–69. 14 José Ángel Brena Alonso, “El Museo de la Guerra de Bilbao (1937–1938): Cinturón de Hierro y turismo bélico al servicio de la propaganda del régimen,” Saibigain 2 (2016), 4–49.

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Fig. 5.1  Abandoned monument in Franco’s headquarters in Coll del Moro. These unprepossessing monuments built during the dictatorship are typical of Spanish battlefields

memorabilia. Other military museums also showcased objects related to the conflict but no museum of the war as such, or of any individual battle, was ever created. The museum of the Alcázar in Toledo, which was inaugurated as the “Museum of the Siege” in the 1950s, was the closest

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instance.15 Monuments were, by far, the preferred option of the dictatorship to memorialize the conflict. In fact, the only active and successful place of memory of nonlocal character in Spain is still the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) near Madrid.16 The basilica of the Valley (1940–1959) is where the dictator, Francisco Franco, the Falangist ideologue, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and (perhaps) 33,000 combatants from both sides are buried. But the monument is more than just a burial place: it is a historical narrative. The history of the war (and its outcome) is written through architecture, landscape, symbols, and an astute manipulation of the context. The monument was built next to important landmarks in the history of the Spanish Crown, most notably the monastery of El Escorial, thus legitimizing the dictatorship as part of the long history of the Spanish Empire.17 It still belongs to the office of National Heritage (Patrimonio Nacional), an institution that manages only royal sites (despite its name). From this perspective, the Valley of the Fallen is not radically different from a museum, if we understand by this a device to tell history through a combination of things, images and text. At a local scale, the monuments of the dictatorship that were erected in every city, town, and village took Francoist pedagogy to every corner of Spain. This form of remembering is now receding fast, first, through the enforcement of the Law of Historical Memory of 2007, which banned the public display of Francoist symbols, and second, by natural death, since Francoist icons and mottos are falling out of synch with contemporary mentalities. Admittedly, the lack of the basic historical knowledge that is required from citizens to interpret these monuments in the “correct” way (that is, in the way they were conceived) does not assist their survival either. Their rusty rhetoric will appeal to an increasingly minor sector of the society, if it is not artificially reactivated by a successful neofascist movement, and will become gradually unintelligible for the rest of the society. Rather than monuments and exhibitions, it is popular 15 Castro

Berrojo, Héroes y caídos, 169 Ferrándiz, Guerras sin fin: Guía para descifrar el Valle de los Caídos en la España contemporánea,” Política y sociedad 48, no. 3 (2011), 481–500. 17 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Topography of Terror or Cultural Heritage? The Monuments of Franco’s Spain,” in Europe’s Deadly Century: Perspectives on 20th Century Conflict Heritage, ed. Neil Forbes, Robin Page, and Guillermo Pérez (Swindon: English Heritage, 2009), 65–72. 16 Francisco

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books by propagandists of the dictatorship that are more effective in transmitting a distorted image of the war and the Franco Regime.

From Monuments to Museums The prevalent forms of material memory during the dictatorship— monuments and memorials—are being replaced by other forms of displaying the past, more in tune with the times and with other Western countries. These new forms of material memory-making fit well with the notion of the past as heritage which has become hegemonic in the world during the last three decades. The past as heritage replaces the notion of the past as epic, which was characteristic of the dictatorship, but it brings with it its own problems. The past as heritage is now best represented in small museums and war sites open to the public. There is an interesting divide between both categories of material memory sites. Many military infrastructures related to the war, such as trenches and air-raid shelters, have been opened to the public during the last decade and a half. In almost all cases, it has been the regional (autonomous governments) or local authorities (municipalities) that have led the initiative (see Chapter 2 by Cazorla-Sánchez and Shubert). Outstanding examples are the trenches of Alcubierre, part of the “Orwell Route” in Aragon, or the shelters of Barcelona, Cartagena and Almería.18 In the case of local museums, it has been private individuals and grassroots associations that are behind the collections. Local governments have begun to be actively involved in this type of initiative only relatively recently. The main exception is Democratic Memorial (Memorial Democràtic) in Catalonia, which combines both open heritage sites and museums. The Memorial Consortium of the Spaces of the Battle of the Ebro (Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la Batalla de l’Ebre, or COMEBE) is a good example of a top-down initiative that co-opts unofficial 18 Andreu Besolí, “Los refugios antiaéreos de Barcelona: Pasado y presente de un patrimonio arcano,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 2 (2004), 181–202; Andreu Besolí, and José Peinado, “El estudio y puesta en valor de los refugios antiaéreos de la guerra civil española: El caso del refugio-museo de Cartagena,” Revista Arqueomurcia 3 (2008), 1–18. For a description of other museums and heritage sites related to the war see Natalia Juan García, “Piezas perdidas, objetos encontrados. El valor de los recuerdos convertidos en colección como vía para recuperar la memoria,” ASRI: Arte y Sociedad Revista de Investigación 1 (2012), 1–16.

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Fig. 5.2  Objects without provenance from the Museum of Gandesa

practices.19 The COMEBE is a museum network that incorporates, and sanctions, a diversity of spontaneous memory practices that had been developing for decades in the region of Catalonia where the Battle of the Ebro was fought in 1938. Thus, the Museum of the Battle of the Ebro in Gandesa is made up basically of collections donated by amateurs who recovered remains from the battlefields, sometimes from the surface, sometimes by digging. The artifacts are displayed without provenance (Fig. 5.2).20 It has been these activities, of course, that have guaranteed the preservation of a legacy that was considered mere junk until very recently, but it is also true that the COMEBE has provided institutional cover to a practice that is today not only illegal but also morally reprehensible: to comb battlefields in search of historical “relics,” often with 19 For a critique, see Francesc-Xavier Hernández Cardona, and María del Carmen Rojo Ariza, “Museïtzació de conflictes contemporanis: El cas de la Guerra Civil espanyola,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011), 131–57. 20 Carolina Martín Piñol, “Los espacios museográficos de la Batall a del Ebro,” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011), 159–74 (162).

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the utmost disregard for the associated human remains. The panorama is not dissimilar in other countries that have been the scenario for the darkest episodes of the twentieth century, from war to genocide: all have been looted in equal measure and looters are now clashing with archaeologists and heritage managers.21 The absence of a critique on the way in which these collections were created, or at least a contextualization that helps explain that such practices are no longer acceptable, implies an exoneration of similar activities in the present. In fact, metal detectorists have increased in numbers and expanded their activities to new frontlines, including hitherto littleknown battlefields (which are, for this reason, pristine and particularly valuable in archaeological terms and as heritage resources). This entails the disappearance of important historical testimonies of the Spanish Civil War and, in the last instance, the annihilation of its material memory: in fact, some key scenarios of the Battle of the Ebro, such as Hill 402 in Gandesa, can be considered destroyed to all intents and purposes after being excavated and “restored” without professional guidance.22 It is understandable that those who have generously donated collections are not criticized, but it would be necessary to explain that their work took place before the development of a heritage sensibility toward the remains of the war. There are several local and private “museums” in Spain, which reproduce the model of the collector-antiquarian. They range from the Wunderkammer model, where one can find the strangest artifacts, and not only those related to the war, to much more professional designs. A good example of the first case is the “museum-restaurant” El Cid in Morata de Tajuña, one of the scenarios of the Battle of Jarama (1937) near Madrid. More professional spaces, which are difficult to distinguish from institutional initiatives, are fortunately becoming more common (Fig. 5.3). This is the case of the Museum of Fayón (Zaragoza), La Trinxera Museum in Corbera d’Ebre (Tarragona), the Museum of 21 Caroline Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2015); Vesa-Pekka Herva, Oula Seitsonen, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, and Suzie Thomas, “‘I Have Better Stuff at Home’: Alternative Archaeologies and Private Collecting of World War II Artefacts in Finnish Lapland,” World Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2016), 267–81. 22 For more on this, see the website, “Historia de la Cota 402,” Latrinxera, http://www. latrinxera.es/index.html?msgOrigen=6&CODART=ART00050.

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Fig. 5.3  The professionally-designed museum of Elgeta

Abánades (Guadalajara) and the Basque Center of Interpretation of the Battle of Elgeta (Gipuzkoa). The best exhibitions often have the support of local or regional governments, though not always. The existence of these and other private collections exhibiting remains of the war prove both that it is possible to showcase the Civil War in museums and that there is an important social demand for these kinds of museums. Local private initiatives will have to meet this demand, before the competent authorities decide to promote more ambitious public initiatives. This is problematic because of the murky origin of the collections, which provide encouragement to looters. But it is also problematic for the kind of historical (or ahistorical) narratives that are transmitted in these spaces, which is very similar in all cases.

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Fig. 5.4  Museum of Abánades

The Museum of Abánades, which I know firsthand, is representative (Fig. 5.4).23 Between 2010 and 2014 my team and I carried out an archaeological project in the area in close collaboration with the promoters of the museum.24 This was created in 2010, in a small village of Guadalajara, with a permanent population of less than 80 people, most of them over seventy years old. Originally, the museum was not intended to be a military one. The idea was to display both ethnographic and historical materials, along with some related to the war donated by residents. However, the part unrelated to the conflict gradually lost relevance due to the interest of some of the promoters of the center in the Spanish Civil War. They included some of the youngest permanent residents in Abánades, people from the village now living in Madrid, and some individuals with no relation whatsoever to the village. It is not, strictly speaking, a community initiative, but it has the support or the sympathy of a large part of the population, many of whom have donated 23 See 24 See

also Juan García, “Piezas perdidas, objetos encontrados,” 7. González-Ruibal, Volver a las trincheras, Chapter 5.

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artifacts or given testimony before the camera. The initiative is not limited to the exhibition of objects: interviews with elderly people talking about their war and postwar memories have been recorded as well. The people of Abánades have a very intimate and even affectionate relationship with the war remains, particularly unexploded ordnance and cartridges, which they used to sell for scrap in the 1940s.25 This relationship simultaneously allows them to understand people interested in those artifacts and not to understand the logic of the museum or archaeology. Our archaeological excavations also contributed to the dissemination of the military history of Abánades, although perhaps what has done more to put the village in the map of the Spanish Civil War memory is a reenactment event that takes place every June under the title “The Forgotten Battle” (in reference to a little known Republican offensive that was launched in the area in April 1938). This performance brings together reenactors from all over Spain. There is a common spirit in the material practices of the reenactors and the promoters of the museum, as with other similar initiatives in Spain. In turn, these interests coincide, sometimes in the same person, with metal detector fans, combing battlefields in search of Civil War artifacts. This is one of the problems of these grassroots memory practices: the continuum between the legal and illegal, the licit and the illicit, preservation and destruction. Our collaboration with the museum of Abánades only partially fulfilled its pedagogic purpose. The partial failure was due to the fact that whereas our presence was seasonal (for the excavation), the networks that were established among reenactors, metal detectorists, amateurs and friends of the museum were thicker and maintained throughout the year. The result has been that the collections of the museum of Abánades have been increased not only with pieces donated by locals, but also by metal detectorists that loot sites all over Spain. In relation to this, one of the problems inherent to all private museums of the Spanish Civil War (which I already commented on the case of the COMEBE) is the lack of context of the exhibited objects. Cartridges, uniforms, grenades, and everyday artifacts could have been found in any other battlefield in Spain. In fact, these spaces often introduce themselves 25 Rachel Ceasar, “How I learned to Love the Bomb: Excavating Pueblo Politics, Love, and Salvaged Technologies after Conflict,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 3 (2016), 570–90.

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as museums of the Spanish Civil War in general. Their collections, originally local, have frequently grown through donations or purchases from different parts of Spain and are usually displayed without specifying the provenance. This practice is in direct opposition to archaeology, where context is everything. It is the association of different objects among themselves and with a specific site, area, and layer that allow us to construct microhistories and link them to History at large. The systematic collection of every object, and not only the most striking, is fundamental in order to produce quantitative and spatial analyses that are essential to construct the archaeological narrative. Small museums are located midway between the local and the general, but fail to link the two scales. They are local because the collections are predominately from the area, but at the same time end up delivering a story that goes beyond the local. And the story itself is problematic not only because it is built with a haphazard collection of artifacts of unknown (or rather untold) provenance (usually sites that have been destroyed by looting), but for other important reasons. In small museums, two themes are emphasized for obvious reasons: everyday life (in that, it coincides with the kind of narrative produced by archaeologists) and military matters. Regarding the first theme, it is significant that at least in two cases (Morata de Tajuña and Abánades) ethnographic and war elements are mixed together in the display. In fact, in all cases we could speak of ethnographic museums of the Spanish Civil War, since it is the material culture of a particular group that is displayed. The group in question is soldiers at war. As in an ethnographic museum, we can see how the soldiers ate, slept, worked and had fun, which were their rituals, beliefs and traditions. The ethnographic perspective is neither exclusive to Spanish war museums nor is it necessarily bad, if combined with other approaches. The ethnographic approach in Spain, however, is both specific to the country and politically problematic. First, the vision that is offered is often a sanitized one. It is a picturesque narrative that recalls a comic book or an action movie and that is inevitably shallow and harmless. Wider historical implications are usually absent as well as the most disturbing aspects of institutionalized violence (although this is somewhat present at Morata de Tajuña). This is not dissimilar to many military museums all over the world, both public and private.26 26 Nick Saunders, Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (Stroud: The History Press 2007), 181–95.

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Fig. 5.5  Everyday objects from the trenches, with no indication of provenance or side to which they belonged at the private collection “La Trinxera” in Corbera d’Ebre

Another problem of this ethnographic perspective, which is specifically Spanish, is that private collections portray the culture of one tribe, not two. The objects of both sides are always displayed together in the same vitrines, offering an impression of unity that is deceiving and far from politically innocent (Fig. 5.5).27 From some flags and insignia one can infer that there are two sides, but the implicit message is obvious: the soldiers were ultimately soldiers, irrespective of the army to which they belonged. This is an ideology that developed from World War I onwards and that is essentially anti-political. In fact, as is well known, fascist ideologies developed in part as solidarity among former combatants against parliamentary politics, which were seen as corrupt and cowardly. This solidarity often transcended boundaries, as many soldiers believed that they had more to do with those they had tried to kill than with their own civilian kinsfolk.

27 Hernández

Cardona, and Rojo Ariza, “Museïtzació de conflictes contemporanis,” 144.

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In the Spanish case, however, the equidistant and anti-political narrative of the common soldier, simultaneously victim and hero, has more to do with the ideology of reconciliation that developed between late Francoism and the transition to democracy (Chapter 3 by Espinosa Romero). Thus, when the Valley of the Fallen was inaugurated in 1959 the triumphal message with which it had been originally designed had been changed into one of reconciliation, which was manifested in the burial of soldiers (and victims of political repression) belonging to the Republican army.28 The remains of the soldiers from both sides were deliberately mixed together to convey the idea of one Spain, great and united in pain. What Civil War museums do with artifacts, then, is exactly the same kind of operation: mixed objects, like mixed bodies, transmit the idea of a single, transcendental national body. The ideology of reconciliation is best represented in La Vaquilla (“The Heifer”), a film by José Luis Berlanga (1985). Here we also have an ethnographic account of the tribe of soldiers, divided by a war which is presented as absurd from the beginning, because it is obvious that the combatants are precisely that: members of one tribe, not two, moved in the last instance by the same (basic) desires and needs. The film is part of a farreaching war mythology which is extremely popular, according to which soldiers would have been organizing truces all the time, playing football together, exchanging paper and tobacco in no-man’s land, and handing letters to girlfriends who always lived in a village on the other side of the line. Although this kind of event is historically attested,29 it was much less common than usually thought. That the description of acts of fraternization coincides in almost exact terms in distant points of Spain corroborates the idea that, in most cases, it is a legend that has been transmitted orally and located in different scenarios. It tells more about the desire for peace and reconciliation than about the war itself. This perspective of the conflict tallies well with the account transmitted by small museums and historical reenactments. The latter tend to end with the reenactors embracing each other after the performance—a very unhistorical detail, if they are trying to reproduce the Spanish Civil War faithfully. In fact, museums tend to combine the narrative of reconciliation with the glorification of the military, manifested in spectacular 28 For

an account, see Ferrándiz, “Guerras sin fin.” Seidman, “Quiet Fronts in the Spanish Civil War,” The Historian 61, no. 4 (1999), 821–42. 29 Michael

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exhibitions of weapons, uniforms, and vehicles. This is no surprise: after all, these museums have been created by collectors fascinated by military history and military artifacts. What is absent in both is the sacralizing character that is so characteristic of war museography elsewhere in Europe and particularly in France,30 perhaps because this kind of narrative is strongly associated with politics and nationalism. The anti-political, equidistant and purely military vision of the war is inevitably too narrow. Although these centers are sometimes marketed as places of reflection with the usual slogans (to learn from the errors of the past, to promote a culture of peace and so on), the fact is that one learns very little about history there. We have to remember that it is ethnography that these museums offer, not history. The gist of ethnography is description, not interpretation. History museums cannot be simply descriptive if they are to play a critical and pedagogical role. They have to explain the past. Irrespective of whether the museums are public or private, one leaves without having truly understood why the war started, for what reasons or ideas the soldiers were fighting, or what was the fate of the defeated. It is not entirely correct to say that one leaves without understanding anything: the absence of discourse is, in itself, a discourse. One leaves with the knowledge (acquired or reasserted) that the war was pure madness, a meaningless fight between brothers, and that we need to learn to solve our disagreements without killing each other. This discourse can be found also outside museums, in war heritage sites, such as restored trenches or routes through frontlines incorporating pillboxes, shelters and other elements. As the remains of the conflict are gradually appraised as heritage in the collective consciousness, the interest of local and regional governments in managing this heritage and making it accessible grows. The ethnographic perspective is the preferred option, as it is the least controversial. However, this inevitably leads to a paradox: we want ethnography to fulfill the role of history, that is, to explain the past by merely describing everyday experience.

30 Daniel J. Sherman, “Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995), 49–74.

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An Archaeological Perspective If we want to explain the past using ethnography, we have to go a step further and transform ethnography into historical anthropology. A historical anthropology of material culture, however, is better described as archaeology: a discipline that builds history through things.31 The perspective of archaeology is, or can be, more nuanced, more complex and more useful from a pedagogic point of view. For all these reasons, it is inevitably more controversial. In the case of the project that my team and I have been developing during the last decade,32 the history that we have tried to convey through our internet profiles has often met with the hostility of reenactors, amateurs and collectors, who feel attacked by the demystifying account of archaeology. This is because the discipline offers a cruder image of the war (bodies torn apart by artillery fire, wounded soldiers killed at short range, mass graves), one that is at odds with the prevailing ideology of reconciliation. Moreover, this reality contradicts the sanitized, bloodless versions of the war cherished by reenactors and collectors. Archaeology also produces a richer narrative that links the local, the national, and the global through specific artifacts: a rusty tin can and the industrial-military complex of Franco’s army, for instance. Whenever one leaves the limits of the battlefield, political questions arise that are complex, ambiguous, and uncomfortable. The same occurs when archaeology brings together phenomena that are strictly separate in many material memory practices, both private and governmentsponsored: trenches and concentration camps, mass graves and pill boxes, military bases and forced labor camps. Thus, at the time of writing, the conservative autonomous government of Madrid is preparing a heritage plan to protect the fortifications of the war and is adamant that it will include only military fortifications and related infrastructures (Fig. 5.6). The aim is to delink the seemingly apolitical military war from the messy political conflict of mass graves, prisons, and even air-raid shelters. However, modern conflict archaeology consistently refuses this approach by focusing on larger landscapes of conflict.33

31 This

is the central argument of Olsen et al., Archeology. Volver a las trincheras. 33 John Schofield, Wayne G. Johnson, and Caroline M. Beck, eds., Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict (London: Routledge, 2002). 32 González-Ruibal,

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Fig. 5.6  One of the pillboxes recently restored by the autonomous government of Madrid in the so-called “Water Front” (because it surrounded the reservoirs that supplied the capital)

Other, more progressive public initiatives are more in accordance with this perspective, such as the Sites of Historical Memory of the Andalusian government34 or Democratic Memory in Catalonia.35 They include both spaces of repression and battlefields, and offer a wider historical contextualization of the events. The problem here is the concept of “memory” and its partisan connotations in Spain (as something that the Left does to impose its view of the past, as it is widely perceived). In contrast, private museums present themselves as neutral and objective, concerned with History as it was, not with memory as is produced in the present. 34 For more on this, see the website, https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/organismos/ presidenciaadministracionlocalymemoriademocratica/servicios/mapa/lugares-memoriahistorica.html. 35 For more on this, see the website, memoria.gen.cat.cat, Generalitat de Catalunya, http://memorialdemocratic.gencat.cat/ca/espais_de_la_memoria/.

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Archaeology can be an excellent ally of public initiatives, by putting their objective practices of knowledge production to their service. The need to build a material narrative of the Spanish Civil War is unquestionable. This cannot be limited to monuments or places of memory, although both are essential. We need museums that tell history. For the time being, it is local, private initiatives that are more successful. However, as I have tried to demonstrate here, many of these “museums” are essentially anti-political and ahistorical and offer a flat perspective of the conflict. It is not simply museums that are needed, then, but public museums with a critical and pedagogic mission. They have to go beyond ethnographic descriptions, anecdotes and military artifacts to explain the history of the war in all its uncomfortable complexity, with all its ramifications (diplomatic, political, economic, and social). Most likely local museums are not the best place to achieve these goals. But then it is not just local museums that are needed, but a center (or several centers) displaying a country-wide materiality-based narrative of war and dictatorship. Archaeology, the discipline of things, has unique tools to collaborate in this enterprise.

Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 620–39. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2004. Andermann, Jens. “Showcasing Dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile.” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 4, no. 2 (2012): 69–93. Besolí, Andreu. “Los refugios antiaéreos de Barcelona: Pasado y presente de un patrimonio arcano.” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936– 1939 2 (2004): 181–202. Besolí, Andreu, and José Peinado. “El estudio y puesta en valor de los refugios antiaéreos de la guerra civil española: El caso del refugio-museo de Cartagena.” Revista Arqueomurcia 3 (2008): 1–18. Brena Alonso, José Ángel. “El Museo de la Guerra de Bilbao (1937–1938): Cinturón de Hierro y turismo bélico al servicio de la propaganda del régimen.” Saibigain 2 (2016): 4–49. Buchli, Victor, and Gavin Lucas. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Castro Berrojo, Luis. Héroes y caídos: Políticas de la memoria en la España contemporánea. Madrid: Los libros de la Catarata, 2008. Ceasar, Rachel. “How I Learned to Love the Bomb: Excavating Pueblo Politics, Love, and Salvaged Technologies after Conflict.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 3 (2016): 570–90. Featherstone, Mark. “Ruin Value.” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 3 (2005): 301–20. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “Guerras sin fin: Guía para descifrar el Valle de los Caídos en la España contemporánea.” Política y sociedad 48, no. 3 (2011): 481–500. ———. “Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-Century Spain.” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (2013): 38–54. García, Natalia Juan. “Piezas perdidas, objetos encontrados. El valor de los recuerdos convertidos en colección como vía para recuperar la memoria.” ASRI: Arte y Sociedad Revista de Investigación 1 (2012): 1–16. Giblin, John D. “Post-conflict Heritage: Symbolic Healing and Cultural Renewal.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 5 (2014): 500–518. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. “Topography of Terror or Cultural Heritage? The Monuments of Franco’s Spain.” In Europe’s Deadly Century: Perspectives on 20th Century Conflict Heritage, edited by Neil Forbes, Robin Page, and Guillermo Pérez, 65–72. Swindon: English Heritage, 2009. ———. Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española. Madrid: Alianza, 2016. ———. “Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francoist Spain.” In Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present, edited by Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink, 93–117. London: Routledge, 2017. Hernández Cardona, Francesc-Xavier, and María del Carmen Rojo Ariza, “Museïtzació de conflictes contemporanis: El cas de la Guerra Civil espanyola.” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011): 131–57. Herva, Vesa-Pekka, Oula Seitsonen, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, and Suzie Thomas, “‘I Have Better Stuff at Home’: Alternative Archaeologies and Private Collecting of World War II Artefacts in Finnish Lapland.” World Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2016): 267–81. Hidalgo, Emilse B. “Argentina’s Former Secret Detention Centres: Between Demolition, Modification and Preservation.” Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 2 (2012): 191–206. Holguin, Sandie. “‘National Spain Invites You’: Battlefield Tourism during the Spanish Civil War.” The American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005): 1399–426.

114  A. GONZÁLEZ-RUIBAL Martín Piñol, Carolina. “Los espacios museográficos de la Batall a del Ebro.” Ebre 38: Revista Internacional de la Guerra Civil, 1936–1939 6 (2011): 159–74. Michonneau, Stéphane. “Belchite: Between Place of Memory and Place of Recognition (1937–2013).” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 3 (2015): 117–31. Mora, Maira. “Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos: Una apuesta estético-política de legibilidad de la experiencia dictatorial.” Cátedra de Artes 11 (2012): 63–76. Olsen, Bjørnar, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2012. Peters, Rik. “Actes de présence: Presence in Fascist Political Culture.” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006): 362–74. Saunders, Nick. Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War. Stroud: The History Press, 2007. Schofield, John, Wayne G. Johnson, and Caroline M. Beck, eds. Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict. London: Routledge, 2002. Seidman, Michael. “Quiet Fronts in the Spanish Civil War.” The Historian 61, no. 4 (1999): 821–42. Sherman, Daniel J. “Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums.” French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995): 49–74. Sturdy Colls, Caroline. Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (New York: Springer, 2015). Viejo-Rose, Dacia. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 6

The Necropolitics of Spain’s Civil War Dead Alison Ribeiro de Menezes

Although the subjects of death and the dead have long been a central concern of literature, art, music, and philosophy, Death Studies have recently emerged as an identifiable field of inquiry within cultural studies, complementing and enriching anthropological, archeological, forensic, scientific, and socialscience research on such issues as death, loss, mourning, and burial rituals. This might be viewed in tandem with the consolidation of the broader field of the Medical Humanities, with which the equally new area of Memory Studies also intersects. Memory Studies, at least in Hispanic contexts, has often been closely concerned with a specific type of loss, namely that of the dead and the disappeared, whether those who were buried in mass and unmarked graves from forgotten conflicts or unjust killings and atrocities, or those who died at the hands of torturers or whose remains have not been recovered. In cultural terms, as Verdery has put it, dead bodies often have a political life beyond the grave.1 The bones of the dead can thus become bones of 1 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

A. Ribeiro de Menezes (*)  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_6

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contention; used and abused, manipulated and stripped of agency, they become playthings of competing instrumentalizations of memory.2 In such a scenario, victims’ individuality may be elided in the name of an imposed narrative of victimhood, often derived from discourses of trauma in which the bodies become, in Anne Fuchs’s words, “the stage for a performance that offers ghosts and phantoms of the past.”3 There is a danger that victims also become the objects of violence rather than historical agents, as Labanyi has recently pointed out.4 In contemporary Spain, the dead of the Civil War have become objects of a contemporary sociopolitical polemic—a necropolitics centered on the recovery of remains from mass and unmarked graves arising from both wartime and postwar repression.5 This issue of exhumations is part of a larger debate concerning the uncovering of what has come to be known as the Francoist penitential universe, that is the Regime’s repressive, re-socializing apparatus understood in the broadest sense.6 Nevertheless, approaches to “the work of death,” to borrow Drew Gilpin Faust’s phrase,7 in the context of the Spanish Civil War have tended to adopt either a levelling perspective (see Chapter 5 by González-Ruibal), or at most a binary view based on two mutually exclusive categories: the glorification of the Nationalist Dead under the Regime, and a contemporary “rebalancing” via the recovery of the forgotten dead—not exactly synonymous with the category of the 2 Francisco Ferrándiz, El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2014). 3 Anne Fuchs, “Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse,” German Quarterly 75 (2002), 235–47 (236). 4 Jo Labanyi, “Emotional Competence and the Discourses of Suffering in the Television Series Amar en tiempos revueltos,” in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, ed. Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labayni (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 225–41 (229). 5 Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C.G.M. Robben develop the term from Achile Mbembe’s work; see their edited volume, Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 6 Helen Graham, “The Memory of Murder: Mass Killing, Incarceration and the Making of Francoism,” in Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, ed. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance, and Anne L. Walsh (Madrid: Verbum, 2009), 29–49 (29). 7 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), xi.

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Republican Dead, but largely overlapping with it. Discussions of the recently exhumed dead, in particular, tend to involve appeals to the literal and metaphorical unearthing or recovery of the past, with studies on the experience of death and dying, the multiple responses to it and ways of enduring it, and cultural refigurations of it beginning to appear.8 Few studies have stood back to consider those discourses that are deployed in the narrativization of Civil War deaths; that is, few examine not the deaths themselves, but the cultural memorialization of death. Furthermore, we have yet to fully comprehend Civil War deaths with the political, social, and cultural richness that Drew Galpin Faust has brought to the American Civil War, evident for instance when she writes, Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation.9

Space here precludes a consideration of such a broad range of issues, which would traverse both battlefield deaths and extrajudicial killings, the fear of anticipated injury and death in combat and the suddenness of the sacas or paseos, the families who could and could not openly mourn, the survivors who could and could not openly mark their involvement in the conflict, the cultural and religious structures that may have helped or hindered the work of mourning. Nevertheless, it is possible to bring some complexity to various aspects of “the vexing question of bodies,”10 by taking as starting points the cemeteries, gravesites, and pits where the Civil War Dead lie in order to examine those who have been included in, and excluded from, Spain’s historically shifting horizons of remembrance. My concern is less with the historical circumstance of “who’s in” and “who’s out” than with the processes that underlie the construction of necropolitical memories and what this might tell us of the shifting

8 Layla Renshaw offers a good analysis of Francoist necropolitics in her study, Exhuming Loss: Memory Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011). 9 Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xv. 10 Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xvi.

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constellations that the past forms in the present.11 The aim of this chapter is thus to indicate the means by which Civil War deaths have been narrated in historiography and remembrance. Or, to put it another way, by drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler, to stress the issue of narrativization rather than the raw details upon which such discourses of death draw, and thus to propose a new means of approaching memory debates in Spain, where history, rather than cultural analysis, has tended to prevail.12

The Grievable Dead As is well known, the Nationalist War Dead constituted an important element in the memorial horizon of the Franco Regime. Glorified through intertwined discourses of military heroism and Catholic crusade, the apotheosis of Nationalist remembrance is the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), for which Franco himself exploded the first stick of dynamite on 1 April 1940.13 The monument was inaugurated on 1 April 1959, after José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, had been interred at the high altar. As Justin Crumbaugh notes, “in its very conception and design, the monument is a mammoth spectacle of

11 Interestingly, there are numerous references to the work of death in Dionisio Ridruejo’s memoir of fighting with the Blue Division in Russia during World War II, where he describes the handling of bodies during the severe winter of 1941–1942 and the consequences of the spring thaw; Cuadernos de Rusia: Diario 1941–1942, prologue Jordi Gracia, ed. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (Madrid: Fórcola Ediciones, 2013). 12 There is a growing bibliography on Spanish Civil War and dictatorship memory. Some of the more encompassing book-length studies include: Joan Ramon Resina, Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); Ofelia Ferrán, Working Through Memory: Writing and Remembrance in Contemporary Spanish Narrative (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007); Samuel Amago, and Carlos Jerez Farrán, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Ignacio Fernández de Mata (ed.), Lloros vueltos puños: El conflicto de los “desaparecidos” y vencidos de la Guerra Civil Española (Granada: Comares. 2016); Ofelia Ferrán, and Lisa Hilbink (eds.), Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present (New York: Routledge, 2017). 13 Queralt Solé I Barjau, “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos: Los primeros traslados desde la provincia de Madrid,” Hispania Nova, 9, http://hispanianova.rediris.es.

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death created to squelch the viewer.”14 José Antonio became an iconic victim of Franco’s bloody crusade.15 Thrice-buried—first in a shared grave in Alicante cemetery, alongside the four men executed with him; later, in October 1939, at the high alter of the basilica in the Escorial palace, having been carried there on the shoulders of old comrades who walked from Alicante; and finally at the high alter of the Valley16—José Antonio’s fate reminds us that Spain has spent the past eight decades burying and reburying her Civil War dead, showing a concern for bodily remains that continues in different guises today.17 José Antonio, of course, became the object of a funerary cult.18 As Peter Anderson notes, “By understanding death as a sacrifice to regenerate Spain and insisting that the gift of the fallen would gain fulfilment with the punishment of the Republican enemy, Francoists turned the ideological goal of defeating Center and Left political forces into a sacred task.”19 José Antonio’s remains were thus important not only because of his status as the martyred founder of the Falange, but for his symbolic role in the construction of a new state. In the words of Crumbaugh, his case exposes “victim enshrinement […] as it relates to the analytics of government.”20 Thus the inclusion of José Antonio’s name on a list of dead in a village or small town could constitute a process of meaning-making for the relatives of the Nationalist fallen, offering a sacrificial and redemptive explanation for their loved ones’ deaths.21 14 Justin Crumbaugh, “Afterlife and Bare Life: The Valley of the Fallen as a Paradigm of Government,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2011), 419–38 (420). 15 In the Nationalist zone, he became known as “el Ausente,” and Franco only officially revealed his death on 16 November 1938. Later, he was referred to via the exclamation “¡Presente!” with streets named after him and memorial stones placed in his honor across Spain; see Julio Gil Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera: Retrato de un visionario (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996), 493, 524. 16 Gil Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 522–26. 17 At the time of writing, the recently sworn-in government of Pedro Sánchez has proposed removing the remains of Franco from the Valley of the Fallen and is discussing resignifying the monument; see Natalia Junquera, “El gobierno prepara la salida de Franco del Valle de los Caídos,” El País, 17 June 2018. 18 Gil Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 525. 19 Peter Anderson, “In the Name of the Martyrs: Memory and Retribution in Francoist Southern Spain,” Cultural and Social History 8 (2011), 355–70 (356). 20 Crumbaugh, “Afterlife and bare life,” 420. 21 Anderson, “In the Name of the Martyrs,” 364.

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José Antonio’s were not the only remains to be reburied at the Valley of the Fallen. Completed in 1959 in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Nationalist victory, the new mausoleum required heroes and martyrs.22 Bodies were transferred from across Spain in a continuous process of reburial that only ended in 1983.23 Nevertheless, interments were not always carried out on the basis of family wishes; the families of those killed by Republicans at Paracuellos de Jarama, for instance, refused to permit the transfer of their relatives’ remains, leading to a revoking in 1960 of families’ rights to oppose reburials.24 The Nationalist victims of Paracuellos had been among the first to be identified, in December 1957, for transfer to the Valley, but across Spain, civil governors were required to identify and arrange the transfer of bodies according to central guidelines.25 The process gives an interesting insight into one aspect of Gilpin Faust’s “work of death” as regards the Civil War, namely the original or initial burials of the war dead, which have been little remarked by historians.26 On 22 January 1937, Franco pronounced that the war dead in the Nationalist zone—whether Nationalist, Republican, or indeed pack animals—were to be buried not earlier than 24 hours and not later than 48 hours following death. His instructions indicated: Burial should occur in the cemetery closest to the event, if this is not too distant from the battlefield or place of death. In cases of distance or large numbers of fallen which make transport difficult, burial should occur in loose ground on a slight slope, with one hundred bodies for every 15 x 24 metres square. This is to be divided into one hundred graves numbered from left to right and from top to bottom, with a sketch kept as a record. These are to be individual graves, with each body covered by at least 0.5 metres of soil. Each is to be marked by a wooden cross, raised on 0.5 metres of compacted soil, bearing the number of the grave and the name, position and regiment of the individual. The body is to be interred with 22 Solé

I Barjau, “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.” Hepworth, “Site of Memory and Dismemory: The Valley of the Fallen in Spain,” Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 4 (2014), 463–85 (473). 24 Hepworth, “Site of Memory and Dismemory,” 483. 25 Solé I Barjau, “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.” 26 We have been much preoccupied by re-burials, but less so with the original burials; certainly Spain has no war cemeteries to rival the battlefield cemeteries of World War I. Antonio González-Ruibal makes the same observation in Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la guerra civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 2016), 256–61. 23 Andrea

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identity tag or, if this is missing, a sealed bottle indicating the identity of the dead between the legs.27

The document goes on to note, “The enemy dead are to be buried in mass pits close to where they are found.”28 Spanish law dictated that ten years after burial in soil, bodies had to be placed in niches, meaning that by the mid-1940s there was some urgency around the question of disinterments from the war era, and exceptions had to be made to permit completion of the Valley of the Fallen to receive the remains. In cases of those buried with a bottle containing a paper on which was written their personal details, the bottles were often found on exhumation to be empty, the paper having degraded. Thus mass graves and the impossibility of the identification of remains were problems in relation to the Nationalist dead exhumed for transfer to the Valley, just as they have become characteristic of the Republican victims of Nationalist violence exhumed in more recent years. The difference, of course, is that the Nationalist dead were remembered proudly and openly; in Judith Butler’s formulation, they were “grievable,” whereas the Republican dead were not until very recently. As Butler suggests, the potential, or not, to grieve publicly thus becomes a measure of the value of life, a social hierarchy that feeds power structures.29 Yet we should not assume that Nationalist families either complied with Regime policy, or always had control over the fate of their dead. Where identification was possible in the late 1950s, families of the victims of Republican violence in the rearguard sometimes shunned the glorifications of the Valley and took advantage of exhumations to transfer their relatives’ remains to cemeteries closer to home. And the families of Nationalist soldiers did not always have freedom to decide; these soldiers were often in mass graves far from home, and the costs of transfer were passed on to families in such cases, whereas the state bore the cost of transfers to the Valley.30 But it is also 27 General

Military Archive, Avila (Archivo General Militar Avila, or AGMA), C.3039, Cp. 25/Burials, 27 January 1937. I am grateful to Anne Rosenbush for assistance with research at the Avila archive. 28 AGMA, C.3039, Cp. 25/Burials, 27 January 1937. 29 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 30 Decisions on which bodies or mass graves would be transferred could be arbitrary; sometimes they depended on a need for more burial space in local cemeteries or a decision to exhume a fosa común; see Solé I Barjau, “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.”

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the case that exhumations may have been conducted hastily, at night, with a lack of clarity about whose remains were being transferred. Despite the fact that the documentation on the Valley does not explicitly state it to be a burial site only for the Nationalist dead, it is manifest that it was initially conceived as a monumental celebration of the Nationalist victory.31 That Republicans would end up interred there is thus a point of contention, not only because the Regime thus doubly defeated and defiled its enemy, but because for some this contaminated the monument. This magnifies today the Valley’s nature as what Hepworth has termed a “dissonant heritage,” for, with its ambiguous history, it constitutes the largest mass grave of the Spanish Civil War.32 Officially, 33,383 bodies are thought to be buried there. Of these, 21,423 are identified by name, and 12,410 are unidentified. Stockey suggests that between 5,000 and 12,000 Republican dead may be interred in the Valley, though the substantial number of unidentified remains means this is impossible to confirm;33 their families likely did not share the values with which the monument is imbued but were powerless to resist. In 1958, Franco attempted to move toward a somewhat more conciliatory tone, agreeing that: “the monument was not built to continue dividing Spaniards irreconcilably. It was built, and this was always my intention, in memory of a victory over the Communism that tried to control Spain. Thus my desire to inter there the Catholic dead of both sides is entirely justified.”34 Catholic Republicans could be included, but not aethiest Communists. Whatever the motivation, this remained an approach to mourning the Civil War dead that clearly divided the dead into Butler’s categories of grievable and non-grievable, with the definition of grievable being extended from Nationalists to Catholics.

31 It was declared to be for “los que cayeron en el camino de Dios y de la Patria,” Solé I Barjau “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.” 32 Hepworth, “Site of Memory and Dismemory,” 474. 33 Gareth Stockey, Valley of the Fallen: The (N)Ever Changing Face of General Franco’s Monument (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2013), 23; see also Report by the Commission of Experts on the Future of the Valley of the Fallen, http://www. memoriahistorica.gob.es/es-es/vallecaidos/Paginas/ComisionExpertosVCaidos.aspx. 34 Solé I Barjau “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.”

