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  • The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century by Helen Graham
  • Adrian Shubert
Helen Graham, The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 2012)

In 1987, 43 years after the Liberation of France, Henri Rousso published his seminal book, Le Syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Editions du Seuil), in which he detailed the torturous ways in which the French had avoided coming to terms with the memory of the Vichy regime and their large-scale collaboration with the Nazis. In West Germany, although the Adenauer government made reparations payments to Israel, general awareness of the Holocaust among Germans was quite limited until the broadcast of the US television series Holocaust kick started broad public debate on how it should be remembered and commemorated. This came in 1979, 34 years after the defeat of the Third Reich and 30 after the creation of the democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Even so, the situation in Germany remains, to quote Saul Friedlander, “a constant seesaw between learning and forgetting” (Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 8). In Poland, which lived under a Communist dictatorship for 44 years, Jan Gross’ 2001 book Neighbours (Princeton: Princeton University Press) provoked a huge controversy; so did his Golden Harvest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which led Solidarity hero and former president Lech Walesa to say that Gross was a “Jew who tries to make money.”

I raise these examples because they illustrate the tremendous difficulties that European democracies, even one whose non-democratic experience was brief, have had in coming to terms with the dark realities of their recent pasts. Spain returned to democracy only in 1978, after a vicious three-year-long civil war and another 36 years of brutal dictatorship. The transition to democracy which followed Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 included the so-called “pact of forgetting” which freed members of the Franco regime from any fear of punishment. In 2000, however, a grass-roots movement devoted to finding and unearthing mass graves put memory on the public agenda and led to the Socialist government’s 2007 “Law on Historical Memory.” The law was hugely controversial and satisfied no one, and the question of memory continues to roil.

If Spaniards are having trouble dealing with their traumatic past, this should not be in the least surprising. With memory politics, as with so much else in its modern history, Spain is very much part of the European mainstream and not an outlier. [End Page 406] This background is essential when approaching Helen Graham’s The War and its Shadow. This is not a straightforward history of post-Spanish Civil War memory and forgetting; readers looking for such an account will be better served by Michael Richards’ After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-Making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rather, Graham, one of Great Britain’s leading historians of the Civil War, has produced an uneven series of interconnected essays: the best tells the moving story of Amparo Barayón, a Republican woman married to well-known novelist Ramón J. Sender, who was imprisoned and then murdered by a death squad in October 1936. Less successful is the chapter on the International Brigades in which Graham tries to present the ibs, most of whom were orthodox Communists, as forerunners of our own progressive times, the embodiment of “hybridity and heterodoxy … soldiers of cosmopolitan cultural modernity.” (75–83)

These essays are undergirded by the proposition that the Nazi new order properly provides “the major analytical reference” (6) for understanding the Franco regime. The choice of the Nazis as the comparators is intriguing. Graham justifies it on the grounds that “Francoism was born of a war made viable by Nazi and Fascist intervention, with a political project conceived therein as a fundamentalist nationalism, extreme in its virulent extirpation of difference.” (6) If I understand this sentence correctly, Graham is saying that Franco’s exterminationist project was a product of the Civil War, not something the Nationalists had created beforehand and were...

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