Open Forum

International Journal of Iberian Studies Volume 19 Number 1 2006 Intellect Ltd Open Forum. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijis.19.1.85/3

Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the Spanish civil war
Michael Richards University of the West of England

Abstract
This brief article focuses on putative connections between public and popular historical movements in Spain to do with the civil war, on the one hand, and problems to be considered in constructing a social history of the war and the post-war era, on the other. One appropriate and useful concept for explaining the relationship between these two forms of recuperating the past, it is argued, is social memory, meaning the ways in which the past has been understood, talked about and assimilated in the past as well as in the present.

Keywords
public history historical memory social history social memory

In Spain there has latterly been a very public resurgence of interest in memories of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship. This resurgence has been channeled by a movement consisting of several organizations whose primary aim has been the recuperation of what is problematically termed historical memory. The unearthing of this buried past has been powerfully symbolized in the excavation of mass civil war burial pits in various parts of Spain. This task began, coincidentally, as the moment approached of the 25th anniversary of the 1978 Constitution, the founding settlement of a new democratic system that overlooked most of the injuries of the past instead of acknowledging them. While the Constitution became a key symbol of a transition that tacitly agreed to forget the past, therefore, the recuperation of the remains of some of the victims of the war has constituted a means by which it has been possible to declare that these things have not been forgotten (Silva et al. 2004). This article, in the light of the movement for collective remembering, consists of a brief outline of arguments resulting from an on-going project researching social memory in post-civil war Spain.1 Social memory, as used here, refers to the ways in which recollections of the past have been articulated, spoken about, represented and understood, in the past (Fentress and Wickham 1992). The ways in which such memories influenced social
IJIS 19 (1) 8594 Intellect Ltd 2006

This project has benefited from the financial assistance of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

85

behaviour in the pastduring the period from 1939 until the end of the 20th century in Spain, for example, as an integral part of the social history of the period, is central to the project. The term social memory can therefore be said to contrast with the term historical memory, which is problematic partlyand paradoxically because of its overly presentist connotations. Indeed, the undifferentiated, umbrella concept of historical memory has not been interrogated or explained; it tends to be employed to refer to something assumed, a simple and unchanging given, which has somehow emerged into the light of day, fully formed, without any prior process of social construction. The fact that these assumptions have been made is clearly of some intrinsic interest. There is undoubtedly a political element that has shaped the movement to remember which is, in itself, worthy of study. Moreover, there is equally no doubt that the repressive distortion of memory for decades under General Francos regime has both created the conditions for this need to remember and contributed more broadly to the shape of public perceptions of the period. However, the movements for the recuperation and articulation of memories also claim to have historical objectives: they are not only channels for the expression of feelings or stories that have been forcibly repressed, though this is an important and necessary function: indeed, as a product related to the current movement, several important historical works have appeared (e.g., Molinero et al. 2003; Rodrigo 2005). The static nature of use of the term historical memory, nevertheless, suggests the limitations of these historical intentions and means that the usefulness of it as a tool of analysis is reduced. For the historian (and, perhaps, especially for those with pretensions to be social historians), however much one might be interested in the public formulation of collective perceptions of the past, historical memory is more variable and subtle than is often assumed and ought therefore to be more precisely situated between Memory and History. The hypothesis behind the current social history project is that there is a relationship between the period of great instability of the 1930s and 1940s and the migration and development of the 1950s and 1960s, a period, in turn, which relates to the transition to democracy, and so on, and that this relationship is meaningful in terms of explaining both social change and collective memories. This relationship between periods that have usually been studied and interpreted historically as separate (each with essentially sui generis defining characteristics) comes into focus when the lived experiences of the era are systematically explored. Post-war social experienceof changes and continuitiescan be related to the development and nature of collective memories. The current upsurge of public claims on historical memory can be grounded in the social history of the period as something collectively constructed over time through the formation and interplay of social relationships. These hypotheses about the social nature of post-war memory are necessarily provisional and are intended to encourage responses and debate.
86
Michael Richards

