Fanny Schoonheyt in Barcelona, May 1937. Photo by Agustí Centelles. Spain, Ministry of Culture, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Archivo Centelles.

Fanny Schoonheyt, born in Rotterdam in 1912, was the only woman among the contingent of Dutch volunteers to take up arms in defense of the Spanish Republic. There were other Dutch women in Spain during the Civil War, to be sure, but they generally worked as nurses. Fanny was already in Barcelona at the outbreak of the war and participated in those July days of 1936 in the defense against the military coup. In a letter to a friend in Rotterdam she later described how she and her comrades entered the military barracks from the roofs and how they confiscated the arms found there: “I wore a rather conspicuous yellow shirt and it is a miracle they didn’t shoot me. But perhaps be they were so surprised to see me they forgot to react.” Surprised to see a girl, is the supposition, although in those days a lot of young Spanish women came into action. Fanny immediately joined the antifascist milicias and as early as July/August ‘36 left for the Aragón front, where she stayed till November when she was wounded.

Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, in an officer's uniform of the Republican Army. (Private archive Marisa Gerecht-López.)

At the front Fanny quickly became famous for her exceptional technical knowledge and her bravery. Almost all Barcelona newspapers—from the CNT’s La Noche to the widely read Vanguardia—published long interviews with her, calling her “la reina de la ametralladora,” the queen of the machine gun. Still, her comandante at the front assured she was “a very feminine woman,” while the interviewer of La Noche described her as tall, blonde (“a real blonde, not peroxide”) with eyes “as blue as a Nordic lake.” Fanny herself was rather averse to what she called “this adoration” and later, when several Dutch newspapers translated the Spanish interviews, she complained in letters to her friend about “all this nonsense” being written about her.

Fanny came to Spain at the end of 1934, trying to make a living as foreign correspondent. In Rotterdam she had had a job as secretary of the prominent Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. She was an ambitious young woman, trying hard to be invited to join the editorial staff—an almost impossible aspiration in this still exclusively male world. Still, her job provided her with an entry into the cultural and intellectual circles of Rotterdam, where she met writers, painters and filmmakers such as Joris Ivens (who in 1937 would shoot The Spanish Earth, although at that point Joris and Fanny did not meet).

Earlier in 1934 Fanny had traveled to the Soviet Union. As so many young people and intellectuals in the ‘30s she was intrigued and attracted by the fame of the Bolshevik Revolution—although she had not the slightest idea of what was really going on in the USSR. She published a series of articles about her visit to Leningrad, where she was invited as art critic. Fanny was a rather talented pianist, but she likely wasn’t too interested in theoretical questions. In these articles she struggles in a naive way with the question what “revolutionary art” should be, and although she does not come to any definite conclusion, she is keen enough to predict the brilliant future of one of the composers she discusses: Shostakovich.

At the end of ‘34 Fanny decides to leave Holland, which she finds “dusty, musty, flat and boring.” She heads to Catalonia to look up the Surinam-born Dutch novelist Lou Lichtveld, one of the writers she has met in Rotterdam. Lichtveld (who, as it happened, also composed the score to one of Joris Ivens’s films) lives in Barcelona, where he is working about the colony of German/Jewish refugees who have fled the Nazi regime. In the broad Spanish political spectrum Lichtveld’s sympathies are on the anarchist side and he is a fervent anti-Catholic. His daughter, in her eighties now, vividly remembers her childhood in those turbulent days, the strikes and demonstrations in Barcelona—and especially the day she and her sister, on their way home from school, saw a chapel that was set on fire. As soon as they got home, the girls burned their doll’s house in a spontaneous act of anticlerical solidarity.

Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, Aug-Sept 1936. Copyright EFE/Juan Guzmán.

Fanny did not stay with the Lichtveld family for very long; she soon found a place of her own in the old center of Barcelona. But she never realized her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent for a Dutch paper. The letters to her friend in Rotterdam indicate that she was not doing well and had kidney trouble. She writes a lot about daily life in Barcelona, inviting her friend to join her on a trip to Ibiza (which she described as the cheapest place on earth), but she never once mentions Spain’s political turmoil. Nor does she give any sign of political commitment herself.

In fact, this is one of the many mysteries surrounding Fanny’s life: When, where, and how did she become politically engaged? Less than a year later, after the outbreak of the Civil War, writing to the same friend in Rotterdam, she is a convinced antifascist and a member of the PSUC (the United Socialist Party of Catalonia), the Catalan branch of the Communist Party. What happened in the interim?

I long thought that Fanny became politicized during the few weeks she worked as a press agent for the Olimpiada Popular, the alternative Olympic Games to be held in Barcelona in July, and on whose organizing committee sat a good number of German and Italian political refugees. When Franco’s coup interrupted the Games, several of them joined the milicias and formed the kernel of what later became the International Brigades. I supposed Fanny’s decision to join the armed Republican resistance against the coup had been a spontaneous one, motivated by a sense of solidarity with the people she had been working with in those weeks. But a conversation with Marina Ginesta in 2007 made me change my mind.

Marina, one of the last survivors of the SCW, is over ninety by now and still a beautiful woman. A photo depicting her on the roof of the Hotel Colon in Barcelona has become an icon of the SCW. During the war she worked as a translator, among others for Koltsov, the famous Pravda-reporter. Marina told me Fanny’s political activism had started much earlier: She had met Fanny at the end of ’35 or the beginning of ‘36 at the meetings of the Communist Youth in Barcelona. “It was hard not to notice her,” Marina told me. “She was tall, blonde and she smoked cigarettes! No woman in Barcelona at that time would have dared to light a cigarette in public. She paid no attention to us, young ignorant Spanish women, I even had the impression she looked down on us. The older men respected her a lot and the younger men… you can imagine.” Marina’s testimony undermined my earlier hypotheses. Could Fanny have lived a double life of which her Dutch friends were unaware?

Fanny Schoonheyt died in 1961, age 49. I have been fascinated with her since the mid-1980s, but reconstructing her life has not been easy. Reliable sources are few and far between. Apart from a handful of letters, Fanny left no personal papers; in fact, I suspect she purposely tried to erase all traces of her Spanish past. Even her daughter, who was born in 1940 in the Dominican Republic, had no idea that her mother had fought in Spain. The most extensive information about this period of her life is to be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. Between 600 and 800 Dutchmen participated in the Spanish Civil War and for almost all there is a personal dossier, compiled by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice. A special Royal Decree of summer ‘37 deprived them all of their Dutch nationality. Probably a third of them were killed in Spain; of those who returned—stateless—to Holland, many ended up in German concentration camps.

As it turns out, the Dutch National Archive contains an extensive correspondence about Fanny between the Dutch consul in Barcelona and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Several remarkable points jump out. In the spring of ‘37 the consul writes that Fanny has become an officer in the Spanish Republican Army. This is the time the militias, where anarchist influence is strong, are being dismantled, and the new army of the Republic, the “Ejército Popular” is being build. It is also the time of increased Soviet influence in the Army.

We don’t know what rank exactly Fanny held in the Republican army; Spanish military historians claim there never was a foreign woman officer at all. However, the uniform she is wearing on one of the few photos taken of her during the war is not the uniform of a simple soldier. Several sources affirm that Fanny was “directora” in the “campo de instrucción premilitar” at Pins del Valles, a little village not far from Barcelona where new recruits got their instruction. Remarkably, during the whole war Fanny never entered the International Brigades; she always operated in the realm of the Ejército Popular and the PSUC, the Catalonian Communist Party. Regardless of the specifics, hers was an exceptional career for a foreign woman.

How involved was Fanny in the internal political conflicts that divided the Republican camp? In his Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes the horrible days of May ‘37, when left-wingers in the streets of Barcelona engaged in a deathly struggle, ending up with the elimination of anarchists and POUMists (wrongly called “Trotskyites”) and the violent death of POUM leader Andreu Nin. Orwell mentions the Barcelona’s central square, the Plaza de Catalunya, whose “principal landmark … was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating the Plaza”: “In a window near the last O but one in the huge ‘Hotel Colón’ that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep the square with deadly effect.”

New of Fanny's having been wounded in La Vanguardia of June 17, 1937. Click on the image to see the whole page.

In the course of my investigation I became more and more convinced that Fanny Schoonheyt had has been one of the PSUC machine-gunners at the Plaza. After publishing my biography of Fanny in the fall of 2011, ALBA’s Sebastiaan Faber sent me a photo depicting Fanny, flanked by two men, standing with her back to a pile of sandbags in front of what looks like the façade of the Hotel Colón. The picture, taken by the famous Catalan war photographer Agustí Centelles, reinforces my supposition that Fanny played a significant role in the “hechos de mayo”. Interestingly, the picture forms part of the exhibit “Centelles in_edit_oh!” which opened in New York in October. In the show, Fanny is misidentified as Fanny Jabcovsky aka Fanny Edelmann, the equally legendary miliciana from Argentina who passed away this year, age 100. (I am still hoping to identify the two men at Fanny’s side, and welcome any suggestions anyone might have on the matter.)

Centelles’ portrait of Fanny is part of a series of at least three photos taken at the same place and time. A cropped version of one of the other images—this time with Fanny smiling—appeared on June 17^th, 1937 in La Vanguardia. “La gran luchadora antifascista conocida por ‘Fanny’ gravemente herida,” the headline reads. The great antifascist fighter known as Fanny, the paper states, has been seriously wounded in a car accident near Tarragona.

This is the last piece of information concerning Fanny I found in the Spanish newspapers. What she did between June 1937 and the summer of 1938 is still an enigma, although some intriguing clues can be found in a book by the American journalist Isaac Don Levine. In The mind of an assassin (1960), a reconstruction of the life of Ramón Mercader, the Catalan secret agent who murdered Trotsky in August 1940, Levine describes how Mercader, during a hospital stay in June 1937, meets another convalescent patient: “a tall, blonde Dutch girl, Fani Castedo, prominent in the communist movement. Ramon had an affair with her. His room became a meeting place for some of the most notorious communists in Barcelona as well as Soviet NKVD operatives hospitalized in the establishment.” Unfortunately Levine does not indicate where he got this information. The name Castedo is traceable to a Catalonian painter prominent in the PSUC, a friend of Fanny’s who after the defeat of the Republic disappeared to the Soviet Union. Had she adopted his name as an alias? Had Fanny entered the NKVD’s spider web?

In the late spring of 1938 Fanny tries to get her Dutch passport renewed at the consulate of the Netherlands in Barcelona. Her request is denied. She tells the consul she wants to go back to Holland—an obvious lie. The summer of 1938 finds her in Toulouse, from where she resumes her correspondence with her friend in Rotterdam. She tells here she is in Toulouse “on duty” and will go on to Paris to obtain a pilot’s license. She is reticent about the exact nature of her activities, but she does tell her friend about a man she has fallen in love with, Georges Vieux, who works at Air France in Toulouse.

Georges, a highly qualified aeronautical technician, was likely involved with the informal aid Air France provided to the Spanish Republic. He regularly traveled to Barcelona, and is there on December 31, 1938, when Barcelona is heavily bombarded by Italian aircraft. “I almost lost my Georgie,” Fanny writes to her friend from Paris, where she is desperately trying to get her pilot’s license; her lessons are continuously postponed because of bad weather. On January 6, 1939, only a few weeks before the fall of Barcelona, she tells her friend she is still determined to go back to Spain, “whatever happens.” Meanwhile, it is not at all clear why Fanny was bent on getting her pilot’s license and what she would have done with it. Was she paid by the PSUC leaders to become some sort of private pilot at the moment a hasty evacuation might be needed? As it turned out, many PSUC leaders were hastily evacuated, with Soviet help, at the end of the Civil War.

There are many questions and just a few answers. Georges Vieux disappears from the scene altogether; I was not able to find a single trace of what happened to him after the war. Fanny stays in Paris till February 1940. How she makes a living is a mystery. A little agenda covering the year 1939—one of the few personal belongings she left behind after her death—contains a long list of more or less well known antifascist artists, painters, musicians, writers. In February 1940 she arrives in the Dominican Republic, then under the dictatorship of Trujillo. She is on the lists of the SERE (Servicio de Emigración para los Repubicanos Españoles), the agency that helped Spanish refugees to leave France. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the non-aggression agreement between Hitler and Stalin, life for communists everywhere had become unbearable. The Communist Party was outlawed and many Spanish refugees ended up in French concentration camps. Fanny, who continued to be stateless, did not choose to go to the Dominican Republic; refugees were simply assigned a destination. Trujillo had his particular reasons to admit several thousands of Spanish and Jewish refugees to his country, among which “improving the race” (with “white” European blood to counterbalance the “blacks” coming from Haiti) seems to have been an important one.

Interview with a hospitalized Fanny in "La Noche," Aug. 25, 1937. Click on the image for a larger view in pdf.

In April 1940 Fanny gives birth to a daughter, whom she will later tell that her father was a Spanish Republican fighter, named Julio López Mariani, who died on the same boat that brought Fanny to the Dominican Republic. From the documents of that time and from the research I did in Spain no such man ever results; most likely Fanny “invented” a father for her child. Regardless, from that moment on she calls herself Fanny López. She contacts the Dutch consul in the Dominican Republic and tries once again to renew her Dutch papers. The Netherlands by then is occupied by the Nazi’s, and Rotterdam has been destroyed in a massive bombardment. Fanny has good reason to hope that the information about her Spanish past has been lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately for her Dutch bureaucracy is still working and her application for Dutch nationality is denied once again. It is just because she gains the personal sympathy of the Dutch consul, Leonard Faber, that she is able to survive. Later on she starts a quite successful career as photographer. Remarkably enough she avoids almost all contact with Spanish Republican refugees that have settled in the Dominican Republic, and who according to all Dominican historians have had a determinant influence on Dominican cultural and intellectual life.

From the moment she arrives in the Dominican Republic Fanny seems bent on blurring her revolutionary past. Of course in a dictatorship it is always better to be extremely careful—and Trujillo’s rule was particularly brutal. But she becomes even more taciturn after 1947, when she is compelled to leave the Dominican Republic—the precise circumstances are unclear—and is allowed to move to Curaçao, then still a Dutch colony. Of course in the Western hemisphere in the 1940s and ‘50s there was little reason to boast of a revolutionary, communist past. But an additional reason for Fanny’s avoiding contact with her Spanish Communist comrades could have been her relation with Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin. Had that chapter of her biography become public information, her life would become even more complicated. Evidently, however, it did not: the FBI files on Spaniards in the Dominican Republic are extremely detailed, but Fanny is not mentioned.

