Memory In Spain Research Articles

Challenging the past in Spain

In recent decades, Spain has enacted two national laws on historical and democratic memory (in 2007 and 2022), alongside numerous laws at the sub-national level. The significance of these laws goes beyond their symbolic value; they not only contribute to collective memory but also acknowledge the plight of victims. This paper aims to analyze the factors influencing regional regulations on historical and democratic memory in Spain. Our focus will be on the drafting processes, exploring the political factors that shape their approval in different regions. Additionally, we will investigate regions that have yet to enact memory laws to understand the reasons behind the absence of such legislation.

Sobre la enseñanza del pasado democrático en España. Alumnado, polarización y redes sociales

The aim of this text is to reflect on the teaching of democratic memory in Spain, focusing on history students, and encourage a debate on how to work on this important subject in the classroom to build and strengthen democracy. To achieve this, three different aspects are dealt with. Firstly, the analysis of the new legislation on democratic memory shows the opposing views on the republican period and the Civil War that have been observed in the parliamentary procedure of this law. Secondly, it connects the process of political polarisation observed in Spain, as well as the relevance of these contradictory visions of the past in it, with the students’ previous conceptions in order to understand their reception in the teaching of history. This polarised context, as it is proposed, should be considered as an influential element in young people’s attitudes towards history. Thirdly, based on the importance of social networks today, these reflections are complemented by the study on the interpretation of the Paracuellos shootings in Madrid in the autumn of 1936, which appeared on the social network Twitter/X. The aim is to show what kind of discourses on the Spanish history young people may be receiving.

Tracce e corpi dal passato: uno sguardo al teatro della memoria spagnolo attuale (dal 2000 in poi)

"That of the recent theatre of memory in Spain is a complex panorama which, while presenting various constants that constitute its distinctive features with respect to the historic theatre and the documentary theatre, also begins to manifest some variables that invite us to reflect on possible categorizations of the dramaturgical strategies put in place for the recovery of the past through the stage. We propose to start a reflection in this sense, examining some of these differential aspects through a selection of significant plays from an ever wider and more variegated corpus through the lens of the need for trauma negotiation."

Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes

Reviewed by: Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes Erick Dickey Fuentes, Víctor. Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro. Editorial Verbum, 2021. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-84-1337-727-8. Morir en Isla Vista is a non-traditional Spanish novel written by Víctor Fuentes that details the life of the Spanish exile living in the United States in the post-Spanish Civil War era. Unlike many Spanish exiles who fled Spain in the early months of 1939, Víctor Fuentes belongs to the generation of the “children of the civil war” who left Spain in 1954 and whose life as an exile would be embodied by numerous exiles that would take him from Spain to Venezuela, to New York and finally to Isla Vista, California as a Spanish professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Adapting to life in exile proved to be difficult for Fuentes as the novel relates the many struggles that he faced integrating into his new adopted homeland particularly in the early years where he was forced to find menial jobs in order to survive financially. While the novel relates in diary form the many vicissitudes and personal troubles suffered by Fuentes throughout his life, such as his failed relationships, battles with depression and psychosis, and difficulties writing novels, the memory of Spain and the Spanish Civil War pervades the text. This becomes a recurring theme in exile literature, as the exile, who is separated and alienated from his home-land and longs to return to Spain, is forced to live off of memory. Therefore, the continual remembrance of Spain and his fellow exiles represents Fuentes’s endeavor to reconstruct new memory traces as their identity has been erased by the Franco dictatorship. This multifaceted novel veers from the traditional narrative structure of the post-war novel with Fuentes’s use of the Cervantine model of the found and transcribed manuscript in addition to the incorporation of multiple narrative voices that combine fiction with reality. It is also a work that reflects on one of the most important and recurring issues within the body of Spanish exile literature, namely the continual remembering of the mother country. The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse in the water, which is that of the author Víctor Fuentes. This initiates what one could call the appearance of the “split narrator” or “Yo-dividido” as Fuentes interjects himself as a character in his own novel recounting his life in exile as the narrative shifts between first- and second-person narrators. This symbolizes the metaphorical “death” of the exile as he is forced to reconstruct a new identity in exile, cut off and separated from his mother country, but still remains as the “other” in the adopted homeland. Upon Fuentes’s mysterious death, his narrative takes shape as a second narrator appears—the Transcriber—who reconstructs the life story of Fuentes’s exilic journey by recovering Fuentes’s discarded writings left in a box. As the Transcriber, he also takes the liberty of inserting, when he deems it appropriate, some critical commentary on Fuentes’s works and bears the responsibility of completing Fuentes’s unfinished text much like Cide Hamete Benengeli in the Quijote. The plurality of narrative voices is Fuentes’s way of creating a collective identity or memory for the exile community. More than an autobiography, this text could be seen as a co-biography given the many voices that appear in it. Fuentes’s narrative represents the memories of the Republican children of a collective suffering, which is illustrated by Fuentes’s usage of a Hispanic “Yo-nosotros” living in exile in the United States. Here Fuentes problematizes the question of the identity of the exiled. The allusion to the “I-we” dichotomy has now merged into what Fuentes believed to be the great deed of the collective subject. Fuentes is determined to rescue the memory of these individuals from what he terms “oblivion and the destructive [End Page 166] clutches of time.” He accomplishes this by enumerating a list of exiles who died and briefly describing their contributions in exile in the United States while also remembering...

