Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography by Sebastiaan Faber (review)

Memory Battles is an exceptional contribution to 21^st century studies on the memory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath after decades of politically imposed silence. In addition to the role of academics and artists, Faber considers the work of activists and journalists, and the memories of victims and their family members, to be fundamental sources of public discourse in Spain's collective process of coming to terms with the past and consolidating democracy. Expressing his dissatisfaction with the "sterile formats and stylistic habits of academic writing," Faber positions himself as a mediator between academic practice and journalism, historiography and the discourses of civil society, the spaces of institutional power and activism. In his "search for relevance," he favors an eclectic approach and a diversity of genres (interview, review essay), as well as an engaging and accessible style, making the book relevant to broader audiences. Faber is also a heated polemicist who critiques the rigor and relevance of the works of some of the Spanish sacred cows in the field of historical memory.

The first half of the book is outstanding. Part I focuses on the visual archive left by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour whose photographs became iconic after they were printed in newspapers and illustrated magazines around the world. Faber illuminates the tension between immediacy and manipulation, as the subsequent creative montages of photos taken during the war altered the location and sometimes the ideological meaning of the original pictures. A lost archive of thousands of negatives of their war photographs ("the Mexican Suitcase"), was retrieved in Mexico City in 2008, and brought to New York where it was inventoried, exhibited at the ICP, and documented in a film by Trisha Ziff. Faber provides an engaging and scrupulously researched account of the photographers' trajectory and working methods, and of the "serial repetition" of their images. In a fascinating analysis of the iconic poster of the war, What Have You Done to Prevent This? he interprets the symbolic and political readings of the image and text following photomontage alterations. Faber's essential point here is that the visual archive of the civil war is a "massive recycling machine" that combined fiction and reality, ideological and affective manipulation inherent to caption writing during the war, and appropriation of images by the Nationalists after the war. For him, more important than the origin, ownership, authorship, and responsibility of the images, is access to the archive.

The section "History and Memory" offers a detailed summary of the main ideological debates between the left and the right in Spain regarding historical memory and the design of the Law of Historical Memory (2007). Faber rightly claims that new generations of Spaniards, in opposition to those who helped orchestrate Spain's transition, reject the notion of de-politicized and impersonal history and want to infuse it with affectivity and subjectivity. Contextualizing the case of Spain within the international trend of memorialization, Faber dismantles the rigid distinction between "objective" history and "subjective," "unreliable" memory, and proposes a more measured view of the relation between them as "different but mutually complementary ways of looking at the past."

In "Memory and the Law" Faber recounts the "Garzón saga" (following the charges against magistrate Baltasar Garzón for initiating proceedings against officials of the Franco regime as suspects in the death or disappearance of Spaniards between 1936 and 1951), with the purpose of clarifying the profound divisions regarding the transition's Amnesty Law. While the left invokes international law and universal jurisdiction to revisit the legal and political foundations of the Spanish Transition (following the recommendation of the UN Committee on Human Rights), historians from the right and center, on the other hand, argue that international law does not apply to the exceptional case of Spain, and define "memory" as a partial, interested, and potentially dangerous tool to account for the past. As part of this debate, Faber analyzes literary and filmic texts (Exilio, Soldados...