Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. History and Representation ed. by Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. History and Representation ed. by Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann Ellen Mayock Brenneis, Sara J. and Gina Herrmann, eds. Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. History and Representation. U of Toronto P, 2020, 913 pp. ISBN: 978 1487505707. With their co-edited collection titled Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, Sara Brenneis and Gina Herrmann have compiled an outstanding body of work that addresses important gaps and lags in Spanish historiography caused in part by the comparatively late passage of the Law of Historical Memory (2007) and in part by the significant archival discoveries that were yet to be made. The subtitle, History and Representation, signals the deep dive Brenneis, Herrmann, and their contributors take to provide full historical accounts of Spaniards’ involvement in the Second World War and the Holocaust and to examine with a critical eye cultural products (memoirs; novels; newspaper articles; documentary and fictional films; posters; etc.) from the 1930s through the 2010s. The cover photo, featuring Francisco Franco at his desk, telephone and a framed photo of Adolf Hitler to his right, invites readers to rethink the snarled entanglements of the Franco regime with Hitler and Nazi Germany, a point reinforced in the volume’s numerous considerations of Spain’s political involvements in the early part of World War II, when the Axis powers appeared to be moving towards victory. In the introduction, Brenneis and Herrmann state their aims for the book: “This book is the first to engage critically with the interdisciplinary implications of the two key paradoxes that mark our understandings of Spain during the Second World War and the Holocaust: that Spain declared itself neutral yet played a role in the Second World War; and that Spain has long promulgated the myth of the Franco regime as saviour of Jews, when in fact Spain also hastened the destruction of European Jewry” (3). The editors cite Haim Avni, who invokes the infamous Expulsion of 1492 and the long centuries of Inquisition as important touchstones for understanding the history and representation of Sephardic Jews. The volume offers nine sections, or “parts,” that contextualize the history of antisemitism in Spain, Spain’s links to Jewish communities, Spanish exiles in France, Spanish Republicans in the Nazi camps, propaganda, the Blue Division, Nazis in Spain, representations of the Holocaust in contemporary Spanish and Ladino culture, and Holocaust appropriation in Spain. Brenneis and Herrmann guide readers through these major themes by usefully conceptualizing them as “a series of interlocking dramas that develop simultaneously on different stages” (14). In fact, while the volume’s 711 pages might suggest the need for some skimming, each one of the “stories” (14), or chapters, is so compelling that readers will want to absorb every word. Doing so yields an enhanced understanding of the history of Spanish Jewry and of the vexing reasons for the long silences on the topic. The Prologue, by Haim Avni, sets the stage for understanding the “points of convergence” (31) of Jews and Spaniards and highlights in particular Francoist Spain’s complicity in the bombing of Guernica, the nation’s geographical stretch in Morocco and Tangier, and its connections to Germany and Italy (44). Each section and chapter offers a compelling historical overview of the theme and, for this reviewer, new information and analyses that have greatly complemented [End Page 143] my research and approaches to questions of historical memory in Spain. Particularly illuminating chapters include but are not limited to: Jacobo Israel Garzón’s examination and archival review of Spain’s treatment of Jews from the mainland peninsula, Northern Africa, and Nazi Europe; Tabea Alexa Linhard’s “Routes of the Renowned and the Nameless: Clandestine Border-Crossing at the Pyrenees, 1939-1945,” with its references to Anne Frank, Mercè Rodoreda, Walter Benjamin, and “stateless” Jewish refugees (the “stateless” are also examined in many other chapters, including Juan M. Calvo Gascón’s on Mauthausen); and Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand’s chapter, which studies Spanish Republicans exiled in France and highlights Neus Català’s work on Spanish female resistance fighters, a topic examined in careful detail in Gina Hermann’s essay on Ravensbr...