For this reason and for the sake of brevity and clarity, each point made is presented as a separate numbered paragraph. 1. Given the symbolic significance of the turn of the millennium, it was perhaps no coincidence that the current crisis over memory, already fermenting for some time, in Spain, emerged as the year 2000 drew closer. With the collapse of Communism, Europeans, both east and west, had already been exhorted to remember, though the purpose of these exhortations was usually political. At the same time as being presented with an ever-growing range of images about the past (through television and the internet), there is a problem of misinformation and manipulation by mass media and governments which reduce the past to something politically usable. This duty to remember, especially ceremonially to mark anniversaries deemed important to those with political power, often has the effect of compressing or telescoping time. In the Spanish case this can give the impression that the civil war happened only yesterday, and tends to oversimplify representations of peoples complex memories. Much of the texture of ordinary peoples memories is rarely expressed publicly and can only be glimpsed in more personal testimony and through elliptical ways of seeing. 2. What is remembered is affected by what happens to peoples lives in the years between the event and the recollection. It is therefore the process of thinking historically (of recognizing the significance of change over time) that allows a multiplicity of memories to be heard rather than to be re-submerged within such catch-all labels as the memory of the defeated or republican memory. Deciding what the defeated meant, for example (and what defeat consisted of), though it was plain and simple for many thousands, was more complex for thousands of others and therefore remains a challenging task for social history. 3. The term crisis (as in crisis of memory) may be appropriate to the current situation, though it is not used here to suggest a fundamental breach of state legitimacy in Spain. The democratic principles of the transition, enshrined in the 1978 Constitution, are almost unanimously seen as remaining fundamental and entirely legitimate (Desfor Edles 1998). (On this legitimacy, see, for example, the banners that headed the demonstrations in the aftermath of the Madrid terrorist bombs on 11 March 2004: con las vctimas, con la Constitucin y por la derrota del terrorismo). A decisive turning-point appears, however, to have been reached in formulating or re-negotiating a shared sense of the past in Spain. Although not systemic, the current situation revolves around elements which maintain broad social and political cohesion: community life, convivencia (co-existence), and statesociety relationsbased on the relations that constantly construct and reconstruct social memory rather than assumptions about a shared but ill-defined historical memory. This decisive conjuncture can be summed up by a feeling of suspense about the relationship of the past to the present. 4. In a more specific sense we can say that there are problems to be addressed in seeing the transition to democracy in the 1970s as the
Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the. . .

87

foundational myth of contemporary Spanish society. There remains a problematic assumption regarding the transitional settlement. At the root of it is the way that the civil war of the 1930s and its repressive aftermath have not yet been effectively absorbed and understood as a collective experience through the availability of adequate public space for representing collective memories of past conflict and the dissemination of multiple historical discourses around victory, defeat and survival. 5. The problem has become more evident as historians and others have attempted to reconcile the resurgence of memory with historical accounts and the methodological/philosophical bases of history. This is obviously not an issue of accuracy nor of so-called bias nor whether memories are considered to be true or not, but rather of contextualization and the kinds of questions that historians want to ask. The originating source of the problem has to do with the polarization created by civil wars and revolutions and the nature and longevity of a dictatorship that appropriated Spains war for its own ends through the construction of an official memory. Only very gradually and partially did this official version of the past evolve. During the transition to democracy, the representation of the war as a guerra fratricida (a war between brothers) where the location of responsibility was deliberately unspecifiedleft a great deal buried psychology amongst social groups of diverse size and countless individuals, particularly the painful experiences of individuals and families. A sense of resistance to the view of the transition as an unproblematic and foundational site of memory can therefore be identified as an element of the recent movement to recuperate memories. 6. The civil war played a significant role in the transition (Aguilar Fernndez 1996, 2002), therefore, but there is scope for understanding this role by looking at the social contribution, from civil society and the public in general. The metaphor of amnesia suggests passivity and a form of political calculation which tends to distance the process in the 1970s from the more complex social reality that should be understood historically. Spain was certainly a very different society in 1975 to that of the 1930s. There was a great contrast between the enormous hardship of the early post-civil war years and the consumerism of the 1960s, which preceded the transition. This contributed to the relegation of the past as a subject of concern to most people and, at a personal level, there were good psychological reasons for trying to forget the sheer awfulness of the war and its aftermath. There is evidence, however, that a broad politics of memory was alive in the 1970s which had displaced the wars directly felt effectsthe sense of mourning, bitterness and division of the 1940s and 1950s. Devotional confraternities, for example, that every year processed religious images founded during and associated with the civil war in order to remind people of the sacrifice and what was considered to be the shame of the revolution, began to provoke protests in the early 1970s. 7. Directing the question of post-war recollections of the past towards the social history of the period shifts attention away from the recent (and
88
Michael Richards

