Jacques Lemare, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline during the filming of With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. (Tamiment Library, NYU, 15th IB Photo Collection, Photo #11_0818)

It was a small war, fought on the fringes of Europe. Its casualties pale by comparison to the savagery of World War II that followed it by only five months. Yet there is something about the Spanish Civil War that insistently draws us back, that compels us to tell and retell the story. The fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939 dashed the hopes and dreams of millions of people around the globe, as Spain’s fledgling democracy was crushed by fascist military might. The Republic’s defeat was the defining moment for an entire generation, for in the words of Albert Camus, “it was in Spain that we learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

There are fewer than 10 U.S. veterans left standing, but their legacy lives on in books and scholarly articles, in memoirs, in photographs and exhibitions, and—not least—in a number of documentary films. The narrative of their participation in the Spanish Civil War as presented in documentary films illustrates important historical themes. This essay refers to the following documentaries:

The Spanish Civil War was the most photographed and filmed military conflict up to that point in history. Technological innovations—principal among them the compact single lens reflex 35 mm. camera and lightweight movie cameras—revolutionized the visual documentation of war. This allowed photojournalists and cameramen to get closer to the action and to record it with unprecedented immediacy. In addition, cinema newsreels were a burgeoning market for footage from Spain. A great deal of this material has been preserved in archives around the world.

It turns out that much of the footage recycled through the subsequent documentaries, in fact, originates in Cartier-Bresson’s short silent film, shot in a very few days and created with the avowed intention of influencing American public opinion and policy in defense of the Republic. I should point out that the material was used without attribution to Cartier-Bresson not out of malice, but because it wasn’t identified as his. These are some of the scenes that recur time and again:

• basic training in Albacete, new volunteers marching over dusty fields;
• Commander Robert Merriman addressing the troops, one in a long string of speeches for which the Lincolns, as many of them later confessed, had little tolerance;
• lining up for a meager meal of soup and bread;
• naked bodies lathering up in a mobile hot shower provided by the French Steelworkers Union;
• wounded Lincolns recovering in the hospital in Benicàssim;
• and, most memorably, portraits of the American volunteers.

There is one sequence often repeated that I find very moving, a slow pan across the faces of a group of young men, many of whom would later die in battle, others of whom would survive to tell the story. The camera lingers on one soldier’s face before slowly gliding down his body to his waist, traveling across the machine gun he is holding horizontal to the ground, to the comrade on his left, who grips the other end of the weapon, before slowly traveling up his torso to his face. Their youth and determination shine through in shy smiles, shrugs of the shoulders, a deep drag on a cigarette. Or do they? Is it perhaps the narrative constructed with these images that makes us see commitment in these young faces?

In Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade establishes many of the elements that will become part of the paradigm of the American volunteers. This includes the concept of steely commitment to the cause; the emphasis on racial and ethnic diversity (we see African Americans and Asians shoulder to shoulder with white Americans) will be elaborated as one of the proudest distinctions of the Brigade, culminating in the promotion of Oliver Law to commander and his death leading the troops up Mosquito Hill in Brunete; the gallery of portraits of the volunteers, many of whom are identified by name, trade, and hometown, will be transformed into interviews with surviving participants in later documentaries. Finally, since this is a silent film, the narrative line is carried by printed texts, often serving as transitions between different scenes as well. In its descendents, this will become voice-over narration, used in all but Souls without Borders. Cartier-Bresson’s film sets in place the main elements and parameters of how the story of the Lincoln Brigade will be told from that moment until today.

With slight variations the story is told in this way. It begins with conditions in the U.S., masses of unemployed thrown into desperation and poverty by the Great Depression; involvement in the labor movement, organization of the unemployed, and radical ideologies that envision a more just world; while this is happening on the home front there is a growing awareness of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the accompanying sense of impotence; Spain finally takes a stand against fascism and is abandoned by her sister democracies, including the U.S.; the formation of the International Brigades finally makes it possible to fight back, and the young Americans hike over the Pyrenees into Spain or swim ashore after their ship is torpedoed; archival footage of scenes of key battles—Jarama, Brunete, Belchite; Pasionaria’s moving Despedida when the internationals are withdrawn in 1938—“You are history, you are legend”; and then normally a coda that varies from film to film and either tells about persecution in the McCarthy witch hunts or follows the ongoing social and political activism of a few veterans. All the documentaries under consideration follow this paradigm to a greater or lesser extent.

