An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural
artifacts of Franco's Spain
True, false, or both?
Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of
water conservation and sustainable energy.
Pedro Almodovar is only the most recent in a line of great
antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in
Spain since the 1930s.
As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were
collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of
the artists' political views.
Censorship can benefit literature.
Memory is not the same thing as history.
Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe--wrongly--that
under Franco's dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively
worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking
new book, "Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936,"
Jeremy Treglown argues that""oversimplifications like these of a
complicated, ""ambiguous actuality have contributed to a
separate""falsehood: that there was and continues to""be a national
pact to forget the evils for which""Franco's side (and, according
to this version, his""side alone) was responsible.
The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain
may explain why foreign narratives ("For Whom the Bell Tolls,"
"Homage to Catalonia") have seemed more credible than Spanish ones.
Yet La Guerra de Espana was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's
own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more
public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history. How it is doing so,
and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory,
are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging
book.
"Franco's Crypt" reveals that despite state censorship, events
of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's
actually there--monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies,
video games--and considers, in a captivating narrative, the
totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed
reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.
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