necessary) resurgence in memory and towards key terms and concepts. Memory and History can be distinguished as different, though overlapping, forms of recuperation of the past. History suggests a methodologically codified practice which, while far from unproblematic epistemologically, claims to be aimed at a value-free enquiry into processes in the past. Memory, on the other hand, presents greater difficulties because of its close relationship to such partial terms as tradition, nostalgia and progress. At the same time, the formation of human collective attachments to myths and the shaping of subjectivity take place through time and potentially tell us a lot about the construction of social groups in the past and in the present. The transmission (or withholding) of memories is therefore a vital part of social history, as in the inter-generational silence within families about the war. 8. In spite of the potential of Memory as a means to understanding change, the upsurge in memory since the end of the millennium has to be analyzed in relation to the civil, political and cultural communities in which it has arisen. Drawing on elements of both History and Memory can allow an effective historical framework of understanding to be developed within which the present concerns of these communities can be allowed expression. With the end of the Cold War there has been an opportunity to bring social and cultural perspectives to bear and the insights of anthropology, integrating ordinary experience and moving away from formal politics and rigid structuralism, towards the civil wars lived effects, towards human agency and the rhythms of social life over decades. Since the 1990s, critical oral history, (as distinguished from the mere collection of undigested testimony), has been an important part of the process. 9. There are four channels of social disruption in the 1940s and 1950s worthy of mention here in relation to an agenda for post-war social history. First, the physical, cultural and political dismantling of communities of solidarity and shared ideas associated with the left and the Second Republic as a direct result of the civil war and state-led repression in its aftermath. 10. Second, there was an important social aspect to the repression of dissent under Franco, particularly in the early years: actions carried out or assisted by those we could call ordinary people and based on a complex mixture of fear and revenge and the struggle to survive by accommodating the Francoist official mentality and its ideological and clientelist networks (especially in the countryside and provinces). 11. Third, the black market in the 1940s, which dominated everyday economic life, was often class-based, coercive and exploitative and increased hunger, suffering and levels of polarisation. But the unofficial market operated on many levels and new relationships were established in a quiet (and illegal) struggle for survivalmany revolving around women. This was a form of resistance (in the sense that a body might be resistant to a disease, rather than in the sense of collective public mobilisation). The black market upset previous practices and patterns. By necessity it was
Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the. . .

89

based on individuals rather than groups and disruptive of former social networks and of post-war social solidarity. But scarcity and the black market were also interpreted culturally and psychologically. For some people, it was difficult to understand the deprivations suffered and the divisions within families as anything other than an ascetic and punitive test to be overcome by accepting a sense of guilt about the war. Relating his wartime memories in the early 1970s, Pedro Altares presented several evocative images: caves outside of town that functioned as bomb shelters, the inscription on the exterior church walls of the names of men and women Cados por Dios y la Patria, the difusa frontera del pan, del pan negro y del pan blanco. The memories of war and post-war therefore merged together in daily practices. Perceptions of food as a kind of frontier could not be extracted from the social and psychological context, producing sometimes contradictory sensations and other curious daily distinctions, which could only be interpreted years later with a greater sense of maturity:
Mis recuerdos infantiles se pueblan de miedo y de sensacin de alegra, de cnticos con la mano alzada y de persianas bajadas con ojos temerosos al trasluz, de extraos odios incomprensibles y de ausencias inexplicables, de noticias de hambre y de comidas con pan blanco, de cruces en las carreteras (recemos un padrenuestro por el padre de Jos Luis o el abuelo de Miguel) o de silencios embarazosos al preguntar a otros por sus padres (cundo sale tu padre de la crcel, ngel?)
(Borrs Betriu, 1971, p. 387.)