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The Ungrievable Dead The second category of Spanish Civil War dead are those who have recently come to be recognized and included in a more expansive view of the grievable. At first labelled Spain’s “disappeared,” the iconic figure of these dead is perhaps Federico García Lorca. Crumbaugh notes that glorified, publicly enshrined dead frequently have, as a complement, politically disenfranchised figures.35 Yet both the publicly enshrined dead, and their disenfranchised complements are subject to the manoeuverings of necropolitical memory. If José Antonio’s biographer could complain that the Falangist leader had first been elevated to mythical status, only to be in reality forgotten, and in the process to have his life ideologically interpreted and then ideologically elided as the Regime’s image of itself changed,36 so Federico Garcá Lorca is also a bellwether of Spanish war memory. A decade ago, Dinverno complained that José María Aznar’s government had appropriated the centenary of the writer’s birth in 1998 to propagate a politics of forgetfulness. The anniversary of Lorca’s birth was, for Aznar’s administration, the moment to bury rancour: “61 años después del fusilamiento que acabó con la vida de Federico García Lorca, es el momento de olvidar viejas fobias y rencores.”37 Nevertheless, icon of the Left as José Antonio had been for the Right, the search for Lorca’s body has become entangled with the larger—and more anonymous— searches for those left buried in common and mass graves across Spain. Lorca now stands metonymically for those who—perhaps not technically lost, in that in cases where the location of their remains is held within communicative and local memory, although they are certainly improperly and disrespectfully buried—are being recovered and returned to the pantheon of what Butler would term the grievable. In this sense, if José Antonio crystallized the pride in martyrdom of the Regime’s mid-century memory horizon, Lorca today, in the words of Dinverno, “mediates

35 Crumbaugh,

“Afterlife and Bare Life,” 428. Pecharromán, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 528. 37 Quoted in Melissa Dinverno, “Raising the Dead: García Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 9 (2005), 29–52. See also Luisa Elena Delgado, La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad española (1996–2011) (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2014), 121–22. 36 Gil

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the nation’s relationship to its grievous history.”38 Assassinated on either 18 or 19 August 1936 on Nationalist orders, Lorca is thought to have been buried in a common grave on a hillside near the village of Víznar, to the north-east of Granada. In the words of María Delagdo, he became “a potent symbol of a liberal era brought brutally down […] the ultimate revenant.”39 For Valis, ironically “the metaphor of Lorca’s larger-thanlife body reflects the Falangist cult of heroism, in which both rhetoric and ritual play a pronounced role.”40 As in the case of José Antonio, she writes, there surrounds Lorca the “same play between absence and presence […] with a similar resurrectional impulse.”41 In this sense, Lorca might not, paradoxically, fall entirely within Butler’s category of the ungrievable. Having been reincorporated into the cultural pantheon slowly under the Regime,42 to the point where Aznar could attempt to claim him as a neutral persona around whom reconciliation could be effected, Lorca has nevertheless come to stand metonymically for those anonymous ungrievables who are gradually being reincorporated into the landscape of Spanish mourning in spite of the fact that he has himself emerged as the subject of a multifarious, overdetermined, and deforming cultural memory.43 While Butler’s 38 Dinverno,

“Raising the Dead,” 31. M. Delgado, Federico García Lorca (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 178. 40 Valis, in a response to the mainly left-wing associations that Lorca has garnered, explores Falangist and right-wing reactions to his death and readings that appropriated his poetry for Falangist ideas. She notes, “Lorca as a Falangist martyr has no basis in reality, but the sacrificial figure of the poet has deep roots,” being viewed with an “aura of transcendence […] a kind of redeemer, capable of rescuing men from their unfortunate lives,” “Lorca’s Agonía republicana and Its Aftermath,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 1–2 (2014), 267–94 (272). 41 Valis, “Lorca’s Agonía republicana,” 269, 274. We should, however, be careful with such readings, as Valis goes on to note (275): “The fiction of a fascist Lorca, while offensive to Republicans, needs to be seen in the context of the claims and counter-claims to the poet as both an instrument of propaganda and a life-enhancing myth. The real Lorca remains an enigma.” 42 Valis identifies a special issue of ABC in 1966 as the first Francoist homage to Lorca and notes how present-day Falangists still insist that he and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who greatly admired the poet’s work, were friends; it is more likely that they were acquiantances. However, during the 1940s and early 1950s, Lorca was essentially “ausente,” his works unpublishable, and his “recuperation” by the Regime would be as an apolitical victim of the chaos of the start of the war, rather than of Nationalist forces. 43 Delgado, Federico García Lorca, 192–98. 39 Maria

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categorizations are therefore useful, they blur at the boundaries in certain instances. If José Antonio’s image was manipulated as part of the Regime’s necropolitics, Lorca’s has been the subject of shifting cultural memory horizon as previously ignored Civil War dead become recognized and therefore grievable. The grievable is thus in some cases coiled within the ungrievable. Lorca’s interred body may symbolize those disappeared of the war who have yet to be recovered from mass graves.44 Victims of extrajudicial killings without due process, they were numerous. Precise figures for the victims of repression are notoriously difficult to arrive at, and local and regional research is required to fill in many lacunae. However, as Santos Juliá has noted in Víctimas de la guerra civil, current historical research has tended to conclude that the number of victims of Nationalist repression was higher than previously appreciated, and the number of victims of Republican repression was lower than thought. Thus, in the 24 provinces for which reliable research exists, the number of Francoist victims is thought to be 72,527. This relates in reality to only half the country, and excludes areas, such as Galicia or parts of Castile, where the repression is known to have been particularly brutal. In 22 provinces where Republican repression has been quantified, the figures list 37,843 victims.45 While Republican violence is generally assumed to have been a response to a break down in social and political control that the Republic moved to end quickly, Nationalist repression worked to instill fear among the defeated and loyalty from society as a whole. Richards notes, “the intention was that the community would be brought together, at the expense of Republican scapegoats, by implicitly projecting its own collective commitment to the national ideal and sense of guilt or shame for having allowed cohesion to break down.”46 In other words, violence 44 There is also debate about the vocabulary of repression, with Francisco Espinsoa arguing against use of the term fusilados for paseados, since both terms conceal the illegal nature of such killings. He proposes homicidio as more appropriate; interview with TV Catalunya, quoted in Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, Las fosas del silencio: ¿Hay un holocausto español?, prologue by Santiago Carrillo (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2006), 137. His point is a fair one, although his term has not become current in historical research. 45 All listed figures are taken from Santos Juliá, “Las cifras: estado de la cuestión,” in his edited volume, Víctimas de la guerra civil, 5th edn. (Madrid: Temas de hoy, 1999), 407–12. 46 Michael Richards, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Remaking Spain Since 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59.

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against Republicans had a dual function; the persecution and shaming of enemies, and the securing of the submission of those left behind, no matter their politics. The dead dumped in ditches and pits as a result of Nationalist violence became—shamefully—ungrievable. They were the excluded complement to the victors’ celebrations of the “Fallen for God and Spain.”47 It is these dead who are often seen as history’s ghosts, returning to haunt the living three generations later, demanding their place in historical memory. However, there has been debate to whether or not the dead of the ditches and pits should be referred to as disappeared. Such debates reveal the shifting nature of how we view the war’s victims.48 The 2006 UN International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances defines enforced disappearance as: the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.49

This becomes significant in the case of Spain not simply for the emotive and eye-catching parallel that can be drawn with cases such as Argentina 47 Ferrándiz,

El pasado bajo tierra, 22. Silva, founder of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), labelled his missing grandfather such in a newspaper article published in 2000. Silva is usually credited with initiating the current wave of exhumations. The first exhumations under democracy, however, occurred between 1978 and 1981, and were, like the current ones, largely citizen-led. They were brought to an abrupt halt by the attempted military coup in the latter year. Ferrándiz notes that the notion of disappearances did exist in the context of Civil-War Spain, although not with the charged transnational resonances that it carries today. It was a procedural issue relating to the listing of the dead and missing in action; Ferrándiz, “De las fosas comunes a los derechos humanos: El descubrimiento de las desapariciones forzadas en la España contemporánea,” Revista de Antropología Social 19 (2010), 161–89. 49 Barbara A. Frey, “Los Desaparecidos: The Latin American Experience as a Narrative Framework for the International Norm against Enforced Disappearance,” Hispanic Issues On Line 5, no. 1 (2009), 52–72 (68); International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances, http://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/ced/pages/ conventionced.aspx. 48 Emilio

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or Chile, but because of the reference to state action, frequently manifested as state terror. Furthermore, the disappeared, in this context, are not themselves defined as anything other than missing victims. The original term, “disappeared detainees,” which emerged in Chile in the mid1970s, has thus been modified to remove what was understood to be a compound noun marking political detention and politically motivated disappearance. Although I agree with Ignacio Fernández de la Mata that, in the case of the Spanish victims of Nationalist repression, the onus of current memory campaigns is on the violence perpetrated by an insurgent army that would go on to base its conception of a new state on the exercise of terror and the victory that it facilitated, I do not agree that the victims in the pits necessarily become, through the lens of human rights with which victimhood is increasingly regarded in a globalized world, political victims in the fullest sense. Rather, they can also be politically manipulated, that is, potentially turned into victims of a misguided exercise of military and political power, with their own militancy, their own varied and various political, social, cultural, and class identities, thereby blunted or even obscured by the workings of necropolitics. Fernández de la Mata argues that civic movements for the recovery of memory “attempted to redefine the victims of Francoist repression from the discourse of the universal principles of human rights. Their insistence on the inviolability of the individual’s humanity was meant to break the shell of social indifference that did not see the massive assassination of “Reds” as an attack on the very foundations of Spanish society and human morality.”50 On the contrary, the figure of the forcibly disappeared person had already lost the qualifier of political militancy—the “detainee” of the original term—long before the term was applied in contemporary Spain. What civic groups have done is to use international connections as a means to raise social awareness and to defend themselves from unwarranted criticism. We ought to attend to what Richard Wilson has called the “social life of human rights,”51 to which I would also wish to add the cultural and performative life of human rights. It is only with a focus on 50 Ignacio Fernández de la Mata, “From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of Their Symbolic Capital,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 2–3 (2008), 253–64 (258). 51 Richard Ashby Wilson, “Afterword to ‘Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key’: The Social Life of Human Rights,” American Anthropologist 108 (2006), 77–83.

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implementation, practice, and cultural mediation—not to mention the increasing vernacularization of rights discourses—that we can, in the words of Ferrándiz, “navigate the difficulties created by the proliferation and fragmentation of discourses and associated practices, the multiplicity of social and state actors who use the legal structures and rhetoric of human rights in order to further various claims as well as political and economic agendas.”52 Ferrándiz proposes the notion of “legal download” to refer to the manner in which international law is incorporated into national and local contexts, though I would suggest shifting the focus from the idea of download—which seems to imply the process of acquiring the legislation—to the dynamics of its interpretation and performance in situ. Perhaps, rather than legal downloading, we need to think of legal sampling, that is, rather like music borrowings and transpositions, the translation and incorporation of certain ideas and their implementation in specific contexts. The current Spanish memory campaign is frequently labelled a “Republican” one, and Renshaw has perhaps come closest to an ethnographic documentation of the intersections between memory, politics-in-the-present, politics-in-the-past, and exhumations. As she observes, exhumations in Spain today are not carried out within a shared national political, social or cultural framework. They are not underpinned by central government money, structures, or centralized supports, but by regional authorities and civic organizations, such as the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (Associación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica) or the Forum for Memory (Foro por la Memoria). This approach to exhumation colours the nature of the process and perceptions of its objectives, not only revealing no national consensus on the historical and political issues that exhumation raises, but arguably eliding past political identities in the name of present-day pragmatism. As Layla Renshaw notes, current memory horizons within Spain appear to “uphold, rather than rupture, the prohibition on political representations of the past that constitutes part of the pact of silence.”53 In many ways, current debates about the exclusiveness of past war remembrance, and the need for a more inclusive approach to remembrance, are about what Butler (echoing Agamben) has termed

52 Ferrándiz, 53 Renshaw,

“De las fosas comunes a los derechos humanos,” 162. Exhuming Loss, 232.

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sovereignty rather than governability. We might say that the coup d’état of 1936 created a new sovereign power by suspending the Republic’s rule of law, and used violence as a form of constructing a new sovereign nation. When Butler speaks of “indefinite detention” (discussing Guantánamo) and mentions “suspended life and suspended death,” one cannot help but think that the heretofore publicly unacknowledged dead of the civil war have been in “suspended death” and their families confronting a form of “suspended mourning.” But returning these individuals and relatives to the domain of the grievable requires care if it is not to fall into the trap of the same exclusivities as the postwar paradigm.54 Renshaw’s work is most impressive in the sensitivity shown toward the subtleties of the work of memory as exposed by the performance of exhumation. Rather than discussing fear, which she notes is often expressed by her interviewees as an oppressive blanket emotion, she disentangles the workings of humiliation and debasement that fear and repression effected upon individuals, and the resulting shame among those affected—the relatives of the victims of shootings who were subject to humiliating practices such as head shaving, administering of castor oil, the theft, and parading of the personal possessions of their dead—as well as the shame left with the relatives of the humiliated who were powerless to prevent such abuses. The effect of the exhumations, she argues, is to move us from the exemplary violence of the war (violence, as Richards noted, intended as a lesson for both sides), to the exposure of the exemplary sacrifice of the dead in the ditches and pits.55 But her research also reveals how the exhumations are also an exposure of the performance of repression. What we have, then, is a series of layered performances— of repression, of exhumation, of memory—all of which point us to the frames within which these are enacted. Indeed, Renshaw’s analysis of the shifting terms used in the context of exhumation work—from “disappeared” to “victims of repression” and “unidentified”—reminds us that exhumation is a construction of the past in the present, accompanied by a sense of enchantment, rather than a simple uncovering of what has been lost.56 Within this, the political, social, and cultural identities of the exhumed are not straight-forwardly identifiable, and we should 54 Butler,

Precarious Life, 67. Exhuming Loss, 140. 56 The terms in Spanish are, desaparecidos, represaliados and desconocidos; Renshaw, Exhuming Loss, 171. 55 Renshaw,

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be cautious about present-day assumptions when we imagine back to life these bodies. Timothy Snyder observes in the conclusion to Bloodlands, his study of the territories between Germany and Russia that were savaged by Hitler and Stalin during World War II, that “the dead are remembered, but the dead do not remember. Someone else had the power, and someone else decided how they died. Later on, someone else still decides why.”57 Following Sontag, we may remind ourselves that the dead are profoundly uninterested in us, and do not seek out our gaze.58 But we gaze on them, and are profoundly interested in who (we think) they were. As Butler notes of Sontag, photographs of the dead (and, we might add, the missing), which have become iconic cyphers of our loss and our need to repair the injuries of history, do nothing more than mirror back “the final narcissism of our desire to see and to refuse satisfaction to that narcissistic demand.”59 They reveal our “wounded attachments,”60 not theirs. It is this framing that has not been truly addressed in the memory debates of the Spanish Civil War, and it is in such frames that we will find the contemporary Spanish “cultural life” of human rights. It is also where we may begin to understand who we, in establishing a frame that brings the previously forgotten dead into the realm of the grievable, in turn, push to the edges of this new frame. It is to that question that I briefly turn in conclusion.

The Other(Ed) Dead? Who might some of the other dead—or perhaps, the othered dead—of the Spanish Civil War be? Whose memory does not fit neatly within the contemporary Spanish commemorative landscape? One answer might be found in Spain’s uneasy relationship to her African colonial past. In 2006 Dris Deiback screened a documentary, Los perdedores, on Moroccan soldiers who had fought in the war. Some of their fallen comrades had been interred on Spanish soil, many in Islamic cemeteries and others 57 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), 402. 58 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). 59 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 100. 60 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52.

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in unexcavated pits. Unlike the vast majority of the disappeared and the victims of repression dumped in mass graves, those Moroccan dead who were buried in designated cemeteries—for instance in Granada, Sevilla, Jérez de la Frontera, Luarca in Asturias, or at A Coruña—were accorded burials respectful of their own religious rites. It is essential to make this distinction with the Republican ungrievable dead. These Civil War cemeteries were the first Islamic burial sites to be established in Spain since the expulsions of the early modern era;61 the Regime did not, however, permit the reinterment of Moroccan troops in the Valley of the Fallen.62 To raise the question of Moroccan troops, in turn, raises that of war atrocities and the spectre of the “Moor” in the Spanish historical imagination. Republicans viewed “Moors” as brutal, violent, and barbaric. The Nationalist army played upon such fears.63 As Carmen Sotomayor Blázquez notes, the Republic’s failure to take seriously Moroccan desires for independence before the outbreak of the war made it easier than it might otherwise have been for Nationalist leaders to gain their support.64 To enlist offered Moroccans a means of escaping poverty by fighting an enemy who had refused to recognize their claims to national autonomy and whose aetheism could be presented as a shared threat to both Christianity and Islam. Hence, the Moroccans could be used as canon fodder during the Civil War, and would later feel betrayed by Franco—as Deiback’s documentary demonstrates, at least for his interviewees—but who nevertheless had been permitted their own religious 61 Óscar Salgueiro Montaño, “El cementerio islámico de Granada: Sobre los procesos de recuperación del espacio público por la comunidad musulmana local,” Bandue 5 (2011), 201–28. The Nationalists also respected the right of Islamic soldiers fighting with them to religiously sensitive hospital care, and other administrative support. For a good survey, see Geoffrey Jensen, “Military Memories, History, and the Myth of Hispano-Arabic Identity in the Spanish Civil War,” in Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion, ed. Aurora G. Morcillo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 495–532 (511). 62 Solé I Barjau “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos.” There is one study of a contemporary exhumation that includes reference to Moroccan soldiers, but its findings are greatly disputed; see Rachel Carmen Caesar, “At the Crossroads of Love, Ritual and Archeology: The Exhumation of Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 2014). 63 Susana Martin-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 202. 64 Carmen T. Sotomayor Blázquez, “El moro traidor, el moro engañado: Variantes de esterotipo en el Romancero republicano,” Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 16 (2005), 233–49 (237).

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funeral rites and cemeteries. The “Moorish enemy” of the North African campaign became, paradoxically for the Nationalist army, a “Moorish friend” as colonial tropes were adapted from the Riffian conflict to colour the discourse of civil war in the Peninsula. This reveals the extent to which political and military pragmatism on both sides determined the image and treatment of Moroccan soldiers in the civil war. Susana Martin-Márquez has charted the ambivalent relationship between Spain and North Africa in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Disorientations, pointing to the ways in which notions of shared history and brotherhood could be mobilized by the Nationalists, initially during the Civil War to gain the Riffians’ support, and later as part of Francoist foreign policy to argue not that Europe ended at the Pyrenees (in the famous formulation), but that Spain ended at the Atlas mountains. This supposedly placed her in a unique position to mediate European–African and European–Arab relations in the early Cold War context.65 A “gentler” colonialism—a Hispanotropicalism, echoing Salazar’s manipulations of Freyre’s notion of Lusotropicalism in Portugal—could thus be theorized by drawing upon Spanish intellectual Arabism. Francoist Arabism was not egalitarian, but viewed the colonial relation as a form of tutelage between brothers, with a respectful younger brother learning from his more civilized elder sibling.66 At the same time the Republican view, truncated by defeat in 1939, became fossilized in the vision of the war as a new North African invasion, echoing the “catastrophe” of 711.67 Aside the question of Francoist ambivalence toward North Africa, there exists a discourse on the Spanish Left that echoes wider European fears to the effect that the deployment of colonial troops on European soil would undermine colonialism itself by presenting the spectacle of European “masters” in conflict with one another. This emerged during World War I and became a matter in the Spanish case not only with the mobilization of such troops during the 65 Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, Chapter 5; Rocío Velasco de Castro, “La imagen del “moro” en la formulación e instrumentalización del africanismo franquista,” Hispania 74 (2014), 205–36 (219). 66 Velasco de Castro, “La imagen del “moro,” 219. 67 Sotomayor Blázquez, “El moro traidor, el moro engañado,” 239; Daniela Flesler, “De la inmigración marroquí a la invasión mora: Discursos pasados y presentes del (des)encuentro entre España y Marruecos,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001), 73–88 (79).

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Civil War, but their use previously in the repression of the 1934 Asturian miners’ strike.68 A small number of Moroccans nevertheless enlisted for the Republic. Abdelatif Ben Salem lists approximately 800 who served in the International Brigades;69 of these 150–200 are thought to have died or disappeared, 300 were estimated injured, and 150 survived. André Malraux included one—the character of Saidi, based on the real-life Jean Belaidi—in his novel, L’Espoir. Moroccans in the Republican lines were, Ben Salem claims, more numerous than volunteers from the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. The Republic did not form Moroccan or Arab regiments, but dispersed such troops throughout the army, diluting and “disappearing” their cultural and religious identity. It may well have served them to propagate stereotypes in an international context in which the Arab world, and particularly Spain’s presence in North Africa, was caught in a tug-of-war between Britain and France. I raise the question of the wider Civil War dead here not to establish a new hierarchy of victimhood, but in fact to achieve the opposite, that is to indicate the danger of such hierarchies in situations of recovered and disputed memories. Issues of memory intersect with political, social, and cultural discourses, and are therefore shaped by them. Butler reminds us that some bodies have been defined as grievable, and others not, and that we should attend to the fact that the category of the grievable shifts over time. But we also need to be vigilant to the possible exclusions that each new formulation of the grievable/ungrievable binary may establish. Or as Martin-Márquez might put it, we need to disorient new memory horizons even as they are emerging and crystalizing, so as not to fall into the trap of a fossilized and exclusive notion of who does or does not count in remembrances of the Spanish Civil War dead. Michael Rothberg has argued that we should embrace memory’s multidirectional nature, rather than view different memory issues

68 Christian Koller, “Colonial Military Participation in Europe (Africa),” 1914– 1918 Online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/colonial_military_participation_in_europe_africa. 69 Abdelatif Ben Salem, “La participación de los voluntarios árabes en las brigadas internacionales: una memoria rescatada,” in Marroquíes en la guerra civil española, ed. J. A. González Alcantud, Rachid Racha, and Mustafá Akalay (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2003), 111–31.

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as embroiled in a mutually exclusive zero-sum competition.70 Echoing that position, I would suggest that Spanish memory discourses should honestly and decently pay tribute to the ungrievable dead who have been shamefully left in pits, ditches and mass graves for far too long, at the same time as they reflect on the processes of memory making that can simultaneously reveal and obscure other vistas of the past. If we do not attend to a plurality of memories that moves beyond either flat categories of collective blame or established binaries, Spain risks remaining stranded in the well-trodden physical and metaphorical trenches of the Civil War. Memory and forgetting are, of course, not antithetical but go hand in hand. A focus on the dead of the Spanish Civil War in the broadest sense throws up the unexpected further issue of Spain’s colonial past, which in turn illuminates less-well-lit corners of Spain’s contemporary memory horizon. While not detracting from the central focus of current memory work, a sense of the culturally constructed nature of memory itself is vital if we are to achieve balanced and open redress for past injustices.

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70 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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Caesar, Rachel Carmen. “At the Crossroads of Love, Ritual and Archeology: The Exhumation of Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 2014. Commission of Experts on the Future of the Valley of the Fallen, http://www.memoriahistorica.gob.es/es-es/vallecaidos/Paginas/ ComisionExpertosVCaidos.aspx. Crumbaugh, Justin. “Afterlife and Bare Life: The Valley of the Fallen as a Paradigm of Government.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2011): 419–38. Delgado, Luisa Elena. La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad española (1996–2011). Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2014. Delgado, Maria M. Federico García Lorca. Oxford: Routledge, 2008. Dinverno, Melissa. “Raising the Dead: García Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 9 (2005): 29–52. Ferrán, Ofelia. Working Through Memory: Writing and Remembrance in Contemporary Spanish Narrative. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007. Ferrán, Ofelia, and Lisa Hilbink, eds. Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present. New York: Routledge, 2017. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “De las fosas comunes a los derechos humanos: El descubrimiento de las desapariciones forzadas en la España contemporánea.” Revista de Antropología Social 19 (2010): 161–89. ———. El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2014. Ferrándiz, Francisco, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben. Necropolitics: Mass Gravves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Fernández de Mata, Ignacio. “From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of Their Symbolic Capital.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 2–3 (2008): 253–64. ——— (ed.), Lloros vueltos puños: El conflicto de los “desaparecidos” y vencidos de la Guerra Civil Española. Granada: Comares. 2016. Flesler, Daniela. “De la inmigración marroquí a la invasión mora: Discursos pasados y presentes del (des)encuentro entre España y Marruecos.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001): 73–88. Frey, Barbara A. “Los Desaparecidos: The Latin American Experience as a Narrative Framework for the International Norm against Enforced Disappearance.” Hispanic Issues On Line 5, no. 1 (2009): 52–72. Fuchs, Anne. “Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse.” German Quarterly 75 (2002), 235–47.

136  A. RIBEIRO de MENEZES Gil Pecharromán, Julio. José Antonio Primo de Rivera: Retrato de un visionario. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996. Gilpin Faust, Drew. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage, 2008. González-Ruibal, Antonio. Volver a las trincheras: Una arqueología de la guerra civil española. Madrid: Alianza, 2016. Graham, Helen. “The Memory of Murder: Mass Killing, Incarceration and the Making of Francoism.” In Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, edited by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance, and Anne L. Walsh, 29–49. Madrid: Verbum, 2009. Hepworth, Andrea. “Site of Memory and Dismemory: The Valley of the Fallen in Spain.” Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 4 (2014): 463–85. Jensen, Geoffrey. “Military Memories, History, and the Myth of Hispano-Arabic Identity in the Spanish Civil War.” In Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion, edited by Aurora G. Morcillo, 495– 532. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Juliá, Santos. “Las cifras: estado de la cuestión.” In Víctimas de la guerra civil, edited by Santos Juliá, 5th edn., 407–12. Madrid: Temas de hoy, 1999. Koller, Christian. “Colonial Military Participation in Europe (Africa).” 1914– 1918 Online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, http:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/colonial_military_participation_ in_europe_africa. Labanyi, Jo. “Emotional Competence and the Discourses of Suffering in the Television Series Amar en tiempos revueltos.” In Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, edited by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labayni, 225–41. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in African and the Performance of Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Ramon Resina, Joan. Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Renshaw, Layla. Exhuming Loss: Memory Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011. Ribeiro de Menezes, Alison. Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Richards, Michael. After the Civil War: Making Memory and Remaking Spain Since 1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Ridruejo, Dionisio. Cuadernos de Rusia: Diario 1941–1942. Prologue Jordi Gracia, ed. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas. Madrid: Fórcola Ediciones, 2013. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Salgueiro Montaño, Óscar. “El cementerio islámico de Granada: Sobre los procesos de recuperación del espacio público por la comunidad musulmana local.” Bandue 5 (2011): 201–28.

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Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage, 2011. Solé I Barjau, Queralt. “Inhumados en el Valle de los Caídos: Los primeros traslados desde la provincia de Madrid.” Hispania Nova 9, http://hispanianova.rediris.es. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Sotomayor Blázquez, Carmen T. “El moro traidor, el moro engañado: Variantes de esterotipo en el Romancero republicano.” Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 16 (2005): 233–49. Stockey, Gareth. Valley of the Fallen: The (N)Ever Changing Face of General Franco’s Monument. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2013. United Nations. International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances, http://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/ced/pages/ conventionced.aspx. Valis, Noël. “Lorca’s Agonía republicana and Its Aftermath.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 1–2 (2014): 267–94. Velasco de Castro, Rocío. “La imagen del ‘moro’ en la formulación e instrumentalización del africanismo franquista.” Hispania 74 (2014), 205–36 (219). Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Wilson, Richard Ashby, “Afterword to ‘Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key’: The Social Life of Human Rights.” American Anthropologist 108 (2006), 77–83.

CHAPTER 7

Thinking Outside the Grave: The Material Traces of Republican Lives Before the Spanish Civil War Layla Renshaw

Introduction Since 2000, the exhumation of Republican victims from mass graves has made a vital contribution to the creation of a public consciousness of Civil War violence. The investigation of mass graves has structured new opportunities for the transmission of memory between generations, often for the first time. Exhumations have enabled many relatives of the dead to establish a detailed understanding and emotional connection with the episodes of violence that touched their own families and communities. The exhumation of mass graves, and the bodies and objects exposed within them, possess their own affordances that enable some representations of the past and certain memories to be constructed or transmitted in a very powerful and enduring way. The growing fields of battlefield and carceral archaeology in Spain also generate new insights on the war and its aftermath, and the emerging evidence is particularly

L. Renshaw (*)  Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_7

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important in the case of prisons and concentration camps, for which the historical record is patchy, or has been actively repressed under Spain’s long dictatorship. However, there are limitations to the range of representations and memories afforded by the graves, battlefield, and prisons and there are particular dimensions of Spain’s recent past which risk being overlooked despite the intensive archaeological activity and wider memory work currently underway. In a conflict as complex as the Spanish Civil War, the use of broad terminology and some necessary generalizations can be helpful to enable an analysis of the wider themes of the conflict and its memory. As this chapter considers the repression of civilians both during and after the war, the perpetrators of repression at different sites include the military, falangist militias and the postwar authorities. For this reason, I refer to the repression in the broadest terms as “Francoist.” Similarly, I use the term Republican to denote a continuum of leftist ideologies and sociallyprogressive ideas that include affiliates to different parties or trade unions, and supporters of the Popular Front government. The term Republic here refers to the Second Republic 1931–1939. Although this article takes a broad overview of the development of different archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War, some observations are drawn from my participation in exhumations in Asturias and Extremadura, and the more detailed examples draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two rural communities in Burgos province, Castile Leon, during and after the exhumation process.

Memories Afforded by the Exhumation of Mass Graves The representations and memories of the past that are afforded by exhumation, and those that are missed, will be discussed here in detail. The power of the bodies and objects contained within the mass graves are pivotal to the remarkable shifts in Spain’s memory politics and public discourse witnessed over the last decade. Yet the very potency of these graves also demands our ethical attention and caution, otherwise the graves may overdetermine the representations of the Civil War that emerge in this period of intense memorial activity and may endure for decades to come, particularly in popular discourse on the past. The power of certain bodies and objects can crowd out other considerations, overshadowing less impactful or emotive material traces of the Republican dead. The visceral immediacy of the grave, capturing the

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moment of violent death, can distract from the longer timeframes of the individual biographies and political upheavals that led up to these killings, yet these longer timeframes are necessary for a full interpretative framework for the archaeology of Spain’s mass graves. The most important aspect of memory served by the exhumation of mass graves is, that it communicates unambiguously and uncontestably that this category of civilian war dead exist, that these political murders by Francoist forces or supporters really occurred, and occurred in their tens of thousands throughout Spain, even far away from the battlefield or far removed from any strategy associated with the normal “laws of war” between combatants. While this may seem self-evident, it is worth reiterating that in 2000, this represented a major rupture with the prevailing representations of the past. Establishing the existence, scale and spread of these graves has been fundamental in counteracting the decades of denial and self-justification offered by the Franco Regime and its apologists, and above all, the pervading climate of censorship and silence that prevented public discussion of the Republican victims of the war and dictatorship. The exposure of the graves undermined the pact of silence and encouraged many more people to speak out with their personal memories or family histories, either as part of formal investigations or academic studies, or within their own family or community.1 The impact of the first wave of exhumations in contributing to a radical step-change for Spanish memory politics must be acknowledged, even while making a critical evaluation of the memory work around Republican lives that is still to be done. In many mass grave exhumations, the biological profile of the victims serves to underscore their status as civilian non-combatants, and therefore not “legitimate targets” in any conventional understanding of warfare. These include the very old, the very young such as teenage boys, some bodies that exhibit disease and physical disability, and the many female victims of all ages, including pregnant mothers. The biology of the dead is hard to equate with the Francoist caricature of the “Reds” as a menacing and anarchic hoard that threatened Spain’s very existence. This impression is compounded by the intimate artifacts such as clothing and jewelry, combs, razors, shoes, and wallets, even cigarette papers. The clothes and shoes are often humble, for example, string belts, and traces 1 Angela Cenarro, “Memory Beyond the Public Sphere,” History and Memory 14, no. 1–2 (2002), 165–88.

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of rope espadrilles, or recycled tires used to resole boots. The dead may also be buried with the tools of their trade such as pen and ink, or electrical fittings in the pocket of an electrician.2 These glimpses of working life reiterate the civilian status of the dead, and the sudden intrusion of violence into quotidian lives, with many taken from their homes at night, or seized in the midst of a working day. These markers of ordinariness are again important in contesting the caricature of Republicans, as aberrant and immoral, that dominated Francoist propaganda. There is both pathos and horror in the mundane and ordinary brought into jarring conjunction with evidence of violence such as ballistic debris and bullet wounds. On the affective level, the details of skeletons are humanizing and real, something of profound importance to those seeking a sense of connection in order to mourn the dead, particularly in those families in which the breakdown of memory has occurred. But beyond the personal connection, these objects reinforce a reading of the grave that foregrounds the innocence of the victims, and the injustice and senselessness of their deaths. While the personal possessions of the dead powerfully convey the fact that these were real, once-living, individuals, it is only a partial glimpse into their lives, emphasizing the intimate, private, and particular aspects of individual identities. The exhumation cannot evoke what was distinctively Republican about their lives, their shared identity, political biographies, and the events that ultimately led them to be targeted for political killings by Francoist forces. In many exhumations, the brutality of the killing can be discerned from skeletal and forensic evidence. The preponderance of gunshot injuries to the skulls is a very evident cause of death that requires no expertise for visitors to the grave site to detect and interpret.3 In addition, many bones bear the marks of mistreatment, restraint, physical struggle, and pain.4 These details are not available, or not as viscerally apparent, from the statistics of wartime casualties. Exhumation enables a 2 Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011). 3 Layla Renshaw, “The Scientific and Affective Identification of Republican Civilian Victims from the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2010), 449–63. 4 Francisco Ferrándiz, “The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain,” Anthropology Today 22, no. 3 (2006), 7–12.

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representation of violence beyond the statistics that reflects the fear and suffering of those killed.5 Also the disturbing burial conditions exposed in many graves, skeletons lying face down or with many skeletons jumbled together, are suggestive of carelessness or contempt on the part of the perpetrators, and reinforce the “unquiet” and unresolved status of the dead, who have occupied mass graves for over seventy years. The incongruous locations of many mass graves, in motorway lay-bys, exposed during construction work, or near refuse dumps, are liminal or forlorn places, reinforcing the neglected status of the dead. The descriptions of the dead offered by visitors to the graves, “thrown out like rubbish,” “dying like rabbits,” “shot like dogs,”6 express the indignation and sense of injustice provoked by these scenes, but also underscore the passivity and powerlessness of the dead. There is very little space at the grave site for representations of the forms of courage, power, and strength exhibited by the Republican dead during their lifetimes, or for memories of agency or resistance. The representations of innocence and injustice afforded by the bodies and objects exposed during mass grave exhumations are an important moral vindication of the dead and the relatives and supporters of those repressed under Franco. However, there is an important ethical distinction between an unjust or undeserved death and an inexplicable or motiveless death. During exhumation, there is little representational space created for the exploration of cause and motive. An exploration of cause and motive is important for establishing that these murders were ideologically driven, to meet the specific political goals of the perpetrators, that a coherent rationale underpinned the selection of targets, and the killings were part of a systematic and enduring policy of repression.7 This assertion is important to contest a general characterization of war as an exceptional period of madness and frenzied violence in which there was a moral equivalence in the actions of both sides. This 5 Ermengol Gassiot Ballbé, Joaquim Oltra Puigdoménech, Elena Sintes Olives, and Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, “The Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War: Recovering Memory and Historical Justice,” in Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, ed. Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007), 235–46. 6 Renshaw, Exhuming Loss, 143. 7 Ignacio Fernández de Mata, “The ‘Logics’ of Violence and Franco’s Mass Graves: An Ethnohistorical Approach,” International Journal of the Humanities 2, no. 3 (2004), 2527–35.

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characterization masks the longer-term repressive strategies of Franco’s Regime, initiated under the cover of war.8 The rationale for these killings lies in the ideological division between the victims and perpetrators and the political and social struggles that polarized Spain prior to the outbreak of war. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens engaged in these struggles as part of daily life, through trade union or party membership, local government and public office, campaigns surrounding their rights and conditions, and social and cultural initiatives, such as adult education, the rejection of organized religion, or the rejection of prevailing constraints around gender and sexual relations. The ethical challenge lies in being able to simultaneously explore the political biographies of the dead, the agency, and power they may have possessed in life, and still assert that, as peaceful civilians, there was no justification for their killings. A further consideration when reflecting on the memories afforded by mass grave exhumation is the focus on death inherent to this process. While it is self-evident that exhumations focus on death, it is worth considering the ethical implications of foregrounding the deaths of these people rather than their lives. It implies that the most significant or remarkable aspect of these Republican lives is the way they ended, rather than the way they were lived. Recovering memory through graves can risk a certain tautology or fatalism, that these deaths were inevitable or foretold. This fosters the impression that the act of dying was a defining act of Republican identity and of the Republican experience. This overshadows the important experiences of mourning and survival for Republicans postwar, as well as the endurance of exile and incarceration which required a different kind of courage. Another ethical challenge presented by the project to recover memory through exhumation, is the creation of a distance, both physical and classificatory, between the Republican victims and their descendant communities. In exhumation, the collective focus moves from one space of death, a mass grave site, to another space of death, through reburial in a cemetery, without being reinserted, symbolically and imaginatively, into the spaces of the living, such as the homes, landscapes, and places of work they built and occupied during their life, many of which are still standing. The material

8 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain (London: Harper, 2012).

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traces uncovered during mass grave exhumation make no explicit link between the dead and the places they once lived.

Memories Afforded by the Archaeology of Battle and Incarceration Over the last decade, there has also been a move toward the use of archaeological techniques to find the material traces of Republican experiences on the battlefields of the Civil War, in the hidden encampments of the maquis or anti-Franco resistance, and among the tens of thousands of Republican political prisoners incarcerated under Franco. Some examples of these sites include a Republican fort excavated and recorded by González-Ruibal,9 and a detailed and poignant material culture study of two opposing trenches from the Battle of Madrid that cut through the University campus in Madrid.10 This archaeology is significant as it gives a fine-grained picture of an important aspect of the Republican experience, that of fighting in defense of the elected government and against the Francoist uprising. The personal artifacts and military provisions recovered from trenches and bunkers shed light on the identities of those who fought and the conditions they fought under. The archaeology of the maquis focuses on those who went into hiding after the Republican defeat and those who became part of the postwar guerilla resistance against the Francoist authorities. Clandestine and transient in nature, the maquis leave few material traces but this narrative of ongoing resistance provides an important corrective to Francoist representations of the period. However, there are limitations in the extent to which the study of warfare, be it a conventional or guerilla war, can represent the wider Republican experience. Tens of thousands of Republican victims of Francoism were civilians, targeted despite their non-combatant status, primarily for their peacetime participation in politics and civil society. The archaeology of Spain’s wartime and postwar incarceration in the network of prisons, forced labor squads and concentration camps is

9 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “The Need for a Decaying Past: An Archaeology of Oblivion in Contemporary Galicia (NW Spain),” Home Cultures 2, no. 2 (2005), 129–52. 10 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp: Archaeology of Civil War and Dictatorship in Spain,” Antiquity 86 (2012), 456–73.

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also an emerging field of study. González-Ruibal11 describes his work and that of his colleagues at a number of incarceration sites and makes a convincing argument for the investigation of camps and prison as part of conflict archaeology as these penal regimes represent the continuation of war by other means: “In the case of totalitarian regimes, spaces of internment often follow the end of hostilities and continue the politics of war in times of peace. Modern conflicts are messy. They blur the distinction between war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, producing hybrid sites: bombed civilian settlements, clandestine detention centers and guerrilla bases.”12 In the case of Spain, the investigation of Franco’s carceral culture is ethically and politically important, as there is little recognition of the scale of incarceration within official discourse and the sites have received little protection or preservation.13 From a historiographical perspective, the demonstration of how violent repression and political killings continued long after the war is an important counterbalance to a widely accepted chronology that associates the Republicans with revolution, war and violence, while Francoism, ultimately, is associated with peace and stability. However, the “messiness” of modern conflicts and the “blurring of war, and peace” is an argument not only for studying the postwar era, as González-Ruibal urges, but also the political tensions and struggles of the pre-war era in order to understand the roots of the violence that followed. This suggests that the study of mass graves, battlefields, and prisons needs to be brought into conjunction with the study of the pre-war Spanish Republicanism of the 1930s. González-Ruibal describes a number of sites that contain the potential to detect the agency and resistance of Republican political prisoners, for example, in crafts or games made to pass the time at Castuera concentration camp in Extremadura, or an assemblage of prisoners’ graffiti

11 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Making Things Public: Archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War,” Public Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2007), 203–26; Alfredo González-Ruibal, “The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936–1952),” in Archaeologies of Internment, ed. Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska (New York: Springer, 2011); González-Ruibal, “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp,” 456–73. 12 González-Ruibal, “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp,” 456. 13 Javier Rodrigo, Cautivos: Campos de Concentracion en la Espana Franquista (1936– 1947) (Barcelona: Critica, 2005); Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, El Exilio Interior: Cárcel y Represión en la España Franquista 1939–1950 (Madrid: Taurus, 2010).

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at Camposancos camp.14 Yet the interjections of the guards’ comments on these walls show that this apparent site of self-expression was actually another area of surveillance and control. In a detailed spatial analysis, he shows that the arrangement of guards and buildings at Bustarviejo camp revealed there was no concern for prisoners escaping, as social and familial pressures engineered by the carceral system obliged the prisoners to conform and complete their sentences.15 The reality appears that in the extreme totalitarian environments of Franco’s prisons, the archaeologist can find little material trace of Republican identity, agency or resistance which leads González-Ruibal “to problematize notions of domination and resistance that are prevalent in the discipline today [and to] argue that the analysis of modern strategies of control and punishment provides a more realistic perspective on the ambiguities, and limits, of resistance and on the powerful effect of domination. An overly optimistic vision of agency among the subalterns downplays the iniquities of power, and the sufferings these cause.”16 This is a valuable and far-reaching insight, although it is ethically important not to underestimate acts of long-term endurance and survival as a form of passive resistance to totalitarian regimes. However, this insight lends weight to the idea that in order to detect the traces of Republican identity and agency, it is more fruitful to look for them in the period before the onset of Spain’s totalitarian regime, and focus instead on the emergence of political movements and civil society in the pre-war democratic period. This period of rapid social and political change, and the aspiration among many for even more rapid change, is constituted of countless small-scale examples of domination and resistance, with these roles being taken by those on both the Left and Right. Overall, the many examples of resistance against the established power relations of the pre-war period, and the sense of threat this engendered in groups such as the military, explain why Franco’s camps and prisons were so brutal.17

14 González-Ruibal, “Making Things Public” and “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp.” 15 González-Ruibal, “The Archaeology of Internment,” 62. 16 González-Ruibal, “The Archaeology of Internment,” 54. 17 Helen Graham, “The Spanish Civil War, 1936–2003: The Return of Republican Memory,” Science and Society 68, no. 3 (2004), 313–28.

