La Arqueología de la Retaguardia y de los Bombardeos y sus posibilidades didácticas. El caso de la ciudad de Madrid.

We compare the most relevant characteristics of the evolution of public health as a science during Franco's regime with the behavior of significant parameters in the evolution of health care in Spain (mortality and morbidity rates, spending on health care, institutional development of the health care system). Our purpose was to characterize how the legacy inherited by current health care legislation in Spain has given rise to the problems currently faced. The backslide during the post-Civil War periiod as a result of the victors' identification of the advances achieved in the Second Republic with leftist policies, delayed modernization imposed by the accelerated process of industrialization, and obstacles caused by the consolidation of National Health Insurance, led to a paradigm based exclusively on medical care.

The paper studies urban place names of the era of the Spanish Civil War (from 1936 to 1939) and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (from 1939 to 1975) in the context of the historical memory in contemporary Spain. The material included academic articles on historical memory, publications in the mass media, pieces of legislation, and data from the National Statistics Institute (Spain). Turning to toponyms allows us to provide insights into the problem of historical memory in Spain after the end of the dictatorship in 1975. The 1977 Amnesty Law (Ley de Amnistía de 1977) stipulated the oblivion of the events of the Franco period so as not to provoke conflict in society. In the late 20th century, the history of the Civil War and Francoist dictatorship needed to be re-examined. The research demonstrates that the current legal framework for memory in Spain is based on the Historical Memory Law (Ley de memoria histórica), adopted in 2007. The paper found that the number of urban toponyms containing symbols of the period under study, such as the names of participants in and events of the Civil War and Francoist dictatorship, has decreased significantly in recent years. However, changes in Francoist toponyms are inevitably accompanied by discussions and polemics at the level of local legislatures as well as public commemorative organizations, which are often covered in the media. Thus, the process of renaming continues to be a topical problem for Spain.

This paper begins with an introduction to the social and political attitudes associated with the process of recovery of historical memory, with the aim of presenting the objectives and some results of the “Names and Voices” research project which has been conducted in Galicia since 2005. The social inclination to forget the past, which was a characteristic of the transition to democracy, has slackened since the mid-1990s, although it is yet to be replaced by a new attitude. We trace the trend towards a new appraisal of an uncomfortable past in the literature and films of the last few decades, and seek to define the phases of recovery of the hidden memory of the vanquished between 1975 and the present. We examine the evolution of public policies regarding historical memory in Galicia and explain the current process of compilation of information in order to construct a history of the violence associated with the coup d’etat in Galicia. We then present some relevant data from the sources consulted. The when, how and who of the victims enables us to put forward some hypotheses regarding the reasons for eliminating the political opposition upon which the Franco dictatorship was founded. The violence and above all the murders constituted a form of terror whose aim was to impose and guarantee the success of the military coup. However, the physical elimination of political rivals, their persecution and extermination, were a means of solving political conflict characteristic of the European fascist regimes of the period.

