Abstract
Spain’s current memory debates are arguably rather belated, and not simply because for many their appearance in public discourse has been tardy. If we take the notion of “belatedness” in a Freudian sense, as designating the manner in which the past is always already interpreted,1 then Civil War memory in Spain is at least triply belated. Interpreted according to Regime dictates during the Francoist period, and reinterpreted according to the new memory horizon of the Transition to democracy, it has, since roughly the turn of the millennium, been undergoing a further revision that has aroused heated disputes in the political, civic, and academic arenas. The palimpsestic nature of Spain’s memory horizon testifies to shifting generational perspectives both on the past and on its significance for the present.
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Notes
Paloma Aguilar, The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (Oxford: Bergahan Books, 2002), chap. 2.
Santos Juliá, “Echar al olvido: memoria y amnistf a en la transición,” Claves de la razón práctica 129 (2003): 14–24.
Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law ( New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997 ), 175.
Teresa Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993) ( Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998 ), 3.
José Carlos Mainer, Tramas, libros, nombres: Para entender la literatura española ( Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005 ), 83.
Ofelia Ferrán, Working through Memory: Writing and Remembrance in Contemporary Spanish Narrative ( Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2007 ), 26. The very title of this book posits a pathological past to be overcome in a Freudian sense.
Madeleine Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory? Breaking the Pacto de Olvido,” Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005): 858–80. (here 867).
Emilio Silva makes reference to these twin goals in his volume with Santiago Macf, Las fosas de Franco: Los republicanos que el dictador dejóen las cunetas ( Madrid: Temas de hoy, 2003 ), 96; Macf as’s lengthy survey of burial sites in Spain in part two of the volume seeks to tell the stories of those who died so that they might be rescued from oblivion. Nevertheless, in an interview with Jo Labanyi, Silva stressed the extent to which, within his family circle, his father preserved his grandfather’s memory and the memory of the Civil War via songs and books. Silva’s comments represent one example of the intergenerational transmission of private memories that were kept separate from the public sphere.
Jo Labanyi, “Entrevista con Emilio Silva,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 143–55.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed., trans., and intro. Lewis A. Coser ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ), 23–9.
Blakeley (“Digging Up Spain’s Past,” 46) notes that although the year 2000 saw the anniversary of Franco’s death and 2001 marked 20 years from the 1981 coup attempt, 2002 was a year of multiple anniversaries that could be said to have brought about an “irruption” of memory from the Transition era: January saw the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Atocha massacres of Communist lawyers, April saw the twenty-fifth anniversary of the legalisation of the Spanish Communist Party, June the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first democratic elections, and October the twentieth anniversary of the PSOE’s arrival in power. The year 2003 then heralded the twenty-fifth anniversary of the constitution. On the notion of “irruptions” of memory, see Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies 31, no. 2 (1999): 473–500.
Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, Las fosas del silencio: ¿Hay un holocausto español?, Prologue by Santiago Carrillo (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2006 ), 243.
Comprehensive accounts of the Transition, upon which I rely, are given by Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain ( London: Routledge, 1986 );
Javier Tusell, La transición española a la democracia (Madrid: Historia 16, s/d [1991]);
Charles Powell, España en democracia, 1975–2000 ( Barcelona: Plaza and Janés, 2001 ).
José-Carlos Mainer and Santos Juliá, El aprendizaje de la libertad 1973–1986 ( Madrid: Alianza, 2000 ), 49.
Figures of the Transition era, notably Socialist leader and later prime minister, Felipe González, and founding editor of El País, Juan Luis Cebrián, have recently criticized the current Spanish political elite for having little sensitivity toward the benefits of consensus politics; see Vera Gutiérrez Calvo, “Felipe González: ‘Hay una crisis institucional que galopa hacia la anarquía,’” El País April 10, 2013;
Eva Saiz, “La Universidad de Brown debate sobre la Transición española,” El País May 2, 2013.
Ferrán, Working through Memory, 25. See also Joan Ramon Resina, “The Weight of Memory and the Lightless of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War,” in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, ed. Carlos Jerez-Ferrán and Samuel Amago (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010 ), 221–42.
Nicolás Sartorius and Javier Alfaya, La memoria insumisa: Sobre la dictadura de Franco ( Barcelona: Crítica, 2002 ), 11.
See, for instance, Vilarós’s El mono del desencanto. For a contrary view that stresses the achievements of the political class, see Víctor M. Pérez Diaz, The Return of Civil Society ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 ), 26.
Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González Enríquez, and Paloma Aguilar, eds., The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 ), 22. Kathryn Sikkink’s recent analysis of what she labels the “justice cascade,” with its origins in the Portuguese and Greek Transitions to democracy of the 1970s, relies too heavily on Samuel Huntingdon’s paradigm of the third wave, ignoring the sea change in global politics brought about by the end of the Cold War. It is the differing world context that explains why the Spanish case does not seem to fit with Sikkink’s focus on the rise of human-rights prosecutions; equally, both Portugal and Greece are rather strained examples in her paradigm. See
Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics ( New York: Norton, 2011 );
Samuel Huntingdon, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century ( Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993 ).
Stephanie Golob, “Volver: The Return of/to Transitional Justice in Spain,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008), 127–41. (here 133). One might speculate that similar measures introduced in the United Kingdom, including gay marriage, citizenship education for new nationals, and of course the ongoing Northern Irish peace process, are a broadly comparable political project to reshape identity via greater inclusiveness. Behind both is perhaps a political will to address the rise of voter apathy that became increasingly evident in Blair-Brown’s Britain and has long been suggested as a characteristic of postdictatorship Spain, but these policies also represent a response to developments in late capitalist democracy more generally.
Judith Keene, “Turning Memories into History in the Spanish Year of Historical Memory,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 4 (2007): 661–71 (here 662).
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 (2008): 253–64. (here 259).
Isabel Durán and Carlos Davila, La gran revancha: La deformada memoria histórica de Zapatero, Prologue by Stanley G. Payne (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006 ), 18.
A similarly personal view from the right-wing is given in, for instance, José Ataz Hernández, ¿Memoria histórica? Sí, pero para todos ( Madrid: Plataforma, 2003 ).
Cercas borrows the term from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Los heroes de la retirada,” El País December 26, 1989;
Javier Cercas, Anatomía de un instante ( Barcelona: Mondadori, 2009 ), 33.
Santiago Carrillo has played down his own heroism somewhat, writing in his memoirs: “Estaba claro para mf que aquello sólo podf a pararlo el rey, con el peso de la autoridad que le había otorgado Franco mi s que con la suya propia por entonces muy en entredicho entre los militares. El pueblo español, traumatizado aún por la memoria de la guerra y del terror que le siguió, no estaba en condiciones de salir a la calle a hacer frente a los sublevados como ocurrióen el 36.” Santiago Carrillo, Memorias ( Barcelona: Planeta, 1993 ), 714.
A similar view is proposed in Juan Francisco Fuentes’s recent biography, Adolfo Suárez: Biografía política (Barcelona: Planeta, 2011 ). See also the debate on Suárez’s role offered in Charles Powell and Pere Bonin, Adolfo Suárez ( Barcelona: Cara and Cruz, 2004 ).
Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 ), 63.
Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law ( New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997 ), 22.
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© 2014 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
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de Menezes, A.R. (2014). Pathologies of the Past: Spain’s “Belated” Memory Debates. In: Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379948_2
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