Memory and History in Shaping National Identity in Spain

The main aim of this study is to highlight the decisive role that the management of history and memory, as well as forgetting, can play in the creation of a nation-state's national identity. From the time the nation-state emerged, the importance and definition of memory has been of utmost importance since it determined the very existence of the nation-state. In this study, the case of Spain is analyzed since it is a typical example of a country that based its existence as a unitary state on the development of a historiography that took the past of the entire Iberian Peninsula as a unified one. After presenting and analyzing the process of the creation of the Spanish collective identity from the 19th century, which was absolutely decisive for the creation of the Spanish national identity, the analysis continues in the more recent period. The way in which the Spanish regime managed historical memory is analyzed according to the objectives it pursued in each period of time, both after the victory of Franco and the implementation of his repressive regime, and after the end of the dictatorship and the advent of democracy in the country. It shows the different phases that Spanish society itself went through in difficult times, and how, through various sociopolitical upheavals, it managed to function smoothly in a climate of harmony, peace and democracy. Through this study, it also attempts to highlight the role of the historian, various other actors and ultimately the citizens of a nation state themselves in the formation of national identity. Furthermore, the aim of this study is to highlight Spain's attempt to balance between multiple and competing memories. Of particular interest is the fact that despite the organized effort made in Spain to silence the past, in recent years there has been an ongoing effort to recognize human rights violations and crimes committed during the Franco dictatorship. However, action to revive historical memory in Spain, despite coming from civil society, remains politically controversial. In this context, an analysis is presented on the management of memory and history in the case of Spain from the time of its emergence as a nation-state to the present day.

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

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...

Основные тенденции мемориальной урбанонимии Испании периода диктатуры Ф. Франко в XX–XXI веках

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.

The Teaching of Historical Memory as a Tool for Achieving SDG 16 and Teachers’ Views on the Exile Memorial Museum (MUME) Routes

This article analyses the educational role of historical memory in Spain in the context of Education for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. The main objective is to show the utilitarian value of historical memory as an enabling element to achieve SDG 16: “Peace, justice and strong institutions”. The study analysed focuses on a very specific heritage product, the exile routes of the Exile Memorial Museum—MUME (La Jonquera, Spain), through a series of semi-open in-depth interviews with teachers who visited the routes. Their responses were cross-checked with the learning objectives for SDG 16 in its three categories: cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural. The results of this cross-referencing show that there is a significant relationship between the teaching of heritage in places of memory and the block of socioemotional learning objectives, and more specifically with the third category, related to the display of empathy and solidarity.

Irregular adoptions and infrastructures of memory in Spain: remnant practices from the Franco Regime

The irregular adoption of displaced children during the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the early years of Spanish democracy remains silent and unrecognised. The difficulty in recognising these irregular practices is linked to remnant infrastructures of memory ( Rubin, 2018 ). We propose that the time to speak openly about irregular adoptions of forcibly disappeared children in Spain is arriving, and doing so could be a way of exposing a series of “unknown knowns” ( Simmel, 1906 ; Bellman, 1981 ; Taussig, 1999 ).