Fanny’s silence about her Spanish past has puzzled me for a long time. When I first met her daughter, I was surprised to realize that she had not the faintest idea of her mother’s life before her birth. When I told her that her mother had been famous as “queen of the machine-gun” and the bravest girl of Barcelona, she was flabbergasted. Did Fanny hide her past only for opportunistic reasons? While in Paris in 1939, she met several Spanish artists who had been members of, or sympathetic to, the POUM. Did they open her eyes to what had really happened in those terrible May days of 1937? Did they tell her about the destructive consequences of Soviet “help” to the Republic? In other words, did she realize that in many ways she had made the wrong political choice?

Her old Dutch-Surinam friend Lou Lichtveld met her again in 1955 in Willemstad, Curaçao. She was “cool,” he said. She did not even invite him to her home. But Lichtveld had a different explanation: It was all due to the Dutch “fascistoid” government that still refused to grant Fanny her Dutch nationality: “She was stateless, so she had to be very careful.” In 1957 Fanny finally returned to Holland. She was in bad shape, her health was deteriorating quickly. On the eve of Christmas 1961 she died from a heart attack.

Yvonne Scholten is a Dutch writer and freelance journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent in Italy and other countries. Her biography of Fanny Schoonheyt appeared with Meulenhoff in Amsterdam in 2011.

The Ivens story is only one of the many surprising pieces of information to be found in Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (read an excerpt here, purchase the book here). Other revelations include definite proof of Buñuel’s Communist Party membership, the political intentions of Land without Bread, the nature of his propaganda work in Paris, and his role in the elusive Civil War compilations Espagne 1936 and Espagne 1937. A joint Spanish-British effort by film scholars Román Gubern and Paul Hammond, The Red Years (a revised English version of their 2009 Los años rojos) covers a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well as the history of Spain and the world. As they follow Buñuel from Madrid to Paris to the United States, the authors painstakingly connect the dots of an intricate, transnational network of friendships, alliances, conflicts, and projects. It’s hard to imagine any future biography Buñuel surpassing Gubern and Hammond in exhaustiveness and virtuosity.

Buñuel, who spent the postwar years as an exile in Mexico, was the groundbreaking creator, with his friend Salvador Dalí, of the surrealist masterpieces Chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930), and directed more than thirty feature films including Los olvidados (1950) and Belle de Jour (1967). He was also an obsessive practical joker and poseur, notoriously difficult to pin down; he enjoyed nothing more than to goad his audience and hoodwink his interviewers, leaving a trail of scandal and confusion. Armed with decades’ of archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Gubern and Hammond manage to cut through the layers of legend and anecdote, revealing Buñuel as a key figure in the Republican public-relations effort during the Spanish Civil War and as a canny operator and propagandist whose decisions were driven as much by artistic and political convictions as by fear and, occasionally, opportunism.

Román Gubern in Portland, February 2011. Photo Sebastiaan Faber

“Buñuel was a consummate chameleon,” Gubern said when I met with him in Portland, Oregon last February (video coming soon), “in aesthetic as much as political terms. In the 1920s, he was a surrealist; in the 1930s, a Communist and propagandist; during his postwar exile in Mexico he filmed commercial melodramas to make a living, while he also worked closely with American blacklisted filmmakers such as Hugo Butler. And in the 1960s and ‘70s, in France, he gave surrealism a new lease on life with films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.”

“Right below that chameleonic surface, however, lurked a deep unity of purpose. Buñuel’s life is the story of a moral and political rebellion—a rebellion against the conservative culture of 1920s Spain, ruled by a reactionary monarchy and an immensely powerful, retrograde Catholic church. At first, surrealism provides Buñuel with the tools to rebel; and surrealism leads him to the Communist Party. But our book also shows that Buñuel was a man of flesh and blood, a human being with weaknesses who tried to survive in difficult times. I would not say he was an exemplary human being in moral or ethical terms. He was a physical coward—this is no criticism, I myself am one, too—and his first instinct was often to save his skin.”

The author of some fifty books, Gubern is Spain’s most prolific scholar of visual and mass media (film, television, comics). A kind of Catalan Marshall MacLuhan, he taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has written films and documentaries. During several stays in the United States, Gubern met a number of Lincoln veterans. In 1969, together with Jaime Camino and Alvah Bessie (Lincoln vet and one of the Hollywood Ten), he made España otra vez, which tells the story of an American doctor who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War and returns years later to search for his Spanish lover. The film was a commercial flop but marked a milestone: “It was the first film produced in Franco´s Spain in which the Republican does not end up converting to the Nationalist cause.”

Gubern (1934) was born into the Catalan bourgeoisie. He became involved in the anti-Francoist resistance in the 1950s as a college student; he joined the Communist Party, leaving it in 1968. As director of the Barcelona student film club, Gubern was the first in Franco´s Spain to screen Buñuel’s controversial 1932 documentary Land without Bread. “I have to confess that the film threw me off,” he remembers. “At that point I hadn’t even seen Chien andalou. I knew of course that Buñuel was a cinematic giant, so I had high expectations—but in fact I was a bit disappointed, the film seemed strangely bland.” Still, with the help of Basilio Martín Patino, the print that Gubern had secured was shown at film clubs throughout the country—“It was screened to shreds.”

“Buñuel is one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, that’s beyond discussion. He was the first to systematically introduce the subconscious as a dramatic element in movies. Without Buñuel, Hitchcock could not have made Psycho. Nothing in what we found denies Buñuel´s importance—but our book does invite the audience to re-read his work, and to reconsider his place in the twentieth-century history of ideas.”

Sebastiaan Faber is Chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors.

Portrait of Luis Buñuel by Man Ray

Two sources of information exist about the poorly documented cinematic activities of the director during the first few weeks of the war: the declarations of Antonio del Amo, and Juan Vicens’s archive in the Residencia de Estudiantes. In the latter there is a receipt signed by Luis Buñuel, dated 25 August 1936, which reads: “Received from Leo Fleischman the sum of £490 for the purchase of film material, for which I assume the responsibility of repaying at some future date.” Leo Fleischman was an American engineer, a New Yorker, the brotherin- law of Juan Vicens, which is why this document is in his archive. Before the first American volunteers would embark at the end of the year in New York to fight on the Republican side, Fleischman, who was probably spending his summer holidays in Spain with the Vicenses, enlisted in the Fifth Regiment and died in combat in October 1936.

On 20 July the PCE had organized the Fifth Regiment, consisting of Communist militiamen—harangued that day by Pasionaria—whose first headquarters were in the Salesian convent on Calle Francos Rodríguez in Madrid. In its ranks it introduced “political commissars” on the Soviet model—the painter Ramón Pontones was one of them—and by the end of July it had already sent a thousand combatants to the Sierra de Guadarrama front. Eduardo Ugarte would join the Fifth regiment’s press service, in which he was chief editor of the newspaper Milicia Popular.

An economic relationship between Buñuel and Fleischman existed, then, within the confines of filmmaking activity at the start of the war, when Buñuel had already abandoned Filmófono. The fact that he was the recipient of a rather large sum to buy film material with would suggest that his function was that of an administrator, manager, or organizer. The comments by Communist filmmaker Antonio del Amo about his activities during that period point in the same direction. The earliest and most illuminating were made to Antonio Castro. “When the war started,” del Amo told him, “I, who had always intended to become a director and had tried without success to become Perojo’s assistant, asked a great friend of mine, Buñuel, what I had to do to make films, and Buñuel gave me a 16 mm camera, a hand-cranked Éclair, a good one, and made a present of film he’d got himself from Kodak. With the camera, the negative film and a few cameramen friends I went to the front with Mantilla; in actual fact I went as an assistant to Fernando G. Mantilla, who was Carlos Velo’s collaborator.” Del Amo was twenty-five years old at the time and was known as a movie critic and film society activist, while the likewise Communist Mantilla, a philosophy and arts graduate in 1931, film critic for Unión Radio, and since 1935 co-director of various documentaries with the Galician biologist Carlos Velo, had greater professional experience. It is usually claimed that Mantilla’s first Civil War documentary was Julio 1936, which was commented upon that September in the film press.  Produced by the improvised Cooperativa Obrera Cinematográfica, consisting of Communists and a few Socialists, its Communist orientation was evident, since it began with an address by José Díaz, general secretary of the PCE, and concluded with a speech by Pasionaria. It is likely that the workers cooperative film unit had some connection or other with the Fifth Regiment, given the Communist predilection for centralized, unified activity, and it is also plausible that Buñuel was not foreign to its pioneering wartime initiative. In February 1937 the Cooperativa Obrera Cinematográfica presented a project to the Ministry of Press and Propaganda for the reorganization of the film industry, a document in whose gestation Buñuel could have intervened before leaving for Paris.

Receipt in Buñuel's hand, dated 15 August 1936, in which he acknowledges the loan of 490 pouns by American International Brigades member Leo Fleischman for the purchase of film material. (Archivo de la Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid.)

Buñuel, then, provided the camera and virgin film that del Amo utilized in his early Civil War work. More than twenty years after his statement to Antonio Castro, and with Buñuel dead, del Amo came up with a more self-serving and colorful version of their professional relations during the war, affirming that he went to film with Buñuel at the front, under his direct orders, “and we launched ourselves into the adventure of filming all the confrontations that were taking place on all the battlefields.” More reliable researches indicate that del Amo was Mantilla’s assistant on the documentaries España 1936 (which must not be confused with the film of the same name made in Paris by Buñuel/Dreyfus), produced by the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture, and Nueva era en el campo (1937), a Film Popular production for the Ministry of Agriculture.  Del Amo was extremely active during the Civil War. He directed the Cinema Section of the Forty-Sixth “El Campesino” Division (led by Valentín González, who was nicknamed thus) of the Fifth Army Corps, following the death of its chief, the Italian cameraman Antonio Vistarini. For it he co-directed, with Rafael Gil, the remarkable Soldados campesinos (1938), using nonprofessional actors. Del Amo was condemned to death at the end of the war, a sentence commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment, thanks to the negotiations of his ex-collaborator Gil, whose life he had previously saved in the opposite political camp. Mantilla, meanwhile, went into exile in Mexico.

The names of Buñuel and Antonio del Amo also appear alongside each other in the dossier held in the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War in relation to the tragic end of the Communist critic Juan Piqueras.  In July 1936 Piqueras, who was suffering from a stomach ulcer, traveled from Paris to the Spanish border in response to an invitation from his comrades in Asturias. Once on Spanish soil on 9 July 1936, however, he began to cough up blood and was obliged to take shelter in the inn of the railway station in Venta de Baños (in the province of Palencia) in order to recover. It was there that the military uprising overtook him. On 19 July he wrote a poignant letter to the Communist painter Hernando Viñes in Paris, informing him in detail of the incoming news he had been noting down since the day before. It is worth reproducing this dramatic document, conserved in Vicens’s archive, which begins thus:

Dear Hernando,

I’ve been in Venta de Baños for ten days now. Just imagine that when making my way on Thursday the 9th to Asturias, twenty minutes or so before reaching Venta de Baños, I suffered a hemorrhage in the stomach. I had to put up at the Station Inn, where I’m confined to bed, being cared for by the local doctors. [Juan Antonio] Cabezas came from Oviedo and hasn’t moved from my side. He and the comrades from here have looked after me. In a few days I shall go to Valladolid and get an X-ray done. If I have to be operated on again I’ll go to Madrid. If not, to Oviedo. Don’t say anything to my wife and if you let on to my friends tell them to be very careful not to say anything so that she doesn’t find out. Given all that’s happening I’m very upset about the useless state I’m in. Never have I felt the revolution so close and me here in bed. It’s infuriating. Since I can’t move, I’ve decided to send you a few notes about the information I’m getting. If you give it to the comrades at L’Humanité, warn them not to say that a sick comrade’s involved, etc. Greetings and best wishes,

Piqueras

You can write me c/o the Hotel de France. Valladolid. I expect to be able to move in the next four days.

As I get to find out things I’ll send them to you. Go and see [Paul] Nizan because I’m sure they must be of interest to him and to L’Huma.

On seeing Cabezas and the other comrades armed and ready to defend our February victory, and seeing myself in the state I’m in I was unable to repress an attack of nerves in the face of my uselessness. Cabezas tries to console me a bit. From the stairs we say goodbye with a UHP [Proletarian Brothers United] and our fists held high.

The train stops 1 1⁄4 hours late. Greetings Rot Front [Red Front] Venta de Baños (Palencia)

Saturday 18 [July]: confused and very vague rumors have been arriving all day, last night’s Madrid press says nothing. This morning’s appears with huge blank spaces, imposed by the censors.

At 3 pm some comrades told me they’d heard on the radio that the Minister of the Interior had stated that in Tetuán and other cities of the protectorate [in Morocco] the forces of the Foreign Legion had risen to the cry of “Viva España!” which is the cry of degenerate patriots, the working population confronted them and two hours later they told me once again that in the streets of Tetuán the working masses were fighting the Legion.

At 6 pm they informed me that Largo Caballero has said on the Madrid radio, in the name of the UGT, that in all those places where military forces or Fascist elements show themselves, the workers will respond with the General Strike.

The CNT and UGT have ordered an all-union general strike in all those places where the state of war is declared.

Saturday, 20.00: around 8 pm Cabezas arrived from the Casa del Pueblo where he’d met the committee, which was interceding to defray the costs occasioned by my illness in Venta de Baños. Moments later, a comrade arrived requesting he go because an individual from Asturias had turned up asking for assistance. When asked if he knew Cabezas he said yes. When he went he was able to discover that the man was a common swindler.

Saturday, 21.00: an hour later Cabezas arrived with two more comrades. He told me they were going to look for arms and to detain all the suspicious people in the village. It appears that this order had been given by the Governor of the province. They’d been in a meeting in the Casa del Pueblo studying the ways in which they could prevent the forces in Palencia and Valladolid from uniting. In Valladolid there are three dangerous reactionary regiments and the one in Palencia is the one that already rebelled in Alcalá de Henares. They want to avoid at all costs that in the event that the forces in these provinces are mobilized, they can unite.

Saturday, 22.00: Cabezas has just arrived with some comrades. He tells me they’ve managed to mobilize a hundred men and that he has them ready in case it’s necessary to go and help the men in Palencia.