I do not mean to imply that this is not an accurate representation of the events, but I am interested in understanding how it came to be the dominant narrative of the Lincoln Brigade. Chronology, of course, is always a compelling organizing principle. But is this the only way to tell the story? Fredric Jameson reminds us that history is not narrative, it is blood and struggle, but that our only access to history is through narrative.

I believe that the story continues to be told in this way in response to an unacknowledged master narrative that hovers, unspoken, over all these films, and that is the discourse of the Cold War. Even before the defeat of fascism in Europe, the Soviet Union lurked on the horizon as the next enemy. Lincoln vets suffered persecution and discrimination after Spain. Labeled “Premature Antifascists,” they were kept from active combat duty by the U.S. military until later in World War II. They were considered subversives and “Un-American,” and many were imprisoned or lost their jobs and passports.

There are a number of ways to understand the story of the Lincoln Brigade as a counter-Cold War narrative. In the 1940s and 50s, members of the American Communist Party were frequently considered foreign agents by the U.S. government. In these documentaries, the veterans’ testimonies often stress a nativist perspective. They unanimously express anger and dismay as Americans at FDR’s failure to support the Republican cause. In The Good Fight, Bill McCarthy tells us that the Spanish people were just fighting for what we already had: the right to vote, equality, and democratic political institutions. The African-American nurse, Salaria Kea, echoes this sentiment in the same documentary and in Into the Fire. The volunteers are presented as independent thinkers rather than as “dupes of Stalin.” Several of them recount their rejection of the CP line and discipline, expressing their scorn for Party functionaries and pie-cards. A repeated emphasis on Popular Front ideology draws attention away from the prominence of the Communist Party in the Spanish struggle. It makes a good story, and it has not gone uncontested by neo-cons such as Ronald Radosh.

Yet it raises other questions about the nature of memory and how it is constructed, about the role of visual documents in memory formation. Photographs and film footage are in one sense frozen moments in time. At the same time, they have an ongoing afterlife and become woven into the very fabric of memory. This afterlife changes with the passage of time and the different contexts into which they are inscribed. Our memory of a war waged over 70 years ago and of the Americans who fought in it is, in fact, built in large part on these images, their sequencing and contextualization not in life but in narrative structures.

And this, in turn, brings up another issue, that of truth value and authenticity. The source of much of the footage, Cartier-Bresson’s film, was self-acknowledged propaganda, created to persuade and convince, to sway public opinion and influence foreign policy. It makes little pretense of objectivity. Juan Salas found the diary of a Spanish miliciano who trained with the Lincolns at the time Cartier-Bresson shot the footage. The Spaniard complains about the staged battle scenes. Controversy rages today over Capa and Taro staging scenes and posing soldiers, not the least of which is the ongoing polemic over Capa’s Fallen Soldier.

As these images, both moving and still, migrate to the documentary narratives of the Lincoln Brigade and are recontextualized, the distinction between reality and simulation, to the extent that it existed originally, becomes flattened and blurred. Staged scenes as well as newsreel footage of real battle acquire the status of truth and become the foundation for our memory of the Spanish Civil War and the American volunteers. Does this make the story less real or our memory less authentic? Abe Osheroff, when asked if his tales of Spain were true, often replied, “Look at it this way: either it’s true or I’m a genius….” Translation: truth is in the telling.

Alberti wearing a shirt given to him by the author

Last night a young Spanish poet, Isabel Cadenas, showed me her blog:  nuncafuiagranada.blogspot.com.  When I asked her why she chose that line from Rafael Alberti’s homage to Federico García Lorca, victim of a fascist firing squad in the first month of the civil war, she replied “Because I’ve never been to Granada.”  Alberti hadn’t either, but I took him to that darkly beautiful Andalusian city in the spring on 1982, his first visit.  I was directing a study abroad program for Dartmouth College and had brought Alberti the year before to Hanover, NH to participate in a symposium on art and literature of the Spanish Civil War.  (It was then that I first became a member of ALBA.)

