"The Struggle for Madrid" is a study of the battles that were waged between the armies of the Spanish Republic and the armies of General Francisco Franco for the city of Madrid. It was this struggle, beginning with the collapse of Republican arms at Toledo in September, 1936, and ending with the victory of the Madrid armies at Guadalajara in March, 1937, that determined the duration and characteristics of the rest of the conflict. It was the central episode of the Spanish War.

Due to international intervention, the Spanish struggle lost its purely national character and became at once a civil war of a profoundly Spanish type, a war of independence waged by a section of the Spanish people against German, Italian, and Moroccan armies, and a clash of supra national ideologies that aroused the deepest passions of peoples far removed from the immediate Spanish interests at stake.

Although the passions aroused by the war distort contemporary accounts of the fighting, the totalities of these obstacles present no insurmountable barrier to a preliminary investigation of the Madrid battles. Such a study is best undertaken while many of the principal actors in the Madrid tragedy still live. If truth has been affronted the witnesses may yet speak, and from the debate margin of error will be reduced. Robert Colodny's groundbreaking cross of military history and political ambitions helps reduce the gap between fiction and fact.

In Spain between 1936-1945, the Franco regime carried out one Europe 's more brutal but less remembered programs of mass repression. Many were murdered by the regime 's death squads, and in some areas Francoists also subjected up to 15% of the population to summary military trials. Here many suffered the death sentence or jail terms up to thirty years. Although historians have recognised the staggering scale of the trials, they have tended to overlook the mass participation that underpinned them. In contrast to the discussion in other European countries, little attention has been paid to the wide scale collusion in the killings and incarcerations in Spain.

Exploring mass complicity in the trials of hundreds of thousands of defeated Republicans following the end of the Spanish Civil War, The Francoist Military Trials probes local Francoists accusations whereby victims were selected for prosecution in military courts. It also shows how insubstantial and hostile testimony formed the bedrock of investigations, secured convictions, and shaped the harsh sentencing practices of Franco 's military judges. Using civil court records, it also documents how grassroots Francoists continued harassing Republicans for many years after they emerged from prison. Challenging the popularly prevalent view that the Franco regime imposed a police state upon a passive Spanish society, the evidence Anderson uncovers here illustrates that local state officials and members of the regime 's support base together forged a powerful repressive system that allowed them to wage war on elements of their own society to a greater extent than perhaps even the Nazis managed against their own population.

Between 1936 and 1938, some 3,000 young Americans sailed to France and crossed the Pyrenees to take part in the brutal civil war raging in Spain. Virtually all joined the International Brigades, formed under the auspices of the Soviet-led Comintern and largely directed by Communists. Yet a large number were not Communists; their activism was inspired by domestic and international crises of the 1930s, and colored by idealism.

The men who went to Spain came out of a radical subculture that emerged from the Depression and the New Deal. Th is radicalism was a native plant, but it was nourished from abroad. In the thirties the menace of fascism seemed to be spreading like cancer across Europe, giving an international aspect to many domestic problems in the United States. To intellectuals, students, unionists, liberals, and leftists, the threat of fascism was so real that many came to believe that if it was not stopped in Spain, eventually they would have to take up arms against fascism at home.

To understand the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War it is necessary to bury some of the shibboleths of cold war years. Dissidence in the United States occurs in response to perceptions of reality on this side of the Atlantic, not because of the wishes of men in the Soviet Union. Th e members of the Lincoln Battalion were genuine products of America, and their story is properly a page in American military and political history. From them, one can learn much about the world of the 1930s and perhaps even something about the potential of modern man for thought and action in time of crisis.

During the last decade of Franco's repressive rule, the Spanish outlook on sex, drugs, and fashion shifted dramatically, creating a favourable cultural environment for the return of democracy. Exploring changes in urban planning, narratives of sexual and gender identity, recreational drug use, and fashion design during the seventies, Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid argues that it was during this decade that the material and emotional conditions for the groundbreaking transition to democracy first began to develop. Thanks in part to a mass media saturated with international trends, citizens of Madrid began to adopt practices, behaviours, and attitudes that would ultimately render Franco's military dictatorship obsolete. This cultural history examines these modest but irreversible changes in the way people lived and thought about their lives during the last decade of the regime's creed. Not a revolution necessarily, but transformational nevertheless, these changes in collective sensibility eased the political transition to democracy and the emergence of the 1980s' cultural movement la Movida.

