Reviewed by: Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain Elena Capraroiu Herrmann, Gina . Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-252-03469-5. Written in Red is a study of Communist autobiographical writing in Spain. What distinguishes Gina Herrmann's work from the existing scholarship on the subject is its broad, international perspective and a way of examining key issues such as Communism, the self, and literature, that brings to the fore tensions and "relations of contingency," not of "substitution" (7). Herrmann takes six Spanish writers—Dolores Ibárruri, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Tomás Pàmies, and Teresa Pàmies—and studies their autobiographical work within the frame of larger practices of self-representation, especially the ones emerging in the Soviet Union during Stalin's time. One underlying assumption of the book, used as a guiding principle in the organization of the study, is that Communist subjects do not become who they are by keeping the public and private spheres of their lives apart, or simply by opposing political power. In line with Foucault [End Page 760] and Judith Butler's work on power and subjection, Herrmann argues that subjects constitute themselves through a process of internalization of power. In the case of Communist cultures, Herrmann points out, voluntary and mandated self-reflection lay at the core of the process of identity formation. To the extent that people were living in a new society, the state endorsed introspection. But as the act of looking into oneself turned into an object of state scrutiny, autobiography often became confession. Herrmann uses state-generated life narratives as a point of reference and claims that these institutionalized stories function as a "template," a "blueprint" for other Communist literary autobiographies. The introduction actually reproduces a questionnaire given to party members in the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The document reveals the paradigm of class and religious oppositions and the story of conversion, which, Herrmann argues, transfers to the structure of the Spanish Communist memoirs. What Herrmann finds surprising is that certain traits of the institutionalized autobiography surface in the Spanish Communist memoirs written in the post-Stalinist years and, in some cases, from a dissident perspective, thus indicating that memoirists drew a line between party affiliation and the belief in Communism as a social model. The persistence of the Communist ideal even in the life stories of dissidents, such as Semprún and Teresa Pàmies, leads Herrmann, following François Furet's work, to underscore the importance of "ideology as sentiment" (6). The idea generates new interpretations, Herrmann notes, and rightfully so, because it guides Communist studies toward matters of subjectivity and language expression. In this sense, the inclusion of life stories of Soviet and western Communists next to the questionnaires would have opened a productive dialogue, a crossfire between personal and collective forms of verbal expression. In fact, Herrmann's approach to Written in Red is intersectional. The five chapters are organized according to how writers "work through, resist, or comply with party-initiated practices of self-representation" (x). The first chapter concerns the "organic Communist memoir." Herrmann identifies a complete overlapping of Dolores Ibárruri's autobiography with the aesthetic of Socialist Realism. Although published in Moscow in 1962, after Khrushchev's secret report, the memoir leaves out all polemical aspects of Stalinism and controversies inside the Spanish Communist Party. An important argument in this chapter is that Ibárruri strategically employs public manifestations of maternal sacrifice and widowhood to shape her political identity. The second chapter considers how each writer constructs a story of conversion vis-à-vis traditional conversion tales and Stalinist self-writing. Chapter 3 follows chronologically to the moment of the Spanish Civil War. Besides the fact that the war sets aside Spanish memoirs from other Communist autobiographies, Herrmann focuses on the "codification of wartime gender roles" (87) and the importance of "public happiness," a concept taken from Hannah Arendt, to emphasize the emotional value of war experience in women's self-narratives. The fourth chapter studies "memoirs of disavowal." Central to the analysis here is the split position of...
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Apr 1, 2013
Jonas Adelin Jørgensen 
Open Access