In Spain today the civil war remains 'the past that will not pass
away'. The long shadow of the Second World War is now also bringing
back centre frame its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a
broader public the stark truth already known by specialist
historians -- that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars
soon to convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians
-- millions were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their
own compatriots, including their own neighbours. Across the
continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 would
detonate a myriad 'irregular wars', of culture as well as of
politics, which took on a 'cleansing' intransigence as those
driving them sought to make 'homogeneous' communities, whether
ethnic, political or religious. So much of this was prefigured with
primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on 17-18 July, a group of
army officers rebelled against the socially-reforming Republic.
Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military
intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity,
these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became
the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities
authorised and presided over an extermination of those sectors
associated with Republican change -- especially those who
symbolised cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of
being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers,
'new' women. In the Republican zone, resistance to the coup also
led to the murder of civilians. This extrajudicial and communal
killing in both zones would fundamentally make new political and
cultural meanings that changed Spain's political landscape forever.
Helen Graham explores the origins, nature and long-term
consequences of this exterminatory war in Spain, charting the
resonant forms of political, social and cultural resistance to it
and the memory/legacy these have left behind in Europe and beyond.
Not least is our growing sense of the enormity of what, in greater
European terms, the Republican war effort resisted: Nazi
adventurism, and the continent-wide wars of ethnic and political
'purification' it would unleash.
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