A bit later he leaves and returns armed with a carbine. He comes with two or three more comrades. They’ve locked up the village Fascists and are going to Palencia. I’m very agitated due to not being able to move.

Cabezas tells me Pasionaria spoke on the Radio along with the Minister of the Interior telling the Communists and workers that they should get weapons and fight. There is no leadership save that of the civil authorities.

At 11 pm the government dismissed five generals. Franco. Mola. Queipo de Llano and two others.

At the same time it announced the dismissal of various members of the high command of the Civil Guard.

Palencia: at 3 am the Civil Governor of the province telephoned the Mayor of Venta de Baños to get him to send the workers’ forces he can, the aim being that on arriving in the town they split up and try and take the strategic sites.

At 3.30 am the mayor, who has been visiting me every day (a good man with anarchistic ideas to whom I’m pointing out the mistaken tactic of the FAI people at this time of a Popular Front in Spain) and who finds himself, precisely, in the Station Inn, where the telephone and telegraph service is installed, has just come up to see me in order to reassure me and he tells me he’d discovered the existence of five wagons full of explosives in the Station. I think their discovery is due to the fact that Cabezas, accustomed to Asturian dynamite, began to ask right away if there were explosives. The mayor, pressed by our comrades, has asked permission of the Governor to requisition them. This he denied to begin with. But moments later he sent him a telegram saying, “Make use of them now and whenever.”

Palencia 5 am. Cabezas has just telephoned the Station Inn telling them to tell me the government is in control of the situation there and that they will return straightaway.

Miners’ train. They assure me the Government has asked for help to the workers’ forces and that a miners’ train is coming from Oviedo.

They tell me that instead of one, two will come and that before reaching Madrid they’ll bring the Fascist forces in Valladolid to book.

Judging by what’s happening here the people identifies with the government.

Seville. General Queipo de Llano seditiously declared a State of War in the Province. The workers replied to this provocation with a General Strike. It seems they took possession of the radio station from which they announced the province is theirs. On the other hand the Minister of the Interior says the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards are facing them and putting up a fight.

4 am, Sunday. Better impressions from Sevilla. The radio is again in the hands of the State.

Malaga 5 am: the Fascists were defeated and a huge popular demonstration took place, which cheered the government forces.

Burgos 5 am. The Commander-in-chief is in military prison.

Valladolid. In this province, where the right-wingers are very strong, it appears that General Mola (that famous assassin of the students of the Universidad de San Carlos in Madrid a few months before the Republic of 14 April [1931]) has taken the railway station with a task force and demands that travelers shout “Viva España!” and “Viva the Fascio!” [Annotated in the margin] 5 generals replaced at 11 pm.

Sunday 5 am. It appears the seditious forces and soldiers are in the street with machine-guns. A Fascist captain has phoned Venta de Baños to say they’re waiting for the miners’ train to riddle it with bullets. Our comrades have taken all sorts of precautions.

Sunday 5 am. They’ve just told me a new Government has been formed: Presidency: [Diego] Martínez Barrios Ministry of the Interior: [Augusto] Barcia War: General [Carlos] Masquelet S[tate] Education: M[arcelino] Domingo Treasury: [Enrique] Ramos Navy: [José] Giral. etc. etc. I’m waiting for the train to Paris to pass at any moment. That’s why everything’s so topsy-turvy.

The train ought to have passed here at 4.30. It’s 5.15 and still it hasn’t passed. This shows that in Valladolid or in Madrid there’s something that’s stopped it leaving or traveling normally.

Juan Piqueras, the Valencian film critic, Communist activist, and close collaborator of Filmófono who was assassinated by the Fascists in July 1936. The portrait dates from 1930. (Institut Valencià de Cinematografia Ricardo Muñoz Suay, Valencia.)

The postmark on the envelope in which Piqueras sent this letter, by express mail, bears the date of 19 July. In the Francoist dossier that contains the documents confiscated from Piqueras there are various interesting items, among them a telegram from Buñuel and del Amo to Piqueras, sent from Madrid on 15 July, which reads “We await a decision to come tomorrow,” which implies that Piqueras had informed his comrades in the capital of his misfortunes. A letter from del Amo to Piqueras the next day was more explicit, since it divulged that Piqueras’s illness was taken as read, and informed him that a meeting of the PCE cell had taken place, before adding:

The first thing I did was phone Buñuel, to say that he was the one who could help me out with his car, since I couldn’t leave for Venta de Baños without money. Buñuel reassured me. He told me you’d written to Urgoiti about your getting better. Anyway, I sent you a telegram, which I suppose you’ll have received, because Buñuel advised me that we oughtn’t to go to Venta de Baños without you informing us of the need there was for it. Today I’ve waited for news from you, but have received nothing before reaching the end of this letter. I hope if you continue being poorly you’ll let me know if it’s essential I come to Venta de Baños. I don’t have money for the trip, if not I would have come already, even though your state of improvement wouldn’t have made it necessary.

In 1980 Antonio del Amo nuanced this information in a letter to Juan Manuel Llopis, Piqueras’s biographer, when relating, “The thing I remember is that I said [to Buñuel], ‘We’ve got to get to Venta de Baños somehow. We can go in your car.’ And he said, ‘They’ve requisitioned my car’ (it was common at the time to requisition cars from all those who had them, be it for the political parties, trade unions and the militias themselves that were springing up at every moment like mushrooms). ‘We might go by train, or in another car, one way or another,’ I interrupted him. And he told me, with good reason, ‘And by what route, if the Somosierra and Alto de los Leones and Navacerrada roads are blocked?’” A certain confusion may be observed in the chronology, since while the correspondence with Piqueras took place before the military uprising, del Amo is referring years later to dates posterior to the insurrection, when Buñuel had already handed over his car to his Communist cell, as Bello explained. In any case, if Buñuel restrained his comrade’s impulse to go and visit the sick man, it is very possible that this somewhat unsupportive attitude saved the two of them from being captured by the Fascists, as occurred to their friend.

English edition copyright © 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and from the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Wisconsin Film Studies: Patrick McGilligan, series editor

Olavi Kantola

Editor’s note: Olavi Kantola was a Finnish-American volunteer in the International Brigades. This text by Alina Flinkman appeared in the Finnish magazine Vaku in 1941.  With thanks to Olavi’s nephew Bob Kantola. Translation by Sirpa Rautio.

It has been snowing heavily the whole day with the harsh Northerly wind blowing. At the break of the evening snowing has paused for a moment, and the wind is blowing with a wheezing sound, circling huge piles of snow, around the buildings and where ever there is a sheltered spot. The harsh and stormy weather has impact also on the human mind.

The newspaper is already read, and sowing and fixing clothes is not of interest for the moment, even for a farm (or peasant) women. So I am wondering what to do, as there is still evening left. I decided to pick up a book from the bookshelf to read, and my hand happened to touch a pile of pictures on the upper shelf. I started to look at the pictures one by one and found many with various groups of ex action-comrades (note – I am not sure what this is, but the translation is literal – probably refers to organized trade union or communist groups.) Many of the lives had already burnt down for ever (they had died). While thinking this and that, I happened to turn a picture of the first child gymnastic group in Superior, Wisconsin, at year 1923. Many of the children in the picture have grown up. Was thinking how have the winds of destiny been swinging your lives, others have had it worse, while some others have possibly been less dented in their lives. I had gone through the back row and moved on to the front row with three boys.

Olavi – you are a hero in that group. You have seen the grand new Soviet Union, where a new system is being built. You were helping to build it and you were satisfied with that system.

You came to your country of birth (translator’s note – not clear but I think it refers to USA rather than Finland) at the moment when assistance was given to the people of Spain in its fight for freedom and democratic rights against the Fascist beasts. You, Olavi, joined the troops, which went to defend workers’ rights. It was the most precious thing for you. You came to see the destruction of the war with all the brutality that went with it.

You managed to see and do a lot considering your young age. You sleep now for eternity there under the grass in Spain. But the memory of your heroism lives on!

Translator’s Note: Reading some excerpts of the letter, which he wrote to his mother before he went to fight, it becomes crystal clear he knew why he was going there:

“This as well is in accordance with those principles I have been thought ever since I was a child. Additionally, I am convinced that it is always in front of me in life to be at the line of fire, which ever country I am in. As I said in my previous letter, it is the task of my generation in this world to resolve the question for which Spartacus already hundreds years ago led the gladiators to fight. Will the workers class, the poor, always be persecuted or will we rise one day to finish off this system of exploitation? In these battles in the past hundreds of years thousands have died, but what is a more honorable death than to die for the future in which millions have a good life and to can build a world where they also benefit.

This experience, combined with my times in the Soviet Union, should make me a proper man for the working class. And then could the coming generations talk about me honestly and perfectly: He lived and died for the principles of Marx-Lenin-Stalin, which have won the freedom for the multimillions of Russians and which will produce the final victory for the entire working class, blacks, yellows and whites in the most distant and smallest corners of the globe. And when we bury the fascist and imperialist systems, my ghost will be there in the vicinity and smiling: It was not for nothing.”

Victims of the Nationalist massacre at Badajoz in August 1936.

Editor’s note: Paul Preston, perhaps the most thorough and prolific historian of the Spanish Civil War, will publish a major new book, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, in New York early next year. The following selection is from the book’s prologue.

Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly two hundred thousand men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process.  They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17-18 July 1936 against the Second Republic.  For the same reason, at least three hundred thousand men died at the battle fronts.  Unknown numbers of men, women and children were killed in bombing attacks and in the exoduses that followed the occupation of territory by Franco’s military forces.  In all of Spain after the final victory of the rebels at the end of March 1939, approximately twenty thousand Republicans were executed.  Many more died of disease and malnutrition in overcrowded, unhygienic prisons and concentration camps.  Others died in the slave labour conditions of work battalions.  More than half a million refugees were forced into exile and many were to die of disease in French concentration camps.  Several thousand were worked to death in Nazi camps.  All of this constitutes what I believe can legitimately be called the Spanish Holocaust.  The purpose of this book is to show as far as possible what happened to civilians and why.

Behind the lines, there were two repressions, one in each of the Republican and rebel zones.  Although very different, both quantitatively and qualitatively, each claimed tens of thousands of lives, most of them innocent of wrong-doing or even of political activism.  The leaders of the rebellion, Generals Mola, Franco and Queipo de Llano, regarded the Spanish proletariat in the same way as they did the Moroccan, as an inferior race that had to be subjugated by sudden, uncompromising violence.  Thus, they applied in Spain the exemplary terror they had learned in North Africa by deploying the Spanish Foreign Legion and Moroccan mercenaries, the Regulares, of the colonial army.

Their approval of the grim violence of their men is reflected in Franco’s war diary of 1922 which lovingly describes Moroccan villages destroyed and their defenders decapitated.  He delights in recounting how his teenage bugler boy cut off the ear of a captive.[1] Franco himself led twelve legionaries on a raid from which they returned carrying as trophies the bloody heads of twelve tribesmen (harqueños).[2] The decapitation and mutilation of prisoners was common.  When General Primo de Rivera visited Morocco in 1926, an entire battalion of the Legion awaited inspection with heads stuck on their bayonets.[3] During the Civil War, terror by the African Army was similarly deployed on the Spanish mainland as the instrument of a coldly conceived project to underpin a future authoritarian regime.

The repression carried out by the military rebels was a carefully planned operation to eliminate, in the words of the director of the coup, Emilio Mola, ‘without scruple or hesitation those who do not think as we do’.  In contrast, the repression in the Republican zone was hot-blooded and reactive.  Initially, it was a spontaneous and defensive response to the military coup which was subsequently intensified by news brought by refugees of military atrocities and by rebel bombing raids.  It is difficult to see how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without the military coup which effectively removed all of the restraints of civilised society.  The collapse of the structures of law and order as a result of the coup thus permitted both an explosion of blind millenarian revenge (the built-in resentment of centuries of oppression) and the irresponsible criminality of those let out of jail or of those individuals never previously daring to give free rein to their instincts.  In addition, as in any war, there was the real military necessity of combating the enemy within.

Executed Republicans in Extremadura.

There is no doubt that hostility intensified on both sides as the Civil War progressed, fed by outrage and a desire for revenge as news of what was happening on the other side filtered through.  Nevertheless, it is also clear that, from the first moments, there was a level of hatred at work that sprang forth ready-formed from the Army in the North African outpost of Ceuta on the night of 17 July or from the Republican populace on 19 July at the Cuartel de la Montaña in Madrid.  The first four chapters of the book aim to explain how those enmities were fomented.  They consider the polarisation that ensued from the right’s determination to block the reforming ambitions of the democratic regime established in April 1931, the Second Republic.  They focus on the process whereby the obstruction of reform led to an ever more radicalised response by the left.  These chapters also analyse the elaboration of rightist theological and racial theories in order to justify the intervention of the military and the extermination of the left.

In the case of the military rebels, a programme of terror and extermination was central to their planning and preparations.  The next two chapters describe the ways in which this was implemented as the rebels established control in very different areas.  Chapter 5 is concerned with the conquest and purging of Western Andalusia – Huelva, Sevilla, Cádiz, Málaga and Córdoba.  Because of the numerical superiority of the landless peasantry, the military plotters believed that the immediate imposition of a reign of terror was crucial.  With the use of forces brutalised in the colonial wars in Africa, backed up by local landowners, this process was supervised by General Queipo de Llano.  Chapter 6 confronts a similar application of terror in the significantly different regions of Navarra, Galicia, Old Castile and León.  These were all deeply conservative areas where the military coup was almost immediately successful.  Despite the minimal evidence of left-wing resistance, the repression there, under the overall jurisdiction of General Mola, was of a lesser scale than in the south but disproportionately severe.  There is also consideration of the repression in the Canary Islands and Mallorca.

The exterminatory objectives of the rebels, if not their military capacities, found an echo on the extreme left, particularly in the anarchist movement, in rhetoric about the need for ‘purification’ of a corrupt society.  Accordingly, chapters 7 and 8 analyse the consequences of the coup within the Republican zone.  They consider how the underlying hatreds deriving from misery, hunger and exploitation found their way into the terror in Republican-held areas, particularly in Barcelona and Madrid.  Inevitably, the targets were not just the wealthy, the bankers, the industrialists and the landowners who were regarded as the instruments of oppression.  No explanation is needed for the fact that hatred was also aimed at the military personnel identified with the revolt.  It was directed too, often with greater ferocity, at the clergy who were seen as the cronies of the rich, legitimising injustice while the Church accumulated fabulous wealth.  Unlike the systematic repression unleashed by the rebels as an instrument of policy, this random violence took place despite, not because of, the Republican authorities.  Indeed, as a result of the efforts of successive Republican governments to re-establish public order, the left-wing repression was restrained and was largely at an end by December 1936.

