Why didn’t we know this before? Challenging the Culture of the Transition through the concentration camp at Castuera

Abstract

ABSTRACT In post-conflict democracies with a recent past of intrastate violence and social fracture, depictions of the nation’s history play a role in efforts toward reconciliation. Public institutions act as agents in constructing the narrative of the country’s traumatic past, thus controlling public display of trauma and determining what is deemed essential to remember and what is not. In the case of contemporary Spain, the politics of oblivion normalized during the Transition produced an absence of democratic memory in Spanish education. This contribution examines the pedagogical possibilities of Spanish concentration camps, namely the concentration camp at Castuera (Badajoz), where the Asociación Memorial Campo de Concentración de Castuera (AMECADEC) has been working on the implementation of educational visits and the development of didactic guides. As with many other Spanish concentration camps, Castuera displays a lack of architectural remains, which poses a challenge to the concept of “ruins”. The activities developed by AMECADEC propose an alternative articulation of pedagogy and trauma, based on the educational possibilities of ruins and their political and material absences. As such, these activities offer an example of how to engage the processes of symbolization and memory intervention needed to create new historical narratives about Spain’s current democracy, challenging the Culture of the Transition.