Reviewed by: Spain is Different?: Historical Memory and the "Two Spains" in Turn-of-the-millennium Spanish Apocalyptic Fictions by Dale Knickerbocker Sara Martín (bio) SF as Historical Allegory: Apocalypse and Democracy in Spain. Dale Knickerbocker. Spain is Different?: Historical Memory and the "Two Spains" in Turn-of-the-millennium Spanish Apocalyptic Fictions. U of Wales P, 2022. 288 pp. $82 hc & ebk. Dale Knickerbocker is a professor of Hispanic Studies at East Carolina University and one of the US's most active specialists in the Spanish-language fantastic. His new book Spain is Different? is published in the Iberian and Latin American Studies series of the University of Wales Press and follows the publication of his edited volume Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World (U of Illinois P, 2019), a fascinating tour of the many linguistic domains in which sf thrives. In contrast, Spain is Different? focuses specifically on six sf novels published in Spain between 1990 and 2005 by noted names in the field. According to Knickerbocker, these novels express in their (post-)apocalyptic plotlines anxieties regarding the history of Spain between the end of General Francisco Franco's regime (1939-1975) and the passage of the Law of Historical Memory in 2005 by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Socialist government. This legislation intended, among other aims, to end the drama of the missing war victims still buried in mass graves. The title Spain is Different? alludes to the slogan that Franco's Minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, used in the 1960s to publicize the attractions of Spain among tourists. Knickerbocker's question is [End Page 574] whether Spain really is different—and hence the uniqueness of its apocalyptic turn-of-the millennium sf—or if it demonstrates the same preoccupations that currently articulate sf at an international level. The inevitable conclusion is that Spain is indeed different, yet it is also similar to other nations in which sf plays a similar allegorical function as a vehicle to discuss the tensions brought on by history. The novels Knickerbocker examines are Rosa Montero's Temblor [Tremor, 1990], Javier Negrete's Nox perpetua [Perpetual Night, 1996], Juan Miguel Aguilera's La locura de Dios [God's Folly, 1998], Enrique del Barco's Punto Omega [Omega Point, 2004], Eduardo Vaquerizo's Mentes de noche y hielo [Minds of Night and Ice, 2001], and José Miguel Pallarés and Amadeo Garrigós's Tiempo prestado [Borrowed Time, 2005]. Of these, only Temblor and La locura de Dios have been translated (into German and French respectively). It is to be hoped that Knickerbocker's monograph will interest prospective publishers and will result in more translations. Among the authors analyzed, all well-known in sf circles, Rosa Montero stands out as one of the most accomplished writers in Spain, as a journalist and as a novelist working in diverse genres. Knickerbocker introduces each author adequately, but readers might miss the fact that sf still occupies a marginal position in Spain beyond fandom circles. Knickerbocker also proficiently presents the theme of the "two Spains" and the historical situation of the nation at the turn of the millennium. Any minimally informed Spaniard can perceive a deep division between the more progressive, left-wing half of the country and the more backward, right-wing half. This is usually attributed to the Civil War (1936-1939) caused by Franco's coup against the legitimate democratic Republic (1931-1939), but readers of Benito Pérez Galdós's marvelous series of 46 novels, Episodios Nacionales [National Episodes, 1872-1912], will understand that the Civil War was yet another "episode" in this constant warfare between the two Spains. Knickerbocker dates this split back to King Philip V, crowned in 1700, the first monarch of the current Borbón dynasty and the man responsible for importing into obscurantist Catholic Spain the ideas of the French Enlightenment. Knickerbocker proposes that in these six sf novels the narrative about the two Spains resurfaces in a fantasy version shaped as much by the old tension between illustrated modernity and repressive religion as by current sf themes, with a special incidence of questions related...

This article analyzes the ongoing process of recovering Spain’s historical memory and building a transitional justice agenda to end the impunity of crimes against humanity committed during the Francoist dictatorship. Over thirty years after the transition to democracy, based on an agreement to silence and forget, a social movement that challenges the narrative of successful democratization has interrupted Spain’s political landscape. Victim associations, relatives, and citizens who support the recovery of historical memory have generated a debate about how to deal with the dictatorial past. In 2007, the Spanish Parliament passed the Historical Memory Act to recognize and enhance victims’ rights. However, victims and victim associations criticized the Act severely due to the absence of mechanisms that guarantee the implementation of a transitional justice agenda, including a failure to investigate the past or create a truth commission. In the wake of a 2012 Spanish Supreme Court decision, which asserts that it is legally impossible to conduct a judicial investigation into the crimes committed during the Francoist dictatorship, it appears that Spain is now further than ever from achieving this goal.