The following chapters, 9 and 10, are concerned with two of the bloodiest episodes in the Spanish Civil War, which are closely inter-related.  Both concern the siege of Madrid by the rebels and the capital’s defence.  Chapter 9 deals with the trail of slaughter left by Franco’s Africanista forces, the so-called ‘Column of Death’ as it travelled from Sevilla to Madrid.  It had been announced along the way that the savagery that the column was imposing on conquered towns and villages was what Madrid could expect if surrender was not immediate.  The consequence was that, after the departure of the Republican government to Valencia, those responsible for the defence of the city made the decision to evacuate right-wing prisoners, particularly army officers who had sworn to join the rebel forces as soon as they could.  Chapter 10 analyses the implementation of that decision, the notorious massacres of right-wingers at Paracuellos on the outskirts of Madrid.

The next two chapters discuss two differing concepts of the war.  Chapter 11 is concerned with the Republic’s defence against enemies within.  This consisted not just of the burgeoning rebel fifth column, dedicate to spying, sabotage and spreading defeatism and despondency but also the extreme left of the anarchist CNT and the anti-Stalinist POUM.  These ultra-left groups were determined to make a priority of revolution.  This seriously undermined the Republic’s war effort and thus they were the targets of the same security apparatus which had put a stop to the uncontrolled repression of the first months.  Chapter 12 is concerned with Franco’s deliberately ponderous war of annihilation through the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, Aragón and Catalonia.  It demonstrates how his war effort was conceived as an investment in terror which would facilitate the establishment of his dictatorship.  Chapter 13 analyses the post-war machinery of trials, executions, prisons and concentration camps which consolidated that investment.

The intention was to ensure that establishment interests would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic.  When the clergy justified and the military implemented General Mola’s call for the elimination of ‘those who do not think as we do’, they were not engaged in an intellectual or ethical crusade.  The defence of establishment interests was about ‘thinking’ only in so far as progressive liberal and left-wing forces were questioning the central tenets of the right which were summed up in the slogan of the major Catholic party, the CEDA – ‘fatherland, order, religion, family, property, hierarchy’.  All of these elements constituted the untouchable elements of social and economic life in Spain before 1931.  ‘Fatherland’ meant no challenge to Spanish centralism from the regional nationalisms.  ‘Order’ meant no toleration of public protest.  ‘Religion’ meant the monopoly of education and religious practice by the Catholic Church.  ‘Family’ meant the subservient position of women and the prohibition of divorce.  ‘Property’ meant that land ownership must remain unchallenged.  ‘Hierarchy’ meant that the existing social order was sacrosanct.  To protect all of these tenets, in the areas occupied by the rebels, the immediate victims were not just schoolteachers, Freemasons, liberal doctors and lawyers, intellectuals and trade union leaders – those who might have propagated ideas.  The killing also extended to all those who might have been influenced by their ideas: the trade unionists, those who didn’t attend mass, those suspected of voting for the Popular Front and the women who had been given the vote and the right to divorce.

What all this meant in terms of numbers of deaths is still impossible to say with finality although the broad lines are clear.  Accordingly, indicative figures are frequently given in the book, drawing on the massive research carried out all over Spain by large numbers of local historians in recent years.  However, despite their remarkable achievements, it is still not possible to present definitive figures for the overall number of those killed behind the lines, especially in the rebel zone.  The objective should always be, as far as is possible, to base figures for those killed in both zones on the named dead.  Thanks to the efforts of the Republican authorities at the time to identify bodies and because of subsequent investigations by the Francoist state, the numbers of those murdered or executed in the Republican zone are known with relative precision.  The most reliable recent figure, produced by the foremost expert on the subject, José Luis Ledesma Vera, is of 49,272.  However, uncertainty over the scale of the killings in Republican Madrid could see that figure rise.[4] Even for areas where reliable studies exist, new information and excavations of common graves see the numbers being revised constantly albeit within relatively small parameters.[5]

Team of gravediggers working in Víznar (Granada) in 1936. The photo was taken at the farmhouse where the poet Federico García Lorca spent his last hours before being shot on August 19, 1936. The man holding the small girl is Manuel Castilla, aka Manolillo el Comunista, who showed the Irish Hispanist Ian Gibson where he thought Lorca was buried.

In contrast, the calculation of numbers of Republican victims of rebel violence has faced innumerable difficulties.  1965 was the year in which Francoists began to think the unthinkable, that the Caudillo was not immortal, and that preparations had to be made for the future.  It was not until 1985 that the Spanish government began to take belated and hesitant action to protect the nation’s archival resources.  Millions of documents were lost during those crucial twenty years, including the archives of the single party, the Falange, of provincial police headquarters, of prisons and of the main Francoist local authority, the Civil Governors.  Convoys of trucks removed the ‘judicial’ records of the repression.  As well as the deliberate destruction of archives, there were also ‘inadvertent’ losses when some town councils sold their archives by the ton as waste paper for recycling.[6]

Serious investigation was not possible until after the death of Franco.  When researchers began the task, they were confronted not only with the deliberate destruction of much archival material by the Francoist authorities but also with the fact that many deaths had simply been registered either falsely or not at all.  In addition to the concealment of crimes by the dictatorship was the continued fear of witnesses about coming forward and the obstruction of research, especially in the provinces of Old Castile.  Archival material has mysteriously disappeared and frequently local officials have refused to permit consultation of the civilian registry.[7]

Many executions by the military rebels were given a veneer of pseudo-legality by trials although they were effectively little different from extra-judicial murder.  Death sentences were handed out after procedures lasting minutes in which the accused were not allowed to speak.[8] The deaths of those killed in what the rebels called ‘cleansing and punishment operations’ were given the flimsiest legal justification by being registered as ‘by dint of the application of the declaration of martial law’ (por aplicación del bando de Guerra).  This was meant to legalise the summary execution of those who resisted the military take-over.  The collateral deaths of many innocent people, unarmed and not offering any resistance, were also registered in this way.  Then there were the executions of those registered as killed ‘without trial’ in reference to those who were discovered harbouring a fugitive, and so were shot just on military orders.  There was also a systematic effort to conceal what had happened.  Prisoners taken far from their hometowns, executed and buried in unmarked mass graves.[9]

Finally, there is the fact that a substantial number of deaths were not registered in any way.  This was the case of many of those who fled before Franco’s African columns as they headed from Sevilla to Madrid.   As each town or village was occupied, among those killed were refugees from elsewhere.  Since they carried no papers, their names or places of origin were unknown.  It may never be possible to calculate the exact numbers murdered in the open fields by squads of mounted Falangists and Carlists.  It is equally impossible to ascertain the fate of the thousands of refugees from Western Andalusia who died in the exodus after the fall of Málaga in 1937 or those from all over Spain who had taken refuge in Barcelona only to die in the flight to the French border in 1939 or those who committed suicide after waiting in vain for evacuation from the Mediterranean ports.

Nevertheless, the huge amount of research that has been carried out makes it possible to state that, broadly speaking, the repression by the rebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone.  The currently most reliable, yet still tentative, figure for deaths at the hands of the military rebels and their supporters is 130,199.  However, it is unlikely that such deaths were fewer than 150,000 and they could well be more.  Some areas have been studied only partially; others hardly at all.  In several areas, which spent time in both zones, and for which the figures are known with some precision, the differences between the numbers of deaths at the hands of Republicans or of rebels are shocking.  To give some examples, in Badajoz, there were 1,437 victims of the left as against 8,914 victims of the rebels; in Sevilla, 447 victims of the left, 12,507 victims of the rebels; in Cádiz: 97 victims of the left, 3,071 victims of the rebels; and in Huelva: 101 victims of the left, 6,019 victims of the rebels.  In places where there was no Republican violence, the figures for rebel killings are almost incredible, Navarra 3,280, La Rioja, 1,977.  In most places where the Republican repression was the greater, like Alicante, Girona or Teruel, the differences are in the hundreds.[10] The exception is Madrid.  The killings throughout the war when the capital was under Republican control seem to have been nearer three times those carried out after the rebel occupation.  However, precise calculation is rendered difficult by the fact that the most frequently quoted figure for the post-war repression in Madrid, of 2,663 deaths, is based on a study of those executed and buried in only one cemetery, the Almudena or Cementerio del Este.[11]

Although exceeded by the violence exercised by the Francoists, the repression in the Republican zone before it was stopped by the Popular Front government was nonetheless horrifying.  Its scale and nature necessarily varied, with the highest figures being recorded for Toledo and the anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into western Tarragona.[12] In Toledo, 3,152 rightists were killed, of whom 10% were members of the clergy (nearly half of the province’s clergy).[13] In Cuenca, the total deaths were 516 (of whom 36, or 7% of the total killed were priests (nearly a quarter of the province’s clergy).[14] The figure for deaths in Republican Catalonia reached in the exhaustive study by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Vilarroyo i Font was 8,360.  This figure corresponds closely to the conclusions reached by a commission created by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1937 and is thus indicative of the efforts of the Republican authorities to register deaths.   Led by a judge, Bertran de Quintana, it investigated all deaths behind the lines in order to instigate measures against those responsible for extra-judicial executions.[15] Such a procedure would have been inconceivable in the rebel zone.

Recent scholarship, not only for Catalonia but also for most of Republican Spain, has dramatically dismantled the propagandistic allegations made by the rebels at the time.  On 18 July 1938 in Burgos, Franco himself claimed that 54,000 people had been killed in Catalonia.  In the same speech, he alleged that 70,000 had been murdered in Madrid and 20,000 in Valencia.  On the same day, he told a reporter there had already been a total of 470,000 murders in the Republican zone.[16] To prove the scale of Republican iniquity to the world, on 26 April 1940, he set up a massive state investigation, the Causa General, ‘to gather trustworthy information’ to ascertain the true scale of the crimes committed in the Republican zone.  Denunciation and exaggeration were encouraged.  Thus, it came as a desperate disappointment to Franco when, on the basis of the information gathered, and despite a flawed methodology which inflated the numbers, the Causa General concluded that the number of deaths was 85,940.  Although exaggerated and including many duplications, this figure was still so far below Franco’s claims that, for over a quarter of a century, it was omitted from editions of the published resumé of the Causa General’s findings.[17]

A central, yet under-estimated, part of the repression carried out by the rebels – the systematic persecution of women – is not susceptible to statistical analysis.  Murder, torture and rape were generalised punishments for the gender liberation embraced by many, but not all, liberal and left-wing women during the Republican period.  Those who came out of prison alive suffered deep life-long physical and psychological problems.  Thousands of others were subjected to rape and other sexual abuses, the humiliation of head shaving and public soiling after the forced ingestion of castor oil.  For most Republican women, there were also the terrible economic and psychological problems of having their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons murdered or forced to flee, which often saw the wives themselves arrested in efforts to get them to reveal the whereabouts of their men folk.  In contrast, there was relatively little equivalent abuse of women in the Republican zone.  That is not to say that it did not take place.  The sexual molestation of around one dozen nuns and the deaths of 296, just over 1.3% of the female clergy in Spain is shocking but of a significantly lower order of magnitude than the fate of women in the rebel zone.[18] That is not entirely surprising given that respect for women was built into the Republic’s reforming programme.

The statistical vision of the Spanish holocaust is not only flawed, incomplete and unlikely ever to be complete.  It also fails to capture the intense horror that lies behind the numbers.  The account that follows includes many stories of individuals, of men, women and children from both sides.  It introduces some specific but representative cases of victims and perpetrators from all over the country.  It is hoped thereby to convey the suffering unleashed upon their own fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the officers who rose up on 17-July 1936.   They provoked war, a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still reverberate in Spain today.

NOTES

1. Comandante Franco, Diario de una bandera (Madrid: Editorial Pueyo, 1922) p.129, 177.

2. El Correo Gallego, 20 April 1922.

3. José Martín Blázquez, I Helped to Build an Army: Civil War Memoirs of a Spanish Staff Officer (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939) p.302; Herbert R.Southworth, Antifalange: estudio crítico de «Falange en la guerra de España: la Unificación y Hedilla» de Maximiano García Venero (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1967) pp.xxi-xxii; Guillermo Cabanellas, La guerra de los mil días 2 vols (Buenos Aires: Grijalbo, 1973) II, p.792.

4. The most widely accepted figure for Madrid is 8,815.  See Santos Juliá, et al., Víctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1999) p.412; Mirta Núñez Díaz-Balart, et al., La gran represión. Los años de plomo del franquismo (Barcelona: Flor del Viento, 2009) p.443 and José Luis Ledesma, ‘Una retaguardia al rojo.  Las violencias en la zona republicana’ in Espinosa Maestre, Violencia roja y azul, pp.247, 409.  The figure of 8,815 is based on that of 5,107 given by General Rafael Casas de la Vega, El terror: Madrid 1936. Investigación histórica y catálogo de víctimas identificadas (Madrid: Editorial Fénix, 1994) pp.247, 311-460, to which, without explanation, 3,708 were added, by Ángel David Martín Rubio, Paz, piedad, perdón… y verdad. La represión en la guerra civil: Una síntesis definitiva (Madrid: Editorial Fénix, 1997) p.316.  In the same work pp.317-19, 370, 374, and in, Los mitos de la represión en la guerra civil (Madrid: Grafite Ediciones, 2005) p.82, Martín Rubio gives the figure of 14,898, again without explanation.

5. For examples, see Jesús Vicente Aguirre González, Aquí nunca pasó nada. La Rioja 1936 2 (Logroño: Editorial Ochoa, 2010) p.8, and Francisco Espinosa Maestre in Núñez Díaz-Balart, La gran represión, p.442.

6. Francisco Espinosa Maestre, La justicia de Queipo. (Violencia selectiva y terror fascista en la II División en 1936) Sevilla, Huelva, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga y Badajoz (Sevilla: Centro Andaluz del Libro, 2000) pp.13-23.

7. See the chapters on Burgos (by Luis Castro) and Palencia (by Jesús Gutiérrez Flores), in Enrique Berzal de la Rosa, coordinador, Testimonio de voces olvidadas 2 vols (León: Fundación 27 de marzo, 2007) pp.100-102, 217-18.