12. Fourthly, mass migration. Long before the transition to democracy there was, in effect, a social and psychological transition in Spain that contributed substantially to the conversion of defeat into what the dictatorship called an economic miracle. Collective resignationwell-practiced endurance of povertyfollowed the end of revolutionary hopes and military and political defeat. Migration to the cities was provoked by the reversal of land reform as, for example, landowners (the victors) took land out of cultivation. Thus, energy, expressed in material sacrifices, was diverted towards silent work, auto-didacticism, the family and urban migration at any cost. The inculcation of this daily effort amounted to the sacrifice of one generation in the interests of the next, and has been lost in the current debate about historical memory. Repression did not begin and end with prison, but in the mechanism of the maximum effort to obtain a reproductive wage from the situation (Ruz Garca 1971: 171). This was a fundamental basis of economic modernisation and, as such, is a central part of what is known in Spain (as in France) as la historia del tiempo presente (history of the present time). 13. The 1950s and 1960s saw millions of lives cut in two by migration or emigration as people sought a sustainable lifeenough to eat, some relatively secure employment and shelter for families. Mass migration led to a
90
Michael Richards

process of cultural destructuring as a consequence of this demographic activity. A social history of the so-called economic miracle of the 1960s would therefore include an assessment of the felt effects and social costs of forced mobility and the shift to consumerism and the consequences of this process for collective memories (Comn and Garca Nieto 1974). 14. A nomadic existence provoked by war and its aftermath, and the liquidation of working class organizations, meant that cultural ties were undone. Pressure on gender relations (the predominance of women in the migratory process), cultural difference (sociologists shocked at the condition of country people in the 1950s, physically aged by privations and hard labour), old customs integrating with the radio and mass media, advertising, consumption patterns, a mix of self sacrifice, solidarity, withdrawal into the self, etc. In the process, memory itself was sacrificed, and the next generation had aspirations directed at the future rather than at looking back. 15. Post-war memory was therefore embedded in the history of society and in cultural change and can only be charted effectively as a unified, inter-generational, social process rather than as disembodied political moments on the way to what is uncritically described as progress. A reasoned critique of progress therefore requires a recuperation of collective memories which is grounded in social history. 16. An effective framework of understanding contemporary collective memories, as well as many other features of el tiempo presente, would therefore be a historical framework. Memories need to be contextualized, to be placed within an explanatory framework of historical knowledge. Memorybased accounts should be processed with a historiographical method concerned with the process of change through time and the relationship of this change to the causes of other processes and events and ways of life. 17. In the place of the officially-encouraged amnesia (Aguilar 1996, 2002) the notion of resignationimplying a social reality of long-term endurance of sufferingseems better to sum up a sense of the popular classes taking stock realistically of the scale of the defeat of the civil war and revolution, the losses it entailed (including breaking the claim and mythical status of the slogan the land for those who work it) and what this meant in terms of new directions. This was no surrender and the term is not used in a negative sense to infer passivity. Resignation implied a wholesale political disillusionment, but also a conscious and active decision by millions of people (many of them migrants) to take on painful sacrifices in the interests of generations to come. 18. The post-war sense of shame to do with the civil war, regularly mentioned in oral testimonies from the 1970s, although partly imposed by the dictatorship, was also expressed, to children, for example, partly through actions rather than words, in terms of a generational failure, at times, seemingly undifferentiated by notions of ideological difference, class distinctions, or religious alignment. 19. The memories of the war-time generation that has fearfully witnessed the recent exhumations incorporate the 1950s and 1960s as a
Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the. . .