A Bloody Transition:Child Killers in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976) Eli Evans and Haley O’Neil Long considered the model of a tidy transition from dictatorship to democracy, the Spanish Transición in fact left behind a residue of uneasiness that is still being contended with today. By and large, this uneasiness can be traced to the so-called pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting – an “institutionalized amnesia,” as Madeline Davis describes it, silently agreed upon by all of the major power players in the Spanish transition and subsequently formalized in the Amnesty Law of 1977. Described at the time by one moderate government deputy as a “forgetting from everybody to everybody,” that law banned the prosecution of crimes of a political nature committed during the Franco regime, including “the violation of human rights by government agents and functionaries” (Davis 863). For years, scholars and writers have debated the significance of this institutionalized amnesia, as well as the spectacle of its reversal witnessed in both the political and cultural arenas during the course of the past decade: a display punctuated by the passage of the “Ley de la Memoria Histórica,” or law of historical memory, in 2007, and what Sebastiaan Faber describes as “the appearance of scores of best-selling novels, memoirs, and studies, as well as … films, television programs, exhibits, and documentaries about hitherto less broadly publicized aspects of the Civil War and Francoism” (206). While many scholars, among them Jo Labanyi, have framed the pacto del olvido as a collective act of repression subsequently manifested in various collective pathologies, others, such as Santos Juliá, have contended that the conscious decision to forget is itself a way of remembering. And while Faber interprets the historical memory “boom” of the late 1990s and [End Page 329] early 2000s as a “sign of socio-political health” (205), Joan Ramon Resina contends that the commodification of history does not constitute a genuine working through of the memory of it so much as yet another means of repressing the same. Mediated by the market, writes Resina, the “past … is constantly neutralized” (93). Despite such disagreements regarding the short and long-term consequences of the pacto del olvido, however, there has been a surprising consensus amongst scholars and historians with respect to its cause. Synthesizing Palomar Aguilar’s 1996 Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy Faber describes “how it was the fear of violent conflict and the overwhelming, haunting presence of a certain memory of the Republic and the Civil War that quickly discouraged any further exploration of the past,” an attitude “imposed … from above,” he concedes, but “with the approval of most of the population” (213). To this widely accepted belief that a top-to-bottom refusal of the possible repetition of past violence lay at the heart of the Spanish transition’s pacto del olvido, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? serves as a striking counter-example – one that, as we read it, goes so far as to suggest such a repetition of violence may be the very condition of a meaningful transition from a totalitarian past to a democratic future. In a moment in which the suspicion, long held by some of Spain’s most acerbic intellectuals, that the Spanish Transición was not one from dictatorship to democracy so much as from political dictatorship to market dictatorship has become word on the street, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? offers a critically valuable glimpse into what Christopher Prendergast calls “the sphere of the might-have-been.” Loosely based on the novel El juego de los niños by Juan José Plans, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? tells the story of British couple Tom and Evie’s ill-fated trip to the fictional Spanish island of Almanzora, four hours by boat from the southern coastal town of Benavís. For Tom, the journey is one of return. Twelve years earlier, he visited Almanzora on his own and retains magical memories he hopes to relive with his now...