TRANSFORMATION OF HOLIDAYS DURING THE DEMO-CRATIC TRANSIT OF SPAIN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DEMOCRATIZATION OF SOCIETY

The article analyzes the impact of democratic transit on the transformation of historical memory in Spain. For a more detailed study, the author chose the holiday as an object that can be changed due to the widespread democratization of society. The author emphasizes that he considers the holiday as an element that contributes to the preservation of historical memory. The study confirms that the holiday is indeed an important element in the process of not only preserving historical memory, but also in the process of its transformation. In the article, the author divides the holidays into national, religious and regional in accordance with the impact on the functioning of society. The study shows that regional holidays are most vulnerable in conditions of democratic transit, as they are not always dedicated to "democratic" episodes of the history of Spain. Also, the regional holiday mostly reflects the national identity of the region, while the national holiday promotes the integration and universalization of world values. At the end of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the holiday is a kind of identifier of the depth of transformations in society: the more serious and dynamic the transformations, the greater the changes are subject to regional traditional holidays. The discourse that has developed around some of the fundamental provisions of the regional holidays speaks of a conflict between the adherents of the" old "and"new order". According to the study, the emerging discourse has achieved changes in the external regulations of traditional holidays in accordance with the standards of a democratic society. In conclusion, the idea is that the introduced external changes can in the future affect the perception of history by younger generations, which will steadily lead to the deepest changes in the formation of the historical memory of Spain.

Spectrality in Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga 2010): Queer aesthetics and its politics of memory

Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre/Black Bread () is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral and aesthetic complexity that resists the politics of consensus and avoids essentialist views on queer identity, the Catalan resistance to the Francoist state and the treatment of the past as a mere ideological commodity in the contemporary politics of memory in Spain.

Демократизация католической церкви в Испании в 1976–1978 годах

The article considers the changes in the position of the Catholic Church in Spanish society caused by the democratic transition. The beginning of the reign of Juan Carlos I was marked by the rethinking of the dialogue between the state and the Catholic Church. The king introduced the initiative to revise the provisions of the Concordat, thereby limiting the power position of the Spanish Catholic diocese. This decision looks like an intention to divide the history of Spain into Franco and democratic periods in the political and public consciousness. But the full-fledged democratization of society would have been impossible without the modernization of the church institution. The Constitution of 1978, being the main law of the country, reflects the state's attitude to religious issues, emphasizing the secular status of Spain and the pluralism of religion of the Spaniards. Despite the restrictions imposed on the Catholic Church, caused by the transition to democracy, the position of the religious institution remains high due to the pressure of the historical memory of Spain, in which Catholicism is a nation forming factor. As a result, the democratization of the Catholic Church was successful, and the church institution took a harmonious position in the conditions of democratic Spain.

Clara Campoamor en Buenos Aires (1938-1955): Un feminismo transnacional

ABSTRACT This work is based on three compilations of articles written by Clara Campoamor in Buenos Aires during her exile between 1938 and 1955: La mujer en la diplomacia y otros artículos, El amor y otras pasiones, Artículos literarios and La mujer quiere alas y otros ensayos, published between 2017 and 2019. The memory of Spain and the fight against fascism are prominent. But it is mainly feminist issues that she addresses, inspired by the example of Americans to re-consider the role of women in society. The perspective is transnational. The author’s analysis of the role of education and the importance of love for women are very topical.

Stumbling over History:Stolpersteineand the Performance of Memory in Spain's Streets

TheStolpersteine(‘stumbling stones’) memorial project commemorates victims of Nazi violence and the Holocaust through an individual marker installed outside the last willing residence before deportation and execution. TheStolpersteineproject has spread throughout Europe, providing an urban topography of sites where traumatic events occurred. BecauseStolpersteineare placed in public streets, they create performance possibilities, inviting passing pedestrians to engage in past history and trauma. As the project grows throughout Europe, however, the universality of the stones abuts with the specificity of local history and memory. This article considers theStolpersteineinstalled in the Catalan city of Manresa. These stones, representing twenty-eight Spanish Republicans who were interned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, are framed by a Catalan-language audio guide that directly points to the collaboration of the Francisco Franco dictatorship with Nazi Germany. In so doing, the stones in Spain also stand for violence meted out during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

Back to the Eighties: Nostalgia and the “Transition Culture” in El ministerio del tiempo

This article addresses the representation of the latter part of the transition to democracy in the Spanish television fantasy drama El ministerio del tiempo (The Ministry of Time, TVE, 2015–). Undoubtedly, one of the most controversial aspects of the series has been its approach to the past in a country such as Spain, where historical representation remains a source of heated intellectual and political debate. In the context of the discussion about historical memory in Spain, I focus on the episodes during the first two seasons in which the series depicts the early years of the 1980s. The representation of this period is tainted by ambiguity over the results of the Transition and is fuelled by nostalgia, as El ministerio del tiempo reconstructs the Transition through non-canonical cultural artefacts in a process in which each new journey to the decade brings more disappointment, which can be related to the critical concept of “la Cultura de la Transición.”