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The battlefields and prisons are comparable to the mass graves, in that they are all exceptional spaces of death and war, and therefore can tell us little about the everyday lives and identities of those who suffered and died at these sites. Above all, the archaeology of battlefields, prisons and mass graves are linked in that they are fundamentally archaeologies of Francoism. Although they contain the material traces of Republican agency, and even Republican skeletons, these sites are Francoist constructions. Although these sites can tell us much about the Republican experiences of, and responses to, systematic repression, the existence of the mass graves and camps, reveals more about the logics and practices of Francoism than it can reveal about Republicanism. These sites provide evidence of a repressive regime, but the precise nature of what they were so desperate to repress remains elusive. This needs to be balanced by an archaeology of Republicanism, not just in its embattled or victimized form, reacting to war and dictatorship, but in its fuller expression during the pre-war democratic period.

Towards an Archaeology of Spanish Republicanism It is useful to turn now to a consideration of the kind of spaces, buildings and landscapes that would provide fertile areas for the archaeology of Spanish Republicanism, or more broadly, the archaeological traces of left-liberal social identities, working-class and labor organization and the prevailing social and political relations enacted on a community level in pre-war Spain. The first category to consider is the town and village halls where mayoral and council meetings were held. In the mass graves that I have worked on or studied throughout Spain, a significant proportion of those targeted early on for social cleansing by Francoist forces were active in community politics and had run for election or held public office at the local level. In the field sites in Burgos where I conducted ethnographic research, the election of the Popular Front government represented a rupture with the political status quo on a local level when many communities returned working class or non-establishment candidates for the first time, representing a serious challenge to existing power structures.18 These buildings represent an important thread of continuity with local politics in the present day. The history of these sites, who 18 Antonio Ruiz Vilaplana, Burgos Justice: A Year’s Experience of Nationalist Spain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938); Renshaw, Exhuming Loss.

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took office and when, the issues they were elected on, and the changes they enacted once in power, give a valuable insight into how political struggles were enacted through democratic means before the outbreak of violence. There are also more explicitly partisan sites, such as the offices of political parties and trade unions, printing presses and political newspapers, and the network of Socialist Party centers, the casas del pueblo, that functioned as organizational bases but also more broadly as social hubs like working men’s clubs. As Ruiz Vilaplana noted in 1938, the pre-war period saw a flowering of working-class social and cultural organization that, while not explicitly political in nature, was informed by a wider spirit of confidence and self-determination aligned to the leftist progressive politics of the period. These included evening classes, choirs, ateneos and variations on friendly societies or co-operatives. Significantly, these challenged prevailing social norms by offering those in small communities an alternative to the sociality provided by the Catholic Church or the local bar. In addition to grassroots developments, there was a movement to bring various forms of high culture or more avant-garde contemporary culture to a wider audience, particularly in rural areas. As described in evocative detail by Holguin,19 young or progressive artists from the cities organized tours of the regions, setting up music, theatre or cinema in the public square of small towns and villages, with Lorca being one of the most famous proponents of these touring companies. While not explicitly Republican in content, these developments were informed by egalitarian ideas on who should have access to cultural life, and encouraged the movement of ideas into otherwise closed communities. A further category of building to consider is the schools in towns and villages and the universities of the cities. Galician Republican artist Castelao’s wartime propaganda cartoon, “The last lesson of the schoolmaster,” which shows the body of a murdered Republican teacher viewed by his young pupils, resonated because such a large proportion of educators were targeted for Francoist repression due to their perceived Republican sympathies or radical ideas.20 In small communities, teachers occupied an ambivalent position on the fringes of the local 19 Sandie Holguin, Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 20 Alfonso Castelao, Galicia Mártir (1937), reissued Galicia Martyr: Prints by Castelao (Madrid: Akal, 1976).

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establishment; they were often incomers to the community, and with their perceived influence over young minds, became targets for denunciation and violence. Many of the sites considered here continue to be as central to the life of the surrounding community as they were in the 1930s, but the life histories of these buildings and their significance in the social changes of the pre-war period remain hidden. All of these places have the potential to be studied archaeologically, particularly with the kind of tools used within contemporary and community archaeology. The history of building use, for example, the building of casas del pueblo or union buildings through subscription, or the appropriation of buildings for new purposes, reveal much about social tensions and workingclass mobilization in this period. The mapping of internal spaces in casas del pueblo to understand the organization of public gatherings, how many people could be accommodated, and the emplacement of key symbols such as flags or portraits provide insights into experiences that were a dominant part of everyday life in the 1930s, but were completely obliterated and repressed by war and dictatorship. The subsequent appropriation or destruction of many of these public spaces and resources by Francoist forces is also a crucial part of their history. Further techniques of contemporary archaeology, such as transect walks or emplaced oral histories, can reconnect existing memories of past events with the place in which they happened and reactivate a local community’s understanding of these places as the material traces of a heavily repressed past. Collaboration with historians, archivists or artists, using materials such as photographs and letters, can make these places the focus for site-specific displays or representations of the past. Buildings such as schools and mayoral offices or council chambers can serve as fitting sites of commemoration for those who were killed while holding public office or working for the community, and who were targeted precisely for the roles they held. The use of commemorative naming, plaques or information boards to create an enduring link between public institutions and those who were killed in the service of these institutions, provide a fuller memorial to those who died than the plaques and monuments placed at mass graves or in cemeteries, as these are spaces of death that are bracketed off from daily life, and cannot fully represent the extraordinary and particular character of these deaths and the underlying rationale for why so many “ordinary” people were killed. Furthermore, the creation of an enduring link between public institutions, such as schools, universities and town halls and those who died while working

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for them is an important testament to the power of these institutions in a democracy, in that those who wish to undermine democracy target these places for repression. Apart from focusing on single significant buildings and institutions, an archaeology of Spanish Republicanism includes the archaeological study of more mundane domestic spaces, as well as larger-scale analyses, including the spatial relationships of homes within a neighborhood, entire settlements and landscapes. A number of traditional village ethnographies of rural Spain, some written in the later Francoist or post-transition periods, pay very close attention to the spatial organization of these communities in relation to themes such as socio-economic status, power relations, intervisibility, privacy and surveillance, and the spatial relationship of the village with traditional hubs such as church and plaza, and important resources such as fields and gardens.21 This close attention suggests that looking at the archaeology of whole neighborhoods or settlements will furnish insights into the social relations of the pre-war period. A particularly relevant example is Mintz’s22 classic ethnography of the Andalucian village, Casas Viejas, which became the site of the notorious massacre when a protest by anarchist workers was violently repressed in a particularly turbulent phase of the 1930s. Mintz undertakes a quasiforensic reconstruction of the events of the massacre and the space in which it unfolded, as well as a wider analysis of the homes in which the murdered men had resided. The use of domestic spaces to chart large scale social trends is employed to great effect by González-Ruibal23 in his archaeological analysis of the abandonment and ruin of traditional homes in rural Galicia as part of a larger narrative of emigration, urbanization and social mobility. An explicit treatment of the political and ideological component of domestic buildings can be seen in Buchli’s study of the Narkomfin block in Russia.24 This study reveals how the spatial 21 Richard Barrett, Benabarre: The Modernization of a Spanish Village (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974); Ruth Behar, Santa María del Monté: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village (Princeton University Press, 1986); Jane Collier, From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton University Press, 1997). 22 Jerome Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 23 González-Ruibal, “The Need for a Decaying Past.” 24 Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

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arrangement of rooms reflected new ideals and aspirations for the soviet way of life, and the allocation of space and resources reflected new forms of social classification and stratification. A careful reconstruction of the residence patterns in these blocks, particularly the sudden disappearances of some residents, charts how particular families, and whole social classes, fared under different phases of Stalinist repression. In one of my field sites, Villavieja, a village in Burgos province in Castile Leon, a number of informants referred to the barrio pobre that had existed in the 1930s and during the dictatorship. The village as a whole was very small and it was striking that, despite its small size, it had a designated neighborhood for the poorest inhabitants. This neighborhood consisted of two adjacent streets of now derelict houses. When talking about the killings that had occurred in Villavieja, some elderly informants described the victims as “the families from the barrio pobre” or gestured toward it. In the village was a notable piece of graffiti from the postwar period, an accusatory sentence that covered the side of a large store house: “Fascists – murderers of half my village.” While numerically not accurate in a strict sense, it is easy to imagine that from inside the close-knit barrio pobre, it would have seemed that half of the working-class men of the village had indeed been murdered or imprisoned.25 The streets of Villavieja’s barrio pobre revealed several features that stood out from the rest of the village. The houses were minutely small in their footprint and overall scale, and it was hard to visualize these spaces functioning as family homes. The streets were the narrowest and on the steepest incline in the village with doors and windows in close proximity and overlooking each other. Although, superficially, the rest of Villavieja appeared very traditional, almost timeless in its architecture, the barrio pobre revealed how much the contemporary homes had been remodeled and extended, and the roads resurfaced or widened for vehicle access. The barrio pobre was largely derelict, as either the plots were too cramped for redevelopment or the Republican families had left the village, or had lacked the material resources to redevelop their homes. Although the mass grave outside Villavieja was meticulously investigated and excavated, these other material traces were not included in the investigation. It would be possible to map the barrio pobre, looking at the

25 Renshaw,

Exhuming Loss, 45.

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fate of the former residents in a manner comparable to Buchli’s study to highlight the concentration of victims within two streets of the village, in order to visually manifest the socio-economic and kinship links between them. The dimensions of these homes and the number of occupants residing in each home in the 1930s is a further visual manifestation of the socio-economic status of those who were targeted by Franco’s forces and the prevailing conditions that fed the political tensions of the period. These streets also contain a rich potential for forms of memory work and commemoration as they are geographically central yet socially marginal to the village, an example of how things in plain view can be forgotten. There are numerous examples of recent archaeological work, particularly historical and contemporary archaeology, which can serve as a useful precedent to inform the analysis of the material traces of Spanish Republicanism. An important starting point, influencing many archaeological studies of social and power relations in the recent past, is Matthew Johnson’s Archaeology of Capitalism.26 This work ranges in scale from landscapes, particularly the enclosure of land, to changing domestic interiors and material culture in the home. Capitalism is considered in the round, as a set of linked trends in property ownership, consumption and display, privacy and individualism, and standardization and mass production. Johnson’s broad, holistic view of social and economic relations and their manifestation in both cultural and personal life is very instructive for an archaeology of Spanish Republicanism in the 1930s, as the political and personal were blurred, with ideological fault lines running through religion, education, sex, gender and the family, summarized by Holguin as the “culture wars” of daily life.27 Other authors have cautioned against trying to interpret local and particular histories in terms of historical or ideological metanarratives. De Cunzo and Ernstein28 argue that it is still possible to find the traces of power relations and ideology in landscapes and buildings, but that it is necessary move to away from grand or simplistic narratives of 26 Matthew

Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Holguin, “Navigating the Historical Labyrinth of the Spanish Civil War,” in Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War, ed. Noël Valis (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2007), 23–32. 28 Lu Ann De Cunzo, and Julie Ernstein, “Landscapes, Ideology and Experience in Historical Archaeology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 255–70. 27 Sandie

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domination and resistance, toward something more nuanced and more sensitive to lived experience, incremental change, and local concerns. An example of this may be found in Wilkie’s archaeology of a black sharecropping community in the American South.29 Although the material traces of this community do not manifest evidence of dramatic upheaval, conflict or an explicitly articulated resistance to the racism of the period, Wilkie asserts that these communities ultimately fed into the flowering of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The kind of schools, churches and social institutions in this, and similar, black communities were a vital building block in achieving Civil Rights. In recording the material culture of this abandoned site, Wilkie finds evidence of “food-sharing and neighborly interdependence,” self-reliance in the growing and foraging of food, and above all, the primary importance of education noted in the number of pens, pencils and slates recovered from each cabin.30 This example of the political legacy and significance of gradual and small-scale progressive change is useful in thinking about an archaeology of Spanish Republicanism. Although there were many dramatic flashpoints in political and labor relations in pre-war Spain, such as the miners’ strike in Asturias, the massacre at Casas Viejas, or later, the adoption of revolutionary social organization in Barcelona, for the great majority of Republican sympathizers, their political struggles were more mundane and more focused on local conditions and needs. The contemporary memory campaign in Spain has arguably steered away from a public representation of, or engagement with, the political lives of Republicans for fear of evoking the violence and destabilization associated with militant Bolshevism and the revolutionary politics of the period. Little of the political actions of murdered Republicans in my field sites constitute “revolutionary acts” as we would conceive of them today. They are more akin to the kind of community spirit of self-reliance and self-improvement evoked by Wilkie. Yet it is telling that these small-scale or grassroots activities throughout Spain provoked the kind of hostility in the establishment that ultimately resulted in such a violent backlash against Republican civilians, as it is arguably a testament to the potential power of small-scale social and political organization, just as Wilkie’s 29 Laurie Wilkie, “Black Sharecroppers and White Frat Boys: Living Communities and the Appropriation of Their Archaeological Pasts,” in Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (London: Routledge, 2001), 108–19. 30 Wilkie, “Black Sharecroppers,” 112.

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sharecropper community was a springboard for a powerful Civil Rights movement. During discussions in my field sites, I observed that there was a very limited reservoir of knowledge regarding the political life of the murdered Republicans, or the political fault lines in the village prewar. However a number of anecdotes and family memories concerned the building of a new wash house and fountain in the center of the village, for those who had previously washed their clothes in the river, a campaign for a new road, a campaign to open a civil cemetery to enable secular funerals outside the church’s remit, and some references to a strike among farm workers.31 The wash house and fountains, now abandoned and ruined, had reportedly been built by the leftist council that held office during the Popular Front government. Only those residents of the village with leftist sympathies seemed to know the history and significance of this ruined building, despite its central locale. At the same time that meticulous attention was being devoted to the gravesite of the murdered Republicans and the preparation of a new monument for their reburial ceremony, the wash house—a tangible trace of the agency and achievements of the dead, and an existing monument to the grassroots politics that had got them killed—continued to be neglected and ignored. Given the humbleness and ordinariness of buildings such as wash houses, meeting rooms and schools, it may appear ridiculous to describe them as “monuments.” But the humbleness of these initiatives makes an ethical demand on our attention, especially in contrast to the bombastic, totalitarian architecture and monuments that are the legacy of the Francoist Regime. The huge scale and monolithic nature of the Francoist postwar redevelopment project was explicitly designed to overshadow or obliterate the material traces and memories of pre-war Spain,32 which furnishes an ethical imperative for archaeologists to look beyond the Francoist legacy for those earlier traces. An example of how archaeology can reveal the significance of the faintest material traces is seen in 31 Renshaw,

Exhuming Loss, 59. Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011); Olivia Munoz-Rojas, Ashes and Granite: Destruction and Reconstruction in the Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011); Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francoist Spain,” in Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain, ed. Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink (London: Routledge, 2016), 93–117. 32 Dacia

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Schofield’s account of the archaeology of the peace camp that for decades surrounded Greenham Common Air Base.33 The missile storage and launch areas have already gained protected status as scheduled monuments, but Schofield asserts the need for archaeologists to look beyond these monolithic structures to record the concurrent history of protest. As a transient and counter-materialist community, the protest camp left very few traces, but its existence is arguably of greater significance to Britain’s history of the nuclear age, feminism, and cold war politics, than the structures of the air base itself. Another important precedent for an archaeology of Spanish Republicanism is the work of the Ludlow Collective who have excavated the site of a notorious massacre that occurred in the suppression of a long-running miners’ strike on the Colorado coal fields in the United States in 1914.34 A significant point in their practice is that although the excavation site is undoubtedly a site of violence and death, their archaeology focuses strongly on the life of the camp prior to its violent destruction, thereby contextualizing and explaining the killings in a broader historical sense, not simply through a forensic reconstruction of the massacre. Although the Colorado miners’ strike was ultimately broken by the massacre, the site’s narrative is not a simplistic one of failure or defeat. The material traces of the camp underscore the fact that it represented the successful mobilization of a labor force on a huge scale, as the miners and their families had left company towns to band together in self-sufficient camps as a form of protest. The massacre is thus situated in a chronology of events lasting months, or even years, enabling a fuller understanding of the rationale for the violence. Conversely, the excavation of Republican mass graves focuses on a brief temporal window in isolation which often fails to represent the complex sequence of events that precede the graves. A member of the Ludlow Collective, Dean Saitta, writes inspiringly on the broader scope and potential of the Ludlow site, as part of what he terms “emancipatory archaeology” which means demonstrating that

33 John Schofield, “Peace Site: An Archaeology of Protest at Greenham Common Air Base,” British Archaeology 104 (2009), 44–49. 34 Ludlow Collective, “Archaeology of the Colarado Coal Field War 1913–1914,” in Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, 108–19.

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“things could always have turned out differently.”35 The ethical imperative for archaeologists to show that “things could have turned out differently” is particularly important for the archaeology of pre-war Republicanism, as for a few years, in communities throughout Spain, things were different. The paradigm of recovering Republican memory through mass grave excavations frames the Republican experience through the fact of death and defeat, without revealing the successes and achievements that preceded it, thus lending this defeat a profound sense of inevitability. This reinforces the narrative link between the Republic and a period of war and chaos, rather than showing the Republic as a fertile time when an alternative version of Spain was explored. It is not venturing into the realm of counterfactual history to acknowledge that different ideals and different power relations were piloted briefly under the Republic. The intellectual and ethical importance of investigating alternative societies and social models is underscored by Tarlow’s assertion that archaeologists could fruitfully study the idealist or “utopian” communities of the nineteenth century as they reveal not only the particular ideologies of their adherents, but also provide a useful critique and counterpoint to the mainstream society around them, and to society in the present day.36

The Memorial Capacity of an Archaeology of Spanish Republicanism The sites enumerated above are all spaces of death, often spatially or structurally distant from the routine of daily life. Sites such as mass graves and cemeteries require a conscious decision to engage in a commemorative act, usually on the part of those already committed to remembering the dead. The monuments and plaques in spaces of death are often somewhat abstract, uniform and content-less, conveying little about the particularity of the dead or the texture of their lives. It is useful to consider the examples of other societies that have struggled to find commemorative forms that reconnect the realm of everyday life in the present with 35 Dean Saitta, “Ethics, Objectivity and Emancipatory Archaeology,” in Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, edited by Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007), 267–80. 36 Sarah Tarlow, “Excavating Utopia: Why Archaeologists Should Study ‘Ideal’ Communities of the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2002), 299–323.

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the memory of those who were plucked from their everyday lives by war and violence. Some of the most interesting examples can be seen in memorial forms in Europe to remember the Holocaust. Harjes points out that while officially-sanctioned and funded monuments became ever larger or more abstract, in a struggle to represent the totality of the Holocaust, alternative or “guerrilla” monuments emerged that zero-ed in on the particularity of names, dates and places, using a fragment of the past to represent the whole.37 Pearson describes the phenomenon of the stolpersteine or stumbling block, which are small brass blocks, engraved with the heading “here lived” and the name and biographical details, including date of deportation and death, of a single victim of the Holocaust.38 These blocks are inserted into paving stones outside the last known address of the victim. In this way, they create an enduring link between a particular victim and the material traces of their ordinary life before it was interrupted by violence. The creation of German artist Gunter Demnig, they began illegally in Berlin in 1997 but were subsequently authorized, and there are now many thousands of stumbling blocks in over 500 locations across Europe. As Pearson notes, they are unobtrusive and become part of the fabric of the street. They can be easily missed, but their power resides in this subtlety and the feeling of shock when they are noticed, that literally causes the passerby to stumble in the course of their daily routine. James Young notes that spontaneous remembering is experienced as more authentic and profound because it penetrates our usual mechanisms that rationalize or distance the past.39 A more familiar version of this kind of embedded monument is the countless monuments to the dead of the two World Wars, particularly World War I, that are integral to numerous public facilities and workplaces in Britain.40 This category of monument differs from those war 37 Kirsten Harjes, “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin,” German Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 138–51. 38 For further information see the website, https://www.needleberlin.com/2010/08/23/nazivicitms-and-stumbling-blocks-to-memory, 2010. 39 James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 40 Alex King, Memorials of the Great War: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

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memorials in village squares or cemeteries, in that they are site specific to the places where the dead soldiers worked in peacetime, and intentionally reflect their dual identities as civilians and soldiers. These are commonly found in railway stations, factories, schools, hospitals or post offices, anywhere where a significant proportion of the workforce fought and died. They perform the same function as a stumbling block in that they embed memory in a shared space, traversed everyday by the living, but once inhabited by the dead. In these functional locations they are frequently overlooked but cannot be entirely avoided. These monuments also reject a bracketing off, or othering, of the category of war dead by reminding us that all the dead had normal lives, be it as train drivers, postmen or students. The kind of buildings discussed above as sites for an archaeology of Spanish Republicanism, such as town halls, schools, universities, or even a ruined wash house, all possess the same potential to become locales of embedded, site-specific memory, that could be activated as memorials to provide a glimpse into the lives of the murdered Republicans. They enable a tangible connection between past and present, generating a tension or dialogue between the two.

Conclusion The exhumation of murdered Republican civilians from mass graves throughout Spain has been of fundamental importance to the historical understanding and public awareness of Francoist repression. For those with an affective or familial relationship to the dead, the exhumations have enabled the illumination of family history, the enactment of post-mortem care and a process of mourning. However, despite the dramatic shifts in Spain’s memory landscape, there are major limitations and lacunae in the way the identities of the dead are remembered and the degree to which the historical context and motives for these killings are interpreted, explained and publicly represented. The interpretative context and historical significance of these graves lies in the lived identities, agency and achievements of the dead and cannot be recovered through their human remains alone. The archaeology of battlefields and prisons explores important facets of the Civil War and the Republican experience but sheds little light on the pre-war roots of this violence and repression. There is also an imbalance in focusing on the material traces of Francoism, such as mass graves and prisons, especially when the dictatorship controlled historical discourse for so many decades and actively

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sought to obliterate traces of a Republican past. A further danger of focusing on an archaeology of death and imprisonment is that the commemoration of Republicans is bracketed off into exceptional spaces, ignoring the opportunity to relate their ideas and legacy to the quotidian struggles still facing individuals and communities today. A fuller archaeology of the Spanish Civil War should encompass the material traces of Republican lives in the 1930s, their socio-economic conditions as revealed by their homes and neighborhoods, their work in unions, schools and town halls, and their contribution to politics and civil society during a time of radical change.

Bibliography Barrett, Richard. Benabarre: The Modernization of a Spanish Village. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974. Behar, Ruth. Santa María del Monté: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Buchli, Victor. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Castelao, Alfonso. Galicia Mártir. 1937. Reissued Galicia Martyr: Prints by Castelao. Madrid: Akal, 1976. Cenarro, Angela. “Memory Beyond the Public Sphere.” History and Memory 14, no. 1–2 (2002): 165–88. Collier, Jane. From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. De Cunzo, Lu Ann, and Julie Ernstein. “Landscapes, Ideology and Experience in Historical Archaeology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, 255–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Fernández de Mata, Ignacio. “The ‘Logics’ of Violence and Franco’s Mass Graves: An Ethnohistorical Approach.” International Journal of the Humanities 2, no. 3 (2004): 2527–35. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain.” Anthropology Today 22, no. 3 (2006): 7–12. Gassiot Ballbé, Ermengol, Joaquim Oltra Puigdoménech, Elena Sintes Olives, and Dawnie Wolfe Steadman. “The Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War: Recovering Memory and Historical Justice.” In Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, ed. Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke, 235–46. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007. Gómez Bravo, Gutmaro. El Exilio Interior: Cárcel y Represión en la España Franquista 1939–1950. Madrid: Taurus, 2010.

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González-Ruibal, Alfredo. “The Need for a Decaying Past. An Archaeology of Oblivion in Contemporary Galicia (NW Spain).” Home Cultures 2, no. 2 (2005): 129–52. ———. “Making Things Public: Archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War.” Public Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2007): 203–26. ———. “The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936–1952).” In Archaeologies of Internment, ed. Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska. New York: Springer, 2011. ———. “From the Battlefield to the Labour Camp: Archaeology of Civil War and Dictatorship in Spain.” Antiquity 86 (2012), 456–73. ———. “Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francoist Spain.” In Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain, ed. Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink, 93–117. London: Routledge, 2016. Graham, Helen. “The Spanish Civil War, 1936–2003: The Return of Republican Memory.” Science and Society 68, no. 3 (2004): 313–28. Harjes, Kirsten. “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin.” German Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 138–51. Holguin, Sandie. Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. ———. “Navigating the Historical Labyrinth of the Spanish Civil War.” In Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War, ed. Noël Valis, 23–32. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2007. Johnson, Matthew. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. King, Alex. Memorials of the Great War: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Ludlow Collective. “Archaeology of the Colarado Coal Field War 1913–1914.” In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, 94–107. London: Routledge, 2001. Mintz, Jerome. The Anarchists of Casas Viejas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Munoz-Rojas, Olivia. Ashes & Granite: Destruction & Reconstruction in the Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. London: Harper, 2012. Renshaw, Layla. “The Scientific and Affective Identification of Republican Civilian Victims from the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2010): 449–63. ———. Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011. Rodrigo, Javier. Cautivos: Campos de Concentracion en la Espana Franquista (1936–1947). Barcelona: Critica, 2005.

162  L. RENSHAW Ruiz Vilaplana, Antonio. Burgos Justice: A Year’s Experience of Nationalist Spain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938. Saitta, Dean. “Ethics, Objectivity and Emancipatory Archaeology.” In Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, ed. Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke, 267–80. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007. Schofield, John. “Peace Site: An Archaeology of Protest at Greenham Common Air Base.” British Archaeology, 104 (2009), 44–49. Tarlow, Sarah. “Excavating Utopia: Why Archaeologists Should Study ‘Ideal’ Communities of the Nineteenth Century.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2002): 299–323. Viejo-Rose, Dacia. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage & Memory after Civil War. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Wilkie, Laurie. “Black Sharecroppers and White Frat Boys: Living Communities and the Appropriation of Their Archaeological Pasts.” In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, 108–19. London: Routledge, 2001. Young, James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 8

Visualizing Mass Grave Recovery: Ritual, Digital Culture and Geographic Information Systems Wendy Perla Kurtz

The recent upsurge in the recovery of bodies from mass graves (circa 2000–present) dating back to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) has unearthed forcibly repressed memories from one of Spain’s most violent and oppressive periods: Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). With the enactment of the Law of Historical Memory by Parliament on 31 October 2007, the Spanish public now has a legal channel through which to exhume mass graves from the War and postwar, but the job of locating and recovering bodies of victims continues to fall on autonomous communities and private entities, such as the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, or ARMH in Spanish) and the State Federation of Forums for Memory (Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria, henceforth Foros). The lack of a state-sponsored exhumation of mass graves after the dictatorship has created a void in collective memory. The disinterment process acts as a catalyst for the rebuilding of suppressed or unexplored W. P. Kurtz (*)  University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_8

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sentiments silenced by a fascist dictatorship and, later, through the transition to a democratic government. This chapter explores the performative aspects of the recovery of cadavers from mass graves found throughout Spanish territories using theories of performance informed by Richard Schechner, Paul Connerton, and Diana Taylor, to examine the necessity for the physical performance of funeral rites in order to disseminate memory and enact closure. Through the creation and dissemination of digital texts, performative rituals help to reconcile and recuperate collective memory. I argue that digital media act together as a performative platform making the search for and recuperation of victims public. Digital productions act as a stage for families and communities of survivors to highlight the process of locating their disappeared family members. Through personal and communal blogs, YouTube shorts, radio programs, and social media groups, contemporary Spaniards document their search for and reburial of family members lost during the War and postwar. The public witness of reburial rituals legitimizes the pain and loss of the defeated by helping overcome the collective trauma caused by the War and Francoism. The modes of dissemination of digital culture become critical and, as such, an analysis regarding modes of visualization, particularly through digital mapping systems, will conclude the chapter. A brief summary of trauma studies will inform the subsequent discussion regarding the performance of reburial as a healing ritual. Significant scholarship exists in relation to collective trauma in the social sciences,1 clinical studies,2 and the

1 Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 221–35; Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 183–99. 2 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth 1955 [1920]); Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Pierre Janet, L’automatisme psychologique (Paris: Société Pierre Janet, 1973 [1889]); Pierre Janet, “L’amnésie continue,” in L’état mental des hystérique (Paris: Alcan, 1990 [1893]); Pierre Janet, “Les idées fixes de forme hystérique,” Press Medicale 3 (1895), 201–3; Bessel A. Van der Kolk, and Onno Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 158–82.

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humanities.3 Collective trauma and its emergence from the Civil War and Francoism have also been studied in depth.4 Drawing from scholars who study trauma suffered at the community level—or what has been termed “collective trauma”—to support theories of performances will facilitate the exploration of the use of social networks as platforms from which to publish digital cultural materials relating to historical memory. Kai Erikson has published several important works on collective trauma. His contribution to the collection of essays Trauma: Explorations in Memory titled “Notes on Trauma and Community” provides a succinct definition of trauma: “To describe people as traumatized is to say that they have withdrawn into a kind of protective envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness, in which the traumatic experience is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expounded by acts of denial and resistance.”5 Erikson draws a distinction between traumas experienced at the individual level and trauma felt at the community level: By collective trauma […] I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with “trauma.” But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community

3 Caruth, “Introductions,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 3–12 and 151–57; Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 236–55; Marita Sturken, “The Remembering of Forgetting: Recovered Memory and the Question of Experience,” Social Text 57 (1998), 103–25; Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 4 Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflection on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 65–82; Cristina MoreirasMenor, “Spectacle, Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Spain,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Arnold, 2000), 134–43; Petar Ramadanovic, Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001); Teresa M. Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la Transición española (1973–1993) (Madrid: Editorial Siglo XXI de España, 1998). 5 Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” 186.

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In the Spanish case, the collective trauma fomented during the decades-long dictatorship that followed the Civil War. As of 17 December 2015, the Spanish Ministry of Justice identified over 2,600 mass graves located throughout Spain, northern Africa and the Balearic and Canary Islands.7 The overwhelming number of gravesites, resulting from a range of repressive campaigns carried out by the Francoist Regime, left a footprint of the Civil War and postwar stamped on the Peninsula. During and after the War, the Regime targeted Republican collaborators, removing them from their homes and transporting them to concentration camps or detention centers, subjecting them to torture and deplorable conditions. Tactics—such as large-scale massacres and paseos (“strolls”) or sacas—were regularly practiced and served to imprint terror on Francoist dissenters. In “Digital memory: The Visual Recording of Mass Grave Exhumations in Contemporary Spain,” Francisco Ferrándiz describes the horrific practice of these “strolls” as: “a generalized terror and death technique where prisoners, drawn from jails and concentration camps, or citizens, deemed collaborators of the defeated Republican government, and therefore included in execution lists drawn up by local Franco agents, were driven in trucks at dawn and shot in isolated places, abandoned on the spot or dumped into a ditch.”8 Family members of prisoners removed (or sacados) from their communities were left in wait, many times never discovering the fate of their relatives and neighbors. The names of the missing were added to the figurative list of desaparecidos or “disappeared” whose whereabouts might never be discovered. Throughout a number of articles, Ferrándiz explains that the current disinterment efforts do not occur in a vacuum, but rather are the most current episode in successive waves of disinterment and reburial.9 6 Erikson,

Everything in Its Path, 154. Ministry of Justice publishes a biannual report on the mass grave recovery effort. Datos.gob.es, Gobierno de Espana, http://datos.gob.es/catalogo/e00003901fosas-o-lugares-de-enterramiento-en-el-territorio-espanol. As of 18 December 2015, the data identified 2,642 mass graves. 8 Francisco Ferrándiz, and Alejandro Baer, “Digital Memory: The Visual Recording of Mass Grave Exhumations in Contemporary Spain,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9, no. 3 (2008), Art. 35, 1. 9 Francisco Ferrándiz, “Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008), 177–92; Francisco Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel: Political Correctness and Digital Emotions in the Exhumation of 7 The

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Postwar exhumations began directly after the War, “as part of the mourning for the losses on the winning side, the reconstruction of the country, and the organization of the new dictatorial state. This happened within a pervasive official narrative of military victory anchored in the concepts of religious crusade, heroism, and martyrdom – known in Spanish political history as National Catholicism.”10 The exhumations of the victorious Nationalists served to honor and mourn the loss of their heroes, while the bodies of the defeated remained buried in unmarked graves. Whereas the remains of the Nationalists were laid in view for honoring by the entire Spanish nation, families of the defeated did not have a site from which to mourn their losses and feared retribution from the Regime if they publicly expressed grief. The second wave of exhumations came in the late 1950s, when over 30,000 bodies were recovered and transferred to the Valley of the Fallen.11 The most recent wave of disinterments, studied herein, focuses on recovering the remaining Republican victims. The current swell of exhumations confronts concessions made by political parties after Franco’s death to ensure a smooth transition from dictatorship to democracy in order to join a contemporary European community. The Amnesty Law of 1977—informally called the Pact of Silence by many—explicitly forbade legal prosecutions against perpetrators of human rights violations that occurred during the War and postwar periods and did not permit family members to seek out the burial sites of relatives secretly discarded in mass graves. After difficult negotiations spanning twenty years, the Law of Historical Memory was enacted by Parliament on 31 October 2007, and recognized the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Michael Richards describes the effect the Pact of Silence had on social and historical forces in his article, “Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History,” saying: “[p]eople were reluctant to ask difficult questions about the recent past for fear of jeopardizing the restoration of liberal-democracy. Political and social explanation was eliminated from public debate. No particular social or

Civil War Mass Graves in Spain Today,” in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, ed. Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi (Nashville, NC: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 242–61. 10 Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” 243. 11 Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” 243.

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political group was to carry the moral responsibility for the War or the postwar repression.”12 The Pact left a void in historical memory, particularly on the part of the defeated republicans, and the current exhumations confront the imposed silence for the survivors. In his article, “The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War,” Joan Ramon Resina explains why the recent exhumations challenge the picture of a smooth transition: “the reemergence of the ‘secret’ dead annihilates at once the meticulous work of mandated amnesia. But it is not only the so-called peace of Francoism that crumbles with the return of the repressed. Those frail vestiges of past violence foul a quarter of a century of cynical democracy.”13 The recuperation of bodies from hidden graves questions the transition to democracy, while at the same time filling the void in historical memory. The exhumations—government sanctioned since 2007, occurring throughout Spain and broadcast through mass media channels—force the recuperation of a collective memory through the assemblage of testimonies and oral histories produced from the search for bodies in mass graves. Fundamental to the recovery of memory is the official recognition of actions perpetrated during the War and postwar period. The public witness of the performance of the burial legitimizes the loss and pain of the defeated. The performative aspect of the recovery of human remains is a crucial component of the clear transformative intention of remembrance stressed by Resina: Rituals of remembrance facilitate the disentangling of the living from the departed. Such rituals are at the foundation of culture and at the origin of sedentary society—in other words, of the state. To lie in state is to be placed in public view for honors accorded prior to burial. Public honoring of the deceased sustains the transcendence that the state claims with respect to each subject, lifting bereavement from the private to the social sphere.14 12 Michael Richards, “Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History: Public Uses of the Past in Postwar Spain,” in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, ed. Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 121–45 (135). 13 Joan Ramon Resina, “The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War,” in Jerez-Farrán and Amago, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy, 221–42 (224). 14 Resina, “The Weight of Memory,” 229–30.

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Until 2007, the task of recuperating the disappeared had fallen almost exclusively on family members or local municipalities, yet it is fundamental that the process of recovery and reburial be witnessed by the entire Spanish nation, not only the familial and affiliative relations immediately affected by the loss. Theories of performance elucidate the necessity for family members to undergo the performance of a burial. Richard Schechner describes the relationship between rituals and performance in his book, Performance Studies: An Introduction, when he recalls sociologist Émile Durheim’s theories on how performing rituals create and sustain social solidarity: “He insisted that although rituals may communicate or express religious ideas, rituals were not ideas or abstractions, but performances enacting known patterns of behavior and texts. Rituals don’t so much express ideas as embody them.”15 The embodiment of the performance makes the ritual of burial and the search for the missing an essential process in the recuperation of historical memory. The performance or the enactment of a ritual creates social solidarity, inscribes behavior, and sediments memory, while at the same time legitimizing the suffering sustained by the vanquished held silent for decades. Like Schechner, Diana Taylor describes the inherited behavior as “acts of transfer” instilled through performative rituals, such as funerals. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Taylor categorizes performance as the “many practices and events – dance, theatre, ritual, political rallies, funerals – that involve theatrical, rehearsed, or conventional/event appropriate behaviors,”16 and she describes the important role these acts of performance play in society: “[p]erformances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity.”17 Without these performances, social knowledge and memory stagnate. In his book, How Societies Remember, sociologist and anthropologist Paul Connerton explains why performance plays a crucial role in acts of transfer: “to study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer

15 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 57. 16 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. 17 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2.

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that make remembering in common possible.”18 The “acts of transfer” Connerton singles out as having crucial importance to the formation of social memories are commemorative ceremonies (that is, funerals) and bodily practices because only those (more or less ritualistic) performances can show the images and recollected knowledge of the past.19 Richard Schechner calls these acts of transfer “twice-behaved behavior.”20 The performative aspect of the funeral and burial of bodies serves as a way for families to transmit appropriate behaviors and memories to future generations. In Spain, the silence surrounding mass graves had not permitted familial and affiliative relations to grieve in the socially prescribed fashion, thereby implanting a fissure in collective memory. In Taylor’s study, she suggests that writing has come to stand in for and against embodiment (or physical performances) because Western epistemologies value the transcendence of the written word over the impermanence of performance rituals. For Taylor, modern culture places more significance on the written word over embodied performance, but she explains that “embodied expression has participated and will probably continue to participate in the transmission of social knowledge, memory, and identity pre- and postwriting.”21 In the case of post-Francoist society, a clear issue arises because of the numerous false documents and testimonies about the disappeared in newspapers, public reports, and official government documents produced during the War and postwar years. The embodied expression—or physical performance—of burial for the missing was restricted by the dictatorship, leaving only falsely written testimonies to recount events in its wake. Taylor examines how writing equals power and how this creates a strained relationship between written and spoken words, where oral testimony is subsumed by written histories.22 A parallel can be drawn from Taylor’s theory of power to the government who falsified documents, while restricting the performance of the burial. Digital media created by everyday people becomes a durable text that visually commemorates the performance of recuperating 18 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39. 19 Connerton, How Societies Remember, 40. 20 Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36. 21 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 16. 22 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 18.

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bodies from mass graves in order to disseminate memory and enact closure. By memorializing the performance of the search for the missing, contemporary Spaniards establish an emerging digital culture on the enduring physicality of bones. In order to legitimize the texts created (the digital media) these productions are based on the union of the performance with the materiality of the archive (the physical remains of victims). The alliance of the performance with the text is fundamental for Taylor, who explains the interaction of the embodied performance and the text: “The rift […] does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring material (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”23 Taylor explains the difference of the archive and repertoire as follows: “‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change,”24 whereas “[t]he repertoire […] enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge. […] The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission.”25 For Taylor, the “archive” or text is an enduring cultural materiality and the “repertoire” relates to the culturally relevant rituals surrounding that text. She gives an example of how the archive and the repertoire work in tandem: “Innumerable practices in the most literate societies require both an archival and an embodied dimension: weddings need both the performative utterances of ‘I do’ and the signed contract; the legality of a court decision lies in the combination of the live trial and the recorded outcome; the performance of a claim contributes to its legality.”26 In order to be recognized and validated, both the archive and repertoire fuse to legitimize the actions (the wedding, in Taylor’s example) and only by 23 Taylor,

The Archive and the Repertoire, 19 (underlined emphasis added). The Archive and the Repertoire, 19. A note on the “literary texts” referenced in this quote: I do not encapsulate digital media into this definition of the archive because they were not created during the Civil War or postwar years. 25 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20. 26 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 21. 24 Taylor,

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working together can the performance occur. If we carry this idea to death (rather than the uniting force of a wedding) we see how the bones of the individuals (as well as oral and written testimonies) comprise the archive and the funeral/burial rite embodies the repertoire. Without the bodies from the mass graves (the archival unit), family members cannot enact the repertoire (the burial). Without the two forces working in conjunction, the prescribed social transmission of memory and knowledge breaks down into an obsolete relationship. Both the archive and repertoire are important and have a necessary bond: “There is an advantage to thinking about a repertoire performed through dance, theatre, song, ritual, witnessing, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviors as something that cannot be housed or contained in an archive.”27 Considering mass graves and the disappeared from the Spanish Civil War, we can see how without the archive of the physical bones, the surviving family members did not have the means to perform the necessary repertoire and could not adequately mourn their loss; they could not bury their dead and only now with the recovery of the archive, can the actual repertoire occur. With the opening of these graves, the true grieving process can begin as the community of individuals performs the requisite repertoire of the burial. In order to counteract the collective trauma described by Erikson, where the breakdown of community bonds hinders a sense of communality, the rituals performed and distributed via digital technologies before a witnessing audience assist in reconstructing the defunct support system lost to the collective trauma experienced under Franco. The large corpus of digital and social media on the web pertaining to the recuperation of historical memory demonstrates how present-day Spaniards continue to struggle with events stemming from the Francoist dictatorship even some forty years after his death. The internet serves as a unique platform for publishing rituals of recuperation. Blogging and website creation become a performative platform making the search for and recovery of victims from the War and postwar period public. For the purposes of this discussion, digital technology refers to any technology used to create or distribute born-digital texts, including digital still and video cameras, smartphones, and social network platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, and Flickr, used for

27 Taylor,

The Archive and the Repertoire, 37.