Drawing the Past:The Graphic Novel as Postmemory in Spain Jordan Tronsgard To paraphrase noted philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the role of telling stories as an approach to past traumas, we must not only have body counts, but also narrative accounts (15). In Spain, narrative gives life to the memories of Civil War (1936-1939) and oppression during the Franco era (1939-1975). This historical memory is a complex web in which discourses about forgetting, remembrance, individuality, collectivity, reconciliation, vindication, justice, and commodification coexist. In 2008 Jo Labanyi noted that the memory boom that had begun in the late nineties was beginning to ebb, having reached a "saturation point" (119).1 Nevertheless, writers and filmmakers and other artists continue to produce works that confront the past, in many cases with more self-reflexivity about the memorialistic process. In addition, historical memory has increasingly gained visibility in less traditional, less "serious" media and genres.2 The presence of irreverence, however, does not signal the end of engagement; in the case of comics (traditionally considered less than the novel or even film), there has been an explosion of interest in the combined drawing/telling of suffering during the war and after.3 Comics constitute the intersection between image and word, allowing articulation and silence in the same visual space. In this article I focus on the [End Page 267] graphic novel in particular as a site of expression for inherited memories of the Civil War and Franco era in the twenty-first century by examining two recent works: El arte de volar (2009) written by Antonio Altarriba and illustrated by Kim, and Un médico novato (2013) by Sento Llobell, known professionally as Sento.4 My objective here is to demonstrate how these two graphic novels take advantage of the multifaceted visual nature of the medium and explore the active space of creation in the absence of personal experience to construct narrative images of Postmemory. "Postmemory" is a concept coined and developed by Marianne Hirsch in reference to the act of recovering and representing "inherited" memories by the descendants of Holocaust victims: "Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that precede their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated" ("Past Lives" 420).5 According to Hirsch, Postmemory is not exclusive to the pain of the Holocaust ("Surviving" 11) and it is clear that this concept is helpful in addressing the issue of memory crossing generations in Spain today.6 While it is true that the term Postmemory has in some cases been applied to any current text about the past in uncritical and indiscriminate ways (Martín-Cabrera 132), I demonstrate here how these two works are not merely historical but are also self-reflexive about the inherited nature of their memory.7 Based on the memories of two men whose lives were altered by the Civil War–Altarriba's father in El arte de volar and Sento's father-in-law, the young doctor Pablo Uriel, in El médico novato–these works act out Post-memory by playing with the question of biography/autobiography, silent and fantastic imagery, and political engagement. These graphic novels illustrate (literally and figuratively) that the past is temporally and experientially distant. They highlight and embrace the fact that those who are producing cultural [End Page 268] works of historical memory did not live the national traumas themselves; their approach is characterized by the obligation to (re)construct and (re)present them by means of an imaginative act mediated by previous narratives and not personal experience. In Un médico novato, paratexts underline the reconstructive task of the work. The annex at the end titled "Álbum de recuerdos" includes photos, letters, documents, etc. as traces of the past, which complement the fictive elaboration of the story. In another paratext, the book jacket, Sento notes that the work is based "en hechos reales y en documentos de la época que nuestra familia ha conservado, lo que nos ha permitido reconstruir las partes de la historia que no encontrábamos en los recuerdos...

Since October 2000, mass graves from the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship have become the most visible issue of the process of recovery of historical memory in Spain, as a metaphor for digging up the traumatic past. This paper offers a historical reading of this process, pointing out the importance of recovering the buried bodies to give them a worthy burial, to restore their memory, and to allow families to complete their mourning. Mass graves have been the subject of different interventions: they have been located, marked and dignified, in some cases opened and the human remains exhumed. The graves, previously symbols of silence and oblivion are now sites of mourning and memory. In addition, many forgotten memories have been recovered. The victims of the war and the dictatorship have returned to the heart of the public debate, although not without controversy.

This chapter considers the place of the silenced Republican mother in Spanish cultural memory of the civil war and Francoist dictatorship today. Beginning with a brief historical background of the visions and discourses of motherhood in Spanish Civil War and postwar Spain, the chapter examines the representation of Republican mothers in postwar Spain as recorded in testimony and fictional representations about the recovery of historical memory. Fictional novels of the post-Transition period highlight women's experience of the civil war and postwar clandestine resistance that has not received the critical attention it deserves. Hortensia, the sole representation of a truly combative mother, does not survive to continue her motherhood. Accordingly, there is still space for the representation of a combative maternal narrative of Republican women's experience of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship in post-Transition memorial fiction. Keywords: Francoist dictatorship; Hortensia; post-Transition memorial fiction; postwar Spain; Republican mother; Spanish Civil War; Spanish cultural memory

Building and environmental acoustics in obsolete residential neighbourhoods: The case of San Pablo, Spain

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

El servicio público de educación superior es ofertado por el Estado nicaragüense y español a través de instituciones especializadas, estas son las universidades, sean de naturaleza pública o privada. El régimen jurídico y administrativo bajo el cual operan estas instituciones es por medio del modelo descentralizado por servicio o por colaboración. De manera que el objetivo de este pequeño estudio es contrastar el grado de autonomía que tienen las instituciones de educación superior en el régimen de descentralización por servicio o por colaboración que los respectivos marcos jurídicos español y nicaragüense les otorgan a las universidades sean éstas públicas o privadas. Para ello, se aborda de forma sucinta una panorámica doctrinaria sobre lo que es descentralización por servicio y colaboración. Se describe los rasgos particulares de las Universidades públicas y privadas tanto en España como en Nicaragua y, finalmente se realiza una comparación de los niveles de autonomía que presentan las instituciones de educación superior en España y Nicaragua. La Metodología utilizada en la investigación jurídica es teórica documental y el tipo de estudio descriptivo y comparativo del grado de autonomía en el régimen de descentralización por servicio o por colaboración de las universidades públicas y privadas de acuerdo a la legislación universitaria de España y Nicaragua. Por lo que las técnicas de investigación fueron esencialmente documentales (fuentes primarias del conocimiento [Constituciones, leyes, etc.], fuentes bibliográficas específicas relacionados con la descentralización administrativa.