Collective memory and intergenerational transmission in social movements: The “grandparents’ movement” iaioflautas, the indignados protests, and the Spanish transition

The iaioflautas movement, which emerged in the course of the indignados protests in Spain in 2011, is one of the few social movements that explicitly organize around a “grandparents’ identity.” This article analyzes the movement against the historical backdrop of the Spanish transición, in particular the characteristic absence of transitional justice and the pacto del olvido—the ‘pact of oblivion’ regarding the political violence of the civil war and the dictatorship. I argue, first, that the emergence of the movement indicates a general shift in the memory debate in Spain, problematizing the memory of transición itself against the backdrop of the crisis. The iaioflautas organize as active historical witnesses to support the younger protesters’ mobilizations, not least by testifying to their historical legacy, that is the struggle for democracy. They thus draw on the hegemonic transition narrative and reframe it at the same time, echoing the indignados’ slogan “Real Democracy Now.” Second, I show that the iaioflautas’ explicit organization around a generational identity on the one hand re-organizes this generational unit of activists that for long had been cast aside from public memory in Spain, while on the other hand it facilitates intergenerational transmission of collective memory and repertoires of contention within the indignados movement. In addition, the concomitant “family narrative” of generativity, that is, of caring for the younger generations, allows addressing a much broader audience, thus adapting to the constraints of the arena, in avoiding the acerbic political divisions that usually characterize an engagement with historical memory in this particular post-civil-war and post-dictatorship context. Third, the iaioflautas offer an example of “remembering hope,” that is, they pass on their own experiences of solidarity, agency, and democratic opportunities in order to encourage the younger generations’ protest and political imaginary.

Towards a film literacy canon: identification and multicultural

In the absence of a state film education plan in Spain, there are numerous initiatives operating in the field of both formal and non-formal education, the aim of which is pedagogy through cinema and about cinema. The European Commission has established the identification of a pantheon of authors of which knowledge is compulsory (canonical competence) as one of the four necessary competencies of this film literacy. This article aims to identify this canon promoted by the entities operating outside the formal curriculum and within the different contexts of non-formal education with early, primary and secondary education students in Spain. For this purpose, 65 entities (N=65) –educational centers, regional programs, museums, film libraries, film clubs, festivals, associations and foundations– have been catalogued and consulted for the first time in the different provinces of Spain. Among the results, 194 film titles and 142 names of directors used by those entities involved in image pedagogy in Spain have been collected. From a multicultural point of view, the analysis of the results points to the promotion of a biological approach to the history of universal cinema, in which national cinematography does not find a place. The primacy of North American and French productions is observed, as well as the absence of images with which to work on historical memory in Spain.

Digital sources: a case study of the analysis of the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain on the social network Twitter

The incorporation of digital sources from online social media into historical research brings great opportunities, although it is not without technological challenges. The huge amount of information that can be obtained from these platforms obliges us to resort to the use of quantitative methodologies in which algorithms have special relevance, especially regarding network analysis and data mining. The Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain on the social network Twitter will be analysed in this article. An open-code tool called T-Hoarder was used; it is based on objectivity, transparency and knowledge-sharing. It has been in use since 2012.

Exhuming memory: Miguel Hernández and the legacy of fascism in Spain

Each March in Orihuela in the province of Valencia, Spain, there is a festival of mural painting in honour of local poet Miguel Hernández. For long the poet, who died in a fascist jail in 1942, had been publicly unacknowledged, but now his life, his work and his political involvement as a Republican political activist are openly displayed. How Hernández is remembered provides a powerful example of the struggles between memory and forgetting in post-Franco Spain. Faced with the contradiction of a Pact of Forgetting in 1977 and a Historical Memory Law in 2007, memory in Spain has to be carefully exhumed from under layers of fascist policies and culture.

The Discourse of Silence as Testimony in Jenn Díaz's Es un decir

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this article examines the multiple roles of silence in Jenn Diaz's Es un decir (2014), a novel that portrays the effects of political violence on three generations of women living in postwar Spain. With closer examination of the dynamic between enunciated and silenced discourses in the novel, this study aims to understand how silence communicates and testifies to traumatic pain and memory, strength, and resistance. This analysis shows that silence in the face of trauma does not indicate weakness, nor does it equal forgetting. Rather, it is a part of discourse that expresses suffering, conveys strength, and safeguards memory.