8. Julián Casanova, Francisco Espinosa, Conxita Mir y Francisco Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2002), p.21.

9. For analysis of how deaths were registered, see the chapter by José María García Márquez in Antonio Leria, Francisco Eslava & José María García Márquez, La guerra civil en Carmona (Carmona: Ayuntamiento de Carmona, 2008) pp.29-48; Julio Prada Rodríguez, ‘Golpe de Estado y represión franquista en la provincia de Ourense’ in Jesús de Juana, & Julio Prada, coordinadores, Lo que han hecho en Galicia. Violencia política, represión y exilio (1936-1939) (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2007) pp.120-1.

10. Francisco Espinosa Maestre, editor, Violencia roja y azul. España, 1936-1950 (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2010) pp.77-8; Francisco Espinosa Maestre in Mirta Núñez Díaz-Balartet al., La gran represión. Los años de plomo del franquismo (Barcelona: Flor del Viento, 2009) pp.440-2.

11. Mirta Núñez Díaz-Balart & Antonio Rojas Friend, Consejo de guerra.  Los fusilamientos en el Madrid de la posguerra (1939-1945) (Madrid: Compañía Literaria, 1997) pp.107-14; Fernando Hernández Holgado, Mujeres encarceladas. La prisión de Ventas: de la República al franquismo, 1931-1941 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003) pp.227-46.  Other places of execution are now being studied: http://www.memoriaylibertad.org/.htm.

12. For comparative analysis, see José Luis Ledesma Vera, Los días de llamas de la revolución. Violencia y política en la retaguardia republicana de Zaragoza durante la guerra civil (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2003) pp.83-4; Ledesma Vera, ‘Qué violencia para qué retaguardia, o la República en guerra de 1936’, Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, No.76, 2009, pp.83-114.

13. José María Ruiz Alonso, La guerra civil en la provincia de Toledo. Utopía, conflicto y poder en el sur del Tajo (1936-1939) 2 vols (Ciudad Real: Almud, Ediciones de Castilla-La Mancha, 2004) I, pp.283-94.

14. Ana Belén Rodríguez Patiño, La guerra civil en Cuenca (1936-1939) 2 vols (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2004) II, pp.122-32.

15. Solé & Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda, I, pp.11-12; Josep Benet, Pròleg, Ibid., pp.vi-vii.

16. Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Palabras del Caudillo 19 abril 1937 – 7 diciembre 1942 (Madrid: Ediciones de la Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular, 1943) pp.312, 445.

17. Ramón Salas Larrazábal, Los fusilados en Navarra en la guerra de 1936 (Madrid: Comisión de Navarros en Madrid y Sevilla, 1983) p.13.

18. Antonio Montero Moreno, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España 1936-1939 (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961) pp.430-4, 762; Gregorio Rodríguez Fernández, El hábito y la cruz. Religiosas asesinadas en la guerra civil española (Madrid: EDIBESA, 2006) pp.594-6.

It seems a fair bet that Picasso knew this film, first shown in France in 1933, although I think Alcaine is wrong to assume that films ran for years on end. A quick sampling of the weekly cinema listing in La Semaine à Paris for the end of January 1937 comes up with Mr Deeds goes to town (1936), Mary Stuart (1936), My Man Godfrey (1936), A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Some of these films will actually have reached France the following year. The oldest film I spotted was the western In Old Santa Fe (1934), obviously far more commercial than the rather troubling A Farewell to Arms (1932), which was not being shown. (Readers, please add a comment below if you can trace a Paris screening of the film – the French title is L’Adieu aux armes – in April 1937.)

Hemingway with Joris Ivens during the filming of "The Spanish Earth".

Actually, with his exceptional visual memory I don’t think Picasso would have had to have seen this film often, or even recently, but I’d have thought this point was preliminary groundwork. That said, Alcaine has drawn attention to a terrific sequence in the movie. You can see it on YouTube and the relevant sequence begins at about 51’, complete with planes bombing in the darkness, frightened horse, geese… You can compare your ideas with the contrasted images here. Not mentioned in the discussion, but no less interesting, is the explicit visual comparison between the bombings and Christ’s crucifixion which comes before the sequence itself, and is very much in the spirit of the painting.

El País, and the other media I have seen, take the line that a movie, and not an event may have inspired Picasso’s painting. Amazingly, none of them even mention the bombardment of the Málaga-Almería road in February 1937, when there were enormous civilian casualties among those who were desperately trying to get away from Málaga. (Alcaine himself does mention it, but the media prefer the Hollywood angle.) Of course, Picasso was born in Málaga and this particular event must have affected him greatly – at least, if we believe Arthur Koestler’s testimony – so the film actually leads us straight back to the bombings.

If Picasso was directly influenced by the Málaga-Almería bombardments – and also, I myself believe, by the bombing of Madrid and its renewal in April 1937 (see my previous essays here and here) – then that, along with the attack on Guernica itself, shows how decisive the aerial bombardments of civilians were in shaping his emotional reactions to the war over an extended period.

Coincidentally – or maybe not – Hemingway himself was in Spain in late April 1937, and reporting on a related subject, i.e., the shelling of Madrid. I don’t know if his articles were translated into French, but Picasso will have known from his friends what Hemingway was up to. Did it renew memories of the film that had he had seen, perhaps recently, perhaps some years before?

An image of our troubled times: riot police in Barcelona violently disband a peaceful public protest in the city's Plaza de Catalunya, so that gargage crews can clean up the square for a celebration of Barça's participation in the Champion's League final. There are as many cameras as billyclubs.

I am a US citizen, born and raised in Brooklyn, but I’ve been traveling at least once a year to Spain for the last 35 years.  I’ve taught Spanish literature and culture since 1988, and for at least the last ten years, I’ve become a total Spanish news junkie; each day, I peruse at least six on-line Spanish dailies, ranging from, nowadays, the moderate left (Público) to the extreme right (La Gaceta).  Today I’d like to share with you my honest understanding of what has been going on in Spain over the last few weeks.  It’s not easy to make sense of what’s going on; the mainstream Spanish press, in my opinion, has been getting things quite wrong, or else ignoring the situation, except in its most sensational aspects.  And the movement itself really is in movement, in flux; in fact, its mobility and indefinition are probably the main sources of its disquieting power.  For all of these reasons, I don’t think that any of us can do more than offer provisional interpretations of the complex processes that were unleashed in Spain on May 15, 2011.

I think it’s worthwhile to recall that Spain’s two major experiments in democracy have been conducted during extremely inauspicious times for democratic movements worldwide.

The country’s first sustained attempt at a modern democracy took place during the five years of the Second Republic –1931 – 1936– in the context of a world-wide Depression, and amidst the rise of anti-democratic totalitarian ideologies on both the Left and the Right.  The short-lived Republic made a valiant effort, under these extremely adverse circumstances, to create democratic citizens out of monarchical or in some cases even feudal subjects, to begin the arduous –and still incomplete– task of separating church and state, to implement land reform, and to promote gender equality.  But Franco, Hitler and Mussolini took care of Spain’s democratic Spring of the 1930s, aided by the dithering of the would-be defenders of democracy, France, the UK and the US, countries that between 1936 and 39 were in full appeasement mode vis-à-vis Hitler, and at the same time wary of the “excesses” on the Left.

The fact that the Republic’s valiant struggle was carried out against-all-odds undoubtedly contributed to the way in which the Spanish Civil War –and the memory of that war– was indelibly seared into the consciousness of progressives all over the world, and still today remains a point of reference and a reservoir of images of democratic hope and courage for underdogs everywhere.  There was no youtube in 1936, but there were newsreels; there wasn’t flicker, but there was the nascent field of modern photo-journalism; there were no facebook walls or blogs, but there were wall newspapers, and posters and broadsides and pamphlets; all the latest innovations in communication and networking were tapped into in the 1930s in an effort to mobilize global public opinion in support of the beleaguered Spanish Republic.  This seventy-five year old story –of messages and media– somehow still powerfully resonates today all around the globe.

The second serious experiment in democracy was begun upon Franco’s death in 1975.   Spain’s transition to democracy has been admirable in many ways, but I think it’s fair to say that, particularly in the last couple of decades, democracy in Spain has coincided with a dramatic impoverishment of democratic ideals and processes worldwide.  Some would even say –though it sounds like a sick joke– that Spain, whose first bid for democracy was squashed by fascism,  has now become a normal democracy, but only at the very time when that concept has practically been hollowed out of meaning.

I think that many Spaniards today feel that their country –much like the U.S. and other countries– has settled into a stagnant and corrupt two-party system, in which, on the issues that most profoundly affect the lives of citizens, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, as both are ruled by what we might call the “tyranny of common sense.”   What are the tenets of that common sense?  “Keep the banks, big business and the credit rating agencies happy, by imposing austerity on, and demanding efficiency from, your citizens.  Let your citizens vote every once in a while –we are, after all, a democracy– and make sure that they keep consuming; if possible, keep them shopping till they drop.  When elections come around, each party should trot out the trusted-old wedge issues, which camouflage the profound similarities between the two parties and focus the attention on largely superficial or symbolic differences.  Political parties should do whatever they need to do as long as they bring out their bases on election day, even if voters have to hold their noses in disgust when they vote, because each party has managed to scare those voters into believing that the stench of the other guy is even worse than ours.”

My understanding of the current situation in Spain is that a significant portion of the population has finally decided to say out loud, in public places, and via virtual spaces which didn’t exist just ten years ago, that you are not alone or disloyal if you think that the choices frankly stink, if it looks to you like the emperor actually has no new clothes, if you have the sense that, somewhere along the way to the promised state, the demos has been dropped from democracy.  The protesters in Spain are wondering aloud why their access to their leaders is pretty much limited to casting a ballot once every four years, while the banks and business leaders and credit rating agencies seem to have unlimited access.  In short: the protesters are asking the basic questions that supposedly had been left behind or bracketed in these commonsensical, post-historical, post-ideological times, and, what is perhaps most remarkable, they are refusing to take the bait of the parties’ wedge issues.  They are claiming that the two main parties have been pretty much taking them for granted, and they are saying to all of this:  “basta ya.”

If the Spanish government at times seems like a hostage of “the market,” I think that the Spanish people are beginning to feel subjected to a double captivity –trapped in a stagnant two party system, whose leaders seem accountable less and less to their sequestered constituents, and more and more to their own supranational captors: those ghostly or godlike international financial “markets” that whimsically giveth and taketh away.

Perhaps the screams we are hearing from Spain these days can best be thought of as the shouts of a hostage’s hostage, who is just becoming fully aware of, and indignant about, her double imprisonment.  Of course, it is impossible to predict the outcome of the processes set in motion over the last few weeks.  Maybe things will fizzle out with the heat of July.   Or maybe Spain, once again, will find itself at the forefront in identifying threats and pointing out promise.   Either way, I think we Americans would do well to heed those calls of the hostage’s hostage, to try to understand her plight, and, while we’re at it, to check on the health of our own democracy, and on the status of our own freedoms.  We might discover, to our own surprise, that in important ways, we are all Spaniards.

–James D. Fernández

Remarks at panel on Democracia Real Ya

Bluestockings Bookstore, 3 June 2011

Garzón gives his acceptance speech. Photo EFE

Editors’ Note: Judge Baltasar Garzón received the First ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism in New York City, on May 14, 2011. This is his acceptance speech.

Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of ALBA, representatives of the Puffin Foundation, authorities, amigas y amigos:

Seventy-five years ago in my country, Spain, one of the darkest and saddest chapters in the history of humanity began. It lasted more than forty years and even today, after 34 years of democracy, it has not been definitively read or closed, or as such, overcome. An unjust and illegal war, though perhaps all wars are, was begun in 1936 by those who scorned the freedom, legality and democracy of the Republic. It was done by those for whom the life of their equals held little value and who, by their decisions, launched a bloodbath between brothers and sisters, with tens of thousands of them tortured, disappeared, and executed without trial; thirty thousand children (known as the Lost Children of Francoism) were stolen from their families simply because their parents were supporters of the Republic, a crime that, according to the new regime, made them unfit to raise their own children.

But it was not just a civil war. The fascist regimes in Germany and Italy aided the rebels led by General Franco, while the western democracies stood by, silent and motionless. But International Solidarity soon stepped up. Forty thousand men and women from fifty-two countries, including twenty-eight hundred from the United States, forming the International Brigades to fight against fascism in Spain, offering their lives for an ideal.

Baltasar Garzón in New York City, 14 May 2011. Photo Richard Bermack

The American Volunteers were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Among them were some seventy-five women, ninety African-Americans, and nearly thirty percent of them were Jewish. It was the first military unit in US history in which white soldiers served under the command of a black commander, Oliver Law. We know that nearly a third of them (nine-hundred) lie forever buried in the Spanish earth. The rest, on their return to the US were persecuted by the McCarthy Commission, which labeled them “Premature Antifascists.”

For me, as for so many others throughout the world, they are an example of courage and solidarity; they are heroes who chose to fight for the promise of freedom and democracy; whose convictions led them to offer the ultimate sacrifice and suffer purges in their own country; who took part in all the important social struggles of their day: from the Mississippi Freedom Summer to opposition to the Vietnam war, from US intervention in Central America in the eighties to the invasion of Iraq. They were the kind of people who fight against the worst cancer of humanity: indifference.

It is our duty to carry this idea of solidarity forward, as ALBA has done for the last 32 years, in the areas of culture, politics, and human rights activism, as the Puffin Foundation continues to do. I want to take this opportunity to salute Perry Rosenstein, president of the Puffin Foundation, who by establishing this Award fosters the creation of an informal network of allied organizations, all working on issues of human rights, historical memory, and the legacy of the International Brigades. The joining of forces of these two institutions—ALBA and the Puffin Foundation—is key to reactivating definitively the fight for truth, justice and reparation for the victims of so many wars and massacres that, today as in the past, scourge our world. Initiatives like this restore our belief in the possibility of regenerating the world.

With humility and gratitude I accept this award given to me today, for precisely today is the anniversary of my suspension from my position in the Spanish judicial system for trying to investigate the crimes of the Franco regime. That day I was surrounded by friends, and today I am too. Thank you for being here.

While I am not worthy of this honor, I would be lying if I did not recognize that it makes me extremely proud to receive it, for what it means for the commitment to the future of this passionate fight against impunity. I am just a judge who has always tried to comply strictly with the law in every case, with a universalist vision, integrated with the basic values that give sense and coherence to the International Community, beginning with respect for human dignity as the foundation that underlies the doctrines of Human Rights. I am one of many who struggle against the theory that the course of the history of the world can only be changed by the force of arms, for only by force, they tell us, can peace, security, and the world order be maintained.

