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A fascinating study of how the memory of Spain's bloody civil war has been contested from 1939 to the present.
List of contents
Introduction: cultural trauma in Spain; Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. War memories since 1936: political, moral, social; 2. Democracy, civil war, and intimate violence in the 1930s; Part II. Memories of War during the Franco Years: 3. Repression and remembrance: the victors' liturgy of memory; 4. Repression and reproduction: social memory in the 1940s; 5. Memory and politics: from Civil War to Cold War; 6. Memory and migration: flight from the countryside during the 1950s; 7. Commemorating Franco's peace: the 25th anniversary of the victory; 8. Contesting Franco's peace: transformation from below in the 1960s; 9. Transition and reconciliation: politics and the Church in the 1970s; Part III. Memories of War after Franco: 10. Transition and consent: the presence of the past, 1975-80; 11. 'The level of our times': memory and modernisation, 1981-96; 12. Collective identity and the ethics of memory, 1996-2007; Conclusion: the history of war memories in Spain; Sources and bibliography.
About the author
Michael Richards is Associate Professor of European History at the University of the West of England. His previous publications include A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, 1998) and The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War (as co-editor, Cambridge, 2005).
Summary
The Spanish Civil War was fought out not only on streets and battlefields from 1936 to 1939 but also in terms of memory and trauma in the decades that followed. This fascinating book explores how the memory of Spain's bloody civil war has been contested from 1939 to the present.
