The Reception of Holocaust (1978) in Spain: Commending and Condemning Holocaust Memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Holocaust reached Spaniards’ TV sets in 1979, the extermination of the Jews of Europe was an event marginally known and scarcely discussed by the Spanish people. The miniseries was a form of Holocaust representation that for the first time was fully embraced by political and TV authorities in Spain. Consequently, the Holocaust emerged from behind the censorship and silencing typical of Francoist dictatorship and became a topic of discussion in the public sphere. The public TV station Televisión Española (TVE) hosted two debates featuring historians and intellectuals that focused on the miniseries and also on various aspects of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the uses of Holocaust memory in the contemporary world. Similarly, the national newspapers El País and ABC offered broad coverage of the release of Holocaust and the polemics surrounding it. This intellectual discussion and journalistic attention to Holocaust took place against a backdrop of political transition from a dictatorial regime to a parliamentary democracy, conflicting interests in foreign policy in relation to the Middle East and the West, and meager acknowledgment of Spain’s role during WWII and long history of antisemitism. Grounded on cultural memory as a suitable approach to understand the potential of popular culture in affecting historical interpretation, the article argues that the public presentation of Holocaust simultaneously commended and condemned Holocaust memory or, more precisely, condemned a perceived hegemonic Jewish reading of the Holocaust and commended an interpretation of that event particularly useful to the Spanish political elites of the time.