Yet this is not true. To give up guarantees and turn to the powers that be and to the use of techniques that contradict the fundamental principles of the rule of law, is not only unacceptable legally, in the long run it also does more harm than good. Another way is possible. And that way must be led by Justice and the Rule of Law, to protect and defend the victims of war, terrorism, and mass crimes that have sown the earth with death and desolation.

All of us, my dear friends, have a moral and even legal obligation to fight against amnesia and indifference, just as we must fight against those who instigated or consented to barbaric acts. To do so means holding high the banner of dignity and human rights to shore up the crumbling edifice of the International Community, and finally turning away from the path of illegality and spaces where the rule of law does not exist, all in the name of the so-called war against terror. To do so means turning toward spaces of equality and the eradication of impunity. But impunity, which had been defeated, after decades of struggle, by the right to truth and the right to justice, which transform memory into one of the most genuine driving forces of the historical reconstruction of a people, has once more gained ground at the expense of justice in many countries, including Spain, which has gone from being a pioneer in the application of the principle of Universal Jurisdiction to cowering in the corner of cowardice, neither wanting nor able to confront its past or look at itself.

Judge Garzón delivers his acceptance speech after receiving the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Photo Len Tsou

Some two-hundred thousand men and women, murdered, executed without trial, tortured, disappeared, lie buried in roadside ditches, in fields, in cemeteries, unidentified, a source of shame for the Spanish people that is so proud of its Transition from dictatorship to democracy, in which, incidentally, any possible resolution of this became impossible.

What is the moral caliber of those who, admitting the necessity of investigating mass crimes in other countries, nonetheless refuse to do so in their own land?

Judges have the obligation to investigate those facts, no matter the personal or professional risks, in order to give a valid response to the human rights of the victims, which consists of the right to truth, to justice and to reparation. Justice, to fulfill its function, must create and consolidate the principle of universal victim as the nucleus of this new vision of an active Universal Jurisdiction in the pursuit of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, above any particular political, economic or diplomatic interests that, for circumstantial reasons, seek to secure their impunity.

Kant’s concept of Justice based on respect for the human rights of any individual and of international justice exercised by independent tribunals such as the Inter American Court for Human Rights, the European Tribunal for Human Rights, or the International Criminal Court, are the best proof that this enterprise is feasible. Sixty-three years ago the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed as a clear project of international coexistence based on the respect for the guarantee of all the rights of all citizens of the world.

Today this declaration is still waiting to be put into action. But in the face of the debilitation and failure of ideologies with pretentions of universality, the only language common to all Humanity is the language of human rights, as a universal reference to guide us in an era of globalization, economically on the verge of collapse and politically opportunistic, in which the values of ethics and responsibility have been suspended.

For these reasons, it is imperative that we take militant action in defense of those rights, and a response to the illicit activities of international corporations in such sensitive areas as poverty, the distribution of wealth, the development and administration of natural resources, protection of the environment and the ecosystem; we must take action against those who have thrown millions of people into bankruptcy through massive fraud, and whose disdain of the lives of others leads them to design policies that justify the persecution or discrimination against people for their origin, religion, race or gender.

It is time, once again, for civil society to confront these new challenges. To do nothing is tantamount to contributing to the continuation of this situation. The road without question is difficult, but we must go down it. The road is perhaps utopian, but one in which utopia means the hope that must guide men and women to achieve a world more just in solidarity with those less fortunate.

More than three centuries ago in Switzerland an epic confrontation took place between power and reason, between conscience and violence, between Castellio and Calvin. Stephan Zweig describes it aptly in his work: “From the point of view of the spirit, the words victory and defeat acquire a different meaning. And for this reason, we must remind the world again and again, a world that only sees the victors, that those who would raise their dominion over the tombs and the destroyed existence of millions of beings, are not the true heroes, rather it is those others who, without taking recourse to force, succumbed before power, like Castellio before Calvin, in his fight for the freedom of conscience and for the final coming of humanity on earth.”

Now it is up to us to continue the fight for human rights, for human dignity, and against impunity.

Thank you.

Picasso's sketch of a hand holding a hammer/sickle, on a copy of Paris-Soir.

I would like to add a note on Picasso’s sketch on a copy of Paris-Soir of April 19th, 1937. Since my piece was published in The Volunteer I have come across some new information that links the evidence on Picasso’s initial engagement with the Spanish Civil War at the end of 1936 and in January 1937 to his masterpiece, the Guernica.

I was especially intrigued by the figure with a raised arm holding a hammer and sickle (image here) that Picasso sketched on a copy of Paris-Soir of April 19, 1937. This not only echoes the Paris-Soir/L’Humanité polemic, it is also highly significant because of its date, just one week before the attack on Guernica. The same image appeared in the sketches that Picasso was drawing as he cast around for a subject for his contribution to the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. The raised arm even makes an appearance in early versions of the Guernica.

Herschel B. Chipp pointed out that Picasso had inked his sketch over an article citing French Foreign Minister Delbos’ wish to have friendly relations with all countries, i.e., including Germany and Italy. However, this did not seem to me to be sufficient–in itself–to spark off Picasso’s indignation. That kind of statement only bothers us when something worse is happening; and in Paris on April 18-19, 1937, as I discovered recently, this was once again the bombing of Madrid.

In Paris, a few weeks ago, I studied the microfilm series of Paris-Soir for 1937. On page 3 of this same April 19 issue I saw a startling little item entitled “Madrid was subjected to an extremely violent bombardment yesterday”. This could have been dictated by Delaprée’s ghost, speaking of “pools of blood” on Gran Vía and its sidewalks, and of brain matter being splattered around. But nothing more. Newspapers shared agency and other sources, and this particular news was also published in L’Humanité (19 April, p. 3), and no doubt elsewhere. It is so short and inconclusive as to read like a fragment from a longer text, presumably truncated at source since L’Humanité would not have hesitated to publish it in full. L’Humanité has been digitized and we can consult the corresponding issue here.

If we compare the front pages of the two newspapers we can see that they both highlighted Delbos’ outline of French foreign policy. But there was also a significant difference. Unlike Paris-Soir, L’Humanité also included on its front page the news that Madrid had been bombed, featuring a picture–almost certainly taken from its archives–of destruction to the city.

Louis Delaprée. (Unpublished photograph from the Lincoln-Delaprée collection.)

The contrast is so significant because Picasso was a regular reader of one newspaper (L’Humanité), and had demonstrably handled a copy of the other (Paris-Soir). For L’Humanité readers, then, the news on April 19, 1937 was that the French government was closing its eyes while Madrid was being bombed. This was consistent with L’Humanité‘s overall approach to the war, which repeatedly juxtaposed attacks on the deceit of Non-Intervention with allusions to its nefarious consequences, for example on January 26, 1937 when a photo of rubble and destruction accompanied the headline, “Hitler et le Duce ont répondu”. On the other hand, Paris-Soir had hidden away the bombing of Madrid on an inside page, and was therefore reenacting, albeit on a very small scale, its handling of Delaprée’s reporting in late 1936. So Picasso was not just reacting to what Paris-Soir had printed on its front page, but also to what it had left out.

Picasso’s picture of around April 19, 1937 shows a small figure with an elongated arm–and how often will an arm, severed or otherwise, appear in this story?–ending in a clenched fist and a hammer and sickle. Chipp’s studied this sketch in the Picasso Museum in Paris, and when I briefly inquired about it there two or three years ago, I was told that it might have been transferred to the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. I have not pursued this further, and the sketch is not on public display in either museum. But if the complete newspaper, rather than just the front page, has been preserved in the museum archives, then it would be interesting to know if there are traces of additional markings on page 3, where the bombings are mentioned.

At first sight, the significance of the hammer and sickle is only too clear, but as so often in Picasso’s work, things are not quite what they seem. Picasso placed this particular hammer and sickle right at the top center of the newspaper, just above Paris-Soir‘s name. If we look at the issue of L’Humanité for that, or indeed any other day, a hammer and sickle was always at the top, as it formed part of its logo. In his sketch, then, Picasso was impishly transforming an issue of Paris-Soir into L’Humanité, its most bitter enemy. Visually, the joke works well as long as you know that Paris-Soir and L’Humanité had been at odds over the bombing of Madrid ever since Delaprée’s death. As we are talking about a newspaper–and therefore a three-dimensional, social object–perhaps the sketch was done in a café with friends. The background and paper were courtesy of Paris-Soir, so all that Picasso needed was a pen.

If we are indeed eavesdropping on a shared conversation, rather than studying a conventional “work of art”, then my impression that the character’s right hand is handling, or perhaps inserting letters, between the second “d” and “ée” of the word “décidée” (ie “d….ée”) may not be altogether fanciful. After all, we are, quite unusually, talking about visual annotations to a printed text here. However, the sketch does not need to evoke the dead journalist’s name to link up with the Delaprée affair, as it shares so many other features with it. I imagine that this is not a portrait, as the similarity to Miró’s Catalan/Spanish peasant in “Aidez L’Espagne”, also displaying an enlarged arm, and also from 1937, points in a different direction. The very prominent clenched fist was both the international left-wing and Spanish Republican salute. During the Spanish Civil War it represented defiance and anti-fascist solidarity. Both ideas are presumably present here.

The reason that the bombing of Madrid had become front page news once again was a long forgotten battle that led to the city being heavily shelled for about two weeks after April 10,  1937. Between April 9 and 14, 1937, the Republicans took advantage of the Nationalist campaign in the North to launch a major diversionary offensive to take Mount Garabitas in the Casa de Campo countryside adjoining Madrid, and offer the Republic an anniversary present on April 14. As well as leaving the Francoist enclave in the University City completely exposed, a Republican victory would have ended shelling from the artillery batteries up on the heights. But the Republican failure had the opposite effect: it invited the Nationalists to show that they were still in full command, and hence the intensified shelling.

Several foreign writers were in Madrid at this time. On April 10 Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos and others went to a damaged appartment in the west of the city that Hemingway called “the old homestead”. From there they had a good view of the offensive. The writers also acquired first-hand experience of being shelled, as well as seeing how it affected the city. A page from Virginia Cowles’ diary for April 12, 1937 records “30 dead and 80 wounded from yesterday’s shelling” (facsimile page in Spanish edn, 2011, p. 150). A few days later shelling narrowly missed a British parliamentary delegation. Madrid was heavily shelled on April 22, when the Florida Hotel was hit, forcing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Hemingway, Gellhorn, and others out of their bedrooms in their pyjamas.

More important, for our purposes, is that what had happened in Madrid was given considerable attention in France. The bombing of Madrid returned to the front page of L’Humanité, not only on April 19, 1937, but also on April 22 (very briefly), and on April 23. On the 23rd, the previous day’s attack was misleadingly illustrated by a drawing of planes bombing Madrid, whereas the city was actually being shelled from the artillery positions on Mount Garabitas. In fact, the whole point of the shelling was to show how strongly entrenched the Nationalists still were there. But L’Humanité identified the destruction with aerial bombardments by Nazi German and Fascist Italian aviation. The accompanying language was an almost verbatim retake of the language that the newspaper had used on January 9, 1937, at the time that Picasso was beginning Songe et Mensonge: “…Franco fait bombarder Madrid, assassinant femmes et enfants.”

L'Humanité, 9 January 1937. (Source: gallica.bnf.fr)

While the intensive shelling of Madrid in April 1937 did not have the savagery of the Condor Legion’s attack on Guernica, it formed a continuum with the earlier, massive aerial bombardments of Madrid. L’Humanité did not have much information when it published a front page article on the destruction of Guernica on April 28, 1937. (A day later it published the famous report by George L. Steer, the London Times journalist.) The best it could do at this stage was show a photo of the victims of previous bombing raids, implicitly Madrid, beneath a large headline on the attack on Guernica. Thus, logically enough, it was past events that initially provided the framework for understanding what might have happened. Allegedly, when the news reached Paris of the bombing of Guernica, the subject was proposed to Picasso and he replied that he didn’t know what a bombed city looked like. If the story is true, then it is marvelously disingenuous, and underlines Picasso’s determination to work on his own terms. Literally, of course, it was quite true. But by late April 1937, Picasso certainly knew a great deal about the impact of bombardments on civilians. He had even been toying with ideas inspired by the shelling of Madrid just the week before. Refracted through the influence of Delaprée’s descriptions of the bombing of Madrid, much of the imaginative groundwork for his masterpiece was already in place.

A very clear pattern emerges as we look at how Spanish news reached Picasso in Paris in the months up to April 1937. Picasso shows no apparent interest in battles or the military vicissitudes of the conflict. But violent death, the bombing of civilians and murderous lies are all present in the series that runs from the painting of 29 December 1936 studied by John Richardson to Songe et Mensonge on January 8-9, 1937 and on to the sketch of April 19, 1937. Many accounts of the genesis of Picasso’s masterpiece describe the destruction of Guernica as unprecedented and wholly unexpected. In the light of what is discussed here, that is misleading. On the contrary, the attack was so deeply disturbing precisely because it was half-feared and half-expected. The destruction of Guernica was a shock in itself, but it also signified that otherwise isolated events were coming together to form an ominous series. Aerial bombardments of other cities, including Barcelona (where Picasso had relatives), were now predictable. And unlike the bombings of Madrid and Durango, which got rather messily mixed up with other news, Guernica was an exceptionally “pure” news event. Thanks to the foreign journalists who covered it, important reports and the first photos were all published in the foreign press over a period of three or four days after April 28, 1937.

It has long been recognized that journalistic reporting and photojournalism worked their way into Picasso’s masterpiece, and indeed may have helped to shape its near monochromatic shading. But the idea that this merely reflected the way Picasso acquired his information may be too benign. The Nationalist claim that the Basques had burnt the city themselves was being widely reported from late April onwards, virtually at the same time as dispatches were arriving on the attack itself. The themes of bombing and lies had already been closely intertwined in Picasso’s reactions to the Delaprée affair, and now there was both a hugely destructive aerial bombardment and the perpetration of a colossal lie. The scratchy newsprint that appears in Picasso’s painting, just above the severed arm, must represent lies as well as news. Manifestly, L’Humanité, too, was far from averse to its own manipulations (cf its drawing on its front page of April 23), which was surely why Delaprée and Steer, both of them independent-minded journalists on center or center-right newspapers, had such an extraordinary influence. Steer provided impeccable, objective reporting, while Delaprée recorded the subjective, emotional experience of living through the nightmare, which I believe fed more directly into the mood of Picasso’s masterpiece.