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distribution. Blogs, videos, and social media sites act as a stage for families and communities of survivors to make public the process of locating disappeared family members. Digital technologies provide opportunities for unprecedented self-representation relating to the retelling of memories via the recuperation of mass graves. The proliferation of digital technologies lends the distinctive power of turning the everyday person into a producer of media. Mark Poster explains: networked computing places in the hands of the general population information machines that are linked to their existences in fundamental ways. Regardless of the efforts of the capitalist class (as well as those of the nation state), the assemblage of human and information machines must be accounted for as a phenomenon unprecedented in the array of media technologies, an innovation that is drastically changing the character of culture. For the human/information machine link introduces new configurations of the binaries of space and time, body and mind, subject and object, producer and consumer, indeed all the constituents that form cultures.28

The media recorded and distributed by everyday people, by communities of survivors and their descendants, ultimately contributes to the creation of culture. Through personal and communal blogs that document their search for and reburial of disappeared family members, contemporary Spaniards add cultural productions to the historiography produced about the Civil War and Francoism. Similar to Poster, David Gauntlett explains how new digital technologies break down traditional relationships of consumer and creator: “A corresponding recognition that the separate categories of ‘producer’ and ‘audience’ are collapsing, as a growing number of people become creators, arrangers and remixers of digital media.”29 As opposed to other curated forms of cultural production, social media and video-hosting platforms become outlets for the public to record and present their vision. Whereas the museum space is curated and mass communication produced by newspapers and public broadcasting systems have a guiding hand, media produced by ordinary people facilitate

28 Mark Poster, “Global Media and Culture,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008), 685–703 (689). 29 David Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0: A Response,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009), 147–57 (149).

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the distribution of new forms of cultural productions. For Gauntlett, Media Studies 2.0 follows the example of Web 2.0 standards of creative and participatory platforms. He writes: “Media Studies 2.0 is interested in the everyday participatory and creative possibilities of media, as compared to the focus of traditional media studies on professional media consumed by audiences who had to take what they were given.”30 The blurring of the line between creator and audience makes the media relating to the recuperation of mass graves a significant cultural form. In Nancy Thumim’s book Self-representation as Digital Culture she describes the diverse body of work that has emerged relating to the new media described by Gauntlett within the social framework.31 Thumim provides a definition for “digital culture” and differentiates it from other terms used to describe what some have labeled “internet studies:” “Even more than ‘cyberculture’, ‘information society’ or ‘new media’, the term ‘digital culture’ indicates a focus on culture at the broadest level; this term implies that the affordances and the constraints resulting from digital technologies shape everyday life across its multiple facets, for everyone, just as electricity and print were seen as doing in previous eras.”32 Technology, then, acts as a mediator for digital texts, and these digital texts become cultural representations and productions. Along with the novels, feature films, and documentaries about the Civil War and Franco dictatorship, digital cultural artifacts become meaningful productions for historical, pedagogical and investigative purposes. A discussion on media and performance would be remiss without mentioning that while new digital technologies allow individuals to publish their stories to social networks and the World Wide Web, even self-representation in contemporary media practices cannot yield unmediated results. Digital technologies become mediators between the producer of media and their audience. The term mediation refers to the role

30 Gauntlett,

“Media Studies 2.0,” 149. instance, Mark Deuze, “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering the Principal Components of a Digital Culture,” The Information Society 22 (2006), 63–75; David Silver, “Internet/Cyberculture/Digital Culture/New Media/Fill-In-The-Blank Studies,” New Media and Society 6, no. 1 (2004), 55–64. 32 Nancy Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 10–11. 31 For

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of technology in meaning-making within society.33 Thumin writes about the mediation of technology and representations of the self: unmediated self-representation is, if not actually possible, at least a commonly held idea, that it should be possible to “speak for oneself” without being mediated by media producers, museum curators, academic research or other professionals. Indeed the idea that unmediated self-representation is conceivable also implies that technology and form do not play too important a role in shaping the meaning of a representation. Finally the ideal of unmediated self-representation downplays the ways in which people inevitably mediate their own representation by bringing to bear certain assumptions, attitudes and understanding of what a self-representation addressed to an audience should entail.34

While readily available technologies and virtually free modes of distribution are democratizing forces that allow everyday people to express themselves, layers of mediation negotiate how the creator communicates with the audience. For example, the Facebook groups and Tweets emanating from Twitter are remediated by avatars, or virtual representations of actual people. With over 35,000 members spanning across several different active Facebook groups dedicated to historical memory, the scope of these groups are varied, but each provides a community space— mediated through an avatar—to discuss the recuperation of historical memory and the exhumation of familial and affiliative relations.35

33 John Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture; Leah L. Lievrouw, “New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study,” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 3 (2009), 303–25. 34 Thumim, Self-Representation and Digital Culture, 50. 35 The following are examples of Facebook groups dedicated to historical memory as of March 2017: “Guerra Civil Española – O Revolucion Social” currently with 21,635 members, https://www.facebook.com/groups/234589516628356/; “Plataforma Memoria Histórica—Guerra Civil Española” with 9571 members, https://www.facebook.com/Plataforma-Memoria-Hist%C3%B3rica-Guerra-Civil-Espa%C3%B1ola219608795906/?ref=br_rs; “Memoria Histórica de España” with 1011 members, https://www.facebook.com/archivosdememoriahistorica/?ref=br_rs; “La Guerra Civil Española” with 3558 members, https://www.facebook.com/groups/378972102146174 /?ref = br_rs. https://www.facebook.com/groups/240289476125136/.

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The existence of these blogs and social media networks exhibits the need for Spaniards to publicly present and discuss recuperation efforts. Through documented online performance, networks assist in recovering historical memory regardless of the mediation effects of technology and distribution modes. The abundance of internet and social media content dedicated to the Spanish Civil War on the web mainly emanates from the Republican position. One reason why much of the media pertains to Republicans’ reinterpretation of history relates to the collective trauma being overcome through the creation of these sites of memory. Many websites take a historical look back in an attempt to accurately document the atrocities masked for decades by the Franco Regime, and later by the democratic government. Using government documents, logs, photographs or testimonies, these websites attempt to recompile a history.36 Other sites are dedicated to locating the missing victims.37 On the Andalusian website for Canal Sur, the radio station’s blog has archived all of its programs for “La Memoria.”38 The weekly radio program grapples with topics on historical memory and, particularly, with the exhumation process in southern Spain by inviting local citizens, government officials, representatives from historical memory associations and other interested parties to discuss regional and national recuperation efforts. Many of the blogs, websites and digital media surface directly from various autonomous communities via historical memory associations. Historical memory associations (Foro and ARMH, for example) become mediating factors between survivors and digital texts produced for the web. The associations become an intermediary—alongside the physical technology and modes of distribution—between the audience and the producers of digital media. Each group has its own stance on

36 “Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española—Republica,” 1 October 2017, http://memoriasdelaguerracivil.blogspot.com/; “Spanish Civil War Memory Project: Audiovisual Archive of the Francoist Repression,” University of California, San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/scwmemory/. 37 “Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” http://memoriahistorica. org.es/; “Guerra Civil Española y sus victimas,” http://victimasguerracivilespaniola.blogspot.com/. 38 “La Memoria,” Canal Sur, http://blogs.canalsur.es/lamemoria/2010/11/24/como-y-por-que-se-escavan-en-espana-las-fosas-comunes-y-como-se-identifican-los-restos-oseos-de-las-victimas-del-franquismo-que-aparecen/.

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how the exhumations should be accomplished and their aims do not always align.39 Despite their differences, they still publish much of the video and photographic material relating to the exhumations occurring on Spanish territories. There are several YouTube channels dedicated not only to the Spanish Civil War, but also to the collection of testimonies from numerous individuals regarding the exhumation of mass graves. The ARMH,40 and one of the regional networks for Foro, “Foro por la memoria: Campo de Gibraltar,”41 have YouTube channels that publish a combination of the following: disinterment of mass graves, the return of remains and reburial by family members recovered through exhumations, and witness testimony from the War and postwar period. On the ARMH’s website under the video gallery section, they highlight their active endeavors, but through their YouTube channel, users can browse through all of the videos released by the group. The ARMH also has a Flickr account where they not only share images from disinterments, but also the process of the exhumations: from exploratory drilling to rituals of reburial. They have created separate albums for each project, making the current state of disinterment easily discernable.42 Distribution methods through social networks and blogs, as well as visualization of digital media relating to mass grave recovery, allow collective memory digital texts to circulate to wider audiences. One of the most recognized visualizations of mass grave recovery in Spain is a digital map published on the Ministry of Justice’s website and based on information provided by regional authorities and historical memory associations (see Fig. 8.1).43 As one of the measures of the Law of Historical Memory, the Ministry developed a map that reveals areas with the remains of victims and the recuperation status of the gravesites. Updated biannually, the government’s map identifies if a mass grave has already 39 For a thorough discussion of some fundamental differences between historical memory associations, see Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” in Delgado, Fernández and Labanyi, Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History. 40 “Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/user/ARMHmemoria. 41 “Foro por la memoria: Campo de Gibraltar,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ user/foroporlamemoriacg. 42 “Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica,” Flickr, https://www. flickr.com/photos/memoriahistorica/albums. 43 “Mapa de fosas,” Memoria Histórica. Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Justicia, http://www.memoriahistorica.gob.es/es-es/mapafosas/Paginas/index.aspx.

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Fig. 8.1  “Mapa de fosas,” Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Justicia

been fully or partially exhumed (red), has yet to be opened (green), is missing (white) or has had its contents moved to the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), a vast underground mausoleum built on Franco’s orders near Madrid (yellow). Along with indicating the status of exhumation, a user can click on any point on the map to pull up further metadata about the gravesite.44 In addition to the mapping interface, through 44 The map includes the following metadata fields: Numero_Registro, Dominación_ Fosa, Tipo_Fosa, Fecha_Fosa, Municipio, Provincia, Comunidad Autónoma, Lat, Long, Tipo_Intervención, Fecha_Intervención, Estado_Actual, Numero_Personas_Fosa, Numero_Personas_Exhumadas, Numero_Personas_Identificadas, Entidad_Promotora, Entidad_Informante.

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an available search function, users can search for keywords within the metadata for the graves. Along with providing the map, and as part of the Law of Historical Memory, the Ministry also publishes the data that underpins the map’s visualization through the website. The national catalogue of Open Data (Datos Abiertos) is housed online (datos.gob.es) and acts as the access point to datasets that the government makes available for reuse. The dataset titled: “Graves or burial sites in the Spanish territory” is purportedly updated twice yearly as the disinterments continue.45 As a condition of use, the Ministry requires that the most current version of the data be displayed in any project. However, the Ministry has not provided an update on the dataset since 18 December 2015. The delay in actualizing the information could be attributed to the election of the conservative Popular Party in December 2011, which eliminated state funding to realize exhumations.46 Private entities and regional communities have constructed digital maps to visualize mass grave locations around the peninsula. Maps produced by autonomous communities such as Asturias,47 Catalonia (see Fig. 8.2),48 and Navarre (see Fig. 8.3)49 emulate the structure of the visualization created by the Ministry of Justice. The maps geographically locate gravesites and include the metadata relating to the specific site, as indicated on the government’s dataset. The ARMH maintains their own digital map where they document the sites they exhume and include narratives within the map pinpoints regarding the disinterment process (“Mapa de la Memoria”).50 The data used for the ARMH map differ

45 “Fosas o lugares de enterramiento en el territorio español - Catálago de Datos,” Ministerio de Justicia, http://datos.gob.es/catalogo/e00003901-fosas-o-lugares-deenterramiento-en-el-territorio-espanol. 46 Ferrándiz, “From Tear to Pixel,” in Delgado, Fernández and Labanyi, Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, 244. 47 “Mapa de fosas comunes de Asturias – Mapa Interactivo,” Gobiernu del Principáu d’Asturies, Universidad de Oviedo, http://tematico.asturias.es/asunsoci/fosas/. 48 “Fosses i Repressió,” Generalitat de Catalunya, http://fossesirepressio.cat/es/home. 49 “Visor de fosas de Navarra,” Gobierno de Navarra, http://fosas.navarra.es/. 50 “Mapa de la memoria.” Asociación de la Resuperación de la Memoria Histórica, http://memoriahistorica.org.es/mapa-de-la-verguenza/.

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Fig. 8.2  “Fosses i Repressió,” Generalitat de Catalunya

in scope and content from the other visualizations discussed herein. The Spanish newspaper El Diario uses the same data from the Ministry of Justice to show the locations of the graves, but take their visualization a step further (see Fig. 8.4).51 They too indicate the location of the gravesite, but rather than simply spatially designating the graves, they have built a bubble map using graduated circles to indicate the proportion of exhumed victims from each site. Just as digital texts are mediated by the technology used to create them and the forms of distribution to disseminate them, cartographic representations of the spatial location of mass graves are mediated by the platforms used to visualize them. Digital maps translate a threedimensional space into a two-dimensional interface. In her book on visualizations, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Johanna Drucker analyzes spatial interfaces: “maps, like other geographic conventions, construct normative notions about time, space, an experience that become so familiar we take them for accurate representations rather

51 “Las víctimas en fosas del franquismo,” El Diario.es, http://desmemoria.eldiario.es/ mapa-fosas/.

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Fig. 8.3  “Visor de fosas de Navarra,” Gobierno de Navarra

Fig. 8.4  “Las víctimas en fosas del franquismo,” El Diario.es

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than constructions. The constructed experience of space cannot be presented in standard cartography any more than the variable concepts of temporality can be charted on a standard timeline.”52 One way these mass grave maps, and their underlying data, could be misconstrued is the fact that the map pinpoints do not correlate to the exact geographic coordinates of gravesites. Under the information about the map, the Ministry notes: “We inform the citizens concerned that the locations of the burial places on the map do not correspond to their real geographical coordinates; rather the symbols have been placed over the populated area where they are located.”53 Interestingly, the information regarding the geographical coordinates for the grave locations are described on the Ministry’s website for the map of graves, but absent from the site where they host the dataset. The maps published by the autonomous communities and private entities mentioned above do not provide the information specified by the Ministry about the location data of the graves. When users visit the maps built by any entity other than the Ministry, they are not provided with the necessary information about the construction of the datasets and maps. In order to avoid misconceptions about visualizations, transparency regarding the decision-making process that contributed to the creation of the projects is imperative. Using the data provided by the Ministry of Justice, I have also constructed a digital map of mass graves to add to the visualization efforts of the Spanish government, autonomous communities, and historical memory associations. Virtual Cartographies aims to visualize two types of data: first, data collected from the Spanish Ministry of Justice that details the over 2,600 mass graves found throughout the Spanish territories, and second, a rich collection of multimedia elements directly related to specific mass graves sites (see Fig. 8.5).54 By mapping these layers in tandem, Virtual Cartographies takes the data pertaining to specific mass graves and ties it directly to digital media associated with the sites. Rather than visualize the status and metadata of the gravesites, Virtual Cartographies spatially visualizes the ever-growing corpus of digital media about the recuperation efforts for specific gravesites alongside 52 Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 82. 53 “Mapa de fosas,” Gobierno de España, http://mapadefosas.mjusticia.es/exovi_ externo/CargarInformacion.htm. 54 “Virtual

Cartographies,” http://www.virtualcartographies.com.

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Fig. 8.5  Virtual Cartographies, Wendy Perla Kurtz: www.virtualcartographies. com

collected data for those locations. The combination of digital media with information regarding specific sites helps to expand on the data-driven aspect of the Ministry of Justice’s map. Virtual Cartographies bridges the gap between digital maps that are representations of locations and visualizations that generate knowledge. Drucker describes the difference between visualizations that represent information already known and visualizations that are capable of being knowledge generators: “knowledge generators are graphical forms that support combinatoric calculation. Their spatial organization may be static or mobile, but their spatial features allow their components to be combined in a multiplicity of ways. They make use of position, sequence, order, and comparison across aligned fields as fundamental spatial properties.”55 Virtual Cartographies does not perform spatial analysis, but instead visualizes gravesites alongside media pertaining to specific locations. Rather than constructing a database where users could search or filter by a variety of fields (such as location), a digital map permits users to easily select media relating to a specific region or area, and further reduce selections to media types (social media videos, audio files, newspaper articles, blogs). 55 Drucker,

Graphesis, 105.

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Following Dublin Core metadata standards, I formatted a dataset of multimedia texts. The media included on the map is inherently inscribed by place, but it was also imperative to include the data (or metadata) about the data (or text). The metadata schema emerged from the texts included on the map, since these digital materials are to be studied, considered and analyzed, rather than consumed. Ultimately, uMap became the platform for the project.56 uMap is a free, open-source platform developed out of France where users create digital maps using OpenStreetMap layers that can be embedded into any website. uMap could easily manage the project goals, which are threefold: to display multiple data layers (Ministry of Justice dataset together with digital media elements); to present the information in a non-linear structure; and to cluster multiple resources for one geographic area. Each of these goals is further described in detail below. One of the greatest challenges of the project was integrating digital media into the map. Most GIS platforms are not designed for the integration of media, but rather to conduct geospatial analysis. While most platforms can incorporate one representative image for each pinpoint, displaying multimedia elements such as videos, PDFs, and audio files proved to be extremely challenging for most out-of-the-box tools.57 uMap displays media on their platform through the use of Iframes. That means one can embed a variety of media types: video (both YouTube and self-hosted), audio clips, PDFs, and images onto the map. The various media elements are designated with different pin colors on the map where novels are represented in blue, films in red, websites in purple, articles in gold, audio in teal, and so on. When visualizing the data layers onto the map, I wanted to extricate the project from imposing an authorial presence in the presentation of materials. Since the map was designed as a resource for scholars and the general public, I did not want to impose a narrative structure on the resources by avoiding the addition of a linear narrative to the media elements. The objective was for the map to function as a performative platform to further bolster the efforts of the creators of the media elements and to situate these digital texts within the larger framework of 56 “uMap,”

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/. were built on the following platforms: Google Fusion Tables, Google MyMaps, Omeka with Neatline functionality, ESRI Story Maps in combination with ArcGIS, CartoDB, and Leaflet and Mapbox libraries and templates. 57 Prototypes

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recuperation efforts. Each multimedia element is divided into a separate layer (such as audio files, documentaries, novels, videos, websites). The inherent structure of the information, then, is alphabetical. For example, the media types are organized by title (audio files, films, novels, websites) and the media within each layer is organized alphabetically by title as well. Similarly, the mass grave dataset organizes the name of the gravesites alphabetically within its own layer. A user could navigate the map by clicking on the different color pinpoints directly on the map, or by using the sidebar that organizes content in alphabetical order. The last goal was to represent multiple media elements for any one site. Certain gravesites have a large number of digital texts associated with them. A site could have a documentary produced about it, a YouTube video filmed by a family member, and a radio program discussing the exhumation. I wanted to display multiple media points (and their metadata) for one gravesite. I considered combining all the multimedia elements for one site into one point, to share one information popup window, but ultimately kept them as separate points to be viewed as a cluster. Combining all the media elements into one popup window would overwhelm the user with too much information on the screen at one time. It was also impossible to devise a coherent way to incorporate the metadata for multiple media elements, if included within one popup window. Keeping the media points separate serves the purpose of immediately signaling what type of media (audio, images, video) is associated with each site. uMap provides the option to cluster together points located in proximity to each other. A circle with a number in the center represents a cluster. The number in the center of the circle indicates the number of elements clustered together. As users zoom in, the clusters disperse and show the individual pinpoints. Clustering functionality permits media elements to retain autonomy while displaying a relation to other surrounding resources. Combining the digital media with geospatial elements and relating them to specific gravesites (or areas) recalls Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace.” In his book of the same title, Soja uses the idea of thirdspace to highlight what he considers to be innovative ways of thinking about community, history and social spatiality: As we approach the fin de siècle, there is a growing awareness of the simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical, and the spatial, their inseparability and interdependence. And this three-sided

186  W. P. KURTZ sensibility of spatiality-historicality-sociality is not only bringing about a profound change in the ways we think about space, it is also beginning to lead to major revisions in how we study history and society.58

In Virtual Cartographies the spatial, social and historical aspects of recovery merge onto one cartographic interface. The metadata pertaining to the mass gravesites and corresponding digital media accompanies the texts in order to give contextual information, rather than presenting digital cultural materials without a supporting framework. Digital technologies foster the proliferation of new forms of communication on the web by turning the typical consumer of media into the originator of cultural productions. By publishing digital images, videos, and audio files relating to the ritual of disinterment and reburial of familial and affiliative relations from mass graves, a new form of personal and collective agency emerges. Social networks based on computer-mediated communication and organized around common interests, rather than by a physical, shared space, transform digital media about the exhumations into acts of transfer assisting communities in continuing to heal from the collective trauma caused by the Francoist Regime. GIS technologies have increasingly improved the ability to learn and share experiences through the dissemination of digital culture materials. These visualization tools should stress the importance of building an archive for digital culture emerging around the search for and disinterment of mass graves. Since the creator of the digital text retains responsibility for publishing the materials online, the sustainability of these texts for public access becomes a critical next-step in the preservation of these cultural artifacts.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima.” In Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 221–35. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

58 Edward

Soja, Thirdspace (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 3.

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Deuze, Mark. “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering the Principal Components of a Digital Culture.” The Information Society 22 (2006): 63–75. Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Erikson, Kai. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976. ———. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 183–99. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 177–92. ———. “From Tear to Pixel: Political Correctness and Digital Emotions in the Exhumation of Civil War Mass Graves in Spain Today.” In Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, edited by Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, 242–61. Nashville, NC: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Ferrándiz, Francisco, and Alejandro Baer. “Digital Memory: The Visual Recording of Mass Grave Exhumations in Contemporary Spain.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9, no. 3 (2008): np. https://doi.org/10.17169/ fqs-9.3.1152. (Online). Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18, translated and edited by James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Hogarth, 1955 [1920]. Gauntlett, David. “Media Studies 2.0: A Response.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 147–57. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Janet, Pierre. L’automatisme psychologique. Paris: Société Pierre Janet, 1973 [1889]. ———. “L’amnésie continue.” In L’état mental des hystérique. Paris: Alcan, 1990 [1893]. ———. “Les idées fixes de forme hystérique.” Press Medicale, 3 (1895): 201–3. Jerez-Farrán, Carlos, and Samuel Amago. Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Labanyi, Jo. “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflection on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period.” In Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, edited by Joan Ramon Resina, 65–82. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Lievrouw, Leah L. “New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study.” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 3 (2009): 303–25.

188  W. P. KURTZ Moreiras-Menor, Cristina. “Spectacle, Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Spain.” In Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, edited by Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, 134–43. London: Arnold, 2000. Newmark, Kevin. “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter.” In Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 236–55. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Poster, Mark. “Global Media and Culture.” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 685–703. Ramadanovic, Petar. Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001. Resina, Joan Ramon. “The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War.” In Jerez-Farrán and Amago, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, 221–42. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Richards, Michael. “Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History: Public Uses of the Past in Postwar Spain.” In Jerez-Farrán and Amago, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, 121–45. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. ———. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Silver, David. “Internet/Cyberculture/Digital Culture/New Media/Fill-InThe-Blank Studies.” New Media and Society 6, no. 1 (2004): 55–64. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Sturken, Marita, “The Remembering of Forgetting: Recovered Memory and the Question of Experience.” Social Text 57 (1998): 103–25. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Thompson, John. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of Media. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Thumim, Nancy. Self-Representation and Digital Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno Van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” In Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 158–82. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Vilarós, Teresa M. El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la Transición española (1973–1993). Madrid: Editorial Siglo XXI de España, 1998. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 9

Digitally Mediated Memory and the Spanish Civil War Paul Spence

Introduction It is clear from current debates within the field of memory studies that digital culture and technology already have a profound influence on both memory formation itself (as a social/cultural phenomenon) and the associated academic field of memory studies (as a research practice), a fact which manifests itself in a number of different ways—including, but by no means limited to institutional archiving, social communication, cultural heritage practices, forensics/the body, geolocation and dissemination. Some maintain that memory studies still have not adapted to the shift from print culture to an information landscape heavily transformed by the digital,1 and it is hard to sustain the argument that digital 1 Andrew Hoskins, “Anachronisms of Media, Anachronisms of Memory: From Collective Memory to a New Memory Ecology,” in On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, ed. Motti Neiger et al. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: AIAA, 2011), 278–88.

P. Spence (*)  King’s College London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_9

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mediation will not have a significant impact on memory studies in the future. “None of the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘when’ of remembering and forgetting are untouched by the advent of digital media” argues Hoskins,2 who identifies an emerging “new memory ecology.” Digital devices and platforms have already significantly altered numerous aspects of memory construction—time, space, communication spheres, access, abundance/scarcity, public/private identities and individual/collective agency—both in practical terms (how we access or enact memory) and in social terms (such as changing expectations and perceptions). In this chapter, I put forward the argument that we need to attend to digital mediation as a concept which traverses both memory formation and memory studies, to contemplate the linkages and ruptures which emerge as a result, and to reflect on its impact on us as researchers in methodological terms. It is a daunting task. One of the greatest hurdles in contemplating this new memory landscape is the sheer variety of perspectives—disciplinary, technical, social—and the very different epistemological assumptions which they bring. In addition to this, popular perceptions of “digital memory” sometimes suffer from a technopositivist slant which impedes fuller and more balanced understanding. So, for example, the smartphone is sometimes perceived as having the capacity to “take over and replace memory functions of the human brain,”3 and common portrayals seem to emphasize the prosthetic nature of digitally mediated memory: in an episode of the Black Mirror TV series titled “The Entire History of You,” a device (called a “grain”) is fixed behind people’s ears which allows them to record their experiences and then replay them later either as personal cinematic projections for their own private benefit, or on-screen for sharing with others (an action known as a “redo”). While the premise is interesting on one level, memory here is merely projected as a neutral/stable object to capture and available as total, instant, recall at will. In these depictions, digital memory is portrayed in terms of lossless fidelity, with a diminished sense of human agency and interpretation over the nature and substance of the memories re-enacted in this way.

2 Hoskins,

“Anachronisms of Media,” 279. Reading, “The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time,” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011), 298–311. 3 Anna

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Such under-socialized perceptions of digital memory have a long history, conforming to wider tendencies in the public relationship to technology.4 The Vannevar Bush essay “As We May Think,” published in The Atlantic magazine at the end of the World War II,5 is commonly seen as one of the key texts in the history of digitally mediated networked culture, which we experience today through the World Wide Web and mobile technology. Bush’s vision of a machine capable of holding collective human memory, the Memex, aimed to address early concerns about information overload and offered a vision for how human knowledge would become more connected and easier to share. Seventy-two years later, certain aspects of Bush’s vision seem either prescient or wildly overambitious. Digital culture has permeated many aspects of our lives, helping us to capture vast amounts of information in digital form, to process it at speeds that a human being would not achieve in several lifetimes and it has allowed ideas and knowledge to be shared almost instantly across the globe. But at the same time we are constantly reminded of its limitations, such as the recent decision by Facebook to replace its human content curators with algorithms which led to people being directed to fake news.6 Oversimplified views of the relationship between human and digital memory and exaggerated claims of their interchangeability frequently impede a nuanced understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of applying digital methods, or of incorporating digital objects into memory formation. The challenge, then, for those of us studying the human record in its various forms is how we navigate a set of tools, methods and infrastructure which increasingly enter the digital domain, and which are therefore subject to and mediated by the logic of code, the algorithm and the digital object, and yet which retain the complexity, subtle nuance and dependency on context which are central features of human interpretation.

4 Thomas Haigh, “We Have Never Been Digital,” Communications of the ACM [online] 57, no. 9 (2014), 24–28. 5 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July, 1945), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/. 6 Annalee Newitz, “Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news,” 30 August 2016, Ars Technica, http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/ facebook-fires-human-editors-algorithm-immediately-posts-fake-news/.

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Digitally Mediated Memory So what are digitally mediated memories? How do they function differently, and how are they produced or transmitted differently, from before? How do they interact with “non-digital” memories? I do not aim to, nor would it be possible to, provide comprehensive answers to all of these questions here, but what I do aim to do is to suggest some of the perspectives which will inform the approaches we need to take in studying digitally mediated memories as a broader set of interlocking social practices. José van Dijck cautions against a technocentric view on mediated memories and characterizes them as a “complex interaction between brain, material object and the cultural matrix from which they arise.”7 In focusing on digital methods and tools here I will not be contradicting this view, but I do argue for greater attention to digital culture as a sociotechnical dynamic which raises particular opportunities and challenges, and which therefore requires particular attention, before we can study mediated memories (digital and non-digital) in all of their manifestations with equal (or appropriate) weight given to each. I also contend that our understanding of digital culture in relation to memory needs to expand beyond the low-hanging fruit of social media and digital networks to enter less immediately penetrable (and at times more technically challenging) terrain. Some historical perspective can be helpful here. Digital culture is constantly changing, and the velocity of transformation involved is a major hurdle to informed engagement with emerging paradigms for individual and collective memory, but in analyzing digitally mediated knowledge production, it is helpful to view it through different historic phases, and to be aware of their different processes of social construction. Historical descriptions of digital culture have traditionally collapsed epochs, focusing on its technical affordances (new functionality) rather than its wider social ramifications, and privileging perceived benefits over possible challenges.8 So, the initial instantiation of the web is presented as the era when instant global publishing (in theory by anyone) becomes possible for the first time, challenging the traditional authority of print 7 José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 28. 8 Haigh, “We Have Never Been Digital.”

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publishing. This is then partially superseded, so the narrative goes, by so-called Web 2.0, with its focus on user-generated content, interaction and the rapid recycling/repurposing of content. More recent defining moments include the Semantic Web (with its promises of connected, additive knowledge and computer-based reasoning and inference), wearable media (capable of capturing personal interactions) or the now seemingly ubiquitous datafication of many aspects of our lives for analysis and visualization using Big Data perspectives. The important point here is that these moments do not collectively constitute a single, homogenous “digital era.” Each new digital wave threatens to erode a different aspect of traditional knowledge production and, in turn, sediments its own layer of interpretation. The dynamics vary each time, and the various actors concerned in the construction of digitally mediated spaces present competing, and often conflicting, claims. This‚ of course‚ has major implications for both memory formation and transmission (in society) and memory studies (scholarship). The significance of each is not, however, primarily “technical” or “functional,” but rather “social”—taken as a whole, these different epochs represent different visions of the digital, which promise (or threaten) to reconfigure our knowledge/memory landscapes according to competing geographic, cultural and political dynamics. If digital mediation is transforming how memories are created and communicated, the effect is likely to be no less profound in the actual process of researching them in future. Whereas up until now sources have traditionally belonged to the print era (or sometimes the broadcast era), in the future, scholars in memory studies will increasingly have to cope with a broader range of material sources in a wide spectrum of platforms, devices and formats. As memory increasingly becomes “transmedial” and “transmodal”9 and people adjust to new memory regimes, we are likely to see a “fundamental epistemic overhaul,”10 which in turn will influence the critical toolkit needed. Beaulieu et al. analyze these “new sites of knowledge production” in terms of mobile perceptions of expertise and authority (who asserts knowledge), institutional/infrastructural innovation (how knowledge is

9 Anna Reading, Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 50–51. 10 van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, 42.

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established), new archival practice (where it is recorded) and validation (the negotiation of knowledge claims).11 This suggests not merely a reappraisal of method but rather a wholesale reappraisal of our architectures of participation in knowledge production, which would better equip scholarship for emerging sociotechnical landscapes, but without compromising key values such as rigor and critical perspective. Others, such as Liu argue that “knowledge today is not intuitively the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the digital,”12 and so we might consider how to navigate predominantly “communicative, political, cultural and economic” imperatives of the digital in our attempts to take a critical approach to applying digital methodologies in memory studies. “What does it mean” then, asks Presner,13 “that these projects were all built on corporate platforms and software (e.g., Google Maps, Twitter, ArcGIS, and Flash)?” in asking whether it is possible to evade the military origins and commercial intonations of much digital culture, or whether in fact we “inevitably speak their language, surreptitiously mimic their worldviews, and quietly extend the dominance of the technological imaginary as put forward by corporations.” This, then, requires reflective and proactive attention to the systems and infrastructures that we use as scholars to perform our own roles as memory agents. There are a number of different “digital” methodologies which come to play here—including new media/digital culture approaches, media archaeology, critical code/platform/infrastructure studies, the study of digital ecosystems and the digital humanities—and in the best case scenario, memory studies will draw on many (or all) of them, establishing closer links between what have often been quite disparate and only loosely connected fields. This requires, then, closer engagement with

11 Anne Beaulieu et al., “Authority and Expertise in New Sites of Knowledge Production,” in Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, ed. Paul Wouters et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 25–56. 12 Alan Liu, Theses on the Epistemology of the Digital: Advice for the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge (2014). 13 Todd Presner, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015), 55–68 (65).

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new methodologies, which in turn evoke fresh theoretical paradigms. “Digital memory practices should not be consigned to an elite few who are fully immersed in the intricacies of what the technologies can do such that their versions of personal and collective memories come to dominate our understandings of social, cultural and political histories.”14 But it also highlights gaps in our knowledge about how these different strands might fit together. Too little is understood, then, about how social inflections within the underlying technical infrastructure, the battles for net neutrality, the creeping commercialization of the web or walled garden platforms for digital content are influencing the re-enactment or transmission of memory, and this has important implications for how we study and read the traces left by these new hybrid ecologies. This poses important questions about the nature of sources. What tangible evidence will be available to us in years to come, and how will remembering (and forgetting) be influenced by factors such as the “connective turn,”15 private and public preservation practices (whether individualized or led by the formal institutions of memory), modes of access (in part affected by digital divides), policies of sustainability (with relation to technical infrastructure, for instance), commercial imperatives (privileging or marginalizing particular voices, for example, through preferred placement in search engine results), or the perceived hypercentrality of English in digital communication? In addition, the less text-centric nature of memory studies offers some interesting opportunities (and challenges) for studying audiovisual traces of memory and complex paths of multimodal transmission. And finally, what, if any, will be the implications of Big Data perspectives in analyzing and visualizing memory? In the next section, I explore a number of different case studies relating to digital mediation and the Spanish Civil War, with a view to examining how they shape acts and objects of memory.

14 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al., Save As… Digital Memories (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9. 15 Andrew Hoskins, “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011), 19–31.

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Digital Architectures for the Spanish Civil War: Digital as Archive Given their historic role as professed custodians and gatekeepers of memory, archives are one natural starting point for a practical examination of memory regimes and institutions. Traditionally, public archives have striven to provide stability and permanence, offering records of authority according to well-established and clearly defined organizing principles. Digital culture challenges traditional notions of the archive in a number of ways,16 and disrupts the connection between archives and national/ institutional narratives or canonical views of culture. Burdick et al. argue that the “memory palaces” of the future will have “more permeable walls” than their predecessors17 and they call for the “animation” of archives,18 within a user-centered strategy that reconfigures the archive as an interactive space facilitating distributed curation, community annotation, multiple pathways and post-archival reprocessing of content. It is important to note that this vision extends beyond the view of digital archives as mere containers for context-free, dematerialized content which can be repurposed many times over, and rather takes advantage of cyberspace’s ability to sustain “intellectual technologies” which augment various aspects of human cognition: “memory,” “imagination,” “perception” and “reasoning.”19 At first glance, the major institutional/national archives which might be consulted for studying the Spanish Civil War collectively offer a mixed response to the challenges of the digital age.20 First, we might note the uneven level of digitization of material relating to the conflict across various archives—for example, in comparison with archives relating to the Holocaust or World Wars I or II—in archives such as the National 16 David Bearman, “Archival Strategies,” The American Archivist 58, no. 4 (1995), 380– 413; Simon Tanner, “Managing Containers, Content and Context in Digital Preservation: Towards a 2020 Vision,” Archiving 2006, 19–23. 17 Anne Burdick et al., Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 39, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities. 18 Burdick et al., 48. 19 Pierre Lévy, The Semantic Sphere: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy (London: ISTE, 2011). 20 The analysis here in no way attempts to evaluate each memory institution in terms of the quality of its holdings; the purpose of this exercise is merely to explore engagement with digitally mediated practice.

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Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico Nacional, or AHN), the Historical Memory Records Center (Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, or CDMH) in Salamanca, the National Archives (Archives Nationales) in France or the UK National Archives (TNA). Indeed, organizations such as the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, or ARMH) highlight the need for greater openness in some archives (e.g. military archives) and appeal for more investment in digitization, an act which has consequences not only for research but also society at large, in that it allows families to locate missing relatives.21 In addition to the relatively low degree of digitization in some prominent archives, the state (and specificity) of metadata is also variable and is often restricted to hierarchical classifications, with at times no thematic categorization which might make it easier for researchers to work across multiple archives or collections. What is more, many collections do not allow direct interaction with the material online. Imagine, for example, what the Portal for Victims of the Civil war and Francoist Repression (Portal de Víctimas de la Guerra Civil y Represaliados del Franquismo)22 might look like if, like the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names (launched in 2004), it allowed readers to follow online individual personal histories of those who were killed and included the facility to submit testimonies in order to enrich our knowledge about the victims.23 For historians, this would potentially make the job of bringing together fragmentary and geographically separate/dislocated evidence easier, while for families, this would allow closer engagement with archives, which may otherwise appear distant and inaccessible. There may be good ethical or practical reasons why this is harder to achieve with Spanish Civil War archives, and of course, as a national conflict it is unlikely to attract the same level of resources as the study of international conflicts such as the World Wars, but nevertheless the potential is there.

21 “Reivindicaciones de la ARMH” (Point 6), Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, http://memoriahistorica.org.es/que-es-la-asociacion-para-la-recuperacionde-la-memoria-historica-armh-2000-2012/. 22 Portal de Víctimas de la Guerra Civil y Represaliados del Franquismo, el Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, http://pares.mcu.es/victimasGCFPortal/staticContent.form?viewName=presentacion. 23 Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center‚ http://yvng.yadvashem.org/.

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The Spanish Archives Portal (Portal de Archivos Españoles, or PARES)24 aims to provide free and quick access to digitized facsimiles of holdings across federated collections, with online access to a few collections, such as posters of the Spanish Civil War, and this represents an increasing tendency toward facilities which allow for aggregating metadata about archival holdings and searching across collections, a development perhaps best exemplified by the Europeana digital platform for European cultural heritage, which gives access to the holdings of more than 3,000 galleries, libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe.25 So, for example, a search on “Spanish Civil War”26 provides links to 17,919 resources, which can be filtered by collection type (art/ fashion/music), media, (re-)usage rights, providing country, language, aggregating service and institution, although it could be argued that, for memory studies research, the breadth of a resource like Europeana dilutes its effectiveness in comparison to more focused resources. Other resources such as the Barcelona municipal Archive (Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona) offer other models for organizing and filtering sources, including filter by subject matter, people mentioned, archive and source type.27 Finally, the Spanish Civil War digital collections of the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick extend the finding aids model with cross-threaded metadata (enabling the user to select metadata in an individual archival holding which runs a search based on the chosen term) and faceted browsing of results by creator, data and subject information.28 The resource also includes options to engage with the content itself in more depth, including options to manipulate digital images through zoom and pan/rotate, full-text transcription and fulltext search of the source. 24 Portal

de Archivos Españoles, or PARES‚ http://pares.mcu.es/. to share your data on Europeana Collections‚” Europeana Pro‚ 21 August 2017‚ http://pro.europeana.eu/share-your-data/become-a-data-provider. 26 Search results for “Spanish Civil War‚” Europeana Collections‚ http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/search?q=spanish+civil+war. 27 Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona‚ Ajuntament de Barcelona‚ http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/arxiumunicipal/arxiuhistoric/ca and http://w151.bcn.cat/ opac/search?q=*:*&fq=mssearch_hierarchy01&fv=AFB3-113+CNT-FAI%2C+19+julio+1936-Espa%C3%B1a. 28 See, for example, the “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War Through the Eyes of Organised Labour” collection: University of Warwick‚ http://contentdm.warwick.ac.uk/ cdm/landingpage/collection/scw. 25 “Reasons

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The UK National Archives website29 typifies a growing tendency among memory institutions to combine specialist research access facilities with wider public engagement, providing multiple pathways through collections, sophisticated search options, materials for education, social media accounts, podcasts, blog posts and personal stories, for example, relating to World War I.30 In addition the website offers curated access by theme, for example, the Spanish Civil War section, with access to relevant documents (in this case British cabinet documents).31 This short review of the functionality, display and navigation mechanisms offered by various archival resources demonstrates the wide range of affordances which basic digitization, and in some cases enhanced digital mediation, enable. On the one hand, they clearly instantiate some of the potential benefits of digital mediation (networked content, scale, user engagement, interaction), but on the other, they also highlight some of its dangers. Design conventions used on these resources show a degree of differentiation and inconsistency which researchers more used to interpreting predigital sources may have difficulty in interpreting. The very mobility of digital content can all too easily lead to deracination and decontextualization, which can devalue content, or make it harder to discern differing degrees of curatorial intervention. The architectural assumptions of many online resources are opaque, and this, combined with our relatively poor understanding of how we should interpret digital sources and follow digital transmission histories, presents a major challenge to contemporary scholarship, in memory studies as in other fields. The historian Tim Hitchcock, in analyzing the effects of digitally mediated history research, identifies further issues such as the invisible effects of poor Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the sources we have access to, the new “selection biases”32 which the Googlization of culture

29 The

National Archives (UK)‚ http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/. World War 100‚” The National Archives UK‚ http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/first-world-war/. 31 “The build-up to war‚” The Cabinet Papers‚ The National Archives (UK)‚ http:// www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/build-up-to-war.htm#Spanish%20 Civil%20War. 32 Tim Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot,” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013), 9–23. 30 “First

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and algorithm-driven research introduce: “[p]rovenance, edition, transcription, editorial practise, readership, authorship, reception – the things academics have traditionally queried in relation to books, are left unexplored in relation to the online text which now forms the basis of most published history.”33 According to his argument, by ignoring the effects that digital culture has had on our research practices in the last decade or two, researchers are worse placed to track evidence and make claims based on the toolkit currently at our disposal: “we are not […] forearmed for working with digital sources.”34 By failing to engage with this agenda “[w]e are lost in a world of reference and evidence which most of us do not understand and which we do not currently have the critical tools to represent.”35 This also calls attention to the wider research infrastructure at our disposal, the subject of the next section.

