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  • “Transatlantic Trenches” in Spanish Civil War JournalismFélix Martí Ibáñez and the Exile Newspaper España Libre (Free Spain, New York City 1939–1977)
  • Maria Monserrat Feu-López (Montse Feu)

Spanish Civil War, exile, anarchism, Félix Martí Ibáñez, journalism, short stories, New York City newspapers

New York, cette immense Barcelona

—Jules Romains

During the Spanish Civil War, Félix Martí Ibáñez (Cartagena 1911–New York City 1972) was known as the “barricades doctor” for his intense activity among the anarchist militias.1 In 1937 he served in the Catalonian government representing the Spanish anarchist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) as general director of public health and social services in Catalonia. Two years later, he was appointed undersecretary of public health in Spain and was named director of wartime health education in Catalonia. When Barcelona fell to the armies of Francisco Franco, Martí Ibáñez trudged through the Pyrenees into France and immigrated to the United States. During his exile, the doctor reinvented his medical and writing career, which had been truncated by the war and later by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Martí Ibáñez became a well-known editor and essayist on the medical humanities and a prolific fiction writer.2 From the United States, Martí Ibáñez financially and politically protected his extended family in Francoist Spain. [End Page 53]

In the last decade, academic publications have successfully contested the stereotypical representation of anarchist transnational networks, politics, and culture as inconsequential, terrorist, irrational, or primitive. Instead, anarchism is being studied in all its complexity as thought, text, culture, and global network.3 In stark contrast to the minimal attention in academic research, the story of Spanish anarchists in the United States is one of a vibrant culture. Certainly, creative writing became a major site of formation of anarchist identity for Spanish Civil War exiles such as Martí Ibáñez. This article recovers some of the previously unexplored author’s opinion columns and short stories in España Libre from the archive and analyzes their aesthetics.4 While Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and Cold War politics have limited the study of anarchist exiles in the United States, Martí Ibáñez’s journalism in España Libre enlarges and offers nuance to our understanding of anarchist literature in the context of the Spanish Civil War and its exile.

First, the article reviews several of his opinion columns in España Libre in the 1940s. In them, the author searches for an exile voice and reflects on the qualities of postrevolutionary literature. His early exile journalism marks his personal transformation from anarcho-public intellectual and doctor in revolutionary Spain to prolific fiction author, successful medical editor, and professor of medicine at New York University. Before his exile, Martí Ibáñez’s novels, Yo, rebelde (I, Rebel, 1936) and Aventura (Adventure, 1938) captured the people’s heroic response to the political upheaval and to the civil war itself.5 The author’s first short stories written in exile and published in the context of his opinion journalism in the exile newspaper España Libre (Free Spain, New York City 1939–77), “Presagio de Berchtesgaden” (Premonition in Berchtesgaden, 1940) and “Episodio en Londres” (Episode in London, 1940), show the transition to an introspective and anti-authoritarian subjectivity.6 The daring “rebel” and “adventure” in the titles of the novels become meditative “premonition” and “episode,” already prompting such an aesthetic shift. Therefore, this section shows how his participation in a transnational antifascist culture in exile stimulated a thought process that envisioned his fictional creation as able to enlarge consciousness with characters that interconnect. [End Page 54]

Finally, the article examines in detail the literary characteristics of “Presagio” and “Episodio” through characters that reflect on the ever-present possibilities of life resulting from their relationships. In this regard, the two short stories articulate a hopeful delivery, analogous to Jesse Cohn’s concept of “resistance culture” that examines anarchist aesthetic expressions that have been an instrument of survival and struggle against “all forms of domination and hierarchy.”7 Cohn characterizes Martí Ibáñez’s later fiction in All the Wonders We Seek: Thirteen Tales of Surprise and Prodigy (1963...

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