The deceit of Non-Intervention was wholly discredited by German and Italian aerial bombardments. This was surely why bombings and lies came to be so closely linked together, and not only to Picasso. Very recently, researchers on Latin-American writers and the Spanish Civil War have located a text (1938) by the Ecuadorian Demetrio Aguilera-Malta which imagines Anthony Eden reading the writing of Louis Delaprée and being converted into a ferocious opponent of Non-Intervention (read it here).

In one report, Delaprée himself ended an hour-by-hour chronicle of the bombings in Madrid with the following denunciation (omitted by Paris-Soir): “I am ashamed to be a man when Mankind shows itself capable of perpetrating such massacres of the innocents. Oh old Europe, so bound up in your petty games and your great intrigues, God grant that all this blood does not choke you.”

Picasso recorded his own feelings on a copy of Paris-Soir, dated April 19, 1937, as well as in the infinitely more astonishing and complex masterpiece that was to follow soon afterwards.

(April 2011)

The Spanish Civil War prompted many memorable responses in all art forms, but none of these came close to matching the extraordinary impact of Picasso’s Guernica[1], inspired by the German Condor Legion’s destruction of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. Guernica‘s searing images made it one of the iconic works of art of the twentieth century, and an archetypal representation of the destructiveness of war.[2] Yet paradoxically the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, then living in France, did not at first seem to respond to the war – artistically, at least – with quite the same immediacy as many of his contemporaries. Although Picasso experts agree that the painter’s interest in the war as a subject was sparked some time in late 1936 or early 1937, the precise circumstances of the “conversion” that made the Guernica possible were never fully made clear—until now, that is. Last year, while preparing an edition of the Spanish Civil War reporting by the now largely forgotten French journalist Louis Delaprée, I came across new materials that I believe help us to pin down the exact turning point in Picasso’s career.

Regards, Dec. 10, 1936: "The Crucified Capital." Photo Robert Capa. Courtesy of the International Center of Photography, www.icp.org

Key, it turned out, was the publication in Paris of a collection of Delaprée’s dispatches from Spain on 8 January 1937. For one, it was precisely then that Picasso started his first clearly political response to events in Spain: a two-part engraving entitled Dream and Lie of Franco. As I further explored the impact of Delaprée’s writing on Picasso, I also became convinced that visual imagery from the journalist’s descriptions of the bombing of Madrid had left very clear traces in the Guernica. My edition of Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, was published last fall; in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the distinguished art historian John Richardson included a review of the book as part of a wide-ranging study of Picasso’s political attitudes.[3] But Richardson’s article also revealed a further important twist in the plot, which I will discuss below. First, however, it is necessary to reflect on the representation in the Western media of civilian bombing during the Spanish Civil War.

Delaprée in Bombed Madrid

The symbolic primacy of the bombing of the town of Guernica, rather than the previous and subsequent bombings of Madrid, Durango or Barcelona, was undoubtedly due to Picasso’s masterpiece. It was assisted by the controversy sparked by clumsy denials from Francoist propagandists that the event had even occurred, or had been perpetrated by the Republicans themselves.[4] However, Guernica’s rise to prominence in the narrative of the Spanish Civil War was a slow process. In March 1938, for example, the journalist Simone Téry still referred to the “famous” bombings of Madrid as she looked for a point of comparison for the massive aerial attacks on Barcelona by Italian aviation.[5] There were many air attacks during the Civil War, which included both Republican and Nationalist targets[6], but the template for mass civilian bombings was Madrid. Aerial bombardments both preceded and accompanied the Francoist advance on the city in late October and early November 1936. They acquired a murderous intensity as mainly German aviation caused numerous civilian casualties and widespread destruction in the city, especially during the latter stages of the full-scale battle that ran from 7 to 23 November 1936.

Madrid bombed. (Archivo Rojo, Spanish Ministry of Culture.)

Madrid did not witness the first civilian casualties of air bombardments, but nothing on this scale had previously occurred in a major European city, and certainly not under the eyes of so many foreign journalists.[7] This was a highly emotive issue, in part because other Europeans were justifiably apprehensive about what the future might hold for them. For a pro-Republican newspaper such as the British News Chronicle, this was the moment – 20 November – to proclaim: “Madrid Is Defiant Under Rain Of Bombs”. In contrast, the French correspondent Louis Delaprée, who also witnessed the bombings in Madrid, fell foul of the apolitical line of his mass-circulation newspaper Paris-Soir. His texts were cut, consigned to the obscurity of page 7 and finally rejected altogether as the rift with head office became insuperable. (See here for an English translation of one of Delaprée’s dispatches.) Delaprée filed his last report from Madrid on 4 December 1936, the day that the media floodgates opened on the scandal of King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Incensed, Delaprée dictated:

You’ve only published half my articles. I know that.

It’s your right. But I’d have thought that out of friendship you’d have spared me some useless work. For the last three weeks, I’ve been getting up every day at five in the morning, so that you could get the news into your first editions. You’ve had me working for the King of Prussia[8] and the waste paper basket. Thanks.

I’ll fly back on Sunday unless I suffer the same fate as Guy de Traversay[9], and that’d be fine, wouldn’t it? Because that way you’d have your own martyr.

Until then, I won’t send you anything else. Not worth it. The killing of a hundred Spanish kids is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson, the royal whore.[10]

As it turned out, this message was premonitory. The French embassy plane on which Delaprée was returning was shot down, and he died in Madrid on 11 December 1936.

Louis Delaprée. (Unpublished photograph from the Lincoln-Delaprée collection.)

Paul Preston has studied the process by which many basically conservative journalists who worked in Spain came to identify with the Republican cause. That identification often led to confrontations with their more right-wing newspaper proprietors.[11] Delaprée’s conflict with his newspaper was not therefore unique, but it certainly had many unusual features, not least its bitterness and remarkable aftermath. Copies of Delaprée’s dispatches, which had been filed in the Republican censorship office in Madrid, made their way to the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité. This provenance makes it likely that their ensuing publication as a 48-page pamphlet was part of a wider Republican propaganda initiative that we know the Minister of State, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, was planning in late December 1936.[12] On 30 December, L’Humanité teased its readers by promising “sensational” forthcoming revelations, and that very evening Delaprée’s melancholy face looked down from posters with the text “A dead man denounces the lies of the press”. Delaprée’s last desperate message to his editors was reproduced on the poster and in L’Humanité (31 December 1936).

The Delaprée Affair

The Delaprée case was fast becoming a cause célèbre. As details emerged about the attack on the plane, the testimony of the pilot and the passengers, including the Red Cross envoy Dr Georges Henny, contradicted the initial hypothesis of Francoist responsibility. Other theories were now advanced, notably that documentation on Republican repression was being prevented from reaching Geneva. But although the attack may well have been committed by Soviet pilots, what were their instructions? A photo of the plane’s wreckage keeps open the possibility of a blunder due to mistaken identification.[13] To make matters even murkier, the fascist writer Brasillach launched the outlandish accusation that the writer André Malraux was responsible for Delaprée’s death. Brasillach also claimed that L’Humanité was softening up the market for a pro-Communist evening newspaper. This charge was was less fanciful, as Ce Soir was indeed launched in March 1937, with financing from the Spanish Republican government.[14]

New of Delaprée's death. (L'Intransigeant, Dec. 12, 1936.)

Front page of L'Humanité, 31 December 1936. (Source: gallica.bnf.fr)

Meanwhile, a selection of Delaprée’s dispatches, Le Martyre de Madrid (The Martyrdom of Madrid), was published in Paris on 8 January 1937, and subsequently translated into English, Spanish, German and Russian.[15] Although prepared in haste, this pamphlet had a clear political purpose. While it purported to show the differences between the original and truncated reports, several allegedly censored passages had in fact been published in Paris-Soir. More importantly, the pamphlet omitted altogether one report that included an unflattering reference to the Madrid security police, as well as Delaprée’s scathing allusion to the royal whore. The latter omission was certainly deliberate, as public opinion in both Britain and France was a vital overseas battlefield for the Spanish Republic.

The Martyrdom of Madrid produced a riposte in February 1937 when circles linked to Paris-Soir brought out a second collection of Delaprée’s work, Mort en Espagne (Dead in Spain), which offered a fuller selection of his journalism while downplaying its political impact. By this stage, the Paris-Soir team had clearly grown wary of accusations of censorship, and provided reasonably complete versions of Delaprée’s reports (although there are significant textual differences between the first edition and a reprint in April). Even so, the editors could not bring themselves to republish Delaprée’s final incendiary dispatch. To one contemporary reviewer, this seemed to close the cycle.[16]

Who was Louis Delaprée? Although he has only attracted very sporadic attention, J. B. Romeiser hailed him nearly 30 years ago as a precursor of the “new journalism” of the 1960s in the way that he broke down the separation between self and subject, sacrificing total objectivity to empathy.[17] He was an acknowledged influence on Virginia Woolf, who kept a copy of The Martyrdom of Madrid among her press cuttings while she wrote Three Guineas. Delaprée’s spirit also presides over André Malraux’s novel L’Espoir. There are numerous echoes of Delaprée’s writing in the novel, with some of Delaprée’s passages even inserted verbatim.[18] Malraux and Delaprée knew each other, and were not particularly friendly, ostensibly because of Malraux’s hostility towards the “bourgeois” journalism of Paris-Soir.[19] In fact, the two men were probably too similar to get on well – they were also physically alike –  while the false accusation that Malraux had killed the journalist cannot have simplified his feelings about him.[20]

Delaprée and Picasso

Although I could find no mention of Delaprée in studies of Picasso, I found several strong indications of the likely impact of the Delaprée affair on the painter’s significant change in orientation leading up to the Guernica.  For one, the Communist poet Louis Aragon was both a prime mover in the Delaprée affair and a close friend of Picasso’s. So too was Paul Eluard, whose poem on “November 1936″ has been cited as a possible influence on Picasso, but may also be connected to the sequence of events related here.[21] Picasso read L’Humanité every day. More important, we know that something related to Spain had deeply affected Picasso on 8-9 January 1937 when he began Dream and Lie of Franco, parts I and II, a fantastic, burlesque representation of Franco in a Golden Age setting. “Bather under a black sun”, a drawing of 9 January, has also been linked to his unease about Spain.[22]

Delaprée in Nationalist territory, some time before August 2, 1936. Unpublished photo from the Lincoln-Delaprée collection.

Curiously, Delaprée was championed by Picasso’s Communist friends as an “honest” journalist fighting the lies of the press; yet he was also respected by the Right who saw him as one of their own. Given Picasso’s known antipathy to agitprop, had a centre-right journalist’s writing helped to redefine the bombings in human, apolitical terms?[23]

As Delaprée’s political attitudes are clearly relevant to this discussion, some of the wilder theories about him need to be laid to rest. Geoffrey Cox’s account in Defence of Madrid (1937) shows that towards the end of his time in Madrid Delaprée was widely suspected of being a fifth columnist – clearly by those who had not read his suppressed writing.[24] A lifetime later, Sir Geoffrey Cox wrote to me that “Louis Delaprée was suspected of being a Fascist because he worked for Paris-Soir, a paper the Republicans regarded as Fascist, that was the case with the rest of us. It was common in the tense atmosphere of Madrid for such suspicions to be held.”[25] In this instance, however, we do not have to rely on such late testimony because there is contemporaneous evidence that that his alleged right-wing sympathies were causing him problems in Republican territory.[26] On the other hand, the suggestion that he was a crypto-communist, put forth by Robert Stradling, probably derives from the posthumous connection to L’Humanité. In any case, Stradling offers no evidence in support of this contention, which dovetails with his more general theory that the foreign correspondents were, first and foremost, propagandists.[27]

In this period, several French writers, including Georges Bernanos and André Gide, took “pride in practicing politics with their hearts”, and reacted to their experiences in Spain and Russia in ways that belied their nominal political sympathies. It took a very young Albert Camus to insist that there was no need to pretend that Bernanos was anything other than what he really was, a right-wing, Catholic monarchist.[28] So there is nothing inherently implausible in Delaprée being both a ferocious critic of Franco, and the journalist who wrote disdainfully that leftists spoke about fascism “with the same horror with which a monk of the Middle Ages would speak of the Devil”.[29] Delaprée’s clash with his newspaper is, I believe, a furious personal and humanistic rebellion against the constraints of commercial journalism.

The Becoming of Delaprée

Some biographical details may be helpful. Delaprée was born in Brittany in 1902, and the loss of his father in the First World War may have reinforced a restless strain that was characteristic of a whole generation of young French intellectuals, the so-called “non-conformists of the 1930s”.[30] Delaprée trained as a lawyer and dabbled in centre-right politics before going into journalism in Paris.[31] Brilliant and charming, he also had a fierce temper. On one occasion he punched the press magnate, Léon Bailby, and he maintained this flair for making life complicated by having an affair with Hélène Gordon, the girlfriend and future wife of his boss Pierre Lazareff at Paris-Soir. Delaprée’s light, brilliant pre-war journalism included a report on a melancholy song that was claimed to have caused a wave of suicides in Hungary. Delaprée brought the words and music back to France, and they were translated and adapted overnight to become the song Sombre Dimanche. (The English version, Gloomy Sunday, followed quickly, and is best known in Billie Holiday’s marvelous version.) At this stage, this kind of human interest story, and Paris-Soir’s commercial journalism, were a perfect match.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Delaprée immediately told Lazareff that he wanted to go to Spain, invoking his part-Spanish ancestry. He would be in Spain, with some interruptions, from 22 July until his death in December 1936. During a brief stay in rebel territory at the beginning of the war, Delaprée sent a report that condemned atrocities on both sides, but provided detailed information on Nationalist killings near Burgos. From a short additional note, we know that Delaprée probably never expected this dispatch to be published, but he nevertheless felt compelled to write it. This surely is the best proof of its authenticity.[32] I have studied all of Delaprée’s reports from Spain, and during the early months of the war the overall picture is one of a conscientious and balanced reporter who signposts the more doubtful information he receives so that readers can make up their own minds. But Delaprée loses this composure in Madrid.