This article describes the all-Russian scientific conference “International Intervention and Civil War in Russia and the Russian North: key problems, historical memory, and lessons of history”, held in Arkhangelsk, September 10–11, 2020. Co-organizers of the conference were the Russian Military-Historical Society and its Arkhangelsk branch, the Government of the Arkhangelsk Region, the M. V. Lomonosov Northern (Arctic) Federal University , and the Association of the Russian Civil War Scholars. Conference sponsors were the Russian Military- Historical Society and the Government of the Arkhangelsk Region. Established and younger scholars from 14 regions of Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Norway, took part in the conference and its proceedings. Conference participators considered the key problems of genesis, origins, and causes for the Russian Civil War, its modern conceptualization, the role of international intervention in Russia and the Russian North, results, consequences, and historical lessons of this war. Special attention was given to preparing of Volume XII (in two books), Civil War in Russia, 1917–1922, of the 20-volume academic series History of Russia and problems of historical and cultural memory of the Russian Civil War. Four sections and three roundtables considered questions of the dialectical relationship of international intervention and Civil War in Russia and the Russian North; of international, national, regional, and local dimensions of the Civil War; and of the individual at war. Conference participators pointed out the necessity of responsible, competent, and objective historical studies of the Russian Civil War, an attitude of care towards existing monuments and memorials, and strict examination and scientific expertise of new memorial projects devoted to this war.

«In this remarkable study, Katrina Heil brilliantly highlights how Buero’s plays serve as a medium for the Spanish audience to process traumatic memory and come to terms with the past. The book successfully offers a fresh perspective on Buero’s theater, acknowledging his pivotal role as a precursor of historical memory activism during Franco’s dictatorship, while also shedding light on his enduring influence on contemporary dramatists of the twenty-first century.» (Yenisei Montes de Oca, Associate Professor of Spanish, James Madison University) This book explores Antonio Buero Vallejo’s use of the theater for historical memory activism and the role this function had in his formation as a tragedian. Buero’s early tragedies counter the assumption that Spaniards have only recently taken up the issue of recuperating historical memory in order to process the collective trauma of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. Buero’s theory of tragedy, which combines an Unamunian existentialist conception of the tragic with an Aristotelian understanding of tragic catharsis, demands personal and historical authenticity while simultaneously allowing for the healing of trauma. While Buero’s influence is rarely acknowledged in this regard, the legacy of Buerian tragedy as an ideal form of memoria histórica activism is seen in contemporary Civil War tragedies, which are appearing with increased frequency on the Spanish stage alongside the growth of the historical memory movement in Spanish culture and politics.

This paper explores the social perception of historical memory among Spanish journalism students. Participants were asked to write an opinion piece on a topic related to their family's historical memory, reflecting on how the coup d'état, the ensuing civil war, and General Francisco Franco's dictatorship affected their families. The corpus of articles (N = 83) reveals the students’ lack of knowledge on the subject and their surprise and perplexity upon discovering events that their families had kept hidden. The articles also show a deep, often very literary reflection on these events. Such educational activities offer an opportunity to explore the complexity of history beyond current political polarities, particularly for journalism students who will soon become reporters and shape public opinion. Students are nearly unanimous in their appreciation of historical memory and the importance of reflecting on it. Paradoxically, however, they are also acutely aware of how much they do not know. This process is not unique to Spain, and the recovery of family memory can be valuable in many contemporary societies.