Research Infrastructure Sustainability has been one of the key elements in digital scholarship debates—although as Anderson notes there is curiously little collaboration or debate about this between the scholarly community and the library and archive sector36—and there has been much work to standardize metadata about archival records. One interesting exercise, outside the scope of this chapter, would be to catalogue the various schemes used by different entities to preserve memory objects relating to the Spanish Civil War and facilitate their findability. The challenge does not only relate to the durability of the media used to store digital data, but also its format and conventions used to model content digitally, which include descriptive taxonomies and protocols for data validation and curation. This is without looking at the “new” archives of digital and social media, which represent a new set of structures, protocols and memory objects to study. An article in the Economist in 2012 pointed to the unfulfilled promise of digital archiving and the obstacles we face, such as password-protection, software dependence, copyright or walled garden platforms for storing 33 Tim Hitchcock‚ “Academic History Writing and Its Disconnects‚” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 Winter (2011), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/academichistory-writing-and-its-disconnects-by-tim-hitchcock/. 34 Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital,” 14. 35 Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital,” 18. 36 Sheila Anderson, “What Are Research Infrastructures?” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7, no. 1–2 (2013), 4–23.

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content and their associated “Apps” and it would be useful to examine the Spanish Civil War research landscape from this perspective.37 How much should all of this be of concern to researchers of historical and cultural memory? In part this relates to debates about (critical responses to) infrastructure—as Svensson observes, infrastructure can be a difficult topic for humanities, which “lack a clear and systematic idea about their current and future infrastructure.”38 And yet perhaps it is something we should pay more attention to, since infrastructure embodies particular social and cultural assumptions and so determines the processes, flows and traces of observable memory. Which brings us to an important question: What should a digitally mediated research landscape for memory studies look like? What are the key elements of a research ecosystem for studying the Spanish Civil War, for example, and how can we ensure greater agency over its design? One possible response is that of the Catalan Democratic Memory (or Memorial Democràtic) initiative, which draws together multiple viewpoints, testimonies, pathways and sites of memory relating to the Spanish Civil War, many of them online.39 A similar, online networked approach is taken by Networked Memory (or Memorias en Red), a collaboration between young researchers interested in memory studies in Spain.40 A rather different approach comes in the form of large-scale monolithic infrastructure: In Argentina, an alliance of human rights organizations called Open Memory (Memoria Abierta)41 has developed an extensive online portal for resources relating to human rights violations, state terrorism and actions of resistance in that country, in particular relating to the period of dictatorship in Argentina in the second half of the twentieth century. In this model, digital mediation primarily consists of dissemination. Offering an online catalogue, oral archives, a film catalogue, witness statements and a “Topography of memory” with maps of 37 “History Flushed: The digital age promised vast libraries‚ but they remain incomplete‚” The Economist‚ 28 April 2012‚ http://www.economist.com/node/21553410. 38 Patrik Svensson, “The Humanistiscope: Exploring the Situatedness of Humanities Infrastructure,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 337–54. 39 Memoria gencat.cat‚ Generalitat de Catalunya‚ http://memorialdemocratic.gencat. cat/ca/. 40 Memorias en Red Asociación Internacional de Estudios de la Memoria‚ http://memoriasenred.es/. 41 Memoria Abierta‚ http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/wp/.

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detention centers, Open Memory is part of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and the Latin American and Caribbean network of memory sites, and so represents a broader collaborative paradigm, which proposes models for curating memory objects according to international standards within a single framework.42 This moves the debate from “archives to research infrastructures”43 and challenges us to consider how infrastructure is constructed to meet our needs as researchers in a new media landscape—in other words, how we deal with the shift from scarcity to abundance, while engaging with new platforms for communication and user engagement. One approach to research infrastructure proposes integrating existing digital resources. Blanke et al. claim that current systems are still not as effective as they might be: “[a]rchival material can be found in many formats and places, and Archival Information Systems are often non-intuitive to use.”44 Kristel and Blanke argue that the ideal is to provide content “as the researcher wants it,” within an infrastructure which is capable of dealing with heterogeneity and organic growth, while being accessible to a wide range of users of different technical backgrounds and abilities.45 In their analysis of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project,46 Anderson and Blanke outline a digitally mediated research methodology for integrating disparate (and sometimes hidden) archives, building a hybrid online/on land research community and providing research tools for integrated markup, association and visualization.47 Rather than merely creating a single canonical system from the ground up, EHRI aims to “[i]ntegrate the data, services and expertise of existing 42 Red de Sitios de Memoria Latinoamericanos y Caribeños‚ Coalición Internacional de Sitios de Conciencia‚ https://redlatinoamericanadesitiosdememoria.wordpress.com/ coalicion-internacional-de-sitios-de-conciencia/. 43 Sheila Anderson, and Tobias Blanke, “Infrastructure as Intermeditation: From Archives to Research Infrastructures,” Journal of Documentation 71, no. 6 (2015), 1183–202. 44 Tobias Blanke et al., “Deploying General-Purpose Virtual Research Environments for Humanities Research,” Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368 (2010), 3813–28. 45 Tobias Blanke, and Conny Kristel, “Integrating Holocaust Research,” Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities 7, no. 1–2 (2013), 41–57. 46 “EHRI has 23 partners from 17 countries, representing archives, libraries, museums and research institutions. The project also relies on a large network of associated partners;” see European Holocaust Research Infrastructure‚ http://ehri-project.eu/. 47 Anderson, and Blanke, “Infrastructure as Intermeditation.”

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Holocaust infrastructures.”48 Based on the Scholarly Primitives framework, which aims to define generalizable principles for scholarly communication and production,49 Anderson and Blanke describe a “flexible technical infrastructure”50 which corresponds to their own EHRI-specific primitives of “Searching and Investigating,” “Collecting,” “Collaborating and Sharing,” “Note-taking/annotations” and “Reading/scanning.” In this formulation, research infrastructure is adaptable to new research questions and capable of showing “provenance trails” which preserve the relationship between research material and its sources.51 At this scale, research infrastructure has the capacity to change how we “read” memory archives, although it also brings with it new questions about trust measurement, inter-institutional validation, the ethics of online engagement and context.

Digital Realms of Memory How might research infrastructure of this scale function in relation to the Spanish Civil War? The conflict presents some unique challenges, not least of which is the so-called “pact of forgetting” during the postFranco transition, which, some argue, aimed to achieve national reconciliation at the cost of silence regarding the events of the Spanish Civil War and Franco Regime (see Chapter 2 by Cazorla-Sánchez and Shubert). Cyberspace still demonstrates examples of the historical divides which are traceable to the conflict,52 and so any attempt to make overarching connections between different resources would need to contemplate how to mediate different points of view, particularly where they emanate from personal sources, or use social media. The sociopolitical hurdles to connecting multiple sources online are at least as difficult as the technical ones, and we need to understand more about the motives of different online memory platforms in order to evaluate their potential integration 48 “European Holocaust Research Infrastructure‚” Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS)‚ http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194942_en.html. 49 John Unsworth, “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” (2000), http://www.people. virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html. 50 Anderson, and Blanke, “Infrastructure as Intermeditation.” 51 Anderson, and Blanke, “Infrastructure as Intermeditation,” 1194–95. 52 Matilde Eiroa, “La Guerra Civil Española en la actualidad cibermediática,” Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea 32 (2014), 357–69.

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properly. The Hismedi project (History and Memory online, or Historia y Memoria Histórica online) aims to do just that in its study of the challenges and opportunities in internet-based study of historical memory in relation to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.53 Bringing together various Spanish researchers, the project aims to catalogue both historical documentation and social media/networking resources such as blogs, wikis, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts relating to the conflict, and in so doing analyze the objectives, points of reference and modes of public interaction of those responsible for each digital resource. It provides multiple entry points: by collections, by exhibitions, via a tag cloud, via a map, or by a search on a series of elements which include resource type, platform, keywords and location. While currently in an early state, the project website opens up some interesting questions about new modes of memory transmission, what to capture, and how. To start with, and while its coverage is uneven at present, the project captures multiple perspectives from across the historical conflict, including, for example, social media sites managed by both Republican and pro-Franco groups. This raises issues about scope: Are new memory infrastructures more effective when they aim for “comprehensiveness” (and if so, what does that mean in practice) or coherence? What are the inbuilt biases of new media (such social media sites as Facebook and Twitter), how do they distort the memory landscape in new ways, and what, if anything, should we/can we do to correct any bias? It is often claimed that digital media “disrupt” traditional boundaries, and break down distinctions between “expert” and “non-expert” views, but is this always a good thing? Digital mediation facilitates the integration of multiple channels to archival content, whether institutional or personal in nature, but would a hypothetical connective memory infrastructure for the Spanish Civil War akin to the EHRI project, for example, be best served by maintaining these distinctions or not? And in a mixed economy of institutional and personal archives, how would validation and trust measures work? We may not have much choice here in the long term—the weakening of the border between academic and public sources is an ongoing process (see Chapter 5 by GonzálezRuibal), with uncertain outcomes for all, and even in the research field, the velocity and quality of memory transmission is significantly altered. 53 HISMEDI: Historia y Memoria Digital‚ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid‚ http:// uc3m.libguides.com/hismedi and http://hismedi.evilinhd.com/om/.

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Parikka refactors the archive as a “dynamic and temporal network, a software environment, and a social platform for memory – but also for remixing,”54 which sits in contrast to the panorama of static “knowledge objects” which many areas of the humanities have traditionally been more used to.55 Anna Reading characterizes the trajectories of memory in terms of their transmediality, transmodality, extensity (circulation from point of origin), velocity (speed of travel through what she calls the “globital memory field”), valency (the mutual “stickiness” of “memory assemblages”), viscosity (memory flow or thickening),56 and we might analyze Spanish Civil War memory in these terms so that we can understand better how particular digital platforms and dynamics make memory flow, “stick” and “thicken.” And if we agree that “software-based cultural memory” will become increasingly significant, as Parikka argues,57 then we will require greater familiarity with the underlying systems, protocols and data motility. There is clearly still a great need for physical, geographically anchored, sites of memory in relation to the Spanish Civil War, but digital culture and technology also offer opportunities to fill in the gaps, or even to enhance existing physical narratives. If, following Foucault58 and others, we accept that archives represent particular instantiations of the relationship between knowledge and power, moulded within given historical contexts, we have to attend to the manner in which phenomena such as digitization and social media have altered the dynamics of communication and knowledge production. Politics of digitization influence how digital archives are created and what they contain, and this is no less true in relation to the Spanish Civil War. Claims frequently made about the more “democratic” nature of digital content production are highly contestable, since power relations have not evanesced but rather power has 54 Jussi

Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15. 56 Anna Reading, Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 50–58. 57 Jussi Parikka, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities,” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David Berry (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 85–104. 58 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (Princeton, NJ: Vintage, 1982). 55 David

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shifted from traditional institutions to large digital media companies. What digital culture has enabled, however, in some cases, is the “animation of the archive” discussed earlier, and this is particularly noticeable in non-institutional collectives less closely aligned to governmental policy. On a personal/individual level, the web serves as a platform for memory sites such as Memories of the Spanish Civil War (Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española),59 which are often sustained for a relatively short duration, with varying degrees of context and background about their objectives and criteria for publication. At the level of collectives, Memory associations such as the ARMH are able to use new technology to develop substantial digital archives (containing, for example, information about the “disappeared,” accounts of repression or lists of deaths) and to engage with substantial communities of users through social media.60 The ARMH claims to have received more than 15,000 emails from relatives requesting or offering information in relation to common graves and disappearances and has extensive social media engagements on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (for more on these, see Chapter 8 by Perla Kurtz). The first objective of the association is to collaborate in creating a large archive of the Spanish Civil War, providing a tangible point of connection to personal memory sites and personal acts of memory. In a similar vein, the e-xiliad@s project aims to provide an online interactive resource about Spanish Republican exile, with a public call for information which might help to identify missing relatives.61 Studying memories of exile, with a particular emphasis on female memory, the project provides biographies, diaries of flight, testimony from refugee camps, a discussion forum and a noticeboard for people seeking information about relatives. In their summary of recent responses to the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, Erraskin Agirrezabala and Martínez Rodríguez take a wider view on memory construction, analyzing a series of examples through the lens of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire,62 which consist of “places” (memory institutions and other public sites), “concepts and 59 Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española‚ 10 August 2013‚ http://memoriasdelaguerracivil.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/INICIO. 60 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica‚ http://memoriahistorica. org.es/. 61 “Tell us your story‚” e-xiliad@s‚ http://exiliadosrepublicanos.info/. 62 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989), 7–24.

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practices” (such as commemorative events) and “objects.”63 The authors highlight the general shortage (and uneven geographic distribution) of memory sites relating to the conflict and signal a marked increase in efforts, which started in 2000, to move private “realms of memory” into the public sphere, in part triggered by popular calls to exhume graves of unidentified victims of the Civil War.64 Numerous web-based resources have attempted to capture aspects of historical memory relating to the Spanish Civil War which were never recorded in official archives. So, for example, the “All The Names” (Todos los nombres) resource is one of many to record information about victims of the Franco system in southern Spain and North Africa, with a database which promises data about 91,000 people, accompanied by keywordfiltered documentation and selected microbiographies.65 In a similar vein, the Galician “Names and Voices” (Nomes e Voces) resource66 captures information relating to the study of repression in the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, providing responsive filtering and rearrangement of data by gender, profession, place of origin/residence and affiliation, all downloadable as a CSV file (meaning that researchers can easily reuse the data for their own research, an unusual but interesting innovation). Unsurprisingly, much of this activity has benefited from the “spatial turn,”67 a loosely defined term for the range of practices which encompasses digital mapping, the digitization of place and geographicinformation systems (GIS). Zephyr identifies the possible advantages of a geospatial approach to history, including the potential to create “multiple interlinked narratives” which integrate different resource types (image,

63 Mikel Erraskin Agirrezabala, and Rosa Martínez Rodríguez, “Realms of Memory and the Recovery of the Historical Memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s Dictatorship (1936–2012),” in Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives, ed. Jenny Kidd et al. (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2014), 152. 64 Erraskin Agirrezabala, and Martínez Rodríguez, “Realms of Memory,” 155. 65 Todos (…) los nombres_‚ Confederación General del Trabajo de Andalucía (CGT.A)‚ http://www.todoslosnombres.org/. 66 Nomes e Voces (“Names and Voices” research project)‚ http://vitimas.nomesevoces.net/en/. 67 See Jo Guldi, “What is the Spatial Turn?” Spatial Humanities (2011), http://spatial. scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/.

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map, text) within a reader-curated platform.68 There are also dangers, and, argues Dunn, we need a greater theoretical framework to bring these innovations within a critical scholarly praxis in the humanities,69 but the number of geospatial representations of the Spanish Civil War (see Chapter 8 by Perla Kurtz) point to the perceived benefits from the point of view of relatives groups and other non-institutional collectives. ARMH’s memory map, entitled “mapa de la vergüenza” (or “map of shame”), in the web page’s URL (effectively a site’s web address), provides one such geospatial arrangement, with a list of other maps below.70 These are maps showing information about common graves all over Spain, usually with a regional dimension, and often containing information about the state of progress in researching each grave site. In some cases (again the Names and Voices site), more detailed filtering is possible by nature of death, state of excavation of graves, etcetera.71 There are varying degrees of associated contextual information, so from a research point of view, the reader does not always know much about the methodology or how recent the information is, but as a first point of engagement, the geospatial perspective has clear potential benefits which allow the reader to situate elements of the conflict in a contemporary geographic setting. Digital “maps” can be used to both navigate research data and to visualize search/browse results, and resources such as the Guatemalan Memory map (Mapa de la memoria) aim to provide a broader survey of sites of memory relating to the armed conflict in that country in the second half of the twentieth century.72 Organized by the “Memorial for Harmony” (Memorial para la Concordia), the map registers a range of memory locations such as plaques, tombs, murals and information centers, which can be filtered according to numerous facets including

68 Frank Zephyr, “Spatial History as Scholarly Practice,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015), 411–28. 69 Stuart Dunn‚ “Praxes of ‘The Human’ and ‘The Digital’: Spatial Humanities and the Digitization of Place‚” GeoHumanities 3‚ no. 1‚ 88–107. 70 Mapa de la memoria‚ Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica‚ http://memoriahistorica.org.es/mapa-de-la-verguenza/. 71 Internet Archive‚ WaybackMachine‚ http://web.archive.org/web/20160426234552. Base de datos de vítimas‚ Nomes e Voces‚ http://www.nomesevoces.net/gl/mapas. 72 Mapeo de la Memoria, http://mapeo.memorialparalaconcordia.org/.

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nature of human rights violation, memorial type, geographic descriptors, period, linguistic community and personal details. Using volunteer labor, and committing to capture the memory of all sides in the conflict, the site aims to “contribute to strengthening the link between the site and the victims, relatives, or survivors.”73 In theory, “[t]echnology enables access to the databanks of human knowledge from anywhere, disregarding and bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge in the state, the universities and the market.”74 But do today’s archives containing material about the Spanish Civil War live up to these claims, or to Pierre Lévy’s bold prediction that “[a] participatory digital memory common to all humanity is on its way”?75 Some contend that the growth of the web and social media, in combination with other factors, has proven an important catalyst for the performance of memory relating to the Spanish Civil War. In charting the growth of websites (self-managed or on social media) dedicated to Spanish Republican exile, Bocanegra and Toscano argue that international online presence meant that “the culture of the exile [has] reached the common citizen,”76 reinforcing a sense of identity and belonging, and providing a “voice for those who were not famous.”77 And while we should be cautious about claims regarding the “democratic” and “equalizing” nature of the web—as Aouragh says, “[i]deals of the internet era characterized by spaceless or swarm networks are confronted by more punitive visions of state control, or shaped by everyday conditions of immobility that still dominates the lives of millions of people”78—the influence of social media has undoubtedly led to the higher circulation of imagery (photographs and mementos) from personal archives. It is perhaps too early to fully assess what effect this has on classic distinctions between communicative 73 Mapeo

de la Memoria‚ http://mapeo.memorialparalaconcordia.org/. Understanding Digital Humanities, 8. 75 Lévy, The Semantic Sphere, 1. 76 Lidia Bocanegra Barbecho, and Maurizio Toscano, “The Spanish Republican Exile: Identity, Belonging and Memory in the Digital World,” in Cultural Heritage in a Changing World, ed. Karol Jan Borowiecki et al. (n.p.: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 237–53. 77 Bocanegra Barbecho, and Toscano, “The Spanish Republican Exile,” in Borowiecki et al., Cultural Heritage in a Changing World, 251. 78 Miriyam Aouragh‚ “Confined Offline: Traversing Online Palestinian Mobility Through the Prism of the Internet,” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (2011), 375–97. 74 Berry,

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and cultural memory79—can we still distinguish so easily between “communicative,” “everyday” memory and what were previously perceived as more stable, “cultural,” forms of memory? Likewise, there is still some distance between institutional and non-institutional responses to memory production, as witnessed by the examples discussed above. But as, on the one hand, memory institutions increasingly strive for greater public engagement, and, on the other, individuals/collectives aim to “institutionalize” their responses (perhaps to fill perceived historical gaps as in the case of the Spanish Civil War) there is clearly going to be more crossover and overlap between “institutional” and “public” modes in future. Whether the increasing interaction between public and personal archives will lead to “new levels of empowerment for communities in managing their own self-representations”80 in the long term remains to be seen, and this will be heavily influenced by more general factors such as the politics of the web, but it will also be influenced by the level and degree of engagement of different memory communities (both academic and public) in managing their own digital pasts (and futures).

Digital Challenges This last point about management raises some challenging questions, which get to the heart of the relationship between research and wider publics. The “All The Names” website is explicit in its criticism of institutional and academic responses to the conflict81—and in so doing, demonstrates the challenges in creating sites of memory which are responsive to multiple perspectives (institutional and public, covering different ideologies and outlooks). In presenting its map of common graves, the project asks an important question about who should be responsible for updating and sustaining digital resources of this nature. Is this a challenge which falls to public institutions, private collectives or other bodies to respond to? These are challenges which straddle

79 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995), 125–33. 80 Natalie Underberg, and Elayne Zorn, Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 81 “El Proyecto‚” Todos (...) los nombres_‚ Confederación General del Trabajo de Andalucía (CGT.A)‚ http://www.todoslosnombres.org/el-proyecto.

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boundaries between public and private, expert and citizen, which juxtapose ethics, political will and policies of access, and which get to the heart of a discussion about the relationship between digitally mediated public history and memory production. Sustainability is a crucial part of this, and here we have to ask then who is best placed to sustain the structures created by these new architectures of participation, and how memory (and forgetting) are affected as a result. The risks, if we do not engage, are stark. To quote the senior IT manager working in a Canadian archival setting, cited by Huyssen,82 “[i]f we don’t find methods for enduring preservation of electronic records, this may be the era without a memory.” Our digital pasts are recorded in a number of different ways across different devices and platforms, so this has multiple implications, but at heart it is a question of policy and of institutional and collective will. In an article in The New Yorker in 2015, Jill Lepore gave the average age of a web page as 100 days, as she explored the problem of how to maintain web-based content.83 In another opinion piece titled “Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job,” Andy Baio contrasts Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and its early information practices (acquiring early internet communication, scanning books under the Google Books initiative and creating its news archive) with the reality of the last few years, where most of these initiatives have ceased to grow, or even function, in some cases.84 Baio argues that memory organizations are better placed to address these challenges than private corporations and he advocates for resources such as the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web since 1996, two years before Google was founded, to sustain the infrastructure containing our digital memories in future. These are solid, compelling, arguments for us, as researchers, to become more active in critiquing (and in some cases supporting) the sustainability of the digitally mediated structures which shape memory production. 82 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 26. 83 Jill Lepore, “Can the Internet Be Archived?” New Yorker, 26 January 2015, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb. 84 Baio‚ Andy‚ “Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job‚” The Message‚ 29 January 2015‚  https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librar ysjob-f58db4673351.

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Writing about memory habitually emphasizes the fact that memory intersects the past and present: how it occurs within an encounter between the situated past (how events are perceived, captured, fixed, preserved at the time), and the situated present (how memory is enacted, digitally or otherwise, in the present). In digital contexts, this sets up an interactive dialogue between the digitized past and the digital present, between personal and collective archives, “born digital content” and collaborative and socially constructed knowledge, which is still relatively poorly understood. Digital content is sometimes characterized as being fluid and mobile, providing opportunities to aggregate or connect different sources—in history, initiatives such as “Connected Histories” have developed federated resources to allow researchers to search across names, places and dates contained in source materials originating in different projects (and without breaching the autonomy of each contributing partner project).85 How might this work for initiatives relating to Spanish Civil War memory? Could the potentially multivocal, decentered nature of digitally mediated knowledge production help to overcome some of the sensitivities around privileging particular memories, allowing us to juxtapose different narratives, or to provide alternative layers which can be assembled and disassembled in different combinations to contrast different human perspectives on the conflict? It is not hard to imagine, how, for example, a combined digital map (toward which Perla Kurtz works) integrating multiple sources of information about burial sites, perhaps connected to other resources cataloguing key events from the war, and with the facility to switch certain sources on or off, might serve to integrate and contrast multiple views on the conflict, allowing for the kind of dynamic experimentation which serves both research and public history. This is not to underestimate the effects of consensus formation and disagreement, which in digital media bring their own risks and opportunities. We might examine, for example, how Wikipedia deals with potentially controversial subjects, in a platform where anyone is allowed to contribute content to a public resource which aims to integrate multiple viewpoints, and how conflicts are resolved in order to arrive at a consensual view.

85 British History Sources‚ 1500–1900‚ Connected Histories‚ http://www.connectedhistories.org/.

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Conclusions The digital mediation of contested memory does not in any way erase difference, or controversy, but it recalibrates the relationship between memory production and reception, creating new platforms, models and processes which shape the traces of interpretation which form our historical and cultural memories. A digitally mediated landscape for studying the Spanish Civil War needs to engage with the issues I have outlined: memory dynamics and traces in digital environments, new architectures of memory transmission, new interfaces of memory, the connective turn, sustainability and the online encounter between conflicting narratives. I have argued here for a practical and intellectual investment in digital methods, and for the need of a kind of digital literacy for memory studies (combined with greater memory literacy among digital practitioners) so that we are better placed to use, critique (and if necessary create) ecosystems better suited to our needs. This requires the engagement of historians, archivists and other memory researchers as much as digital specialists, bringing together the digitized past and the born digital present, pushing traditional boundaries between “history” and “cultural memory,” and forcing us to study the negotiation of difference in hybrid digital/non-digital environments.

Bibliography Anderson, Sheila. “What Are Research Infrastructures?” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 4–23. Anderson, Sheila, and Tobias Blanke. “Infrastructure as Intermeditation: From Archives to Research Infrastructures.” Journal of Documentation 71, no. 6 (2015): 1183–1202. Aouragh, Miriyam. “Confined Offline: Traversing Online Palestinian Mobility Through the Prism of the Internet.” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (2011): 375–97. Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33. Barbecho, Lidia Bocanegra, and Maucizio Toscano. “The Spanish Republican Exile: Identity, Belonging and Memory in the Digital World.” In Cultural Heritage in a Changing World, edited by Karol Jan Borowiecki, Neil Forbes, and Antonella Fresa, 237–53. Bearman, David. “Archival Strategies.” The American Archivist 58, no. 4 (1995): 380–413.

214  P. SPENCE Beaulieu, Anne, and Sarah de Rijcke Bas van Heur “Authority and Expertise in New Sites of Knowledge Production.” In Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, edited by Paul Wouters, Anne Beaulieu, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Sally Wyatt, 25–56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Berry, David, ed. Understanding Digital Humanities. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Blanke, Tobias, Leonardo Candela, Mark Hedges, Mike Priddy, and Fabio Simeoni. “Deploying General-Purpose Virtual Research Environments for Humanities Research. Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368 (2010), 3813–28. Blanke, Tobias, and Conny Kristel. “Integrating Holocaust Research.” Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 41–57. Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Bush, Vannevar, “As We May Think.” The Atlantic (1945) [online]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-maythink/303881/. Accessed 25 September 2015. Dijck, José van. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Dunn, Stuart. “Praxes of ‘The Human’ and ‘The Digital’: Spatial Humanities and the Digitization of Place.” GeoHumanities 3, no. 1 (2017), 88–107. Eiroa, Matilde. “La Guerra Civil Española en la actualidad cibermediática.” Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea 32 (2014): 357–69. Erraskin Agirrezabala, Mikel, and Rosa Martínez Rodríguez. “Realms of Memory and the Recovery of the Historical Memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s Dictatorship (1936–2012).” In Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives, edited by Jenny Kidd, Sam Cairns, Alex Drago and Amy Ryall. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2014. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language. Princeton, NJ: Vintage, 1982. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, eds. Save As… Digital Memories. Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Guldi, Jo. “What Is the Spatial Turn?” Spatial Humanities (2011), http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/. Haigh, Thomas. “We Have Never Been Digital.” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 9 (2014): 24–28. Hitchcock, Tim. “Academic History Writing and its Disconnects.” Journal of Digital Humanities (2012), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/ academic-history-writing-and-its-disconnects-by-tim-hitchcock/. ———. Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot. Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 9–23.

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Hoskins, Andrew. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 19–31. ———. “Anachronisms of Media, Anachronisms of Memory: From Collective Memory to a New Memory Ecology.” In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, edited by Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, 278–88. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: AIAA, 2012. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Lepore, Jill. “Can the Internet Be Archived?” New Yorker, 26 January 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb. Lévy, Pierre. The Semantic Sphere: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy. London: ISTE Ltd., 2011. Liu, Alan. Theses on the Epistemology of the Digital: Advice for the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge, 2014, http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/ theses-on-the-epistemologyof-the-digital-page/. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Parikka, Jussi. “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities.” In Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry, 85–104. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012a. ———. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Policy Press, 2012b. Presner, Todd. “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities.” In Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, Between Humanities and the Digital, 55–67. Reading, Anna. “The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time.” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 298–311. ———. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Svensson, Patrik. “The Humanistiscope: Exploring the Situatedness of Humanities Infrastructure.” In Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Svensson, Patrik, and David Theo Goldberg, eds. Between Humanities and the Digital. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Tanner, Simon. “Managing Containers, Content and Context in Digital Preservation: Towards a 2020 Vision.” Archiving (2006): 19–23. Underberg, Natalie, and Elayne Zorn. Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Unsworth, John. Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This? (2000), http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html. Zephyr, Frank. “Spatial History as Scholarly Practice.” In Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, Between Humanities and the Digital, 411–28.

CHAPTER 10

The Spanish Civil War in the Classroom: From Absence to Didactic Potential Maria Feliu-Torruella

Introduction: Why Should the Spanish Civil War Be Present in the Classroom? If we observe the role that Western society currently attributes to the Humanities, we see that it includes a capacity for the repetition of knowledge learned, verbosity and inaccessible discourse. This fact has lead to a crisis of the Humanities and has relegated them to a secondary role, not only in the world of research, but also in that of educational policies leading to a reduction in funding in many areas. The underlying question, nevertheless, is not to focus arguments on the supposed usefulness of “the Arts” as opposed to “Science,” or vice versa, but rather on how they advance knowledge while facing the social challenges they are presented with.1 This is how it is understood by the European Commission as reflected in the Framework Program, Horizon 2020 which, on the 1 Joan

Campàs Montaner, “Antimanifest per les humanitats,” el Periódico, 17 January

2014.

M. Feliu-Torruella (*)  University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_10

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one hand, increases topics related to Social Sciences and Humanities and, on the other, maintains a budget comparable to those of Experimental Sciences.2 The LERU (League of European Research Universities) argued in favor of the vital role of the Social Sciences and Humanities in society today, considering that their objectives of study are the challenges currently faced by European society: sustainable development, linguistic education policies, immigration, identity, citizenship and memory management.3 In this context, the understanding of conflicts and their heritage becomes one of these challenges since the Humanities are precisely the disciplines that can contribute most to personal and social development as well as to thinking skills and linguistic and mathematical competence,4 all considered essential for citizens of the twenty-first century.5 The Humanities are disciplines which base research around problem solving, ethical and moral dilemmas, the development of informed opinions, critical reading and writing, story building, the responsible use of technologies and reflection on identity.6 Among these, socially controversial topics stand out as most important,7 with conflict becoming a fundamental point if the intention is to establish a base for a critical attitude toward violence and a peaceful outcome, and if we understand that 2 European Commission (n.d.). Horizon 2020: The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en. 3 League of European Research Universities, Social Sciences and Humanities: Essential Fields for European Research and in Horizon 2020, Advice Paper 11 (2012), https://www. leru.org/files/Social-Sciences-and-Humanities-Essential-Fields-for-European-Research-andHorizon-2020-Full-paper.pdf. 4 Belle Wallace, Using History to Develop Problem-Solving and Thinking Skills at Key Stage 2 (London: David Fulton, 2003). 5 The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Framework for 21st Century Learning (n.d.), http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework. 6 Anthony Adams, The Humanities Jungle (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1976); Ciriaco Moron Arroyo, The Humanities in the Age of Technology (Washington, DCE: Catholic University of America Press, 2002). 7 Hillary Claire and Cathie Holden, “The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues: Principles and Practice,” in their edited book, The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues, 1–14 (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2007); Paula Cowan and Henry Maitles, “Preface and Framework,” in Teaching Controversial Issues in the Classroom: Key Issues and Debates, ed. Paula Cowan and Henry Maitles (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–9; Richard Woolley, Tackling Controversial Issues in the Primary School: Facing Life’s Challenges with Your Learners (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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conflict is an inherent part of every society and is not negative in itself, only in the way that it is resolved.8 In Spain, the Civil War is one of these controversial, almost taboo topics. One need only be aware of the debates that the exhumation of victims’ remains, the Law of Historical Memory, and related initiatives have generated.9 I agree with Avery et al. who affirm that without an open social debate based on the knowledge and understanding of conflict, that allows citizens to decide, in a sensible, critical way, what future they want for the remains of their past, it is impossible to overcome the past and, consequently, become critical citizens.10 Indeed, we all agree that people should be educated to be good citizens. What differs in the different ideologies is the definition of a “good citizen.” Should citizens be critical, participative and have a desire to change reality? Or should they be integrated in society and enterprising in order to achieve maximum individual success? Or both? It’s likely that the purpose of education is to give people the opportunity to understand reality and to form their own ideas. Fostering the maximum personal development of individuals therefore involves developing all of their abilities and all of their intelligences to achieve the best of each person. Consequently, we cannot undervalue in education any of the possibilities of each person: memory, reason, aesthetic sense, physical capabilities or communication skills.11 Based on the considerations mentioned above, it makes sense to confirm the importance of promoting a collective responsibility in students so they 8 Lynn Davies, “Schools and War: Urgent Agendas for Comparative and International Education,” Compare 35, no. 4 (2005), 357–71; Olwen Goodall, “War and Peace with Young Children,” in Claire and Holden, The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues, 41–49; Henry Maitles, “Discussing War in the Classroom,” in Cowan and Maitles, Teaching Controversial Issues in the Classroom, 61–69. 9 Francisco Ferrándiz, El pasado bajo tierra (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2014); Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Making Things Public: Archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War,” Public Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2007), 203–26. 10 Patricia Avery et  al., “Teaching and Understanding War and Peace Through Structured Academic Controversies,” in How Children Understand War and Peace: A Call for International Peace Education, ed. Amiram Raviv, Louis Oppenheimer, and Daniel BarTal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), 260–80. 11 Jacques Delors, “Los cuatro pilares de la educación,” in La educación encierra un tesoro: Informe a la UNESCO de la Comisión internacional sobre la educación para el siglo XXI (Madrid: Santillana/UNESCO, 1996), 91–103.

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are conscious of their actions and their obligations to the world around them. This responsibility is developed through interaction with themselves and with others, and if in school the contributions of different social disciplines are taken into account, this development will be much richer. The search for acknowledgment of diverse social and cultural identities in the educational process can be resolved through the concept of interculturality. A homogenous way of educating in uniformity causes serious harm to the development of identities, since it ignores the diversity of memories and mental universes that make up present-day society. This diversity should be reflected in schools and taken into account, rather than ignored, when nurturing identities. But one process cannot occur without the other, and the building of a social identity in particular cannot be an isolated process; on the contrary, it is fully inscribed in the social and historical relationships of a particular culture. On this basis, I consider that the Spanish Civil War should be present in the classroom as a main focus for developing critical citizenship and to be able to address the treatment of conflict as something inherent in human life but with multiple possible solutions.

Learning History for….? We should ask ourselves what history is for and what role it should play in the education of children today, regardless of the dictates of a particular educational curriculum. Such a debate is too broad for the purposes of this chapter, but I would like to briefly point out the valuable contribution of history in learning to be, to know, to do, and to live together. These are the four pillars of learning proposed by UNESCO that allow us to understand education globally, as being aimed at the development of critical citizens, where the teaching and learning of history should play a fundamental role. Learning to Be History allows children to be brought closer to stories of the past. Stories are an ideal resource for the development of emotions through which children can travel to faraway places and times and experience them both as individuals and as part of a community. In the AngloSaxon education system, storytellers bring children closer to these past

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realities through experience, from a human perspective.12 The way to do this is by interacting with them, making them co-protagonists of these stories from history, using images, objects, costumes, puppets, dolls, music, dance and so on.13 With any of these resources, the key lies in the emotional engagement that the storyteller builds with students, and it is important to make the story emotionally significant. It is essential, therefore, to link history to the lives of children, to create connections with their present-day lives that allow them to delve into the depths of history by comparing with the present. Making children the protagonists of history is a way of connecting them emotionally to the ways of life of the past by relating them to their own experience. And the ability to imitate helps children to learn about something without having experienced it directly themselves. Through role-play, children can develop different roles in different situations and can imitate gestures, movements and expressions. To the extent that history brings us closer to a past time through play, an identification with other times occurs and reflection on other identities is made possible. This fact undoubtedly has an impact on the development of our own identity. We learn to do individually, but we cannot do it without others. Learning to Know In school, students can learn to know through the discovery of history. Children can find out from the sources things that happened a long time ago, since they constitute the footprints of the past that remain in the present. In this sense, it can be fundamental to make use of the local surroundings, although doing so may entail a more imaginative teaching methodology. Educating the perception of students so they can read the landscape, observe it and understand it is the mission not only of cathedral cities or rural or urban enclaves that are proud to have prominent buildings or archaeological remains; rather, every school is located in a place that can be interpreted historically.14 Learning by discovery can be 12 Eric Maddern, A Teachers’ Guide to Storytelling at Historic Sites (London: English Heritage Publications, 1992). 13 Lucia Carubba, Francesco Tonucci, and Manuela Cecchini, A los tres años se investiga (Barcelona: Editorial Avance, 1976). 14 Antoni Bardavio, and Paloma González, Objetos en el tiempo. Las fuentes materiales en la enseñanza de las ciencias sociales (Barcelona: ICE UB/Horsori, 2003).

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presented in teaching proposals linked to local environments, like a reading from the past in the living present. In order to help children to learn to know through history it is important to use this discipline to perform plays and representations. In addition, objects and images can be a good resource as well as stories and narrations. In the same way, learning about the past means acquiring the vocabulary that, to a certain extent, is specific to history, for example, vocabulary that has to do with the common characteristics of certain periods, organizing ideas that are not necessarily historic, buildings, technology or concepts associated with the process of interpreting archaeological sources.15 The contact of children with the past is much more normal than we might think, since they are surrounded by physical remains of the past. Young children can ask questions about objects of daily life from the past which involves looking, listening, touching and smelling. These objects encourage pre-school children to reach conclusions and make inferences about the past.16 This knowledge about the past and the specific vocabulary needed to explain it is what allows us, in turn, to learn to know the present, considering that understanding the relationship between subjective and measured time develops due to the understanding of other dimensions of the concept of time, such as the similarities and differences between the present and the past.17 Hillary Cooper comments that the understanding that young children have of stories shows that they are capable of commenting on the way people’s behavior influences events, showing their potential with respect to their ability to develop cognitive skills linked to changes in time, like those of cause and effect. Learning to Do What students need to learn to do is entirely influenced by the context in which they live. The environment in which we grow up determines the skills that we need to acquire. Today, we experience many transformations, accelerated changes that force us to advance at considerable speed. The current model of education is not able to respond to the daily needs 15 Hillary Cooper, Didáctica de la historia en la educación infantil y primaria (Madrid: Ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte/Ediciones Morata, 2002). 16 Cooper, Didáctica de la historia. 17 Cooper, Didáctica de la historia.