By late November, Delaprée is on the other side of the mirror. He is no longer a working journalist, he is writing for himself. Madrid is a besieged island: “I hope nobody takes it amiss that I say ‘we‘. Living with people under a bombardment makes you feel incredibly close to them.”[33] We are witnessing the experiential transformation of the journalist.[34] Other, more pragmatic journalists worked in upbeat, colorful details – the aerial combats, the rescue of art treasures – to make the carnage more palatable to a mass readership. There is none of this in Delaprée. But his subjectivity makes it harder for us to vouchsafe for each factual detail. If we want balanced, informative descriptions of the bombings by working journalists we should look elsewhere. Moreover, from internal evidence, it is clear that “Bombs over Madrid“, the article translated here, was – unusually for Delaprée – written over two or three days, permitting him to rework his material, and achieve a more personal interpretation of what he had seen and experienced.

“Bombs over Madrid” and Picasso’s Guernica

Front page of L'Humanité, 9 January 1937. (Source: gallica.bnf.fr)

It is not difficult to imagine the effect that this writing had on Picasso when Delaprée’s writing was published on 8 January 1937. Nothing quite like this had come out of Spain, and certainly not in such dramatic circumstances. Picasso began Part I of Dream and Lie on the very same day. This work has been linked to Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, but after reading Delaprée, Goya’s engraving becomes the eeriest premonition of a nocturnal aerial bombardment as winged night-monsters, owls and bats attack a dormant figure from the sky. “Bombs over Madrid” has a special claim on our attention. After its publication in the pamphlet on 8 January 1937, it was reprinted in L’Humanité on the following day, so Picasso saw it at least twice. As it turned out, after Paris-Soir´s rejection Delaprée had published it under a pseudonym in a moderate left-wing weekly, Marianne. But Marianne had cut out its final sentences, allowing L’Humanité on 9 January once again to make front page news out of the scandal of the “lying press”. Scholars have invoked the possible influence of Golden Age dramatist Calderón de la Barca’s exploration of the nature of illusion on Picasso’s Dream and Lie. Perhaps: but on the 8th and 9th January when he began it, the linked themes of lies and a murderous Franco were very much closer to hand in a newly printed pamphlet and on the front page of Picasso’s own daily newspaper.

Picasso's sketch of a hand holding a hammer/sickle, on a copy of Paris-Soir.

The single most striking image in “Bombs over Madrid“, and probably in all of Delaprée’s writing, is an electric flashlight illuminating a woman and dead child, which is also of course a central image in the Guernica. Chronologically, the reprinting of the article in L’Humanité on 9 January coincided with Dream and Lie II. Picasso depicted a prostrate woman that day, only introducing the woman and child motif at a later stage. Visually, in any case, Delaprée’s mater dolorosa is closer to the version in the Guernica, with its nocturnal, dreamlike atmosphere that so closely matches the mood of Delaprée’s writing. One of the drawings connected to the Guernica has an even more explicit allusion to Delaprée’s text, showing a woman with a sliced breast, from which a triangle of light illuminates the baby.[35]

New light was shed on Delaprée’s influence on Picasso with the publication of Richardson’s article in the NYRB, mentioned above. That article brought to light a little-known painting from 1936, Still Life with a Lamp, which represents Picasso’s very first reference to the Spanish Civil War.[36] This shows a modern table in the center of a seemingly antique, tomb-like marble room. Richardson explains that in accordance with Picasso’s anthropomorphic imagery, a jug on the table represents Picasso himself, while a fruit bowl is his mistress Marie-Thérèse. There is a severed arm between them – the image will reappear in the Guernica – and a poster on the wall is dated 29 December.

Still Life with a Lamp shows that Picasso was in on the Delaprée affair right from the very beginning. As we have seen, the affair flared up twice in Paris, the first time between 30 December 1936 and 1 January, when L’Humanité launched its poster campaign against Paris-Soir; and again on 8-9 January, when the pamphlet was published, and when L’Humanité reprinted “Bombs over Madrid”. On 29 December circles linked to L’Humanité were busy printing the Delaprée poster, so only insiders knew about the affair at that stage. Pablo Picasso must have been one of them.

As I read Richardson’s NYRB essay, and related it to my own reconstruction of the Delaprée affair, I found myself slipping between languages as additional associations suggested themselves. I asked myself: doesn’t this mean that on 29 December, Picasso must have been at the… marbre? Marbre did not only mean “marble” in the 1930s, it also referred to the table on which newspapers were set and corrected, as well as to finished newspaper articles that were ready for publication. Is there submerged wordplay, then, in the painting’s depiction of a table – or perhaps marbre – within a marble mausoleum that is haunted by a dead newspaperman? And is a severed arm not the perfect visual metaphor for the silencing of a journalist, and the mutilation of his work? When the image of the severed arm reappears in the Guernica, it is just beneath scratched lines representing newsprint. Moreover, Picasso first included it in the Guernica at about the same time, to judge from Dora Maar’s photos.[37]

As Picasso must have seen the poster being printed on 29 December, the visual appearance of the street poster takes on great importance. Unfortunately, I know of no surviving copy, but it appears in the background of a photo of a crowd scene on page 1 of L’Humanité on 1 January 1937. We can make out Delaprée’s face to our left, and the headline is spread out over three lines to our right: “A dead man / denounces / the lies of the press”. Beneath this, although we cannot see it in the photo, is the facsimile of Delaprée’s furious final message, which Picasso will most certainly have read, discussed, and quite possibly relished. It would be the final irony if the art historians were to decipher this imagery, only to discover that the “royal whore” was also present in this modern/antique setting. In Picasso’s painting the poster itself is blank except for the date, which is highly conspicuous.

There is nothing surprising about Picasso being drawn into this affair, taken to the marbre, shown the poster, perhaps even invited to make suggestions. The Francoists had made all the running with propaganda campaigns in the early months of the war by focusing on atrocities that had been committed in Republican territory. Anti-clerical killings, in particular, had greatly damaged the Republic’s international reputation. Now, however, the Republicans were recovering lost ground, and the bombing of civilians – in Madrid but later on in Guernica and elsewhere – gave them an emotive issue which played a major role in reshaping world opinion.[38] (The Communist news agency Agence Espagne, too, was now active in Paris, but I have no evidence of their involvement in this affair.) Here surely was an extraordinary opportunity to get Picasso fully involved.

But while the pro-Republicans would certainly have been interested in attracting Picasso’s attention, they had no control over his creative response. If Picasso responded so strongly, it was surely because he was moved by Delaprée’s writing, moved by the killing of civilians. The affair reinforces, rather than diminishes, the importance of the destruction of Guernica because it demonstrates that the aerial bombing of civilians was at the very heart of Picasso’s response to the Spanish Civil War. The images discussed here had clearly entered Picasso’s creative landscape. And if Picasso reacted so furiously to the destruction of Guernica in April 1937 it was surely because he felt: they’ve done it again. Aerial bombardments were now perceived as a series of recurring and ongoing disasters, interweaving in the single, universal tragedy of the Guernica.

Read the English translation of Delaprée’s “Madrid sous les bombes” here.

Martin Minchom’s publications include Spanish editions of Geoffrey Cox, La defensa de Madrid (2005), and Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid (2009).

1. My greatest debt is to Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée. I also wish to thank Professor Paul Preston and the participants at the Cañada Blanch Centre (LSE) seminar in February 2010, and Carlos García Santa Cecilia, Jaime Ruiz Reig and Mirta Núnez Díaz-Balart who participated in presentations at Gefrema and Amesde / the Blanquerna Cultural Center in Madrid. Professor Sebastiaan Faber’s detailed suggestions greatly improved an early version of this article.

2. For the influence of the Guernica, Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, London, Bloomsbury, 2004.

3. John Richardson, “How Political was Picasso?“, New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/how-political-was-picasso/ The art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, Richardson’s collaborator, kindly sent me a pre-publication copy of the picture discussed in that article. Van Hensbergen is now working with Richardson on the fourth and concluding volume of his monumental Picasso biography, which will cover this period.

4. Herbert R. Southworth, La destruction de Guernica: Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire, Paris, Ruedo Ibérico, 1975. Southworth’s classic study settled this argument, but it has had a tenacious afterlife.

5. Simone Téry, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937-1938, Paris, Éditions sociales internationales, 1938, p. 315.

6. Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté, y Joan Villarroya, España en llamas: La guerra civil desde el aire, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2003.

7. The only precedent was the Japanese air bombardment of the Chinese borough of Shanghai in 1932. But significantly, that too was viewed by Western journalists from the neighbouring International Settlement, and helped to swing world opinion against Japan. Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919-1933, Oxford University Press, 2007 edn, pp. 731-732.

8. “Pour le roi de Prussie”: in vain.

9. The French journalist Guy de Traversay had been killed by the Francoists in Majorca.

10. “Le massacre de cent gosses espagnols est moins intéressant qu’un soupir de Mrs Simpson, putain royale.” The last two words were omitted from published versions, and disappeared from the historical literature. Pierre Lazareff, the head of Paris-Soir’s news service, later claimed that Delaprée would never have used used this kind of language. But he did: the words are perfectly visible in the facsimile that L’Humanité published on 31 December 1936. Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, edited by Martin Minchom, Madrid, Raíces, 2009 (henceforth: Morir), includes fuller references than it is possible to give here.

11. Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, London, Constable, 2008; see also P. Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq, London, André Deutsch, 2003 edn. Corresponsales en la Guerra de España, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes / Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 2006, includes essays by Preston and Carlos García Santa Cecilia. Noteworthy studies of French journalism include François Fontaine, La guerre d’Espagne, un déluge de feu et d’images, Paris, BDIC/ Berg International, 2003.

12. Carlos Serrano, L’enjeu espagnol: PCF et guerre d’Espagne, Paris, Messidor / Éditions sociales, 1987, pp. 91-92, although he suggested that it was connected to the launch of Ce Soir.

13. Cf. my discussion in Morir, pp. 71-77. A photo of the wreckage lent to me by Mme Lincoln-Delaprée (published in Morir, p. 82), shows that the embassy plane was still being transformed for civilian use and did not yet have the official tricolor. It displayed a single letter (F), which was characteristic of Malraux’s air squadron.

14. Robert Brasillach, “Quand demandera-t-on l’extradition d’André Malraux?”, Je suis partout, 16 January 1937. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond, Los años rojos de Luis Buñuel, Madrid, Cátedra, 2009, p. 337.

15. It was unusual for texts to be translated into so many languages, so this points to official Republican (and Communist?) backing. The French, Spanish and English pamphlets have similar formats, while the German version may have come out later. Brandeis University Library has a copy of the Russian pamphlet, which I have not seen.

16. Imré Gyomai, “La foire aux livres: Louis Delaprée, mort en Espagne”, Vendredi, 26 February 1937.

17. J. B. Romeiser, “The Limits of Objective War Reporting: Louis Delaprée and Paris-Soir“, in: J. B. Romeiser, ed., Red Flags, Black Flags, Madrid, José Porrua Turanzas, 1982.

18. Discussions include Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 149-178, and Robert S. Thornberry, André Malraux et l’Espagne, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1977.

19. Information from Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée.

20. The character Shade is probably a composite of Herbert Matthews and Delaprée. However, another journalist is portrayed less sympathetically, and works for a newspaper that closely resembles Paris-Soir. Malraux’s novel was first published in instalments in Ce Soir, which was launched as a pro-Communist rival to Paris-Soir.

21. I have no specific information on the Eluard poem “Novembre 1936″, which was published in L’Humanité on 17 December 1936. It begins “Regardez travailler les bâtisseurs de ruines…”, and includes the lines: “On s’habitue à tout / Sauf à ces oiseaux de plomb / Sauf à leur haine de ce qui brille…”, which I think may echo Delaprée’s “oiseaux noirs” in one of his reports.

22. Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 17-18, 20-21. A fine poem by Gérard de Nerval was widely known, and referred to “the black sun of melancholy”. Moreover, the poem had a Spanish title, El Desdichado: “The Ill-starred One”.

23. Picasso drew a hammer and sickle on a copy of Paris-Soir on 19 April 1937, Herschel B. Chipp, El Guernica de Picasso, Historia, transformaciones, significado, Barcelona, Polígrafa, 1991, p. 69. So he clearly perceived Paris-Soir as being the antithesis of Communism / L’Humanité.

24. Geoffrey Cox, Defence of Madrid, London, Victor Gollancz, 1937, pp. 203-206.

25. Letter of Sir Geoffrey Cox to Martin Minchom, 28 April 2007.

26. Morir, pp. 47-48.

27. Robert Stradling, Your Children will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2008, p. 119. The corresponding footnote provides only a mystifying parallel with the Communist spy Kim Philby, who never blew his cover. As I disagree with almost everything that Professor Stradling has to say in his 300-page book (with the partial exception of some issues of quantification), I will limit myself to a single point. An aerial attack on Getafe on 30 October 1936 was rapidly overshadowed by the massive aerial bombardments of Madrid, which became far bigger news. Yet Stradling argues that Getafe was the “biggest single atrocity story” after Badajoz in November 1936 (p. 232), and interprets allusions to Madrid as concealed references to Getafe. On 11 November 1936, L’Humanité observed: “Et les partisans de la “neutralité” oseront-ils regarder, sans se sentir complices, ces victimes déchirées des bombes italiennes et allemandes tombées sur Getafe et Madrid le 30 octobre 1936?” Stradling (p. 110) translates the latter part of this sentence as the “victims destroyed by Italian and German bombs that fell on Getafe”, and omits the reference to Madrid altogether!

28. Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, Paris, Seuil, 1999 edn, pp. 368, 378.

29. Morir, p. 187.

30. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30, Paris, Seuil, 2001 edn.

31. My biographical data come from obituaries, and a variety of other sources; but especially from information provided to me by Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée. She is both a journalist and a novelist and has written a highly readable and vivid reconstruction (forthcoming) of her late father’s final days.

32. Morir, pp. 105-108, for this previously unpublished report from Mme Lincoln-Delaprée’s collection.

33. Morir, p. 189.

34. cf. Preston, op. cit. and David Deacon, British News Media and the Spanish Civil War, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

35. “Mother with Dead Child II”, exhibited in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. The museum labels this sketch “Postcripto de Guernica”. See also: “Madre con niño muerto en escalera (II)“.

36. The painting is online at: http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/1943

37. I am following the sequence of Dora Maar’s photos as they are exhibited in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

38. Hugo García Fernández, “Seis y media docena: propaganda de atrocidades y opinión británica durante la guerra civil española”, Hispania, 2007, LXVII, 226, pp. 671-692.