Alberti spent a week with me in Granada, giving a reading in the patio of Puentezuelas to hundreds of adoring students and local poets, a public interview in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the University of Granada, a private visit to the Alhambra at night, and visit to El Barranco de Víznar, Lorca’s burial site.  The highlight of the trip for me was the last day, when I borrowed a friend’s car and drove Rafael to the mountains south of Granada, Las Alpujarras, for lunch.  He recited the poetry of Góngora on the ride there and back, until I dropped him at the airport.

I am grateful to Isabel Cadenas for sparking this memory.

The Battle of Brunete looms large in the memories and the memoirs of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, some 2,800 young Americans who joined 40,000 other volunteers from over fifty countries in the fight against fascism in Spain from 1936 to 1939.

In July 1937, in an attempt to stem the Nationalist advance on Madrid, the Republican army went on the offensive at Brunete, about 35 kilometers outside the capital city. The Lincoln Brigade formed part of the government’s 80,000 troops. The Battle of Brunete instantly, if briefly, attained mythical status internationally and among the American volunteers for two reasons. It was there on July 9 that Oliver Law, leading an attack up Mosquito Ridge, met his death. Law was the first African American to command white troops in the history of the United States military. It was also on a battlefield between Villanueva de la Cañada and Brunete two weeks later, on July 25, that Gerda Taro was crushed by a Republican tank in the chaos of retreat. Taro was the first woman photojournalist to die in action. She was given a hero’s burial in Paris.

Gerda Taro with a Republican solider near Córdoba, Spain. Photo Robert Capa

Law and Taro have something else in common as well: until recently, history has all but forgotten them both. The Lincoln Brigade fell victim to the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s, holding a place of honor at the beginning (as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) and end (as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s list of subversive organizations. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade has been systematically written out of American history books, including, sad to say, Howard Zinn’s otherwise splendid A People’s History of the United States, which makes not a single mention of the volunteers.

Gerda Taro was consigned to oblivion for other reasons. For one thing, Robert Capa, Taro’s partner in love and photography, quickly overshadowed her after her death. His photos of Spain and D-Day soon came to define photojournalism in thetwentieth century. For another, World War II surpassed the Spanish Civil War in sheer savagery and numbers of casualties, reducing the earlier conflict to a footnote. Yet in her brief career as a photojournalist (which lasted scarcely a year), Taro’s work was published in many of the most important European and American magazines of the time. Subsequently, many of her photos were attributed to Capa. Recently, due in large part to Richard Whelan’s meticulous efforts to identify her prints and negatives, and Irme Schaber’s groundbreaking biographical studies, Taro has begun to emerge from the shadows.

Viewing Taro’s negatives of the Battle of Brunete, preserved for seventy years in the Mexican Suitcase, is like seeing a ghost. They constitute a visual record of the last days of her life. Indeed, many of them have a ghostly quality. Whether the negatives have deteriorated over the years or were originally overexposed, many of them have a phantom look to them: figures emerge from a cloudy background, flames from a burning truck sear through the smoke, buildings literally spill their guts after an air raid.

Taro's Brunete negatives from the Mexican Suitcase; www.icp.org

The Mexican Suitcase negatives do not represent all of Taro’s photos from Brunete. Many of her better-known shots, published in reportages in a number of French, German, and American periodicals, are not here. From those that are, it is difficult to configure a chronology or narrative line. With many of Capa’s photos included in this same collection, one can reconstruct a sequence by studying the contact sheets. His photos from the Battle of Teruel, for instance, fall into groupings that can be reassembled to structure a narrative: battle itself, captured prisoners, initial victory celebration, the consequences for the civilian population after the Republican defeat.

Such is not the case with Taro’s negatives dating from the weeks of the Brunete battle. They jump from shots of the battlefield (where the war is almost always outside the frame) to a handful of pictures of María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti in the Palace of the Marquis of Heredia Spinola back in Madrid (requisitioned by the Republican government as the headquarters of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas); from the Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture (in Valencia) to scenes of Madrid under bombardment. Yet even when viewed in the contacts it is difficult to establish a narrative sequence. Perhaps this is because, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, history is not narrative, it is struggle and blood. Yet paradoxically our only access to history is through narrative. Hence our compulsion to tell stories, to set the pieces in order.