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of people and requires increasingly larger doses of creativity and innovation. These changes entail reconsideration of the teaching–learning process, and in this context learning “by doing” based on personal experience makes sense, as it allows for the creation, distribution and transformation of knowledge. Students will have to be capable of meeting the constant need for retraining. If we accept that learning consists not only of the accessibility of knowledge, of knowledge itself, or of the systematic assimilation of content, we will thus understand the importance of acquiring skills, of learning to do. Our challenge becomes to stimulate and support a form of learning that fosters commitment, creativity, forms of open innovation and, ultimately, action. Piaget demonstrated that children learn to form sets of objects with common characteristics.18 In the context of history, this means that children can begin to classify “the old” and “the new” and to discuss the reasons for putting an object in one set or another.19 This aspect connects us directly with the possibilities that history offers in relation to learning to do, considering that promoting interrogation and problematization is essential during these stages in order to encourage divergent thinking. Research takes place in the pre-school classroom when we present students with a problem they need to solve, and the research method (also historical) demands that they solve the problem using their previous knowledge in a new and creative way.20 Another contribution that history can make in relation to this pillar is to develop the capacity of comparison. To compare means to establish a type of relationship between things, objects, people, etcetera, and the learning of history makes these comparisons possible because, with young children, this learning is generally based on traveling from present to past, and vice versa. This journey always occurs by comparing different elements to establish characteristics. Comparing requires perceiving a common purpose shared by two different things.21 Another aspect of methodological learning that is transmitted through history is the capacity to classify, select and group. These are 18 Jean

Piaget, and Bärbel Inhelder, Psicología del niño (Ediciones Morata, 1997). Didáctica de la historia. 20 Francesco Tonucci, La escuela como investigación (Nueva edición ampliada) (Barcelona: Reforma de la Escuela, 1979). 21 Irene de Puig, Pensem-hi! Propostes per reforçar les habilitats de pensament en els infants de 2 i 3 anys (Vic: Eumo Editorial/Universitat de Girona, 2013). 19 Cooper,

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undoubtedly essential aspects in the cognitive development of children. One way of selecting is to group, which is a rudimentary form of classification, because it does not require the specification of the criteria used to distinguish one group from the other. Classifying is taking the process one step further, arranging a set of elements by classes or categories,22 and history can contribute to promoting this type of learning since it allows us to establish relationships between a part and the set and these relationships shape discovery.23 The implications that history has for learning to do are thus aimed at generating multiple points of view in children. According to Cooper,24 children have the capacity to see a situation from more than one point of view depending on how involved they are and their understanding of the situation. Learning to Live Together Today more than ever, our complex interrelated world forces us to learn to live together, not only for solidarity or humanitarian reasons, or to practice the values of pluralism, as described in the majority of educational curriculums, but because we must learn to live within the complexity of our world. We live in a world that is increasingly interdependent economically, culturally, environmentally, socially and politically. This forces us to educate and train ourselves, to work and live with people from different social and cultural groups to our own, from different parts of the world. Asian, African or American people are no longer exotic and have become fellow citizens, with whom we share space, interests, work, training or we establish more intense relationships. Learning to live together in such a competitive and individualistic world is a required condition, even for those who seek individual success. School constitutes a significant and critical context where children can and should develop the competencies and attitudes necessary for democratic coexistence. Thus, school, and particularly the classroom, as a public space, is a meeting place where discussion among equals should be encouraged, so individuals can express their knowledge and concerns. In short, school is a society on a smaller scale, a reflection of the community

22 Puig,

Pensem-hi! Pensem-hi! 24 Cooper, Didáctica de la historia. 23 Puig,

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around it. If we do not instill practices of positive coexistence in the classrooms of pre-school education, democratic practices will be more difficult when the children are older. Children have a natural curiosity about their past, since it helps them to develop a sense of their own identity, both in relation to other people and through time.25 Even so, very young children have difficulty empathizing. Given this dichotomy between their curiosity about the past and their difficulty empathizing, history offers relevant opportunities that can facilitate the development of young children. Living together also refers to our own trajectory and personal history; knowing how our parents and grandparents lived leads us to get to know better the people around us from their personal stories, which end up forming collective histories: we cannot live together if we do not know each other.

The Spanish Civil War in the Classroom: A Great Void The Spanish school system is structured in three levels. Primary education equals grades 1–6 in North America; compulsory secondary education (ESO in Spanish) covers grades 7–10; non-compulsory secondary education (Bachillerato in Spanish) includes grades 11 and 12. The limited presence of the Spanish Civil War in Spanish classrooms is a fact that cannot be overlooked; curriculum proposals in Spain change according to the educational policies of governments. The War is addressed as historical content, from the point of view of facts, concepts and conceptual systems, in the last year of compulsory secondary education. In non-compulsory secondary levels, the War may be taught in the context of a common history content, and in the expanded content of Humanities disciplines. In primary education, content on the War is not formally taught. It should be mentioned that the decisions of schools and teachers can have an impact on the presence or relevance of content about the War at different levels of the educational system. That is to say, often a chronological timeline is what marks the teaching and learning of history. We continue to teach it from the furthest point in time to the closest, perpetuating in this way many problems, one of which is that students complete their compulsory education with a lack of content; how many times is prehistory taught throughout school simply because 25 Liz Wood, and Cathie Holden, Ensenyar història als més petits (Manresa: Zenobita edicions, 2007).

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it is the first topic? The chronological order in the teaching of history prioritizes the content and the time we dedicate to each of the topics. There are many who finish school within the Spanish education system without ever having studied the Spanish Civil War. Is it possible to really understand our society or our current political system without having studied the Spanish Civil War? I think not. As mentioned, on a curricular level the topic is usually taught in grade 6, depending on how the teacher organizes the material, and again in the last year of compulsory secondary education. In non-compulsory secondary classes, it may be addressed again, but only for students in certain disciplines. The presence or not of the Spanish Civil War in the classrooms of primary education depends on different factors. On the one hand, the teacher’s interest in the war will define the teaching and learning of the topic. No doubt there are examples that confirm that the subject can be taught in a primary class, but this depends on the willingness of the teacher. Another factor that determines the presence of the subject is the educational curriculum. This aspect is difficult to assess and analyze because Spain’s autonomous communities are responsible for implementing it as they see fit, which in fact poses a problem since the teaching and learning of history is often subject to political preferences. It is not the aim of this chapter to discuss the politicization of the teaching and learning of history. We should point out, however, that it is very likely that politics has kept the Spanish Civil War out of the classroom. To return to the curriculum, in this case of primary education, an in-depth analysis of general provisions of Royal Decree 126/2014 of 28 February 2014, which established the basic curriculum of primary education,26 shows that even with a simple search for “Spanish Civil War,” the topic does not appear! The decree states, “It is important for students to acquire the historical references that will allow them to develop a personal interpretation of the world, through a basic knowledge of the history of Spain and of the autonomous community with respect and appreciation for both common and diverse aspects.” We ask then, does the Spanish Civil War not contribute to the students acquiring historical references for interpreting the world? Another factor that influences the presence or not of the topic in the primary education classrooms is textbooks and how they are used. 26 Boletín Oficial del Estado, 1 March 2014, https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2014/03/01/ pdfs/BOE-A-2014-2222.pdf.

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The curriculum is often confused with the textbook, and teachers may believe that they cannot address a certain topic because it is not in the book, but the curriculum does not prevent them from doing so. In this case, textbooks also determine whether or not the Spanish Civil War appears in the classroom and, above all, they determine which aspects are addressed. There are still books used in primary education where the consequences of the war are not mentioned (numbers of civil victims, combatants, repression) and the causes are explained only vaguely. A Francoist chronology is frequently used to delimit the period (18 July 1936, 1 April 1939). What’s more, foreign intervention is not reflected, nor is the decisive role of Germany and Italy in Franco’s victory. Another element identified is the perception of atonement or reconciliation that is transmitted. The conflict is still being explained in the same way as it was during, and immediately after, the transition to democracy. After 30 years, perhaps it is necessary to begin to explain it in a different way, by describing the cause: a military coup against an elected government (we cannot say that a general caused an uprising, for example). Finally, another significant aspect is that often more time and effort is spent discussing Francoism and anti-Francoism than the war itself, probably because it generates more political consensus and less controversy. But can Francoism and anti-Francoism be understood without having discussed the consequences of the war? As can be seen, the presence of the Spanish Civil War in the primary school classroom is insignificant and, in addition, if we focus on documents that are available to the teacher (curriculum and textbook), there is a significant lack of information. If we do not introduce the topic and address it correctly, how can we achieve what Royal Decree 126/2014 dictates in relation to the Social Sciences: “The ultimate objective of the area is to transmit and put into practice the values that contribute to personal freedom, responsibility, democratic citizenship, solidarity, tolerance, equality, respect and justice, as well as helping to overcome any type of discrimination. Another aim that is considered and that the Spanish education system has focused on is the preparation for exercising citizenship and for active participation in economic, social and cultural life, with a critical, responsible attitude and a capacity for adapting to the changing situations of the society of knowledge.”27 Furthermore, 27 Boletín Oficial del Estado, 1 March 2014, https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2014/03/01/ pdfs/BOE-A-2014-2222.pdf.

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as mentioned above, this decree establishes the general guidelines but autonomous governments have the responsibility for educational delivery within this general framework. Under Royal Decree 1105/2014, of 26 December 2015, which establishes the basic curriculum of compulsory and non-compulsory secondary education,28 the picture is different to our discussion of primary education. Here the Spanish Civil War is mentioned. In general, the topic is taught at secondary level rather than primary, but it is concentrated in the second cycle of compulsory secondary education. In first and second years, students study prehistory to the seventeenth century, while in third and fourth years they study the eighteenth century to globalization. In the official bulletin on secondary education mentioned above, we find the Spanish Civil War as part of the larger block, entitled “The inter-war period: 1919–1945,” which is taught mainly in the fourth year. We wonder if it would not be more relevant to propose that it be studied separately. We recognize the necessity to understand the Spanish Civil War within a European context but as it is, it runs the risk of going unnoticed in the teaching–learning process since it is the last lesson of the unit. This does not mean to say that the European context is not necessary; we think it unlikely that the Spanish Civil War could be understood without understanding what was occurring in Europe, considering that the case of Spain is not dramatically different to that of Germany or Italy. What we are suggesting is that sufficient time be spent on teaching the Civil War, and that it not be overlooked in the study of the interwar period, or conditioned by the time spent on the entire block of content. As we have reiterated, this chronological structuring of the curriculum often conditions the teaching and learning of certain historical topics. The war is taught again in non-compulsory secondary education, but as mentioned, it depends on the discipline chosen by the student. This stage of secondary education constitutes post-compulsory studies, and therefore only students who have passed compulsory secondary education may be admitted. It is organized into disciplines which students choose, thus dividing them according to their interests in Science, Social Science and Humanities or Arts. Within these three major divisions, there are specific branches depending on each 28 Boletín Oficial del Estado, 3 January 2015, https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/01/03/ pdfs/BOE-A-2015-37.pdf.

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autonomous administration, but also varying with the school. (There are Technological programs, Humanities and Social Science programs, Earth and Health Sciences, to name but a few.) Students are between the ages of 16 and 18 at this non-compulsory level, which also affects the study of the Spanish Civil War. Those who opt for certain disciplines will leave school having only studied it briefly in primary and secondary school. There are two history courses at the non-compulsory level. History of the Contemporary World is taught in the first year, and is an elective only for students who choose to study Social Sciences and Humanities or the Arts. History of Spain is taught in the second year to all students. In the first-year course, it is not specified that the Spanish Civil War should be taught, since the course is a general one. It covers from the “Old Regime” to the “Contemporary World from a Historical Perspective.” Block 5, called “The Inter-War Period: World War II and its Consequences,” contains a unit that could include the Civil War, entitled “European Fascism and German Nazism,” but no reference is made to the Civil War. As a result, the Spanish Civil War is taught in the second year in the course History of Spain. This course covers an extensive list of topics with twelve blocks of content and a broad time range from prehistory to the contemporary world. This could mean that the latter topics (where the Spanish Civil War is included) may be addressed only superficially if the time is not distributed correctly. It is important to remember that at this point in time in Spain a university entrance exam still exists and this determines the duration of the second year of non-compulsory secondary, which is usually shortened to allow for preparation for the exam. The study of the Civil War in the History of Spain course is taught in “Block 10: The Second Republic, The Civil War in a Context of International Crisis (1931–1939).” The contents of this block are as follows: “The reformist biennium: the Constitution of 1931; Reform policies; The Statute of Catalonia; Forces of opposition to the Republic; The radical-cedista biennium: Restoration politics and popular radicalization; The Revolution of Asturias; The Popular Front: the first government interventions; Preparation of the military coup; The Civil War: the uprising and the development of the war; The international dimension of the conflict; Evolution of the two sides; The consequences of the war; The Silver Age of Spanish culture: from the Generation 98 to the Generation

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of 36.”29 In the assessment criteria for this block students are asked, in relation to the theme of the Civil War, to identify the War’s causes and consequences, international intervention and the course of events on the two sides. The measurable standards of learning are specified as follows: “3.1. Describe the antecedents of the Civil War; 3.2. Relate the Spanish Civil War to the international context; 3.3. Compare the political evolution and the economic situation of the two sides during the war; 3.4. Describe the human costs and the economic and social consequences of the war; 3.5. Summarize in an outline, the main phases of the war from a military point of view.”30 As can be seen from the above, this course addresses the topic in a comprehensive way and the evaluation standards seem appropriate, since students are required to relate the Civil War to the international context which, in our opinion, is essential to an understanding of what happened in Spain. Even so, it is important to remember that this course is not part of compulsory schooling, but rather is taught in the second year of post-compulsory secondary education. What is more, what we have described here is official state policy, but the factors that determine the teaching and learning of a topic—which were described above in relation to primary education—must also be taken into account. The main problem is the focus that is given to the subject, since what is prioritized is still largely factual teaching, which simply generates historical prejudices. It will depend largely on the motivation of the teacher to go into more depth and avoid rote learning if students are encouraged to move on to the interpretation of history as a mean of encouraging the development of critical citizens. But it will also depend on the focus of the textbook chosen. It is surprising to see, for example, secondary-level books that maintain the same discourse that we explained previously when discussing primary education. We might think that the primary text is intended to simplify to ensure the students’ understanding, although in our opinion an educational adaptation should never lack historic truth. But in the secondary textbooks we see the same approach and thus we conclude that this is not mere simplification; rather, it seems that current textbooks have yet to incorporate new historiographical interpretations and that the Civil 29 Boletín Oficial del Estado, 3 January 2015, https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/01/03/ pdfs/BOE-A-2015-37.pdf. 30 Boletín Oficial del Estado, 3 January 2015, https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/01/03/ pdfs/BOE-A-2015-37.pdf.

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War continues to be approached through a need to equalize responsibilities between fascists and democrats. We consider that explicit condemnation of fascism implies an affirmation of democracy and if we do not find this in the textbooks, what kind of democracy are we supporting? As previously mentioned, the educational value of history is unquestionable. If we also consider that the teaching and learning of conflicts has a high value in the development of a critical attitude toward violence, we must accept that the presence of the Spanish Civil War in the classroom should not depend on a curricular ordinance. What would be most reasonable, in this sense, would be to propose a general rational form of teaching independent of politicized and ideological proposals for programming that are rarely based on scientific criteria.

Transferring the Spanish Civil War to the Classroom: Developing Its Teaching Potential Here we propose some general guidelines for teachers who decide to introduce the Spanish Civil War in the classroom.31 In this sense, we put special emphasis on a methodological factor that, regardless of the circumstances, will always be justified and useful for proposing teaching– learning situations. History is a science, and the Spanish Civil War is a subject of study, like any other, which must be approached from the perspective of interpretation and the critical evaluation of sources and evidence. In future approaches in primary, compulsory and non-compulsory secondary education to teach and demonstrate historical and archaeological methods, nothing prevents us from referencing methodological practices based on the Spanish Civil War and its consequences for the social and patrimonial environment of the school. That is to say, when we work with historical memory, archaeological method, description of the landscape, reliability of sources, protection of patrimony, and so on, regardless of the course, nothing prevents us from taking aspects of the Spanish Civil War as examples. In the same way, the Spanish Civil War could be a good topic for the development of interdisciplinary assignments, for proposing summary credits, or as a focus for training debates in the area of values and citizenship. 31 For greater detail on these aspects and on the key topics proposed below, see Maria Feliu-Torruella, and F. Xavier Hernàndez Cardona, Didáctica de la Guerra Civil española (Barcelona: Graó, 2013).

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Taking into account the fragmentary presence of the Spanish Civil War in the educational system, we propose a series of topics that have high educational value and that provide a methodology based on the Spanish Civil War. The idea is to spark the student’s interest in the topic and avoid a simply chronological approach to conflict, bringing the historical method into the classroom and in this way reaffirming our belief in the high educational potential of history.

Key Topics with Teaching Potential One of the first suggestions for topics would be to work from memories and life stories in order to emphasize the importance of the perceptions of witnesses, understood as primary sources, or to understand a particular fact or historical situation. Memories of individuals can be collected, consulted or contrasted in very different ways: interviews, questionnaires, notebooks and books of memories. Thus, the range of possibilities in this respect is very broad, and the use of memory, understood also in the sense of recovering one’s memory, can be useful in the classroom on its own as a methodology, or to document a particular fact or historical period. The heritage of a country provides an endless number of educational experiences with a focus on stepping onto the stages of the war. Battlefields, for example, are emblematic places for what occurred as well as for the transformations caused to the landscape, which in some cases are still visible. History offers the possibility of working outside the classroom, inviting us to engage in fieldwork. In this case, it brings us closer to our unique immovable heritage, little known but with very good educational potential because of the methodological possibilities and opportunities for observational archaeology that it offers. In the same way, other settings include places of repression, which remind us of the need to reflect on the collateral effects of the war, which at times represent a central theme. In the case of the Spanish Civil War this is quite clear, occasionally on the Republican side and systematically on the Nationalist side, since Franco put great effort, during decades, into annihilating his political enemies in order to avoid any possibility of a return of democracy. Repression was not just an anecdote; the implacable destruction of the enemy defined Franco’s victory, and thus its consequences. The possibilities of using places of repression—concentration camps, prisons, centers of detention and execution—to get a sense of the horrors of the

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repression and the terrible anguish that thousands of Spanish citizens suffered for decades have great educational potential in developing a critical attitude toward violence. Finally, in the area of heritage, we can also work with monuments. Monuments are understood to mean monumental architecture, that is to say, large structures built during the war or in the immediate postwar period. However, the concept of monumental can also be associated with the monuments of different sizes that were built to perpetuate the memory of the victors. The construction of these pieces, in many cases removed as democratic thinking became stronger, provides interesting possibilities for study in the classroom based on work carried out in the field. Movable tangible heritage and documents are extremely significant on an educational level. Each period generates objects, artifacts and documents of many types. During a war, objects and artifacts are produced and used, and the Spanish Civil War generated very extensive documentation. An appreciation of the material and the artifacts of the 1930s is of interest from an educational point of view. Connecting objects and documents with their historical period requires processes of relation and association of fundamental concepts to generate the links in knowledge that will allow students to add, in a significant way, new information and understanding. Archaeology offers extraordinary educational possibilities, and the material traces of the Spanish Civil War allow information about its microhistory to emerge. This is absolutely indispensable for understanding the daily life of combatants and in the rearguard. Archaeological method, and especially the archaeology of conflict, allows us to generate a large amount of knowledge since the analysis of the materiality of conflict constitutes a reliable way of tracing the conflict with immense educational possibilities (though see Chapter 5 by González-Ruibal on the need for this to be properly informed, showing the importance of training and educational methodology). Cartography and aerial photography also offer enormous possibilities for addressing history. The maps of the conflict constitute firsthand documents that are important for understanding the variables of time and space. In addition, current aerial photographs contain evidence of the past; they allow us to read the footprints of the Spanish Civil War. There are aerial photographs of the period, taken mostly by the fascist air force to prepare or verify bombings. These dramatic and terrifying documents constitute a unique vision of the past that helps to coordinate and

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connect knowledge and to link historical and geographic concepts from the present and from the past. There is no doubt either about the educational potential of photography, considered mainly as a primary source of information. Photography allows us to approach macrohistory since during the Spanish Civil War there were photojournalists present who strove to capture the spirit of the conflict. Photography is also critical in documenting the conflict’s microhistory. Thousands of photographs illustrate the lives of particular people and places, and constitute an important primary source of information. In the same way, documentaries and films are considered primary information sources and can assist greatly in this approach to the War. Moving images are, by definition, objective and in this sense taking them into account is not only interesting but indispensable. Nevertheless, in the majority of the documentaries the images are arranged in the form of propaganda serving the interests of certain political objectives. The analysis of both variables is extremely interesting from an educational point of view. The educational possibilities of films (revealing information and motivation) can also be considered important in so far as they give a vision of the conflict at a given moment during or following the conflict. In this sense, they demonstrate the collective imagination of a society at a particular time with respect to the historical fact that is the subject of study. The press, another primary source of information, has a good tradition of use in the classroom. Newspapers and magazines written daily supply more or less the same information in the form of editorials, columns, opinion articles, comic strips or even advertisements.32 During the Spanish Civil War the press experienced considerable growth since new publications, belonging to repositioned parties and unions, and to military units, were added to the many existing newspapers at the time. A comparison of how a particular news item is presented by the newspapers of one side or the other opens up exceptional educational possibilities. The use of the press in the classroom, understood as a source of h ­ istorical information, continues to be problematic since it is not easy to obtain replicas of newspapers of earlier times. However, the existence of some 32 Paul Preston, and José Pablo García, La Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Debate, 2016). For more titles see Anna Abella, “La Guerra Civil en 10 cómics,” elPeriódico, 18 July 2016, http://www.elperiodico.com/es/ocio-y-cultura/20160718/guerra-civil-diezcomic-5274920.

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digital newspaper libraries containing important newspapers opens up new possibilities for educational approaches. Comics also constitute a resource that is very typical of the twentieth century. During the conflict many “comic” strips, as well as articulated and standard comics, were created to explain situations or ideas in a direct manner. Comics were also used subsequently to explain the conflict from a historical perspective. In the same way, historical illustrations were occasionally used, in addition to comics, and they continue to be utilized in the present, despite the prevalence of photography, for their numerous educational possibilities. We must not forget the use of art to bring us closer to any chapter of history. The important works of art created in the context of the Spanish Civil War, and the manner in which artists became protagonists of the conflict, can help us to understand it. Geniuses such as Pablo Picasso, Julio González or Joan Miró worked intensely in support of the democratic cause and created works of art that are part of world heritage and the universal imagination of freedom. The perception of the Spanish Civil War cannot be separated from Gernika, La Montserrat, el Campesino Catalán, and so on. But art, understood as an instrument of combat, was also part of the everyday life of the conflict, with impressive and aggressive posters inviting people to battle, or to resistance or solidarity. Along with these forms of artistic expression, but with their possibilities restricted by the conflict itself, rationalist architects attempted to continue the great work begun in the republican context. And on the subject of art, we must also include music. The popular songs that characterized the Spanish Civil War and that contributed to characterizing and perpetuating its memory—songs that often transcended the conflict and that are still alive today in the imagination of many people—can transform our approach to the War into something much more significant. In fact, songs form a genuine “sound track” that is absolutely indispensable to contextualize and document the Spanish Civil War, and also to understand it. The educational possibilities of this resource, and ultimately of this source of information, are impressive and the decision to include the topic means taking a step forward in the teaching of the War by promoting a holistic framework for approaching the subject. Lastly, historical recreation holds great potential with regard to the instilling of empathy and is also relevant to experimental archaeology. This is a new context that is dramatically educational in so far as it proposes, based on an accurate representation, a substitute for actually

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traveling through time and space. The observation or participation in groups engaged in historical recreation involves conscientious research on the period, but it also educates for empathy. The recreator ultimately is forced to put him/herself in the point of view or in the situation of a person from another time and to consider a wide variety of questions in that regard. In addition, historical recreation involves experimental archaeology in that it utilizes structures and artifacts of another time, and it thus has great teaching potential. The dramatization of historic moments and situations, understood as staging—or what Anglo-Saxon culture understands as living history and reenactment—has multiple educational possibilities, as we pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, and helps us to learn to live with others since it obligates us to practice the empathetic exercise of travelling to the past to experience it.

Final Reflections We have described in this reflection the contributions of history to children’s learning and we have attempted to establish some guidelines for the development of this learning based on the study of the Spanish Civil War. This is a forgotten topic but one with great teaching potential, especially in our present complex, interrelated society. A good relationship with the current world entails overcoming individualism, either personal or the closed thinking of groups, and this must be taught to our children. The process of globalization that developed intensively in the last quarter of a century has generated a response focused on the restitution of what is local: singularity versus standardization. At times, in this process of reaffirmation of what is our own, it could be that we overvalue our identity and express prejudice against those who are different. We need to incorporate Foucault’s concept of the look of the other into our interpersonal relationships. It is important that we learn to solve conflicts resulting from daily coexistence between people or groups with diverse interests. And we must do this with a critical spirit, analyzing the conventions of each and reaching an agreement to initiate common projects. It is not necessary to avoid conflict, but it is important to lay our cards on the table, to compare our different interests, and come to solid agreements to consolidate our coexistence. Understanding oneself as well as the other makes mutual understanding possible. We must educate by and for an appreciation of interdependence among people, groups and spaces on different

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levels: personal, local, regional and global. This is the path that must be taken in order to achieve a society that is fairer and more peaceful. Introducing the Spanish Civil War into the classroom, studying it and analyzing it from multiple points of view will undoubtedly contribute to the building of this fairer society. We live in a complex world and it is within this complexity that children will learn to be themselves and to interact with others. We must attempt to strengthen our coexistence basing our teaching practices on what connects us and in order to do this, it is important that we know how to analyze our reality from different viewpoints and history (in this case, the Civil War), without a doubt, can contribute to providing these different views.

Bibliography Adams, Anthony. The Humanities Jungle (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1976). Arroyo, Ciriaco Moron. The Humanities in the Age of Technology. Washington, DCE: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. Avery, Patricia, David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and James M. Mitchell. “Teaching and Understanding War and Peace through Structured Academic Controversies.” In How Children Understand War and Peace: A Call for International Peace Education, ed. Amiram Raviv, Louis Oppenheimer, and Daniel Bar-Tal, 260–80. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Bardavio, Antoni, and Paloma González. Objetos en el tiempo. Las fuentes materiales en la enseñanza de las ciencias sociales. Barcelona: ICE UB/Horsori, 2003. Carubba, Lucia, Francesco Tonucci, and Manuela Cecchini. A los tres años se investiga. Barcelona: Editorial Avance, 1976. Claire, Hillary, and Cathie Holden. “The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues: Principles and Practice.” In The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues, ed. Hillary Claire and Cathie Holden, 1–14. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2007. Cooper, Hillary. Didáctica de la historia en la educación infantil y primaria. Madrid: Ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte/ Ediciones Morata, 2002. Cowan, Paula, and Henry Maitles. “Preface and Framework.” In Teaching Controversial Issues in the Classroom: Key Issues and Debates, ed. Paula Cowan and Henry Maitles, 1–9. London: Continuum, 2012. Davies, Lynn. “Schools and War: Urgent Agendas for Comparative and International Education.” Compare 35, no. 4 (2005): 357–71.

238  M. FELIU-TORRUELLA Delors, Jacques. “Los cuatro pilares de la educación.” In La educación encierra un tesoro: Informe a la UNESCO de la Comisión internacional sobre la educación para el siglo XXI, 91–103. Madrid: Santillana/UNESCO, 1996. Feliu-Torruella, Maria, and F. Xavier Hernàndez Cardona. Didáctica de la Guerra Civil española. Barcelona: Graó, 2013. Ferrándiz, Francisco. El pasado bajo tierra. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2014. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. “Making Things Public: Archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War.” Public Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2007): 203–26. Goodall, Olwen. “War and Peace with Young Children.” In The Challenge of Teaching Controversial Issues, ed. Hillary Claire and Cathie Holden, 41–49. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2007. Maddern, Eric. A Teachers’ Guide to Storytelling at Historic Sites. London: English Heritage Publications, 1992. Maitles, Henry. “Discussing War in the Classroom.” In Teaching Controversial Issues in the Classroom: Key Issues and Debates, ed. Paula Cowan and Henry Maitles, 61–69. London: Continuum, 2012. Piaget, Jean, and Bärbel Inhelder. Psicología del niño. Ediciones Morata, 1997. Preston, Paul, and José Pablo García. La Guerra Civil Española. Madrid: Debate, 2016. Puig, Irene de. Pensem-hi! Propostes per reforçar les habilitats de pensament en els infants de 2 i 3 anys. Vic: Eumo Editorial/Universitat de Girona, 2013. Tonucci, Francesco. La escuela como investigación (Nueva edición ampliada). Barcelona: Reforma de la Escuela, 1979. Wallace, Belle. Using History to Develop Problem-Solving and Thinking Skills at Key Stage 2. London: David Fulton, 2003. Wood, Liz, and Cathie Holden. Ensenyar història als més petits. Manresa: Zenobita edicions, 2007. Woolley, Richard. Tackling Controversial Issues in the Primary School: Facing Life’s Challenges with Your Learners. New York: Routledge, 2010.

CHAPTER 11

Veiling and Exhuming the Past: Conflict and Post-conflict Challenges Jordi Palou-Loverdos

Introduction The past no longer exists and yet, to a greater or lesser extent, it conditions the present of people, communities, and nations. Confronting the past often entails facing conflict situations that are not necessarily negative. There are incidents from the past that we consciously or unconsciously forget, at times even voluntarily choosing to destroy their physical manifestations. There are often also diverse conflicting interests: the interest in veiling or burying the past—or its material and immaterial evidence—coincides in time and space with an interest in exhuming or discovering what occurred and directing this knowledge toward different teleological dynamics. The term exhume, in the sense of unveil, is used intentionally here since, as will be seen, it is closely related to a basic concept on which these various teleological proposals work. The word exhume refers both to disinterring or removing from a grave, cave or sunken furrow, and to bring to light something that has been in the

J. Palou-Loverdos (*)  Aequitas, Il·Lustre Col·Legi de l’Advocacia de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain © The Author(s) 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9_11

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dark. It has obvious connections to the concept of revelation (thus, we also refer to concealing or revealing the past). Many professionals, in diverse areas of scientific, technical or artistic knowledge, work with the past. We could say that, in one way or another, they all work with the past with a view to discovering the truth. This concept is key for many of them. Let’s take a moment to address briefly the meaning of “truth.” Veritas, which comes from the Latin, has come to be understood as an attempt to connect external reality— or the manifestation of facts—and internal conviction. Achieving truth could be regarded as a complete connection without gaps, an almost unfathomable concept, especially with regard to conflictive processes of a collective nature. Thus, in diverse areas of knowledge the Latin term is used, indicating as fundamental objectives “to determine what the truth is” (justice), “to tell each other the truth” (processes of dialogue, communication and/or conflict resolution), “to seek the truth and tell it” (journalism), “to establish the truth” (truth commissions or forensic medicine), or “to discover and document the truth” (historiography).1 We can, however, go further into the past and access an equivalent term, one that is somewhat older than the word “truth,” and no longer used: aletheia. In classical Greece, aletheia is connected to discovering what is hidden, or to making public what has been hidden. It is about revealing what is or has been concealed from knowledge in a particular place and time. If, instead of attempting to arrive at and establish the truth of what occurred (as a whole), the researcher or agent of past events were to focus on making the public aware of what is hidden or has been deliberately concealed, with the aim of completing the knowledge, awareness or vision of the events, the objective proposed is more attainable.

Pharmakon with Respect to the Past Once the general approaching it are be done with the Should all of the

proposal about the past and the main dynamics for developed, innumerable questions arise: What should past? Which past should be the subject of research? past—both material and immaterial—be subject to

1 On historiography and its possible approximation to the truth, see Aitor Bolaños de Miguel, and Marisa González de Oleaga, “Teoría y práctica de la Historiografía Moderna,” Revista de Libros, September 2016.

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public treatment and dissemination? Should an agreement be reached beforehand about the objectives of research, treatment, and dissemination about the past? Should it be done from a public and/or private perspective and, if applicable, how should these interact? What should the context be for working with the past: university, political, scientific, jurisdictional and/or non-jurisdictional, archival, artistic, etcetera? Before answering this and other questions, it is necessary to focus on two key questions: “How?” and, especially, “What for?” It is important to mention the original Greek concept of pharmakon. As is known, etymologically the word pharmakon possesses a dual meaning: remedy or poison. Its use, effects, and meaning will depend on the specific treatment chosen, the time of treatment and, particularly, on the dosage applied. Thus, the same specific procedures can either cure or kill, depending on these variables, keeping in mind that at the same time we are talking about the equality of humans and the existence of as many bio-psycho-socio-spiritual entities as humans coexist on the planet. For a long time, and especially in recent decades in contexts where serious abuse has occurred in the past, new creative intelligences have been offered, new transitional processes that seek by different means to facilitate methods of remedy to alleviate the pain or the wounds and enable individual and/or collective evolutionary processes.2 It is key, therefore, to consider beforehand what different pharmakon are used in a particular situation of past abuse or historical violence, in what order, with what impact, to which individuals or groups they are applied, in what way the different pharmakon interact with each other and how the entity progresses with these treatments so that they serve human development and not degeneration. Figure 11.1 shows an outline of judicial and non-judicial transitional processes that have been and are used in different violent contexts in the world. Some of these mechanisms or a combination of them are often grouped under the term, transitional justice.3 As is known, this approach gained in content, knowledge and practical application at the end of 2 Transitional procedures generated to transition from war to peace, from dictatorship to democracy, from violence to a culture of peace. 3 See reference to “the search for truth” in the report of the United Nations Secretary General, The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies, 23 August 2004.

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Fig. 11.1  Transitional Justice Processes

the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s as a diverse and at the same time all-encompassing response to the systematic violations of human rights and abuses of the past in violent conflicts and authoritarian regimes. Various initiatives were adopted by different governments, of their own accord or as a response to the claims of victims or different members of civil society, taking into account national and international judicial investigations of the perpetrators of mass or systematic crimes. These include: forensic investigations; truth commissions or similar mechanisms with different names (such as justice, truth, reparation and/or reconciliation, among others) which seek to investigate and bring to light violations of human rights, contributing recommendations for remedying these abuses and establishing regulations to prevent them being repeated in the future; government measures for victim reparation, including proposals for individual and/or collective material and symbolic reparations which vary from economic compensation, exhumation of human remains and the dignification of victims, to acts of apology and/or public

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regret; memorials and/or public policies on memory, with the participation of the victims and their families, memorialist organizations, the educational community and other members of civil society, including museums, public monuments or centers for the interpretation or signage of sites of memory, university research into historical facts, and documents in primary and secondary sources as well as public and private archives, collections of oral memories of victims that contribute to the knowledge and awareness of the abuses committed in the past and aim to avoid the repetition of these abuses and to further the conditions of democracy and peace; diverse mechanisms of institutional reform of various state bodies linked to the abuses of the past, such as armies, police, judicial powers and other civil servants and leaders focused on transforming the structure of instruments of repression, corruption, and injustice with the purpose of facilitating the rule of law and public service to benefit the political community. Other complementary proposals that have been added to the range of transitional initiatives toward coexistence and peace, depending on the context and the participants (such as traditional courts and other mechanisms for peaceful resolution of conflicts), include conciliation, mediation, public conversations, memorial hearings, participatory procedures focused on overcoming violence and on the synergy of peaceful coexistence, facilitation of national or highly inclusive dialogues, among others. The necessary interrelationship of these mechanisms and the need for creativity and adaptation to the particular violent conflict soon became evident, since some of these measures considered individually may not serve the purpose of an equitable and shared transition toward a culture of peace and new democratic systems. This holistic approach with a vision of complementarity has gained in relevance to the extent that the United Nations Human Rights Council agreed to create the position of Special Rapporteur with a specific mandate for “truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.” The first Rapporteur named, in the first report of 9 August 2012,4 placed special emphasis on a global approach and the necessary interrelation of the four elements included in the mandate, adding two additional objectives, namely acknowledgment of victims and measures of trust as

4 Pablo de Greiff, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-recurrence, 9 August 2012, http://www.ohchr.org/ Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session21/A-HRC-21-46_en.pdf.

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well as two final objectives: contributing to reconciliation and consolidating rule of law.

Managing the Past in Rwanda, Colombia, and Spain Taking into consideration the points indicated above, we will briefly address the different proposals of pharmakon made by three countries on three different continents during three different time periods: Rwanda, Colombia, and Spain. In 2014 the Republic of Rwanda, led by its president Paul Kagame, officially commemorated the 20th anniversary of what is known as “the Rwandan genocide” with the commemoration focusing, according to official reports, on the memory of the genocide: “more than a million victims of the genocide of batutsi and massacres of bahutu that opposed the genocide” [sic].5 Only the victims and their families and close relatives know the pain behind each death and each person injured in the terrible criminal dynamic that shook Rwanda for a hundred long days in 1994. During the last twenty years, numerous memorial ceremonies marking the genocide were held in Rwanda led by Rwandan institutional representatives. It is evident that the violent conflict did not begin or end in 1994. However, starting on 1 October 1990 and continuing with different intensities and ranges to this day (and not just limited to Rwanda, but extending to the Democratic Republic of Congo), and in a context in which ethnic groups have been officially abolished, memory initiatives by public policies have been put into action to honor the victims, although not all the victims feel acknowledged. Initiatives carried out in the Kigali Memorial Center,6 or the Memorial of Gisozi, are not always perceived as truly inclusive. It is not only Rwandans of the Bahutu and Batwa ethnic groups who do not feel represented in these memorials (they are not even named as victims). Prominent members of the Batutsi, who until recently were

5 The official website of the Government of Rwanda offers a brief historical description that it would be difficult for many Rwandans in the interior and in exile to share: see http://www.gov.rw/History?lang=en. 6 At the entrance to this memorial it states that the “memorial is the final resting place for more than 250,000 victims of the genocide against the tutsi: a place for remembering and learning.” See Kigali Genocide Memorial (website), http://www.kgm.rw/.

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direct collaborators7 of General Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, have revealed the official strategy of manipulation, appropriation of the victims by established interests, and blame of the international community deployed by representatives of the Rwandan public powers focusing solely on the Batutsi victims. Rwanda is not the only country faced with the effort of remembering in an inclusive way. Despite the distance between them, these initiatives recall similar ones that seek to perpetuate the memory of the victors of a war: in Spain, for example, eighty years after the beginning of what is known as the Spanish Civil War—and more than forty years after the end of the military dictatorship that followed the war—the Monument of the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) has still not been redefined in a globally reparative way and continues to honor “those who died for God and Spain.”8 In 1994 the second ad hoc international court was created from Nuremberg and Tokyo: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The UN Security Council links the prosecution of the international crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994 with justice and reconciliation.9 It is questionable whether the constitution of this international tribunal could fulfill the objectives indicated, since it was decided that criminal acts stemming from the military invasion from Uganda and the armed conflict that followed from at least 1 October 1990 to 4 August 1993, when the Peace Agreement of Arusha was signed (marking the end of the war, after several failed ceasefires), would be excluded from the temporary jurisdiction of the court, facilitated among others by representatives of the UN. Another reason for this questionability is the decision made on 8 November 1994 that this temporary jurisdiction would end definitively on 31 December 1994, omitting from the temporary jurisdiction of the court possible future crimes even before the year had ended. In contrast to the decision of the UN Security Council with respect to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

7 See declarations on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide pronounced by Théogène Rudasingwa, who was Chief of Staff to the President of the Republic, Paul Kagame: “Remarks by Dr. Théogène Rudasingwa,” The Rwandan, 1 April 2014. 8 “Por Dios y España” in Spanish. 9 See preamble of the Statute of the ICTR approved by the UN Security Council 8 November 1994, http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/ictr_EF.pdf.

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(ICTY), in which the Security Council reserved the end-date of the temporary jurisdiction, in the case of Rwanda the Council decided to exclude from the jurisdiction of the court possible crimes in Rwanda in 1995 and subsequent years, as well as crimes in neighboring Zaire (later renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1996 and subsequent years. Many Rwandans, both inside and outside Rwanda, consider that the efforts of the ICTR over more than twenty years, combined with the Rwandan national justice and the Gacaca courts, which have imprisoned thousands of Rwandans of the Hutu ethnic group, represent a new example of “victor’s justice” and have not contributed significantly to justice and reconciliation. In Colombia, the courage and complexity of recourse to diverse mechanisms of transitional justice is notable when, to a great extent, Colombian institutions and society themselves considered until very recently that the violent conflict had not ended. Here we find a model that is diametrically opposed to the Spanish model, in that while in Spain, as will be analyzed below, the transitional process initiated at the end of a long military dictatorship was built on forgetting the abuses of the past and on principles of reform (not rupture) that sought to build a forward-looking democracy, in Colombia transitional initiatives were promoted by public institutions and civil society while a decades-long violent conflict continued. Colombia has been capable of implementing significant initiatives, though not without internal controversies, such as the Justice and Peace Law of 2005,10 or diverse initiatives of national memory,11 and local/regional memory,12 based on legal mandates and/ or initiatives agreed on with the victims, their families and civil society. The latest initiative to achieve lasting peace in Colombia is worthy of note: after exploratory conversations in August 2012, the parties agreed

10 See Felipe Gómez Isa, Paramilitary Demobilization in Colombia: Between Peace and Justice, FRIDE Working Paper no. 57 (April 2008), http://www.tiempodelosderechos.es/ seminarioJusticia/ColombiaFRIDE.pdf. 11 See in this regard the notable initiative of the National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia, http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co. 12 See in this regard the relevant initiatives of the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá (Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación, http://centromemoria.gov.co) or the House of Memory Museum in Medellin (Museo Casa de la Memoria, http://www.museocasadelamemoria.gov.co), among other valuable initiatives.