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 impacted music as much as it did literature and academia, with well-known figures such as Adolfo Salazar and Roberto Gerhard forced to leave Spain. Exile is typically regarded as a discontinuity - an irreparable dissociation between the home country and the host country. Spanish exiled composers, however, were never totally cut off from the musical life of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), be it through private correspondence, public performances of their work, honorary appointments and invitations from Francoist institutions, or a physical return to Spanish soil. Music and Exile in Francoist Spain analyses the connections of Spanish exiled composers with their homeland throughout 1939-1975. Taking the diversity and heterogeneity of the Spanish Republican exile as its starting point, the volume presents extended comparative case studies in order to broaden and advance current conceptions of, and debates surrounding, exile in musicology and Spanish studies. In doing so, it significantly furthers academic research on individual composers including Salvador Bacarisse, Julian Bautista, Roberto Gerhard, Rodolfo Halffter, Julian Orbon and Adolfo Salazar. As the first English-language monograph to explore the exiled composers from the perspectives of historiography, music criticism, performance and correspondence, Eva Moreda Rodriguez's vivid reconception of the role of place and nation in twentieth-century music history will be of particular interest for scholars of Spanish music, Spanish Republican history, and exile and displacement more broadly.

Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. Guided by renowned editors, they drew on transnational approaches that extended beyond their own country's histories, in a fashion that Budapest's Central European University has done so much to encourage. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping todayis ideology and national identity. Experts on these issues, and in particular young researchers, must compare and contrast the original sources of conviction in order to fully grasp the topics that are too often uncontested both inside and outside the region.

On October 1, 2017, the Spanish police assault on Catalans voting in a peaceful referendum shot Catalonia's struggle for independence onto the world's front pages. Today, those two million-plus voters have neither forgiven nor forgotten: the struggle continues. Catalonia's national consciousness has deep roots. A People's History of Catalonia tells this small country's history, from below, in all its richness and complexity. Catalonia's struggles for freedom have, for centuries, been violently resisted; and its language and rights, suppressed. Since the nineteenth century, the fight for national sovereignty has often intertwined with working-class mobilisation for social justice. Barcelona became known as the Rose of Fire. In 1936 Catalonia saw one of history's most profound workers' revolutions. From the peasant revolts of the 15th century and the siege of Barcelona in 1714, through the explosive workers' movement led by anarchists, the defeat in the Spanish Civil War, to the anti-Franco resistance in the grim years that followed, the author tells a compelling story whose ending has yet to be written.

From the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II, many poets around the world felt an obligation to write about the wars of their time. Famed poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney had earned their literary authority because of their experience fighting in the trenches during World War I, but civilian poets who wished to write about warfare doubted their own authority to write about the battles from afar. In News of War, Professor Rachel Galvin argues that this standard is a strongly gendered norm that is problematic for women writers, who were much less likely to have firsthand experience with war. Galvin indicates that the predicament of writing war without witnessing war is exemplified by six of the most prominent poets of the time: a Spanish-language poet, Cesar Vallejo; a French-language poet, Raymond Queneau; and four English-language poets, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Although scholars have previously observed the anxieties of civilian poets writing about war, especially in the literature of World War I, Galvin gives the topic a new emphasis by developing the idea that the poets are in dialogue with journalism of the time and developing a framework within which to see their formal patterns for grappling with war at a distance. Expanding on the work of previous scholars who have written on poetry's relation to the news, News of War develops the idea of a strong tendency toward aesthetic self-reflexivity and ethical self-scrutiny in the poetry of the war.

