Confronting Silence and Memory in Contemporary Spain: The Grandchildren’s Perspective

Abstract

The relationship between memory and history in contemporary Spain remains controversial. In spite of the current obsession with memory, materialized both in cultural production and in media debates over whether to acknowledge or forget the past, the lack of a political consensus on the issue points towards a ‘memory crisis’.² Seventy-five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and nearly 40 years after Franco’s death, Spain has not fully resolved the fratricidal conflict that started in 1936, or successfully dealt with its violent traumatic past. Throughout most of the 20th century, the conflict has been remembered — or disremembered — in a very different manner in each historical period, depending on the political needs of the time. This, in turn, has influenced the collective memory and the construction of a national identity based on a division between the ‘victors’ (Nationalists) and the ‘defeated’ (Republicans) created by Francoist discourse. After Franco’s death, the promulgation of the 1977 Amnesty Law and the symbolic ‘pact of oblivion’ negotiated in the transition period postponed the settling of scores for war and post-war crimes, prolonging an indefinite silence for the ‘defeated’. However, democracy — with its consequent freedom of speech — gave rise to a fruitful cultural production that problematized Spain’s relationship with its past, initiating a remarkable transformation of its collective national memory.

The choice that we have is not between remembering and forgetting; because forgetting can’t be done by an act of the will, it is not something we can choose to do. The choice is between different ways of remembering.

Tzvetan Todorov¹