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to begin continuous conversations to address peace, in what has come to be known as the “Havana peace talks.” The National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica) has explained in detail the challenge involved in carrying out public policies of memory within a legal framework and in the midst of the conflict, pointing out the difficulties on the part of institutional representatives to acknowledge the existence— and persistence—of an armed conflict. It is worth noting in this context the publication of the report, “Basta Ya” (Enough is Enough),13 by this public body, which, with rigorous documentation of systematic violations of human rights, has succeeded in placing memory and related claims in favor of truth, justice and reparation at the very center of the peace talks described above. Unlike Rwanda or Spain, the initiatives of transitional justice that countries like Colombia or the Democratic Republic of Congo might decide to implement in order to overcome recent violence must take into account the international principles and regulations contained in the International Criminal Court Statute (ICC) for abuses and international crimes perpetrated after 1 July 2002.14 Therefore, there is no doubt that in any conversation, transitional justice agreement or peace agreement in these countries, a balance should be reached between the themes of justice and peace (in addition to the measures of victim reparation and guarantees of non-repetition and institutional reform), considering that, according to international law and the ICC Statute, a general amnesty is not permitted for international crimes. This has been, and is a reality, in the process of Colombia.15

13 “¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad;” see Centro de Memoria Histórica, http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/micrositios/informeGeneral/descargas.html. 14 The Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia have suffered—and continue to suffer—serious abuses of human rights and international crimes postdating their ratifications to the International Criminal Court, on 11 April 2002 and 5 August 2002 respectively. 15 Colombia was the subject of preliminary investigations by the district attorney’s office of the ICC from 2004 (see “Informe sobre Investigaciones Preliminares de la Corte referido a Colombia,” International Criminal Court, 2 December 2014, https://www. icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/otp/OTP-Hon-Col-2014.PDF). Also recently, see the statement of ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, on the conclusion of the peace negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the FARC, International Criminal Court, 1 September 2016, https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=160901-otp-stat-colombia.

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Some Contributions on Transitional Justice Initiatives in Rwanda, Colombia, and Spain The outline of mechanisms of transitional justice presented above shows that from a judicial perspective, different mechanisms which are not necessarily connected have been used at the international level in Rwanda and/or the Democratic Republic of Congo.16 1. International courts We have briefly mentioned the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, an ad hoc international court, with jurisdiction to bring to trial international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Rwanda and/or adjacent countries from 1 January 1994 to 31 December 1994. The ICTR presents a brief quantitative assessment, from its creation to the present, of a total of 75 completed cases. Of these, 47 were convicted, 16 cases are pending appeal, and 12 have been acquitted by the Court. All of these processes refer to members of the defeated side of the war. Recently, Carla del Ponte, public prosecutor of the ICTR and the ICTY from 1999 to 2003, when assessing this international court, has acknowledged the effort to prosecute those responsible for international crimes, and has further admitted the lack of impartiality in the Court in noting that in war there are at least two sides who should be subject to investigation. She thus openly admitted that the winning side in the conflict and the members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR/EPR) responsible for the crimes were not subject to prosecution, in large part because of the pressures and blocks imposed by the Rwandan authorities and members of the FPR jointly with the United States administration and the office of the Attorney General (which ex officio holds sole responsibility for the investigation and public prosecution).17 On the other hand, there is the International Court 16 For

a more detailed analysis of the different processes of justice (ICTR, ICC, Universal Justice) and reconciliation in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, see Jordi Palou-Loverdos, Justice et paix inequitables: des risques? Compétence juridictionnelle, réalités judiciaires, vérité et résolution pacifique des conflits en Afrique Centrale (2010a), http:// docplayer.fr/78915244-Jordi-palou-loverdos-introduction-page-2-1-questions-sur-les-efforts-de-la-justice-internationale-page-3.html. 17 See the contributions of the public prosecutor of the Courts of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Carla del Ponte: La caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), and the video, Le drame rwandais merite une justice impartielle, recorded during

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of Justice of the ICC located in The Hague, with temporary jurisdiction only after 1 July 2002. The first case opened by this first permanent court was precisely the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo at the request of the same,18 with six different cases in process and two convictions to date, though we should bear in mind that on 23 May 2014 the last sentence—of 12 years—was pronounced against Germain Katanga.19 2. National courts Despite the benefits of investigating and bringing to trial all of the perpetrators of systematic and mass crimes from 1990 to the present (including, of course, those responsible for the genocide of 1994), the Rwandan courts have investigated crimes committed in Rwanda during the year 1994, having convicted more than 2,000 people for these acts, although the investigation of civil and military matters was clearly insufficient and biased, as previously noted, with access to justice being limited to certain people and criminal acts, and with few guarantees. Numerous international organizations have admitted their partiality and the breach of national and international standards of administration of justice in the Rwandan national courts.20 Various countries including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands have processed nearly 30 requests for extradition from Rwandan authorities and tribunals in relation to crimes connected to the official genocide of 1994. The Rwandan national courts have requested the extradition of Rwandan nationals investigated by the ICTR for the genocide of 1994. In some cases, extradition requests have the coloquium Le drame rwandais: la verité des acteurs, held at the Senate of France on 1 April 2014. YouTube, 10 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzSGKIF2rYs. 18 International Criminal Court, Press Release, 19 April 2004, “Prosecutor receives referral of the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” United Nations, Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, AFR/903-L/3067, 19 April 2004, https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=prosecutor+receives+referral+of+the+situation+in+the+democratic+republic+of+congo. 19 The conviction of Germain Katanga before the ICC is firm, and is pending the status of reparations for the victims, International Criminal Court, Reparation/Compensation stage, https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/ReparationCompensation.aspx. 20 See the report of Amnesty International, Rwanda: Justice in Jeopardy: The First Instance Trial of Victoire Ingabire, AFR 47/001/2013, 25 May 2013, https://www. amnesty.ch/de/laender/afrika/ruanda/dok/2013/faires-gerichtsverfahren-fuer-victoire-ingabire/rwanda-justice-in-jeopardy-the-first-instance-trial-of-victoire-ingabire-44-p.

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been granted21; however, both the ICTR22 and third countries, members of both the civil and common law traditions have denied extradition to Rwanda on numerous occasions under the legal arguments of a lack of legal and procedural guarantees in Rwandan law (the absence of judicial independence, risk of unfair trial, impossibility of exercising legal defense with minimum guarantees, systematic violations of the presumption of innocence, risk of perpetual imprisonment in isolation, and risk of inhuman or degrading treatment, among others). The Congolese Tribunals have not generally investigated possible crimes committed during the wars and other violent conflicts that occurred in this territory from 1996 to the present, considering that there are several requests from Congolese and international human rights groups to constitute the jurisdiction of national or mixed courts with the United Nations to investigate the most serious crimes committed by Congolese and/or Rwandans, among others. 3. Traditional courts The Rwandan government approved a specific law in relation to the adaptation of traditional courts known as Gacaca. Rwanda has used a traditional instrument of resolution of small domestic conflicts like Gacaca (family conflicts, land disputes, etcetera) for the investigation and prosecution by untrained personnel without sufficient guarantees, of one of the most technically complex international crimes, that is to say, the crime of genocide, which traditionally did not exist in Rwandan culture. Only one ethnic group has access to justice in relation to crimes connected solely with the year 1994, with no possibility of reporting or investigating crimes presumably committed by the victors of the war— the Rwandan Patriotic Army and/or the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

21 According to the ICTR trials have been transferred to the national jurisdictions of Rwanda and France by the Court in ten cases. 22 At least in three different cases the ICTR has denied Rwandan courts the extradition requested based on 11bis of the Statute of the Tribunal. See The Prosecutor v Yussuf Munyakazi, Case No. ICTR-97-36-R11bis, 28 May 2008; The Prosecutor v. Ildephonse Hategekimana, Case No. ICTR-00-55B-11bis, 19 June 2008; The Prosecutor v Gaspard Kanyarukiga, Case No. ICTR-2002-78-R11bis, 6 June 2008.

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4. Universal justice Some countries other than the places where the acts were committed have begun processes of investigation of international crimes in accordance with the principle of Universal Justice. Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Spain are some of the countries that have initiated processes of universal justice.23 In the majority of cases, these are processes that focus on prosecuting suspected perpetrators of the genocide of 1994, all belonging to the Hutu ethnic group. The Spanish courts are the only international court to investigate the victors of the various wars, both in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo.24 In summary, since the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda on 1 October 1990 and neighboring Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1996 and 1998, there have been approximately seven million fatalities in both countries, mainly Rwandans and Congolese, caused directly or indirectly by the conflicts of war; Western victims should also be included in this number, among them eleven Spanish victims. This conflict is not only the history of a power struggle among extremist and criminal elements but also, and especially, a history of plunder and fighting for control of the exploitation of the rich natural resources of the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an enterprise that included the participation of not only local organizations, but many large western multinational corporations,25 primarily from the United States, Canada and Europe. A large part of this human and ecological drama has been deliberately concealed and, often, strategically manipulated. Reference is made here to an initiative for truth and justice, based on the presentation of a 23 See

judicial resolutions of third countries other than Rwanda in application of the principle of universal justice: conviction of Pascal Simbikangwa to 25 years in prison by the Criminal Court of Paris (France) for genocide and complicity in crimes against humanity, sentence dated 17 March 2004, as well as the conviction of Desiré Munyaneza, sentence dated 7 May 2004, from the Court of Appeal in Quebec (Canada); respectively, “Pascal Simbikangwa convicted of genocide and complicity in crimes against humanity,” FIDH, 14/03/2014,  http://www.fidh.org/en/africa/rwanda/14932-pascal-simbikangwa-convicted-of-genocide-and-complicity-in-crimes-against;http://www.jugements.qc.ca/php/ ti.php?format =doa&doc=26F0BA41E2F6193AEBC9B27DB316B731. 24 For information on this act of justice, VeritasRwandaForum, http://www.veritasrwandaforum.org/dosier/resol_auto_esp_06022008.pdf. 25 See Jordi Palou-Loverdos (November 2010b), “International Justice, Plunder in War, Human Rights and Multinationals,” Barcelona: Office for the Promotion of Peace and Human Rights of the Government of Catalonia. http://www.gencat.cat/governacio/ pub/sum/dgrip/MPDH_16_eng.pdf.

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criminal complaint against the main perpetrators of the aforementioned crimes. This initiative has prioritized two main points: focusing on empathy for the victims and their families (offering them acknowledgment and empowerment) and working with the experience of “reformed criminals,” both Tutsis and Hutus. The Spanish judge concluded the first phase of investigation, deciding in 2008 to issue a resolution ordering international arrest warrants against 40 people who are—or have been—part of the political-military leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA/ FPR), which since July 1994 has held power in Rwanda, charging them with crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, among others.26 In addition to legal action, and on the initiative of the victims themselves, a process of dialogue that aims to be highly inclusive has been underway since 2004. Conscious of the fact that the pathway to justice constituted an important, but at the same time insufficient, step in the transformation of the Rwandan conflict, the prevention of new violent episodes and overcoming the tragedy experienced over the last two decades, prominent members of Rwandan civil society together with Rwandan victims (some of whom participated in the process of universal justice) proposed a dialogue from exile. This initiative has also prioritized two main points: on the one hand, working with the empathy of sharing; on the other, channelling pain toward a common space and the experience of a shared vision of the future. During these years of legal process, over 150 Rwandan leaders have participated, most notably two ex-Prime Ministers, several ex-ministers, ex-ambassadors, ex-military figures, political leaders, and representatives of civil society, of organizations for victims, of human rights and investigations for peace and of the economic world. They visualize themselves with potential in the future for the celebration of an Inter-Rwandan dialogue which might be considered a valid basis on which to build a new Rwanda. It is widely accepted by all the political, ethnic, social, and economic groups in Rwanda, and by the international community.27 26 For detailed information on facts, crimes investigated and main perpetrators, see “Los tribunales españoles dictan 40 órdenes de arresto internacional contra máximos responsables de la cupula político-militar de Rwanda,” Forum Internacional para la Verdad y la Justicia en el África de los Grandes Lagos, press release, http://www.veritasrwandaforum. org/material/press_release_080208_eng.pdf. 27 See the documents of the Resolutions and Recommendations of the different editions of the Intra-Rwandan Dialogue (IRD 2004–2010), Dialogue, VeritasRwandaForum, http://www.veritasrwandaforum.org/dosier/resol_auto_esp_06022008.pdf.

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The armed conflict of Colombia also presents considerable challenges in the areas of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. Some of these have been noted briefly in this chapter. The importance of the timeframe of reference is clear (as in the case of Rwanda): the date considered to be the start of the violent conflict could be decisive, as well as, in the case of judicial investigations or of the peace talks in Havana, what was considered the end point. It is not the same to consider that the conflict began at the end of the 1940s, or the 1950s or 1960s, since this will determine the origin, causes and participants, among other aspects.28 Not only is the diagnosis of the past decisive, but also the diverse methods of pharmakon that could be agreed upon to face the facts of the past. In Colombia, a complex system to confront a violent past that lasted fifty-two years was recently agreed, and is still being implemented. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) occurred after a failed military coup, with important international connections in many senses. The War caused more than half a million fatalities, hundreds of thousands of wounded, immense material damage to infrastructure and public and private property, more than 300,000 exiles (from Europe to Russia and to many countries on the American continent), more than 100,000 disappeared, thousands of victims in French concentration camps and in Nazi concentration and extermination camps, an implacable internal repression during a long military dictatorship, with extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, large-scale torture, hundreds of prisons and internment camps, and forced labor. The impact of this period and its historical moment conditioned in a fundamental way the transition to democracy of the 1970s.29 There are numerous elements to consider but we will limit ourselves here to an expert view from outside the country, that given by the independent UN Rapporteur after an official visit to Spain at the end of

28 Guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC), the Camilista Union—National Liberation Army (Unión Camilista—Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or UC-ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, or EPL), or the public forces of the army and/or Colombian police forces, either directly or through paramilitary groups, among others. 29 See Memorial Democràtic, Catalunya en transició 1971–1980 (Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic, 2013).

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January 2014.30 In his final report, Pablo de Greiff emphasized that with regard to Spain the greatest shortcomings were found precisely in the concepts of truth and justice, inviting Spain and its institutions to promote initiatives specific to these two points: 1. Amnesty, access to justice and collaboration of Spanish law with judicial procedures abroad 31 The Rapporteur suggests depriving the Amnesty Law of legal effect in the context of a democracy that it sees as consolidated.32 The Rapporteur considers it important to allow victims to have access to justice, both on a domestic level and in judicial proceedings initiated in

30 See Pablo de Greiff, Observaciones preliminares del Relator Especial para la promoción de la verdad, la justicia, la reparación y las garantías de no repetición, Pablo de Greiff, al concluir su visita oficial a España, 3 February 2014, OHCHR, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14216. 31 In this aspect, Spain can offer no better an example than Rwanda: although the crimes were committed within the framework of a war that took place between 1936 and 1939 and that exceeds the category of domestic conflict, and although it was a dictatorial regime that continued to commit crimes systematically in the years following the military victory (extrajudicial executions and judicial executions without guarantees, torture, forced disappearances, among others), the Spanish national courts have not opened an investigation into these crimes. Some years ago the Spanish Supreme Court closed all possibility of investigating these crimes in establishing a mantle of impunity, protected among other reasons, by the validity of the 1977 Amnesty legislation, approved during the period of transition to democracy. 32 The Spanish amnesty laws of the 1970s would not be acceptable today according to international standards, but perhaps they made some sense at the end of the dictatorship with an aim to move toward a new democratic system: perhaps the pharmakon of the 1970s is neither valid nor effective at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is important to point out that although the Spanish courts were pioneers in the application of the principle of universal justice in relation to the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, and that thanks to these initiatives Argentina decided to abolish its amnesty laws, giving cause for the opening of more than 200 trials by the Argentine courts, in Spain not only has justice been blocked, but it does not appear that the Amnesty Law will be revised. The initiative of universal justice initiated by Spanish and Argentinian victims before the Argentine courts faces innumerable government and diplomatic obstacles.

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third countries.33 These proceedings should have all judicial guarantees and respect the rights of victims and perpetrators. 2. Historical memory and truth The Rapporteur suggests re-establishing and increasing the resources at all levels, by means of the use of different practicable mechanisms of 33 In 2010, a criminal complaint was put before the Argentine courts in application of the principle of universal justice and the rulings of international law in relation to crimes of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship (1936–1977). This complaint, filed on 14 April 2010, was processed as no. 4591-10 before the National Court in Federal Criminal and Correctional Matters No. 1 in Buenos Aires (Republic of Argentina). On 18 September 2013 the court issued an international arrest warrant for the purpose of extradition against Celso Galvás, Jesus Muñecas, Ignacio Giralte, and Juan Antonio González Pacheco, about whom there are rational indications of criminality for their alleged participation in crimes of torture allegedly committed during the Franco dictatorship (see judicial resolución, Coordinadora estatal de apoyo a la Querella Argentina contra crímenes del franquismo, 18 September 2013, http://www.ceaqua.org/resolucion-ordenes-de-detencion-contra-4-torturadores/). On 25 April 2014, the Spanish National Court (Section 3, Criminal) passed a decree denying the requested extradition for reasons of the prescription of the crime. After numerous failed attempts to receive a statement from Spanish victims, the Argentine Magistrate travelled to Spain to take the statements of victims who were elderly or unable to travel. On 29 May 2014, two victims of repression during the dictatorship, Teresa Álvarez Alonso (93) and Faustina Romeral Cervantes (90) declared before this judge and the Spanish Magistrate, and emphasized that they felt partially compensated for having been heard in the courts. The Argentine judge issued an arrest warrant and requested the extradition of 19 people investigated for crimes against humanity: the Spanish government denied on 13 March 2015 the extradition of the accused, arguing that Spain has jurisdiction to prosecute Spanish citizens, that the acts investigated were prescribed and that at the time they were not a crime. Faced with this negative response from the government, the Argentine judge asked that the Spanish judges themselves receive the statement, see “Martin Villa y otros 18 franquistas declararan es España por los crímenes de la dictadura,” El Periódico de Catalunya, 27 September 2016. It is worth noting that very recently, on 30 September 2016, the Attorney General, Consuelo Madrigal, issued a document addressed to all district attorneys in Spain, giving precise instructions before multiple international investigation commissions established by the Argentine court in relation to the investigation of international crimes allegedly perpetrated during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship: in summary, the non-jurisdiction of the Argentine courts and the jurisdiction of the Spanish courts is confirmed, accompanied by an interpretative restrictive criterion (refutable) that considers these criminal acts unprosecutable and covered by the Amnesty Law, inviting the district attorneys to oppose the practice of any international investigation commission, (document ST412/2016A of the Office of the Attorney General, 20 September 2016); according to documents that this author has had access to, in direct application of the criteria of this document the Attorney General’s Office presented a notice of opposition before Investigative Court No. 4 in Oviedo in relation to International Legal Aid No. 471/2016 issued by the Argentine court, literally repeating the arguments and instructions contained in Document ST412/2016ª (opposition dated 4 October 2016).

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historical memory, such as memorials,34 dignification,35 and public apologies, among others. He suggests that the Law of Historical Memory be revised,36 inviting improvement of the channelling of demands and communication between victims, associations and public authorities.

34 Although, as will be seen, both Spain and Catalonia adopted some reparative measures for victims of the Civil War and/or the Franco dictatorship in the eighties, it was not until 2007 that the first general guidelines on memory were adopted: the Parliament of Catalonia was the first legislative body to adapt a law that created a stable institution dedicated to developing public policies on memory (Ley 13/2007, 31 October, creation of Democratic Memory, or Memorial Democràtic: Boletín Oficial del Estado, 284, 27 November 2007, 48487-91). 35 In the last few years, the Generalitat in Catalonia has initiated various acts of dignification of common graves, mainly inside cemeteries. Democratic Memory is part of the international network of Memory Sites, being a member of the organization Sites of Conscience, International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, http://www.sitesofconscience.org/. 36 After the Catalonian law mentioned above, Law 52/2007, of 26 December 2007 was approved, which recognizes and increases rights and establishes measures in favor of those who suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and the dictatorship. It is popularly known as the Law of Historical Memory: Boletín Oficial del Estado, 310, 27 December 2007, 53410-16. Unlike in Colombia, a permanent, state-level public institution that develops public policies on memory was not created and still does not exist today: many victims, families of victims, and national and/or regional memory organizations have been, and continue to be, critical of the wording of the law and its even more limited practical application. Although some acknowledgment of symbolic reparation has been expressed through the issuing of certificates by the Ministry of Justice, or the awarding of certain public subsidies for non-governmental organizations focused on the exhumation of human remains in common graves, many aspects are publicly contested: the recent abolition of the political-administrative unit of reference, the privatized model of the exhumation of bodies based on subsidies without leadership and public state criteria, the non-striking-down of military, civil and administrative trials (among them the trial of Lluis Companys, President of the government of Catalonia, the only democratically elected president of Europe who was executed by fascism after a summary trial and illegal extradition carried out by the French authorities after his arrest in France by the Gestapo), the absence of measures for the reparation of patrimony or public regret on the part of the State, the absence of a redefinition of the memorial of the Valley of the Fallen as an example of a partial, non-inclusive memorial built using forced labor on the orders of dictator Franco, the partial return of confiscated documents and the absence of any restitution of money and property seized from the defeated, etcetera. Andalusia approved in 2017 the Proyecto de Ley de Memoria Histórica y Democrática de Andalucía, which is far more advanced than the national law: Boletín Oficial Paramento de Andalucía, 420, 10 March 2017.

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3. Reparation and restitution Special attention should be given to material and symbolic reparation37 to the victims of violations of human rights who have not received legal redress, especially women. There is a need for the restitution of property, goods and public and private files that were requisitioned.38 The need for a state policy on files, which should be open to historical academic and judicial investigation, is pointed out, with the possibility of public access in accordance with international standards.39

37 In 2015 an act of symbolic reparation was held for the first time at the highest institutional level in Catalonia, proclaiming National Victims Day: the act was presided over by the President of the Catalan Generalitat (accompanied by the Director of Democratic Memory at the time, who endorses this document) in the Presidential Palace in the presence of victims, families of the victims, institutional representatives, representatives of memorialist organizations and of victims. Recently the Catalan Generalitat has approved a government agreement through which a permanent “National Day in Memory of the Victims of the Civil War and the Victims of the Franco Dictatorship” was established. See the press release, “El Govern declara el 15 d’octubre de cada any com a ‘Dia Nacional en memòria de les víctimes de la Guerra Civil i de la repressió franquista’,” 11 October 2016, Govern.cat, http://memoria.gencat.cat/ca/que-fem/reconeixement-victimes/ dia-nacional-en-memoria-de-les-victimes-de-la-guerra-civil-i-de-la-repressio-franquista/. 38 This partial restitution and reparation is currently pending, since the public and private files and documents seized by Francoist troops at the time of the military occupation and at the end of war served subsequently during the dictatorship in the systematic repression against the adversaries (extrajudicial or judicial executions without proper guarantees, military tribunals, forced labor, prison, torture, etc.). For more on the Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española (Salamanca), see Chapter 3 by Espinosa Romero and Chapter 4 by Melgar Camarzana. 39 Although the Rapporteur acknowledges the existence of the files, mentioning particularly the Salamanca Archive, he points out the limitations in accessing them and complaints thereof; Pablo de Greiff, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence,” United Nations General Assembly, A/HRC/27/56, distributed 27 August 2014, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/ ENACARegion/Pages/ESIndex.aspx. There is a great contrast between the limited public access of various state files (state police files, files of the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, files of the Government Delegations) and broad public access to the archives of Catalonia: Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (130,000 records of common and political prisoners, 18,000 records of exiled persons, scanned documents of 99,654 military judicial proceedings from 1939 to 1980, 1,439 boxes of textual documentation returned from the Archives of Salamanca), 38 regional archives, 137 municipal archives and 4 archives from council offices, that serve as the framework for truth and justice indicated by the UN.

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4. Repeal of sentences The Rapporteur highlights the importance of the repeal of sentences of an ideological nature from all the tribunals created during the Civil War and the Franco Regime, an aspect that to this day has not been resolved either legally or in terms of jurisprudence.40 5. Exhumations and missing persons The Rapporteur points out the advantage of public institutional leadership with sufficient resources for the search for missing persons and identification of human remains.41 40 State Law 2007 of Historical Memory declares the illegitimacy of legal and administrative sentences, but does not fully strike them down and, therefore, complete annulment of the legal effect is pending. Dating to before the approval of the State Law, the Parliament of Catalonia has repeatedly requested the striking down of these processes and their rulings, see “Resolució 237/X del Parlament de Catalunya, sobre la declaració de nul·litat de ple dret del judici al president Lluís Companys i dels altres procediments que van comportar la condemna a mort de milers de ciutadans,” Bulletí Oficial del Parlament de Catalunya, 119, 15 July 2013. For a detailed study of the initiatives of the Parliament of Catalonia and the Government of Catalonia, see Oriol Dueñas and Jordi Palou-Loverdos, “The Annulment of the trial Against President Companys: A Question of Justice,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Histórics, 27 (2016), 411–37. In October 2016, a legislative initiative was presented in the Parliament of Catalonia aimed at the annulment of the sentences of summary trials of the dictatorship, appealing to the jurisdiction of the courts of Catalonia in application of the legislation of the Republican Generalitat, which was repealed by the insurgents during the Civil War. 41 The Spanish Ministry of Justice has published a public map of graves, Ministerio de Justica (http://mapadefosas.mjusticia.es/exovi_externo/CargarInformacion.htm), with numerous interventions still pending in matters of the identification of the remains of missing persons as well as the exhumation of remains in graves that have been identified. In Catalonia, under the framework of Law 10/2009, of 30 June 2009, on the location and identification of people who disappeared during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, and the dignification of common graves, two basic types of common graves from the Civil War are envisaged: (a) the large dignified ossuaries of cemeteries (historically documented and, when possible, with lists of people on plaques or other elements of dignification); and (b) the graves of the front—with soldiers from one army and/or the other—located in places of combat and, most prominently, in the area of the Battle of the Ebro. This specific case, which differs from that of other places in Spain, helps us to understand why in Catalonia the main public act in terms of common graves consists of the actions of dignification and signage, notwithstanding exhumations carried out as a result of the chance discovery of the remains of soldiers. There is still a long way to go on a public level in this matter. For more on gravesites and exhumations, see Chapter 6 by Ribeiro de Menezes and Chapter 8 by Perla Kurtz.

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It is evident that 80 years after the start of the war, and more than forty years after the death of General Francisco Franco, which accelerated the transition to democracy, Spain still has significant challenges to confront in relation to the topics discussed, although it is important to appreciate the significant structural and institutional transformations that followed the transition process.

Final Agreement to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace: The Case of Colombia After more than four years of dialogue, meetings, conversations, negotiations and partial agreements, on 24 August 2016, it was announced that a global agreement had been reached by representatives of the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). One month later, on 26 September 2016, a Peace Agreement was solemnly signed in Cartagena de Índias, before 250 victims from a variety of locations in Colombia and 2,500 national and international guests, most notably various presidents of countries and the Secretary General of the United Nations himself.42 Taking into account that the peace talks aimed to bring an end to more than five decades of armed conflict without legal obligation, the President of Colombia called a referendum in which all Colombians, including exiles, could vote. He sought popular legitimation for the Peace Agreement. The participation of Colombian citizens in this referendum was low, resulting in a negative outcome by a small margin,43 even though the majority of voters in the most victimized territories— those most affected by systematic violence, and therefore, potentially more concerned that there not be impunity—voted in favor of the agreement. 42 The solemn signing of this Peace Agreement enjoyed extensive global media coverage: the President of Colombia and the representative of FARC signed it while noting, “What we sign today is a declaration from the Colombian people before the world that we are tired of war […] that we don’t accept violence as the means of defending ideas.” They also declared, “Let no one doubt that we will now pursue politics without weapons,” publicly apologizing to the victims. See “Colombia Signs Peace Agreement With FARC after 5 Decades of War,” New York Times, 26 September 2016. 43 See “Colombia Referendum: Voters Reject Peace Deal with Farc Guerrillas,” Guardian, 2 October 2016. It is worth noting that 62% of Colombian voters abstained. See Jordi Palou-Loverdos, “Colombia: elogio del diálogo,” Diari ARA, 3 October 2016.

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The vote against the referendum resulted in the inclusion in further negotiations of a number of political and civic representatives who had rejected the Peace Agreement (based on certain conditions of amnesty,44 exclusions of criminal responsibility for crimes, and the political participation of ex-combatants), with the aim of incorporating proposals and improving some of the controversial points of the extensive text of the Agreement. After several weeks of negotiation, focusing on relevant aspects of 54 of the 57 central themes of the original agreement, the “Final Agreement to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace” was signed in Bogotá before legislators and ambassadors on 24 November 2016.45 The progress of this Final Agreement should be followed closely until its political formalization and implementation, bearing in mind at the time of writing the Peace Agreement has been approved and formally ratified by the Colombian Congress.46 The signatories to the Peace Agreement and Colombian citizens know that the true challenge lies in the implementation of this agreement, which begins now, as well as in finalizing exploratory processes leading to peace agreements with other armed groups (such as the National Liberation Army), in full awareness of the fact that the document signed does not constitute peace but rather a pathway to ending the armed conflict and generating new conditions for coexistence and a stable peace. It is not possible to analyze here, even briefly, a complex 310-page Peace Agreement that creates an elaborate system of jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional mechanisms for transitional justice. Along the lines of what has been explained so far, only some mechanisms will be mentioned:

44 It is important to remember the numerous resolutions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights establishing limits to impunity and to the Amnesty Laws that extended to several countries of Latin America: see the case of Barrios Altos vs. Peru, sentence dated 7 September 2012, Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, http://www.corteidh. or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/Seriec_75_esp.pdf. 45 Alto Comisión Para la Paz, “Acuerdo final para la terminación del conflicto y la construcción de una paz estable y duradera,” 24 November 2016, http://www.altocomisionadoparalapaz.gov.co/procesos-y-conversaciones/Documentos%20compartidos/24-11-2016NuevoAcuerdoFinal.pdf. 46 See in this regard, “Colombia’s Congress Approves Peace Accord With FARC,” New York Times, 30 November 2016.

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1. Clarification of the truth, and policies and initiatives of memory We have already pointed out the important political courage involved in carrying out initiatives of memory in the midst of the violent conflict, both from the perspective of the victims and communities affected, and public initiatives at a national, regional or local level. In addition, the final Agreement includes the creation of a Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition.47 National, regional and local Colombian institutions now face the challenge of using their knowledge and experience to implement the Peace Agreement in the different territories in an intelligent manner, while fulfilling their respective institutional and civic missions.48 2. International courts As indicated, unlike Spain or Rwanda but coinciding with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the situation of Colombia falls under the spectrum of the International Criminal Court. It has been pointed out that Colombia has been part of the ICC since 2012. The official information of the ICC states that Colombia is one of 14 instances in the world which are subject to preliminary examinations by the District Attorney’s office of the International Criminal Court.49 It is evident that the possible intervention of the ICC has determined and continues to determine the management of the violent conflict, and will probably also determine the management of the post-conflict. In the context of these preliminary examinations, civil servants from the District Attorney’s office have had various engagements with Colombian institutional representatives within the framework of their jurisdiction. Regardless of the great impact on the population of the outbreak of violent conflict in the middle of the last century, since 2002 there have been numerous possible crimes relevant to the work of the ICC, within the framework of the three major 47 Alto

Comisión Para la Paz, “Acuerdo final,” pp. 131ff. final Peace Agreement makes explicit the commitment of the Colombian government with regard to memory and symbolic reparation: “strengthening of the organizational processes and of the building of historical memory for reconciliation” (195). 49 The District Attorney’s office of the ICC conducts preliminary examinations in relation to the following countries, including Colombia: Afghanistan, Burundi, Colombia, Gabon, Guinea, Iraq/UK, Nigeria, Palestine, Central African Republic, Ukraine, Comoros and Cambodia, International Criminal Court, https://www.icc-cpi.int/pages/preliminary-examinations.aspx. 48 The

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crimes included under the jurisdiction of the Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes). These include assassinations; kidnappings and other serious forms of false imprisonment; forced disappearances; forced recruitment of minors; forced relocation of persons; torture and/ or systematic violations on the part of guerrillas and/or paramilitaries. There are also assassinations such as so-called “false positives” (assassinations of civilians, passing them off as guerrillas killed in combat during the armed conflict), forced disappearances, and torture on the part of the Colombian army, other Colombian public forces, or other groups. Even this partial reality of the violent conflict is complex, taking into account the sensitive aspect of previous amnesties: in the case of Colombia, the content of the peace talks in Havana is especially delicate, as are the possible agreements in matters of amnesty in relation to incidents that could be described as international war crimes or crimes against humanity from 2002 to the present. The district attorney of the ICC has made official declarations regarding the Peace Agreement reached, taking into account crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court which came under the spotlight of Preliminary Investigations by the district attorney’s office.50 3. Colombian national courts The final Peace Agreement is truly ambitious as regards national justice, agreeing to create new courts and special national jurisdictions that seek to end impunity, establish criminal responsibility and carry out effective reparation. This is a crucial point of the Peace Agreement since some opponents of its endorsement consider that the reduced sentences and the spaces of impunity created where former combatants will live could call into question the entire system of the agreement. Supporters of the Agreement, for their part, claim that it is the best way to respond systemically and comprehensively to over 50 years of criminal acts committed across an extensive territory and affecting several generations of Colombians. It is evident that a viable justice system, however special, cannot encompass all criminal situations. We must bear in mind the fact

50 See “Statement of ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, on the conclusion of the peace negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples’ Army,” 1 September 2016, https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item. aspx?name=160901-otp-stat-colombia.

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that many situations of direct and indirect responsibility51 for incitement should be the subject precisely of non-jurisdictional mechanisms, such as those that are part of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition. It is worth mentioning the agreement to create a “Special Jurisdiction for Peace,” which should be brought to Congress for the purpose of approving the appropriate constitutional and legal modifications and which aims to establish a special process for the acknowledgment of responsibility for or participation in criminal acts, both on the part of the FARC, the government armed forces and police.52 No doubt, these new bodies and national agencies of justice, some of which will require further legislation, represent a great challenge for the implementation of the Peace Agreement, and will serve to offer verifiable degrees of satisfaction for participants, victims, perpetrators and other collaborators of formal justice, as well as researchers and monitors.

51 Many critics of the Peace Agreement protest the possible impunity of the perpetrators, who hide behind various titles, such as financiers of criminal activities, politicians and ex-politicians involved in criminal activities or in the production of crimes with state or parastate bodies, instigators, as well as persons in charge of military companies and private security companies. These last are of particular relevance: the demobilization of armed forces and their reintegration into civil life always presents a challenge, but in Colombia there is an enormous risk that members of the military and paramilitary join private military and/or security companies, both national and multinational, many of which provide violent and cheap labor to various armed conflicts in the world, such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others. See studies including specific data about this dynamic of privatization of wars: Jordi Palou-Loverdos and Leticia Armendariz, “The Privatisation of Warfare, Violence and Private Military and Security Companies,” NOVACT (November 2011), https://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/The-privatization-of-warfare. pdf. See also the special investigation in relation to Colombia: Leticia Armendariz and Felip Daza, “The Invisible Force: A Comparative Study of the Use of Private Military and Security Companies in Iraq, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Colombia—Lessons for International Regulation,” NOVACT (July 2016), http://novact.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/07/NOVACT_THE_INVISIBLE_FORCE_2016.pdf. It is also important to keep in mind the immense challenge of regulating the activities of multinational companies that extract natural resources: in Colombia this challenge is significant, given the agreements for the allocation of land among agrarian communities and, in contrast, the granting of mining concessions to multinationals to mine the subsoil of areas that are subject to land distribution. 52 See

Section 45, page 152 of the Final Agreement.

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Final Reflections It is the shared challenge facing individuals, groups, organizations, governments and diverse power structures, as well as of nations to implement the range of transitional mechanisms appropriate to a particular situation of armed conflict, violence, or of abuse of human rights in the past with a view to taking steps toward a culture of peace which allows emerging and/or latent tensions to be channelled in a non-violent way, thus generating conditions of harmony that drive profound changes to unjust, unequal and/or violent systems. Addressing the cases of Rwanda/Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, and Spain allows us to observe diverse dynamics and strategies, and leads us to conclude once again that there is no universally applicable model for the management of postwar and/or post-dictatorship situations. Thus, each situation, each country, each nation must identify the most appropriate channels and mechanisms that allow it, from a combination of jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional perspectives, to confront the abuses of the past in a way that serves to transform the situation, without forgetfulness or resentment but with clarity, honesty, justice, memory and reparation, leading toward new horizons that are equitable, democratic and preserve human rights in a sustainable way—horizons desired by the people, institutions, and nations affected, for the good of present and future generations.

Bibliography Alto Comisión Para la Paz. “Acuerdo final para la terminación del conflicto y la construcción de una paz estable y duradera,” 24 November 2016, http://www.altocomisionadoparalapaz.gov.co/procesos-y-conversaciones/ Documentos%20compartidos/24-11-2016NuevoAcuerdoFinal.pdf. Amnesty International. Rwanda: Justice in Jeopardy: The First Instance Trial of Victoire Ingabire, 25 May 2013, https://www.amnesty.ch/de/laender/ afrika/ruanda/dok/2013/faires-gerichtsverfahren-fuer-victoire-ingabire/ rwanda-justice-in-jeopardy-the-first-instance-trial-of-victoire-ingabire-44-p. Armendariz, Leticia, and Felip Daza. “The Invisible Force: A Comparative Study of the Use of Private Military and Security Companies in Iraq, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Colombia—Lessons for International Regulation.” NOVACT, July 2016, http://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ NOVACT_THE_INVISIBLE_FORCE_2016.pdf. “¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad,” http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/micrositios/informeGeneral/descargas.html.

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Bolaños de Miguel, Aitor, and Marisa González de Oleaga. “Teoría y práctica de la Historiografía Moderna.” Revista de Libros September 2016. “Colombia’s Congress Approves Peace Accord With FARC.” New York Times, 30 November 2016. “Colombia Referendum: Voters Reject Peace Deal with Farc Guerrillas.” Guardian, 2 October 2016. “Colombia Signs Peace Agreement with FARC after 5 Decades of War.” New York Times, 26 September 2016. Dueñas, Oriol, and Jordi Palou-Loverdos. “The Annulment of the Trial against President Companys: A Question of Justice.” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Histórics 27 (2016), 411–37. “El Govern declara el 15 d’octubre de cada any com a ‘Dia Nacional en memòria de les víctimes de la Guerra Civil i de la repressió franquista’,” http://memoria.gencat.cat/ca/que-fem/reconeixement-victimes/dia-nacional-en-memoria-de-les-victimes-de-la-guerra-civil-i-de-la-repressio-franquista/. Gómez Isa, Felipe. Paramilitary Demobilization in Colombia: Between Peace and Justice. FRIDE Working Paper no. 57, April 2008, http://www.fride.org/ download/WP57_Colombia_Desmili_ENG_abr08.pdf. Greiff, Pablo de. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-recurrence, 9 August 2012, https:// www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/ENACARegion/Pages/ESIndex.aspx. ———. Observaciones preliminares del Relator Especial para la promoción de la verdad, la justicia, la reparación y las garantías de no repetición, Pablo de Greiff, al concluir su visita oficial a España, 3 February 2014, http://www. ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14216. ———. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-recurrence, 22 July 2014, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/090/52/pdf/G1409052. pdf?OpenElement. “Informe sobre Investigaciones Preliminares de la Corte referido a Colombia,” https://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/otp/OTP-Hon-Col-2014.PDF. International Criminal Court, Press Release, 19 April 2004. “Prosecutor receives referral of the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” https://www. icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=prosecutor+receives+referral+of+the+situation+in+the+democratic+republic+of+congo. Ley 13/2007. Boletín Oficial del Estado, 284, 27 November 2007, 48487–91. Ley 52/2007. Boletín Oficial del Estado, 310, 27 December 2007, 53410–16. “Los tribunales españoles dictan 40 órdenes de arresto internacional contra máximos responsables de la cupula político-militar de Rwanda.” Press Release, http://www.veritasrwandaforum.org/material/press_release_080208_eng.pdf. “Martin Villa y otros 18 franquistas declararan es España por los crímenes de la dictadura.” El Periódico de Catalunya, 27 September 2016.