91

period of looking forward rather than back, in sharp but conscious contrast to the war and the 1940s. Normalisation was a profound element of post-war cultural reproduction although rather than implying that Franco managed to reconcile post-war society, as some regime loyalists argued (e.g., Vizcano Casas 1978), 1960s normalization was reduced to forgetting through alignment of Spain with western European consumer societies and Americanism. 20. Shared memory may be observed within the interstices of social relations and routine practices, particularly in an authoritarian context where other outlets are closed off. Collective attitudes, the shaping of work and material conditions, relationships to the environment (everyday life is above all situated and hundreds of thousands of people moved from place to place), and the realm of family and private life were all partly shaped by the individually and collectively lived events of the 1930s and 1940s. Recent research on the era of the war (on the ideological construction and treatment of male and female prisoners and the forcible adoption of children, for example) suggests that memory was inscribed upon bodies, within families, and in shaping a sense of the self (e.g., Vinyes et al. 2002). The field of social relations under scrutiny needs, therefore, to be broad, incorporating not only social classes or incipient nations but also generations, neighbourhoods, families, and gender. 21. It is impossible to argue against the process of unearthing memories of the civil war in Spain: though full of problems, the process seems both necessary and inevitable. While being aware of the entrepreneurship connected to some of the published material carried along by or produced in reaction against this popular historical movement, historians should not condemn such movements, as such, but confront them critically. Popular history may well enrich or call into question the overly intellectualized offerings of professional historians. Collective memories in Spain cannot be properly understood, however, without accounting for the totality of postwar experience, particularly the living of everyday life alongside political repression. The current approach to collective memory tends to extract particular episodes to do with the crimes of Francoism as a way of declaring that they have not been forgotten. There is a danger, therefore, of fragmenting the Spanish twentieth-century past which can instead be re-told by reference to some sense of structure and unity of experience over time through a social history methodology applied to the Franco years. 22. There is, indeed, a price to be paid for focusing on the crimes of the past in isolation and how they are remembered. In calling for an analytical or structural narrative of the twentieth century, in place of the overwhelmingly moral story that he sees as currently transfixing intellectuals and public alike, Charles S. Maier has calculated this price (albeit in the context of thoughts about the Jewish Holocaust and the Gulag):
With its moving chords of memory, the locations of history tug at our heartstrings and allow us to debate endlessly over museums and memorials

92

Michael Richards

while acceptingwhether realistically or from exhaustion, depending on the perspective of the observerthe continuing limits on public-policy responses to social problems
(Maier 2000).

Focusing on atrocities suggests that a moral standpoint is the key vantage point of the historian whereas it is arguably the historians ability to observe changes which may be invisible to contemporary actors, and to see the reasons for those changes, which are more significant. How else is the continuity between those who hold social and economic power in Spain today and those who benefited from victory in 1939 to be demonstrated? References
Aguilar Fernndez, P. (1996), Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil espaola, Madrid: Alianza. [English translation (2002): Memory and Amnesia: the Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, New York: Berghahn Books.] Borrs Betriu, R. (1971), Los que no hicimos la guerra, Barcelona: Ediciones Nauta. Comn, A. and Garca Nieto, J. (1974), Juventud obrera y conciencia de clase, Madrid: Cuadernos Para el Dilogo. Desfor Edles, L. (1998), Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy after Franco, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. (1992), Social Memory, Oxford: Blackwell. Maier, C.S. (2000), Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, American Historical Review, 105: 3, pp. 807831. Molinero, C., Sala, M. and Sobrequs, J. (2003), Una inmensa prisin: los campos de concentracin y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo, Barcelona: Crtica. Rodrigo, J. (2005), Cautivos: campos de concentracin en la Espaa franquista, 19361947, Barcelona: Crtica. Ruz Garca, E. (1979), Espaa hoy: poltica econmica y sociedad en la transicin democrtica, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autnoma. Silva, E. et al. (2004), La memoria de los olvidados: un debate sobre el silencio de la represin franquista, Valladolid: mbito. Vinyes, R, Armengou, M, and Belis, R. (2002), Los nios perdidos del franquismo, Barcelona: Plaza Jans. Vizcano Casas, F. (1978), La Espaa de la posguerra, Barcelona: Planeta.

Suggested citation
Richards, M. (2006), Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the Spanish civil war, International Journal of Iberian Studies 19: 1, pp. 8594, doi: 10.1386/ijis.19.1.85/3

Contributor details
Michael Richards teaches Spanish history at the University of the West of England. He has published A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Francos

Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the. . .

93

Spain, 19361945 (Cambridge, 1998, 2006) and, with Chris Earlham, has edited The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 19361939, (Cambridge, 2005). Contact: School of History, University of the West of England, St. Matthias Campus, Oldbury Court Road, Bristol BS16 2JP. E-mail: Michael.Richards@uwe.ac.uk

94

Michael Richards