This volume brings together new interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of the Spanish Republic and the course of the Civil War, the authors have chosen to range in turn over cinematic, literary and historical depictions of the era. In addition, reactions elsewhere in Europe to the Spanish conflict are examined; the role of the International Brigades is looked at afresh; the fate of children displaced during the Civil War is explored; and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement is revisited. The volume shows that to be any kind of soldier in the armies of the Republic, or even to be seen as a Republican sympathiser, was to become a "non-person" in the new order in Spain under Franco, and sets what supporters of the Republic had to endure within the wider European and international context of the period. This book offers timely fresh insights into the failure of the Spanish Republic and into a society that tried in vain to unite its divided people during what was a seismic era in Spain's history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

This book brings together different and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of republican ideals, contributors range over many diverse historical and cultural topics - discussing, for instance, the attitudes of both Left and Right to the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and to his assassination, examining the documentary evidence offered in surviving memoirs of the Civil War, and assessing the major characteristics of the new order in Spain under Franco. Cinematic and literary depictions of the Civil War and its consequences are also studied. Other topics investigated include: contemporary French reactions to the Spanish conflict, Stalinist policies towards Spain, the activities and motives of the anarcho-syndicalists and the role of the International Brigades. This collection of essays published on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, not only places the events and experiences studied within the context of the 'new state' of Franco's Spain, but also offers timely fresh insights into wider European and international issues during what was a period of seismic change in world history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Historians have only recently established the scale of the violence carried out by the supporters of General Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. An estimated 88,000 unidentified victims of Francoist violence remain to be exhumed from mass graves and given a dignified burial, and for decades, the history of these victims has also been buried. This volume brings together a range of Spanish and British specialists who offer an original and challenging overview of this violence. Contributors not only examine the mass killings and incarcerations, but also carefully consider how the repression carried out in the government zone during the Civil War - long misrepresented in Francoist accounts - seeped into everyday life. A final section explores ways of facing Spain's recent violent past.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines contemporary public history's engagement with the Spanish Civil War. The chapters discuss the history and mission of the main institutional archives of the war, contemporary and forensic archaeology of the conflict, burial sites, the affordances of digital culture in the sphere of war memory, the teaching of the conflict in Spanish school curricula, and the place of war memory within human rights initiatives. Adopting a strongly comparative focus, the authors argue for greater public visibility and more nuanced discussion of the Civil War's legacy, positing a virtual museum as one means to foster dialogue.

This volume brings together new interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of the Spanish Republic and the course of the Civil War, the authors have chosen to range in turn over cinematic, literary and historical depictions of the era. In addition, reactions elsewhere in Europe to the Spanish conflict are examined; the role of the International Brigades is looked at afresh; the fate of children displaced during the Civil War is explored; and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement is revisited. The volume shows that to be any kind of soldier in the armies of the Republic, or even to be seen as a Republican sympathiser, was to become a "non-person" in the new order in Spain under Franco, and sets what supporters of the Republic had to endure within the wider European and international context of the period. This book offers timely fresh insights into the failure of the Spanish Republic and into a society that tried in vain to unite its divided people during what was a seismic era in Spain's history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

This book examines the contested representations of those murdered during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s in two small rural communities as they undergo the experience of exhumation, identification, and reburial from nearby mass graves. Based on interviews with relatives of the dead, community members and forensic archaeologists, it pays close attention to the role of excavated objects and images in breaking the pact of silence that surrounded the memory of these painful events for decades afterward. It also assesses the significance of archaeological and forensic practices in changing relationships between the living and dead. The exposure of graves has opened up a discursive space in Spanish society for multiple representations to be made of the war dead and of Spain's traumatic past.

Spain's principal and most devastating war during the 20th century was, unusually for most of Europe, an internal conflict. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 two competing armies - the insurgent and counterrevolutionary Nationalist Army and the Republican Popular Army - engaged in a conflict to impose their version of Spanish identity and the right to shape the country's future. In its aftermath, Francoist Spain remained on a war footing for the duration of the Second World War. In spite of the unabated flood of books on the Spanish Civil War and its consequences, historians of Spain in the 20th century have focused relatively little on the interaction of society and culture, and their roles in wartime mobilization. Spain at War addresses this omission through an examination of individual experiences of conflict and the mobilization of society. This edited volume acknowledges the agency of low-ranking individuals and the impact of their choices upon the historical processes that shaped the conflict and its aftermath. In doing so, this new military history provides a more complex and nuanced understanding of Spain's most intense period of wartime cultural mobilization between the years 1936 to 1944 and challenges traditional political accounts of the period.