266  J. PALOU-LOVERDOS Memorial Democràtic. Catalunya en transició 1971–1980. Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic, 2013. Palou-Loverdos, Jordi. Justice et paix inequitables: des risques? Compétence juridictionnelle, réalités judiciaires, vérité et résolution pacifique des conflits en Afrique Centrale (2010a), http://docplayer.fr/78915244-Jordi-palou-loverdos-introduction-page-2-1-questions-sur-les-efforts-de-la-justice-internationale-page-3.html. ———. International Justice, Plunder in War, Human Rights and Multinationals. Barcelona: Office for the Promotion of Peace and Human Rights of the Government of Catalonia, 2010b, http://www.gencat.cat/governacio/pub/sum/dgrip/MPDH_16_eng.pdf. ———. “Colombia: elogio del diálogo.” Diari ARA, 3 October 2016. Palou-Loverdos, Jordi, and Leticia Armendariz. “The Privatisation of Warfare, Violence and Private Military and Security Companies.” NOVACT, November 2011, http://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ NOVACT_THE_INVISIBLE_FORCE_2016.pdf. Ponte, Carla del. La caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008. Proyecto de Ley de Memoria Histórica y Democrática de Andalucía. Boletín Oficial Paramento de Andalucía, 420, 10 March 2017. Remarks by Dr. Théogène Rudasingwa, The Rwandan, 1 April 2014. “Resolució 237/X del Parlament de Catalunya, sobre la declaració de nul·litat de ple dret del judici al president Lluís Companys i dels altres procediments que van comportar la condemna a mort de milers de ciutadans,” Bulletí Oficial del Parlament de Catalunya, 119, 15 July 2013. “Statement of ICC Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, on the Conclusion of the Peace Negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples’ Army,” 1 September 2016, https:// www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=160901-otp-stat-colombia. United Nations Secretary General. The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies, 23 August 2004. United Nations Security Council, Statute of the ICTR, 8 November 1994, http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/ictr_EF.pdf.

Final Reflections: The Way Forward

Spain remains a country with too many sites without memory of its recent violent past, as well as too many memories without a place in which to be firmly grounded and usefully transmitted to society. Spain, in sum, has a deficit of Public History even as there is a wider consensus in the West that as citizens of a democratic society, educators, and historians in particular, have the moral obligation to discover the truth about the past and publicize it. In recent years there were numerous efforts to bridge this gap between sites and memory. Many commemorative plaques have been put up; hundreds of mass graves and thousands of corpses have been identified and many exhumed; and numerous small museums and interpretative centers have been created. Since 2011, however, the role of the state, both nationally and in the autonomous communities, and of civil society has been drastically reduced. The overall result has been disappointing. To put it crudely, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The most glaring example of this situation is the Valley of the Fallen, which does not even have an official guidebook to help visitors interpret the monument. We, the editors of this book, advocate turning the Valley of the Fallen into a genuine site of Public History and inclusive collective memory. This would mean creating a museum and a research center devoted to studying Spain’s political violence and understanding it as part of European and global violence of the twentieth and twenty-first © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9

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268  Final Reflections: The Way Forward

centuries. We also argue for the importance of Digital Humanities in this reinvigorated Public History. Specifically, we advocate the creation of a Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War. This online museum would help bring together the resources of the various institutions, museums, databases, etc., and make them accessible to a variety of publics, from the casual historical tourist to serious scholars, across Spain and around the world. It would also help address the pedagogical needs of primary and secondary schools. This virtual museum could use and connect existing resources available at major institutions such as the Historical Memory Records Center (Salamanca), Democratic Memory (Barcelona), as well as smaller museums and the output of research groups. We conceive museums not as archives of the excellent, the exotic or the temporarily distant, but as places that tell the story behind ordinary objects, the lives of marginalized populations, and the experience of the victims of history or the episodes of the most recent past. This is the type of institution that Spain lacks: an institution aimed at telling the history of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath to the broadest possible public. It is not simply museums that are needed, then, but public museums with a critical and pedagogic mission. They have to go beyond ethnographic descriptions, anecdotes, and military artifacts and explain the history of the war in all its ramifications (diplomatic, political, economic, and social) and with all its uncomfortable complexity. We are aware such a museum must attend to a plurality of memories that moves beyond established binaries. If this is not done, Spain risks rsemaining stranded in the deep physical and metaphorical trenches of the Civil War. At the same time, we believe that the museum must also pay honest and proper tribute to the ungrievable dead who have been shamefully left in pits, ditches and mass graves for far too long. Digital History must play a crucial role in such project. Digital History is a transformative discipline. The large corpus of digital and social media pertaining to the recovery of historical memory available on the web demonstrates how present-day Spaniards continue to struggle with events stemming from the Francoist dictatorship more than forty years after its end. Furthermore, website creation has become a platform making possible the public search for and recovery of victims from the War and postwar period. For example, the Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War could make available to the public projects such as Virtual Cartographies which aims to visualize data collected from the Spanish Ministry of Justice that details the over 2600 mass grave found throughout the Spanish territories, and has a rich collection of multimedia elements directly related to specific mass graves sites.

Final Reflections: The Way Forward

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This type of digital project, which brings together the digitized past and the emerging digital future, requires the engagement of historians, archivists and other memory researchers as much as digital specialists. It will push traditional boundaries between “history” and “cultural memory,” and force us to study the negotiation of difference in hybrid digital/non-digital environments. Sustainability is a crucial part of this, and here we have to ask who is best placed to sustain the structures created by these new architectures of participation, and how memory (and forgetting) are affected as a result. Last, but not least, we must remember that we have a debt to both the victims of the past and an obligation to Spain’s actual democratic society. After an official visit to Spain in 2014, UN Rapporteur Pablo de Greiff found that the greatest shortcomings existed precisely in the concepts of truth and justice, and he invited Spain and its institutions, among other things, to promote historical memory and truth. De Greiff suggested reestablishing and increasing the resources at all levels of government in the different dimensions of truth, by means of the use of different practicable mechanisms of historical memory, memorials, dignification and public apologies, among others. Digital Humanities and Public History are key tools in overcoming those shortcomings in present-day Spain. The Spanish Civil War and the dictatorial regime that came out of it are an outstanding case of what has been called “difficult history.” Spain badly needs to have its difficult histories, “histories that have been traditionally marginalized or silenced” and which also incite “anxiety, resistance and stress for their audiences,” addressed in a concerted way so they can become a tool for “collective memory, identity making, commemoration, grieving, nation building and empathy” rather than remaining an obstacle to them.1 This will be the most important mission of the Digital Museum of the Spanish Civil War.

Note 1. Julia Rose, Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 4.

Bibliograpy Rose, Julia. Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

Index

A abuse, 21, 129, 241–243, 246, 247, 264 Academia General Militar, 48. See also General Military Academy agency, 69, 70, 116, 143, 144, 146– 148, 155, 159, 186, 190, 201 Aguilar Fernández, Paloma, 19, 57 Alcázar of Toledo, the, 10, 30, 31 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, 86 Algeria, 77 Alicante, 50, 53, 54, 74, 119 Almería, 29, 32, 100 Alonso, Bruno, 77 American Civil War, 36, 116, 117 amnesty, 247, 249, 254, 260, 262 Amnesty Law, 167, 254, 255, 260 anarchists, 79, 81, 151 Anderson, Peter, 119 Andres, Erich, 79 anti-Masonic, 83, 84 apolitical, 110, 124 Arabism, 132 Aragon, 9, 20, 74, 100 archaeological critique, 93

archaeology, 93, 94, 105, 106, 110, 112, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153–157, 159, 160, 194, 232, 233, 235 architecture, 16, 25, 26, 99, 152, 155, 194, 211, 213, 233 archive, 6, 30, 45–47, 49–57, 59–65, 70–73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 95, 121, 169–172, 176, 186, 196–198, 200–207, 209, 211, 212, 243, 257 Archives and Libraries of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, 71 Archivo General de la Administración or Central AmdinistrationArchive (AGA), xiii Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española, 46, 64, 70. See also General Archive of the Spanish Civil War; Salamanca Civil War Archive Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), 46, 62, 70, 197. See also National Historical Archive, the

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. Ribeiro de Menezes et al. (eds.), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97274-9

271

272  Index Argentina, 58, 77, 95, 96, 126, 201, 254, 255 army Francoist, 23, 31 Republican, 58, 75, 97, 108 Spanish, 58, 79, 108, 127, 131 Army Headquarters, 48 Arrese, José Luis, 52 art, 7, 115, 166, 198, 235 artifacts, 31, 34, 40, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108–110, 112, 141, 145 Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, 198. See also Barcelona Municipal Archive assassination, 127, 262 Auditoría de Guerra, 49. See also Central Office for Military Prosecution Auschwitz-Birkenau, 35 autarchy, 10 Ávalos, Juan de, 26 Azaña, Manuel, 89 Aznar, José María, 64, 123, 124 B Balearic Islands, 166 Barcelona, 13, 30, 45, 50, 62, 64, 74, 78, 79, 87, 100, 154 Barcelona Municipal Archive, 198. See also Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona barrio pobre, 152 Basque Centre of Interpretation of the Battle of Elgeta, 103 battlefront, 80, 81, 88 BBC Radio, 80 Belchite, 8–14, 45, 97 Berlanga, José Luis, 108 Berlin, 38, 39, 158 Biennium First, 86

Second, 86 Big Data, 193, 195 Bilbao, 74, 97 Blogging, 172 Blue Division, the, 89, 118 Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE), 52, 54, 61, 64, 256 Bolín, Luis, 97 Bolshevism, 154 bombing, 45, 79, 81, 82, 190, 233 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 11 Brunete, the Battle of, 45 Buenos Aires, 58, 59, 77, 255 Burgos, 48, 97, 140, 148, 152 Bustarviejo, 147 C Cadiz, 74 Calvo Sotelo, José, 87 Calvo Sotelo, Leopoldo, 90 Camarzana, Melgar, 6, 33 camp concentration, 26, 38, 76–79, 89, 94, 110, 140, 145, 146, 166, 232, 253 death, 77 prison, 77 Campesino Catalán, el, 235 Camposancos, 147 Canada, 249, 251 Canal Sur, 176 Canary Islands, 166 Capa, Robert, 63, 78, 81 Carlos Esplá Files, 78 Carrero Blanco, Luis, 52, 57, 59 Carrillo, Santiago, 90, 125 Cartagena, 74, 100, 259 Cartagena de Índias, 259 Carter, Jimmy, 28 Castellón, 49, 74 Castillón, Mata, 60

Index

Castro, Fidel, 28 Castuera, 146 Catalan Government, 63. See also Generalitat Catalonia, 33, 34, 63, 71, 79, 100, 101, 179, 229, 251, 256–258 Catholic Church, 64, 149 Catholic crusade, 118 Caudillo, 51, 89. See also Generalísimo Causa General, 75. See also General Cause Centelles, Agustí, 79, 87 Center for Feminist Research and Training, the, 77. See also Centro de Investigación y Formación Feminista Center for the Study and Documentation of the Civil War, 64. See also Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra Civil Central Office for Military Prosecution, 49. See also Auditoría de Guerra Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra Civil, 64. See also Center for the Study and Documentation of the Civil War Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra de España, 56. See also Study and Documentation Center on the Spanish War Centro de Investigación y Formación Feminista (CIFE), 77. See also Center for Feminist Research and Training, the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (CMDH), 46. See also Historical Memory Records Center Centro Republicano Español, 77. See also Spanish Republican Center, The

  273

Cerro de los Ángeles, el, 10 Chamber of Reflection, the, 84 children, 30, 32, 52, 81, 88, 90, 219–225, 236, 237 Chile, 95, 96, 127, 254 church, 9, 23, 64, 149, 151, 155 Cierva, Ricardo de la, 55–57, 59–62 City of Culture, 34 City of the Arts and Sciences, the, 34 Civil Guard, the, 52, 60, 61 civilians, 32, 82, 87, 140, 144, 145, 154, 159, 262 Civil Rights, 154, 155 clandestine, 145, 146 classroom, 16, 217–220, 223–227, 231–234, 237 Clerecía Church, 50 clinical studies, 164 coalition, 35 Code of Military Justice, the, 47 Cold War, 16, 28, 88, 132, 156 collective trauma, 164–166, 172, 176, 186 collectivism, 81 Colombia, 244, 246–248, 253, 256, 259–264 colonialism, 131, 132 Colonial Williamsburg, 36 comics, 235 commemoration, 96, 97, 150, 153, 160, 244 communism international, 54 Spanish, 90 communist, 48, 69 Connerton, Paul, 164, 169, 170 Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la Batalla de l’Ebre (COMEBE), 100, 101, 105. See also Memorial Consortium of the Spaces of the Battle of the Ebro, the Constituent Assembly of the Spanish Republic of 1931, the, 86

274  Index Constitution of 1978, 26 Constitution of Harmony, the, 90 Contemporary Collection, 62 Contemporary History Studies Office, 59. See also Gabinete de Estudios de Historia Contemporánea Corbera d’Ebre, 10, 34, 36, 107 coup, 28, 48, 87, 89, 90, 126, 129, 227, 229, 253 Court for Public Order, 76, 89. See also Tribunal y Juzgado de Orden Público (TOP) criminal justice system, 47 Cuelgamuros, 26, 35 cultural war, 54 D datafication, 193 death camps, 77. See also concentration camp death of, 77 Death Studies, 115 debate intellectual, 4, 20 public, 22, 25, 167 Decree Law of 23 August 1957, the, 26 Decree no. 108, 47 defeated, 46, 47, 94, 109, 122, 125, 164, 166–168, 248, 256 Delagdo, María, 124 Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD), 47–51, 70. See also State Delegation for the Recovery of Records Delegación Nacional de Asuntos Especiales, 70. See also National Delegation on Special Affairs Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales Spanish (DNSD), 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 70. See

also National Delegation of Documentary Services Demnig, Gunter, 158 democracy, 2, 19, 20, 23, 25, 28, 46, 47, 54, 60, 63, 69–72, 75, 85, 89, 108, 118, 126, 151, 165, 167, 168, 227, 231, 232, 241, 243, 246, 253, 254, 259 Democratic Memory in Catalonia, 111 Democratic Republic of Congo, the, 244, 246–249, 251, 261, 264 demonstration, 64, 89, 146 Denmark, 249 Deputy Director of Archives, 60 Deschamps, Albert-Louis, 64, 79 destabilization, 154 detention centers, 146, 202 Diario, El, 180, 181 dictatorship Franco, 24, 25, 64, 71, 94, 95, 174, 204, 206, 207, 255, 257, 258 Nazi, 27 digital architectures, 196 digital culture, 164, 171, 174, 175, 186, 189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 200, 205, 206 digital era, 193 digital media, 16, 164, 170, 171, 173, 176, 177, 182–186, 190, 204, 206, 212 digital technologies, 172–174, 186 digital texts, 164, 172, 174, 176, 177, 180, 184, 185 digitization, 208 Dinverno, Melissa, 123 Dionisio Ridruejo Archive, 77 Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS), 50–53, 60, 61. See also Directorate-General of Security Directorate-General for Security, 60 Directorate-General of Fine Arts and Cultural Assets, 71

Index

Directorate-General of Security, 50. See also Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) disappearance, 102, 126, 127 discordant historicities, 11 discourse, 4, 38, 58, 109, 116, 127, 132, 140, 146, 159, 205, 217, 230 disinterments, 121, 167, 177, 179 documentaries, 63, 174, 185, 234 Documentary and Bibliographical Heritage, 72 Documentary Services of the Presidency, 46. See also Servicios Documentales de Presidencia de Gobierno The Documents of the Tragic Spring, 58 E Ebro, the Battle of the, 34, 36, 79, 101, 102, 258 economic crisis, 14, 21, 28, 34 Editora Nacional, 53, 55, 59 education, 2, 3, 16, 71, 85, 144, 153, 154, 199, 218–220, 222, 225–228, 230, 231 Education for Citizenship, 36 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 89 emigration, 151 empathy, 7, 235, 236, 252 enemy, 45–51, 70, 77, 119, 121, 122, 131, 132, 232 equality, 227, 241 Escorial, El, 25, 26, 35, 99 Estudios sobre la Guerra de España, 54. See also Studies of the Spanish War ETA, 28 ethnic group, 246, 250, 251 ethnography, 20, 109, 110, 142, 151, 210 European Commission, 217, 218 European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project (EHRI), 202, 204

  275

exhumation, 8, 25, 121, 128, 129, 131, 139–145, 159, 163, 166, 175–178, 185, 219, 242, 256, 258 exiles, 58, 59, 78, 79, 85, 253, 259 e-xiliad@s, 206 experience, 3, 6, 36, 39, 40, 50, 86, 87, 109, 117, 126, 144, 145, 148, 153, 154, 157, 159, 165, 180, 182, 191, 220–223, 236, 252, 261 extradition, 249, 250, 255, 256 Extremadura, 33, 74, 140, 146 F factory, 159 Falange Women’s’ Section of, 60 Fayón, 34, 36 Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (FEDIP), 77. See also Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Internees, the feminism, 156 Fernández de la Mata, Ignacio, 127 Fernández Zúñiga, Guillermo, 79 FET-JONS Unification Decree, the, 45 FET y de las JONS, 52 Filmoteca Nacional, 62. See also National Film Archive films, 30, 171, 174, 184, 185, 234 financing international, 53 Finland, 249 First World War, 97, 106, 107, 120, 132, 133 Fiscal Court, 76. See also Tribunal de Cuentas food, 154 forced labor, 76, 110 forced relocation, 262

276  Index forensic, 6, 115, 142, 151, 156, 240, 242 forgetfulness, 123, 264 forgetting, 19, 20, 24, 27, 30, 36, 38, 40, 134, 165, 190, 195, 203, 211, 246 Forgotten Battle, The, 105 Foro por la Memoria, 128, 177. See also Forum for Memory Forum for Memory, the, 128. See also Foro por la Memoria Fraga, Manuel, 54, 56, 61 France, 22, 27, 30, 37, 39, 76, 79, 82, 90, 109, 133, 184, 197, 249–251, 256 Francisco Franco Foundation, 80 Franco, Francisco, 19, 22, 24–26, 31, 32, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 57, 60, 64, 69, 74–76, 78, 82–84, 87–89, 120, 122, 141, 143, 147, 153, 163, 166, 167, 172, 203, 207, 232, 258 death of, 19 Franco, Nicolás, 48, 49 Francoists, 21, 27, 60, 119 freemasonry, 50, 51, 70, 73, 74, 78, 80, 82–85 Freemasonry and Communism, The Law against, 51 Freemasonry Section, 50. See also Sección de Masonería Friends of Russia, 48 Fuendetodos, 13–15 G Gabinete de Estudios de Historia Contemporánea, 59. See also Contemporary History Studies Office Gacaca courts, the, 246 Galarza, Ángel, 50

Galicia, 33, 34, 125, 145, 149, 151 Gárate Córdoba, Lieutenant-Colonel José María, 55 García Lorca, Federico, 123, 124 Garzón, Baltasar, 25 General Archive of the Spanish Civil War, 64, 70, 71. See also Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española General Cause, 60, 61. See also Causa General General Department of State Archives, 71. See also Subdirección General de los Archivos Estatales Generalísimo, 70. See also Franco, Francisco Generalitat, 63, 71, 179, 180, 256– 258. See also Catalan Government General Military Academy, 48. See also Academia General Militar General Secretariat, 48 genocide, 22, 102, 120, 244, 245, 248–252, 262 Geographic Information Systems, 163 Gettysburg, 36, 39 Gijón, 74 Gilpin Faust, Drew, 116, 117, 120 Gipuzkoa, 103 GIS, 184, 186, 207 globalization, 228, 236 globital memory field, 205 glorification, 108, 116 González, Felipe, 63, 90 González-Ruibal, Alfredo, 7, 10, 14, 23, 94, 97, 99, 145, 146, 155, 219 government local, 100, 144 Provincial, 61 Provisional, 86 Socialist, 21, 30, 35 Goya, 13, 14 Granada, 51, 118, 124, 131

Index

gravesite metadata of, 178, 182 Great Britain, 37 Greiff, Pablo de, 243, 254 Grievable Dead, the, 118 grieving, 172 Guadalajara, 45, 47, 103, 104 Guernica, 33, 45, 81, 82, 87 Guernica Peace Museum, the, 30 guerrilla, 146, 158, 253 H Hague, The, 249 Havana, 247, 253, 262 Hendaya, 89 heritage, 4, 6–8, 11–14, 16, 56, 72, 73, 74, 90, 95–97, 99, 100, 102, 109, 110, 122, 155, 189, 198, 209, 218, 221, 232, 233, 235 heroism, 9, 31, 37, 118, 124, 167 Hismedi project, the, 204 Hispanotropicalism, 132 historians, 5, 6, 21, 24, 27–30, 32, 35, 39–41, 54, 63–65, 85, 89, 120, 150, 197, 213 Historical Memory Law Article 20 of, 72 Historical Memory Records Center, 46, 47, 65, 69–71, 73, 80, 85, 86, 197. See also Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (CMDH) historical recreation, 235, 236 historiography, 20, 58, 118, 173, 240 History digital, 15, 40, 41 Public, 19, 23, 30, 33–35, 37–41, 211, 212 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 89, 130 Holocaust, 16, 22, 37, 38, 95, 102, 134, 144, 158, 196, 202, 203. See also Shoa

  277

Horizon 2020, 217, 218 Horna, Kati, 63, 79 hospital, 23, 48 humanist paradigm, 22, 28 humanities, 1–5, 14–16, 143, 165, 194, 196, 200–203, 205, 207– 209, 217, 218, 228, 229 human rights, 4, 23, 26, 28, 116, 127, 128, 130, 167, 201, 209, 242, 247, 250–252, 257, 260, 264 Human Rights League, the, 48 I identity, 20, 38, 52, 95, 121, 131, 133, 142, 144, 147, 149, 158, 165, 169, 170, 209, 210, 218, 220, 221, 225, 236 Iframes, 184 immigration, 218 imprisonment, 160, 250, 262 incarceration, 116, 144–146 industry, 82 information graphic, 90, 163 textual, 90 Information Policy on the Spanish War, 57 initiatives, 16, 56, 96, 102, 103, 105, 111, 112, 144, 155, 211, 212, 219, 242–248, 254, 258, 261 Institute of Studies on the Spanish Civil War, the, 58 Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social, 73. See also National Institute for Social Security interculturality, 220 International Brigade, 88 International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, 202 international court, 245, 248, 251 international crimes, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 255

278  Index International Criminal Court Statute, 247 International Criminal Tribunal, 245, 248 International Monetary Fund, 53 International Red Aid, 48 Internet, 36, 38, 41, 110, 172, 174, 176, 204, 209, 211 Islam, 131 isolation, 39, 88, 156, 250 Italy, 227, 228, 249 IV Batallion of Mount Arapiles, The, 23 J Jaén, 74 Jarama, the Battle of, 34, 102 Jesuits, 50 Jewish Museum, 38 José Mario Armero Collection, 78 journalism, 240 Juan Carlos I King of Spain, 90 Juliá, Santos, 20, 47, 125 justice transitional, 16, 241, 246–248, 260 universal, 248, 251, 252, 254, 255 K Kagame, Paul, 244, 245 kidnapping, 262 Kigali Memorial Center, 244 L labor battalions, 76 land, 8, 82, 108, 153, 202, 250, 263 landscape, 8, 99, 124, 130, 159, 189, 190, 201, 202, 204, 213, 221, 231, 232 La Poza (Pozuelo de Alarcón) Cultural Association, 80

Latin American and Caribbean network of memory sites, 202 La Trinxera Museum in Corbera d’Ebre, 102 Law on Historical Memory, 21, 30 League of Amputees and Invalids of the Spanish War, the, 77 League of European Research Universities, 218 left-wing, 35, 49, 124 legacy, 20, 22, 34, 101, 118, 154, 155, 160, 168 legitimacy, 54, 55, 88 Lérida, 50, 74 Levi, Primo, 25 Liga de Mutilados e Inválidos de la Guerra de España, 77. See also League of Amputees and Invalids of the Spanish War, the literature, 20, 27, 54, 75, 115 Ludlow Collective, the, 156 Luis García Cerdeño Collection, 78 Lusotropicalism, 132 M Madrid, 8, 10, 13, 19, 20, 23, 25, 31, 32, 34, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 74, 77–80, 86, 87, 89–91, 96, 97, 99, 102, 104, 110, 111, 116, 118–120, 123, 125, 145, 146, 149, 165, 178, 219, 222, 234 Madrid, University City of, 87, 96 Málaga, 32, 63 Mapa de la Memoria, 179, 208 mapping, 150, 164, 178, 182, 207 maquis, 145 María Castiella, Fernando, 54 Martín Sastre, Captain Manuel, 49 martyrdom, 123, 167 Marxist, 48 Masonic Lodge, 73, 80, 84

Index

mass graves Office of the President of the Government on Paseo de la Castellana, the, 57 Mauthausen, 77, 89 May Days, the, 45 Mayo Brothers, The, 79, 89 Medical Humanities, 115 Memoria, La, 20, 30, 33, 54, 69, 91, 95, 97, 100, 126, 128, 163, 176, 177, 179, 197, 208, 246 Memoria Abierta, 201. See also Open Memory Memoria Democrática, 33 memorial, 36, 38, 96, 100, 118, 119, 140, 150, 157, 158, 208, 209, 243, 244, 256 Memorial Consortium of the Spaces of the Battle of the Ebro, the, 100. See also Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la Batalla de l’Ebre (COMEBE) Memorial Democràtic, 33, 100, 201, 253, 256 memorialization, 12, 14, 117 Memorial of Gisozi, 244 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 38 Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española, 176, 206. See also Memories of the Spanish Civil War Memorias en Red, 201. See also Networked Memory Memories of the Spanish Civil War, 20, 206. See also Memorias de la Guerra Civil Española memory assemblages of, 205 collective human, 191 democratic, 8, 25, 88, 111, 256 digital, 166, 190, 191, 195, 209, 211 ecology of, 190 European, 16, 27

  279

formation of, 169 historical, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 19, 21, 27, 33, 35, 38, 72, 80, 126, 128, 165, 168, 169, 172, 175–177, 207, 231 instrumentalizations of, 116 mediated, 190, 192 pedagogy of, 33 Topography of, 201 Memory Studies, 16, 115, 189, 190, 193–195, 198, 199, 201, 213 Méndez, Diego, 26 mentalities, 99 Mexico, 58, 78–80, 82, 89 Mexico City, 77 Military Courts, 70 Military Historical Service in Madrid, 46, 47. See also Servicio Histórico Militar de Madrid military invasion, 245 Military Police and Information Service, 49. See also Servicio de Información y Policía Militar (SIPM) Ministry of Culture, 61, 62, 70, 76 of Information and Tourism, 53 of Interior, 50, 51 of Justice, 166, 177, 179, 180, 182–184 of the Presidency, 52, 80 missing, 6, 30, 47, 121, 126, 127, 130, 166, 169–171, 176, 178, 197, 206, 258 Moa, Pío, 64 modernization, 13, 88, 151 Mola, General, 87 Moncloa Pacts, the, 89 Montevideo, 58 Montserrat, La, 235 monument, 22, 26, 30, 35, 39, 98, 99, 118, 119, 122, 155, 158, 245 Morata de Tajuña, 102, 106

280  Index Moscardó, Colonel José, 31, 88 múdejar, 9, 11, 13 Muguruza, Pedro, 26 murder of the innocents, the, 23. See also González-Ruibal, Alfredo Muro, Virgilio, 80 Museo del Pueblo Español, 96 museography, 109 museum, 7, 14, 31, 32, 34–38, 40, 73, 84, 86, 95–99, 101, 103– 106, 173, 175, 207, 246 Museum of Abánades, 102, 104, 105 Museum of Amsterdam City, 95 Museum of Contemporary Engraving, 14, 15 the Museum of Fayón, 102 Museum of London, 95 Museum of Peace in Guernica, 30, 33 Museum of the Army, 30, 31, 97 Museum of the Crusade, 97 Museum of the Siege, 98 Museum-restaurant El Cid, 102 music, 115, 128, 149, 198, 221, 235 N narrative historical, 8, 11, 20, 99 linear, 46, 184 national, 7, 37 religious, 37 narrativization, 117, 118 national building, 73 National Catholicism, 85, 167 National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia, 246, 247 national courts, 249, 254, 262 National Delegation of Documentary Services, 52. See also Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales Spanish (DNSD) National Delegation on Special Affairs, 70. See also Delegación Nacional de Asuntos Especiales

National Film Archive, 62. See also Filmoteca Nacional National Historical Archive, the, 46, 61, 62, 64, 70, 196, 197. See also Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) the Trust for the Civil War Section of the, 62 National Institute for Social Security, 73. See also Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social Nationalist Dead, the, 116, 121, 122 Nationalists, 9, 49, 60, 122, 131, 132, 167. See also rebels Nationalist War Dead, the, 118 National Movement, 47, 60 National natalogue of Open Data, the Spanish, 179 National Parks Service, the, 36 National Referendum, 90 Navarre, 23, 48, 179 navy, 32, 33 necropolitics, 8, 23, 116, 117, 125, 127 Negrín, Juan, 80 neofascism, 99 neophyte, 84 Netherlands, 22, 249 Networked Memory, 201. See also Memorias en Red New Spain, 11, 49 New State, the, 50, 51 Nieto, Vicente, 79 NO-DO, 62 Norway, 249 nuclear age, 156 Nuremberg, 245 O Oakland Museum of California, 95 oblivion, 23, 131, 145, 168 Oficina de Investigación y Propaganda Anticomunista (OIPA), 45, 48, 69

Index

Open Memory, 201. See also Memoria Abierta OpenStreetMap, 184 Optical Character Recognition (OCR), 199 Opus Dei, 53 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, 53 Orwell Route, 100 P Padrós, Santiago, 26 Pamplona, 24 Paracuellos de Jarama, 120 Party Communist, 90 Popular, 21, 25, 34, 35, 64 Socialist, 65, 149 Patrimonio Nacional, 26, 99 Payne, Stanley, 55, 64 peace, 53, 108, 109, 146, 156, 168, 219, 241, 243, 246, 247, 251–253, 259, 260, 262–264 peace agreement, 245, 247, 259–263 perpetrators, 37, 48, 140, 143, 144, 167, 242, 249, 251, 252, 255, 263 pharmakon, 240, 241, 244, 253, 254 Phillip II, King of Spain, 25 philosophy, 84, 115 photography, 233–235 photo-journalism, 64 Picasso, 81, 82, 235 Pinochet, General, 28 Planas de Tovar, Colonel Francisco Javier, 52 plaque, 31 policy archival, 60 educational, 217 linguistic, 218 state, 3

  281

political cleansing, 48 Political Reform, Law of, 76 Political Responsibilities law of, 51 The National Court of, 76 tribunals of, 70 Politico-Social Brigade, the, 52 Politico-Social Section, 50, 53. See also Sección Político-Social Ponte, Carla del, 248 Popular Front, 47, 49, 50, 86, 87, 140, 148, 155, 229 Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), 198. See also Spanish Archives Portal, the Portillo, Michael, 80 postmodernism, 5 post office, 159 postwar, 9, 46, 79, 88, 129, 140, 144–146, 152, 155, 264 pregnant, 141 preservation, 16, 26, 71, 95, 101, 105, 146, 186, 195, 196, 211 press, 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 20, 21, 23, 27, 38, 57, 93, 95, 97, 106, 115–118, 122, 125, 130, 131, 134, 142, 143, 149, 151, 153, 155, 158, 164, 165, 167–170, 182, 192, 194, 196, 201, 205, 208, 210, 211, 218, 234, 249, 257 presumption of innocence, 250 pre-war period, 147, 149–151 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 99, 118, 119, 123, 124 Principles of the National Movement, The Law of, 53 private institutions, 71, 77, 80 Private Secretariat, 48 propaganda anti-communist, 45, 48 Francoist, 27, 142 wartime, 149 public institutions, 150, 210, 246

282  Index Q Queipo de Llano, General Gonzalo, 31 R Rajoy, Mariano, 21 rapporteur, 243, 253–255, 257, 258 rearguard, 79–81, 88, 121, 233 rebels, 31, 49, 60. See also Nationalists reconciliation, 108, 110, 124, 203, 227, 242, 244–246, 248, 261 Records Services, 59, 61, 70, 74 recovering, 71, 89, 94, 143, 144, 157, 163, 167, 176, 232 recruitment, 262 Reds, 31, 127, 141 regime Franco, 11, 22, 100, 118, 176 of 1978, 21 totalitarian, 146, 147 religious crusade, 167 remembrance, 38, 45, 117, 118, 128, 158, 168 reparation, 69, 242, 243, 247, 253, 256, 257, 261, 262, 264 reparation laws, 47 repeal of sentences, 258 repertoire, 58, 169–172 repression, 8, 9, 20, 21, 31, 45–47, 51, 71, 72, 75, 80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 94, 108, 111, 116, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 140, 143, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 159, 168, 176, 197, 206, 207, 227, 232, 233, 243, 253, 255, 257 Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, law of, 70 Republic, 47, 49–54, 59, 63, 75, 78, 86, 96, 116, 117, 125, 129, 131, 133, 140, 157, 229, 244–249, 251, 255, 261, 264

Republican, 8–11, 24, 46, 49, 50, 57, 58, 70, 74–82, 86, 87, 89, 97, 105, 108, 119–122, 125, 128, 131–133, 139–142, 144–149, 152, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 166, 167, 176, 204, 206, 209, 232, 235, 258 Catholic, 122 Republican Dead, the, 116, 121, 140, 143 Research Excellence Framework, 1 resentment, 264 resistance, 11, 38, 143, 145–147, 153, 154, 165, 201, 235 responsibility, 26, 168, 186, 219, 220, 227, 228, 248, 260, 262, 263 restitution, 64, 71, 236, 256, 257 revolution, 81, 86, 87, 146, 229 revolutionary, 154 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 253, 259, 262 right-wing, 49, 87, 124 rituals, 83, 106, 115, 164, 168–172, 177 Robles Piquer, Carlos, 53, 56, 57 Rodén, 13, 14 Rojo, General Vicente, 58 Romero, Espinosa, 33 Room of the Lost Steps, the, 84 Rotarianism, 70, 74 ruins, 9–12, 14, 88, 96, 97 Russia, 48, 88, 89, 118, 130, 151, 253 Rwanda, 95, 244–254, 261, 264 Rwandan Patriotic Army, 250, 252 Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR/EPR), 248, 250, 251 S sacralizing, 109 Salamanca Archive, 6, 46, 47, 52, 54, 55, 57, 65, 71, 75

Index

University of, 61 Salamanca Civil War Archive, 197. See also Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española San Ambrosio, Colegio de, 50 San Ambrosio Foundation, 73 Sánchez Belda, Luis, 62 San Esteban, Dominican convent of, 50 Santiago de Compostela, 34 Santuario de Nuestra Señora del Pueyo, 9 Schechner, Richard, 164, 169, 170 Scholarly Primitives, 203 school, 30, 32, 36, 39, 73, 81, 87, 218, 220, 221, 223–227, 229, 231 Sección de Masonería, 50. See also Freemasonry Section Sección Especial, 49, 50, 74. See also Special Section Sección Político-Social, 50, 74. See also Politico-Social Section Second Bureau of the Army General Staff, The, 50. See also Segunda Sección del Alto Estado Mayor Second Republic, the, 63, 71, 75, 85, 86, 140, 229 Second World War, 38, 88, 118 Seco Serrano, Carlo, 55, 64 secularism, 70, 85 Segunda Sección del Alto Estado Mayor, 50. See also Second Bureau of the Army General Staff Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 48 Servicio de Información y Policía Militar (SIPM), 49–51. See also Military Police and Information Service Servicio Histórico Militar de Madrid, 46, 47. See also Military Historical Service in Madrid

  283

Servicios Documentales de Presidencia de Gobierno, 46. See also Documentary Services of the Presidency Sevilla, 62, 131 Shoa, 36–38. See also Holocaust Silver, Robert, 82 Sites of Historical Memory of the Andalusian government, the, 111 sites war, 8, 24, 36, 96, 100, 109 slavery history of, 37 museum of, 36 social imaginary, 46 social mobility, 151 social networks, 72, 165, 174, 177, 186 social sciences, 164, 194, 218, 227, 229 society civil, 5, 24, 28, 36, 38, 40, 41, 87, 145, 147, 160, 242, 246, 252 evangelical, 49 masonic, 49 Spanish, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 39, 127 theosophical, 49 solidarity, 107, 169, 224, 227, 235 Soviet Union, the, 52, 63, 81, 82 Spain, 5–9, 11, 12, 14–16, 20–25, 27–31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 47–49, 51, 53–59, 65, 70, 71, 75, 77–80, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 94–97, 99, 102, 105, 106, 108, 111, 116–120, 122, 123, 125–128, 130–134, 139–142, 144–149, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159, 163, 165–168, 170, 176, 177, 201, 207, 208, 219, 225, 226, 228– 230, 244–248, 251, 253–256, 258, 259, 261, 264 Spaniards, 22–24, 27, 28, 35, 39, 46, 47, 53, 55–57, 63, 71, 77,

284  Index 82, 83, 89, 94, 122, 149, 164, 171–173, 176 Spanish America, 58 Spanish Archives Portal, 198. See also Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES) Spanish Civil War, 5, 7, 9, 10, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 35, 36, 39, 40, 45, 46, 49, 54–56, 58, 60, 62–64, 70, 71, 79, 80, 83, 94, 95, 97, 102, 104–106, 108, 112, 116–118, 122, 123, 130, 131, 133, 134, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147, 153, 155, 160, 163, 168, 172, 176, 177, 195–201, 203–210, 212, 213, 217, 219, 220, 225–237, 245, 253 Spanish Council of Ministers, 54 Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Internees, the, 77. See also Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (FEDIP) Spanish Republican Centre, The, 77. See also Centro Republicano Español spatial interface, 180 Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, 51, 70, 74, 75, 83. See also Tribunal Especial para la represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo Special Section, 49, 50, 74, 78. See also Sección Especial state, 4, 24–26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36–38, 40, 41, 47, 48, 50–52, 60, 62, 63, 65, 71–73, 76, 84, 96, 119, 121, 122, 126–128, 163, 167, 168, 173, 177, 179, 197, 201, 204, 208, 209, 230, 243, 256–258, 263 State Delegation for the Recovery of Records, 47, 70. See also

Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD) Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, Law enacting the 1932, 86 strike Asturian miners’, 133 Colorado miners’, 156 Studies of the Spanish War, 54, 55, 58. See also Estudios sobre la Guerra de España Study and Documentation Center on the Spanish War, 56. See also Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre la Guerra de España Suárez, Adolfo, 46, 60 Subdirección General de los Archivos Estatales, 71 Subsecretaría de Presidencia, 59. See also Undersecretariat of the Presidency subversion, 51 Sweden, 249 T Tajuña de Morata, 34 Tarragona, 34, 102 Taylor, Diana, 164, 169 teaching, 2, 29, 30, 36, 81, 153, 218– 223, 225, 226, 228, 230–232, 235–237 technocrats, 53 television, 21, 63, 64, 116 Temple of Solomon, the, 84 terror, 7, 8, 94, 99, 127, 166 testimony oral, 47, 71, 72, 80, 170 personal, 20, 40 textbook, 81, 227, 230 thirdspace, 185, 186 Tokyo, 245

Index

Torre del Reloj, la, 9 Toulouse, 77 trade union, 70, 74, 76, 81, 140, 144, 149 traditions, 106, 250 Transition, the, 19, 20, 27, 47, 54, 60, 69, 71, 85, 89, 90, 108, 164, 168, 227, 253, 259 trauma discourses of, 116 Tribunal de Cuentas, 76. See also Fiscal Court Tribunal Especial para la represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo, 70. See also Special Court for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism Tribunal y Juzgado de Orden Público (TOP), 76. See also Court for Public Order truth, 21, 24, 35, 230, 240–243, 247, 251, 253–255, 257, 261, 263 Tunisia, 77 U Uganda, 245 UK National Archives website, the, 199 Ulibarri, Marcelino, 48 uMap, 184, 185 Undersecretariat of the Presidency, 59. See also Subsecretaría de Presidencia UNESCO, 219, 220 Ungría, Colonel José, 49 ungrievable, 124, 126, 131, 133, 134 UN International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances The 2006, 126 union, 52, 60, 61, 63, 79, 81, 82, 84, 144, 150, 171, 253

  285

United Kingdom, the, 1, 29, 249 United Nations Human Rights Council, 243 United States, the, 29, 36, 37, 88, 156, 248, 251 urbanization, 151 US Civil War, 37 V Valdediós, 23, 25. See also Valley of God, The Valencia, 34, 50, 62, 74, 79 Valley of God, The, 23. See also Valdediós Valley of the Fallen, The, 22, 25–27, 29–31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 99, 108, 118–122, 131, 167, 178, 245, 256 values humanist-based, 24 religious, 24 Vaquilla, La, 108 veterans, 46, 77, 80, 97 victimhood, 116, 127, 133 victims the bodies of the, 22 demands and communication between, 256 exhumations of, 94 the experience of the, 95 families of the, 21 moral and economic reparations for the, 72 the physical remains of, 171 the suffering of, 22 Villavieja, 152 Vinaroz, 50, 74 violence political, 29, 33, 40, 96 Spain’s history of, 6 Virtual Cartographies, 182, 183, 186

286  Index Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War, 40 Vizcaya, 48 Víznar, 124 W war, 5–13, 16, 19–40, 45–49, 51, 53–60, 62–65, 69–73, 75, 77–84, 86–89, 94–100, 102–106, 108– 110, 112, 116–126, 128–134, 139–151, 153–160, 163–168, 170–174, 176, 177, 191, 195– 201, 203–210, 212, 213, 217, 219, 220, 225–237, 241, 245, 248, 250–259, 262, 264

War Museum of Bilbao, 97 wartime, 116, 142, 145, 149 women, 63, 85, 87, 257 World Bank, 53 Wunderkammer, 102 Z Zaragoza, 9, 13, 34, 48, 49, 54, 62, 102 Zarzuela Palace, 90 zone Francoist, 87 Republican, 87