On the one hand, a snapshot is a frozen moment in time. It removes the subject from chronology and sequence, rendering it static and iconic. (Capa’s controversial Falling Soldier is one such example.) On the other hand, “photographs are artifacts with a continuing life,” as Judith Fryer Davidov contends in her book Women’s Camera Work (1998). The difference between stasis and “continuing life,” in essence, is context. In the case of Taro’s Brunete negatives, we can reconstruct context as thegeneral historical framework of the Spanish Civil War and the ideological mobilization of the media. Capa and Taro were both aware of the international dimensions of the war and consciously put their craft at the service of the Republican cause. “Objectivity” was not their goal. They strove to show the world the effects of fascism on the civilian population. Their objective in photographing the Battle of Brunete was to provide visual evidence that the Republican army was indeed prevailing.

The context of a particular snapshot is also found in the exposures that precede and follow it. One of the more compelling sequences in Taro’s Brunete negatives consists of three photos of a soldier squinting down the barrel of his Mauser (ms076, frames 49, 50, 51). Negative 50 was published on the cover of a German magazine, Die Volks-Illustrierte (August 25, 1937). Sepia tinting replaces the gray of the negative, making light glance dramatically off the two hand grenades strapped to the soldier’s belt. It is a powerful shot that captures the tension of combat in the man’s body as he pokes his weapon through the sandbag levee. The frame before is nearly identical but shot in horizontal format. In the following frame, the soldier has turned to the camera, a wide grin creasing his face. It changes our understanding of the previous photo without in any way devaluing it. Is the infantryman mugging for the camera or, more likely, for the young woman behind the lens? Is this shot staged rather than spontaneous? Ultimately, what does it tell us?

Taro’s own image is almost entirely absent from her Brunete negatives. She was always behind the camera. We see her shadow in just one shot (ms075, frame 36). Yet in a certain sense it is Taro who emerges from these ghostly negatives, haunting us as we look back over seven decades and countless armed conflicts. She is powerfully present in her traces, in her very absence. To this day, treasure hunters armed with metal detectors sweep the hills and fields of Brunete in search of Gerda’s lost Leica.

Anthony Geist is chair of the Spanish department at the University of Washington.

Erin Murphy is pursuing a joint MA in Public Affairs in UW’s Evans School and International Studies in the Jackson School. Last year, she participated in an innovative study abroad program created by Prof. Joel Ngugi, Associate Professor of Law and Director of UW’s Africa studies program. This program, entitled “Health, Human Rights, and Social Transformation,” lasts for three quarters and culminates in students’ conducting their own human rights project in conjunction with Kenyan organizations; it is designed to forge lasting ties between the University of Washington and Kenyan human rights groups.

Abe Osheroff

Last year, Erin and several of her peers had the opportunity to meet members of the Ngecha Artists Association, a group dedicated to using art to advance dialogue around important human rights concerns. Erin took on a leadership role in bringing some of their artwork to Seattle to host a show in January 2010. All proceeds from this show went to the artists and their community arts center fund (video here). At the artists’ request, Erin created a website, ngechaartist.org. With funds from the Osheroff-Clark Fund, Erin will return to Kenya this summer to continue work with the Ngecha Artists Association.

Peter Morris, a JD/MA student in Law and Southeast Asian Studies, will use support from the Osheroff-Clark Fund to work with Human Rights Now (HRN), a Japanese NGO that has played an active role in addressing Burma’s refugee crisis and other human rights issues in Asia. Morris has prior experience in this region, having conducted research on human trafficking in Japan at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies as well receiving a Master’s Certificate in China Studies from Johns Hopkins’ Center in Nanjing, China. He has served previously as an intern with Burma Lawyers’ Council, an NGO in Thailand that provides legal assistance to Burmese migrants and advocates for democracy and human rights in Burma.

Last year, Morris worked on the creation of the Peace Law Academy, an institution designed to teach aspiring Burmese lawyers exiled in Thailand about human rights and international law. This year, he plans to continue that work, aiming to impart students with tools they can use to provide legal assistance to Burmese migrants in Thailand and to advocate for democracy and human rights in Burma through non-violent means.

(For more on the fund, see here).