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco's Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance-a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler's Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions-not ideology-drove Hitler's Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. "The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler's Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. -Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish Civil War. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved. Now, eighty years after its first publication, this exceptional eyewitness account of the war is republished with a new introduction by acclaimed scholar Paul Preston. The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic is a unique account of Spanish politics throughout the Second Republic, from its foundation of 14 April 1931 to its defeat at the end of March 1939. It combines personal recollections of meetings with the great politicians of the day and intimate accounts of dramatic events with a deep understanding of Spain - its people, politics and culture. Providing a fascinating portrait of a crucial decade of contemporary Spanish history and based on an abundance of the witness material, this important book is one of the most enduring records of the Second Republic and is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the Spanish Civil War.

Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. Written during and immediately after the Civil War, this book has all the vividness of the author's experience. It represents a struggle to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published.

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of 'negationists, ' has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional 'national historical narratives' react to the 'spill-over' of international and political controversies into their 'sphere of influence'? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.

The memoir of Stipe Mesic which anatyzes events,personalities and motivations inside Yugoslavia and its former nations, as well as in the international arena.

Shortlisted for the History Book of the Year category of the 2009 Saltire Literary Awards The Spanish Civil War was a call to arms for 2,300 British volunteers, of which over 500 were from Scotland. The first book of its kind, Homage to Caledonia examines Scotland's role in the conflict, detailing exactly why Scottish involvement was so profound. The book moves chronologically through events and places, firstly surveying the landscape in contemporary Scotland before describing volunteers' journeys to Spain, and then tracing their every involvement from arrival to homecoming (or not). There is also an account of the non-combative role, from fundraising for Spain and medical aid, to political manoeuvrings within the volatile Scottish left. Using a wealth of previously-unpublished letters sent back from the front as well as other archival items, Daniel Gray is able to tell little known stories of courage in conflict, and to call into question accepted versions of events such as the 'murder' of Bob Smillie, or the heroism of 'The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel'. Homage to Caledonia offers a very human take on events in Spain: for every tale of abject distress in a time of war, there is a tale of a Scottish volunteer urinating in his general's boots, knocking back a dram with Errol Flynn or appalling Spanish comrades with his pipe playing. For the first time, read the fascinating story of Caledonia's role in this seminal conflict.

As one of the most prolific writers of Hungarian literature, Gyula Krudy provides us with a collection of articles that display his intimate knowledge of Hungarian society. Written during the 1910s, `20s and `30s, Krudy provides us with a wistful and nostalgic image of the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with portraits of the Habsburgs, culminating in first hand reports in 1916, from Vienna on the funeral of Emperor Francis Joseph I, and from Budapest on the coronation of Charles IV, the last king of Hungary. Krudy's reports follow the bloodless democratic revolution of 1918, the Karolyi government and the short lived Soviet Republic, and present cameos of the leading political figures of the day such as Ferenc Kossuth, Mihaly Karolyi and Bela Kun.

Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War inaugurates a new field of research in literary and Jewish studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. With the Spanish Civil War as a point of departure, this volume proposes a definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple poetic modes. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, these essays unveil non-canonic authors across the West and explore these works in the context of antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism, among other cultural phenomena. Jewish writings from the war have much to tell about the encounter between old traditions and new experimentations, framed by urgency, migration, and messianic hope. They offer perspectives on memorial and post-memorial literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination, and many were written against the grain of canonic literature, where subtle forms of dissidence, manifested through language, structure, sound, and thought, sought to tune with the anti-fascist fight. This book revindicates the polyglossia of Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide and proposes to remember the cultural phenomena produced by the Spanish Civil War, demanding a new understanding of the cosmopolitan imaginaries in Jewish literature.

The International Bestseller of the Spanish Civil War - Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, fifty prominent Nationalist prisoners are executed by firing squad. Among them is the writer and fascist Rafael Sanchez Mazas. As the guns fire, he escapes into the forest, and can hear a search party and their dogs hunting him down. The branches move and he finds himself looking into the eyes of a militiaman, and faces death for the second time that day. But the unknown soldier simply turns and walks away. Sanchez Mazas becomes a national hero and the soldier disappears into history. As Cercas sifts the evidence to establish what happened, he realises that the true hero may not be Sanchez Mazas at all, but the soldier who chose not to shoot him. Who was he? Why did he spare him? And might he still be alive? Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean