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.

Jonathan Turley in conversation with Baltasar Garzón, recipient of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. New York City, 14 May 2011. Photo Richard Bermack

Among the distinguished guests at ALBA’s 2011 reunion to honor Judge Garzón were Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School, who interviewed the Judge; as well as Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, and Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who both gave speeches at the event. See videos of all three here:

]]> http://www.albavolunteer.org/2011/06/turley-cox-and-ratner-on-garzon/feed/ 0 http://www.albavolunteer.org/2010/08/%e2%80%9cnegrin-was-right-%e2%80%9d-an-interview-with-gabriel-jackson/ http://www.albavolunteer.org/2010/08/%e2%80%9cnegrin-was-right-%e2%80%9d-an-interview-with-gabriel-jackson/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:09:25 +0000 Sebastiaan Faber http://www.albavolunteer.org/?p=1641 [Editor’s note: this is an extended version of the interview published in the print issue of the September Volunteer. See here for 10-minute video excerpt.]

“Se nos ha ido Gabriel Jackson”—“Gabriel Jackson Has Left Us.” The March 25 headline in La Vanguardia, Catalonia’s newspaper of record, almost looked like an obituary. But it wasn’t: Gabe Jackson, who turned 89 this year, is alive and well. And yet the article in question, by Francesc de Carreras, a professor of Constitutional Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, was a lament about a deeply felt loss. After twenty-six years in Barcelona, one of the world’s most prominent historians of twentieth-century Spain was moving back to the United States. “It’s impossible,” the article said, “to imagine someone more down-to-earth—someone kinder, more educated, discreet, tolerant, austere, always ready to lend a hand to the weak, incapable of flattering those in power.”

Few foreign scholars command the respect and authority that Gabriel Jackson enjoys in Spain. In the English-speaking world, Jackson is best known as the author of two classic scholarly accounts of twentieth-century Spanish history: The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (1965) and A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (1974). In Spain, however, Jackson is an all-round public intellectual, known not only for his regular contributions to the op-ed page of El País or his frequent review essays in La Revista de Libros (the Madrid equivalent of the Times Literary Supplement) but also, until a couple of years ago, for his performances as semiprofessional classical flutist. The prestigious academic publisher Crítica has been reissuing his complete works in Spanish translation as a separate series (the “Biblioteca Gabriel Jackson”), which in addition to his Civil War work include the panoramic Civilization and Barbarity in Twentieth-Century Europe and Jackson’s 1969 memoir, Historian´s Quest. Jackson has also been a long-time ALBA Board member.

Negrín Was Right

For the past decade, Jackson has been working on a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic’s Prime Minister during much of the Civil War. Negrín was an accomplished scientist and Socialist politician—as well as a polyglot and bon vivant—whose insistence on winning the war above all else, acceptance of Soviet aid, and refusal to surrender to Franco even when there seemed little hope for a Republican victory earned him the contempt, if not hatred, of many on the Right and Left: the Nationalist supporters of General Franco, of course, but also the more violent factions within Anarchism, the revolutionary anti-Stalinist Left, and those factions of the deeply divided Spanish Socialist Party which sympathized with Largo Caballero, Besteiro, or Prieto. Not surprisingly, Negrín has been one of the most reviled figures of twentieth-century Spanish politics. Jackson tirelessly scoured through thousands of previously unseen archival materials to produce the most balanced and comprehensive account yet of the man’s life and significance. A year after the publication of the Spanish translation, his Juan Negrín: Physiologist, Socialist, and Spanish Republican War Leader has just come out with Sussex University Press.

His work on Negrín has strengthened Jackson’s conviction that the Prime Minister was justified in his refusal to surrender, and that the continued refusal on the part of the Western democracies to support the Spanish Republic was not only immoral and contrary to international law, but a huge political mistake. “Negrín’s policy of resistance and constant diplomatic effort was the right one—he visited Paris secretly a number of times during the war, to get the French to realize that they themselves were going to be the next victims. I am also convinced that if England and France had supported the Republic and stood up to Hitler, history would have taken a different course. Look at Hitler’s reactions when occasionally there was a moment of resistance—for instance in May 1938, when Chamberlain threatened the Nazi government with British action if the Heinlein Party in Czechoslovakia physically attacked their Czech neighbors. Hitler drew back immediately, and Heinlein shut his mouth. If the democratic countries had aided the Republic so that Franco would not have had the complete victory that he did, we need not have had a Second World War, or it would not have occurred in the terribly disastrous fashion that it did. The combined failure of courage and foresight on the part of the democratic powers was critical for Hitler´s successful Blitzkrieg in 1939-40.”

A Jewish New Yorker in Spain

In March of this year Jackson closed the Barcelona chapter of his life, moving to Oregon to live to in closer proximity to his daughter and grandchildren. The decision to leave Spain wasn’t an easy one, and neither was the move itself, which included the emotionally difficult but intellectually satisfying donation of more than a thousand books to several great libraries where he had worked—and been very well treated. And yet he had barely dropped his suitcases on the West Coast when he boarded another plane for a Midwestern lecture tour. In early April he visited Oberlin College, where we spoke.

What moves a Jewish New Yorker to dedicate his life to the study of Spanish history? “There is really no family connection, I have no Spanish relatives,. What first drew me to Spain, like so many of my generation, was the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1936. Although I was only fifteen, I was an avid newspaper reader and quite politically conscious already. I clearly remember the heated dinner table discussions on Spain between my father, who was a Socialist, and my Communist older brother. Then in the summer of 1942, after graduating from Harvard College, I got to spend two months in Mexico on a fellowship. I was supposed to have entered military service like all boys my age, but was given a six-month break to recover from an automobile accident. Now of course Mexico City in 1942 was full of Spanish Republican exiles. It was meeting and speaking with them that further opened my eyes to the history of Spain and Latin America.” Together with two Princeton students, Jackson stayed at the home of an exiled Republican physician. In the apartment upstairs lived the widow of President Manuel Azaña, who had died in France in 1939. “She often came down to have coffee and cigarettes; we played dominos after lunch.”

After spending World War II as a cartographer in the Pacific, Jackson considered a career as a college teacher, an ambition further strengthened by a three-year stint at the Putney School in Vermont. What he really longed for, though, was Europe. “I was jealous of my many friends who spent the war in the European theater and had had a chance to really learn to speak French and German. All I had done was to spend four years making maps of tropical islands. Europe drew me because I wanted to become bilingual, too. And although I was attracted to history as a subject, in reality my deepest personal interest has always been classical music. I had read biographies of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven much more than I had read biographies of political figures.” Entering in a European doctoral program required a Master’s degree, which Jackson earned at Stanford in 1950 with a thesis on the educational program during the first two years of the Second Spanish Republic.

In 1950, Jackson and his wife, who studied French literature, began their doctoral studies at the University of Toulouse in Southern France. Two years later, Jackson had finished a dissertation on the work of Joaquín Costa, the turn-of-the-century regenerationist. The fall of 1952 found the Jacksons reluctantly back in the States: “We would have happily stayed in France if it had been possible in the 1950s for Americans to get jobs in the French teaching system.”

The years in Toulouse were useful in more than one respect. “I did learn French and Spanish quite thoroughly, although I’m sorry to say I have always spoken them with a pretty horrible accent. But you have to remember that at the time we lived in Toulouse, a third or a half of the city’s population were Spanish refugees. I made a great many friends among Spanish fellow students and their parents. In later years these connections proved crucial. When I went to Spain to research the Republic, I carried letters from my refugee friends vouching that I could be trusted. That allowed me to speak to people and hear the unvarnished truth—despite the fact that I was an American and that the U.S. government supported Franco.”

On Roy Cohn’s List

The first decade back in the States was a difficult one, professionally speaking. Jackson quickly found he was haunted by his reputation as a leftist troublemaker. “In 1948, when I was teaching at the Putney School I was paid a visit by two agents from the FBI. Although they did not accuse me directly of being a Communist or a subversive, they wanted me to tell them everything about my college classmates’ political activities. I told them that I had not considered that to be any of my business. Apparently this was enough to be branded non-cooperative—which I was, of course: I was strongly opposed to these kinds of interrogation, treating people’s leftist political opinion as ‘evidence’ of ‘disloyalty,’ etc. From that moment on, however, my not having cooperated with the FBI followed me whenever I went looking for jobs. In the mid-1950s, for instance, I had a very favorable interview for a job in Spanish and Latin American history at Dartmouth College. When we were finished, one of the interviewers took me aside quietly and said: Listen, I am very sorry to have to say this, but we know you’re on Roy Cohn’s list—Cohn was McCarthy’s chief field investigator—and you’re not going to get an offer from Dartmouth. I figured I might as well let you know right away.”

After three years at Goddard College, five at Wellesley—where he became close friends with the exiled Spanish poet Jorge Guillén—and three at Knox College in Illinois, Jackson had almost given up on a tenured position when he finally landed a job at the University of California at San Diego, in 1965. Princeton had just published his The Spanish Republic and the Civil War.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Jackson’s first book. In the United States, it helped put twentieth-century Spanish history back on the academic map, earning him the 1966 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Its appearance did not go unnoticed in Spain, either. “I’ve been told it made a considerable scandal among regime circles—especially the appendix, which gave estimated numbers of victims of Nationalist repression. Together with Herbert Southworth’s La cruzada de Francisco Franco and Hugh Thomas’s book, which had come out in 1961, it motivated the Spanish government to initiate a whole new line of research to defend the Francoist record in the war.”

Stanley Payne

Jackson is the only one among prominent American scholars of Spain who was born early enough to consciously live the Civil War. His most well-known colleague, Stanley Payne, is from 1934. Payne, who specialized in the study of Spanish fascism, has long been Jackson’s ideological counterpart. Although the work of both was censored by the Franco regime, with Spanish translations initially published in Paris and smuggled into the country, Payne’s position has always been much less sympathetic to the Republic. Like Jackson, Payne is a well-known public figure in Spain, publishing prolifically and often interviewed in the media. In recent years, Payne has stirred up controversy by promoting the work of Pío Moa, a popularizing historian and Franco apologist, and by criticizing the current government’s support for the so-called recovery of historical memory. Jackson is sanguine: “Look, it’s perfectly obvious, and perfectly acceptable, that I am generally on the democratic Left, and Payne is generally on the democratic Right. Our different interpretations of Spanish history flow from that fact. But we have always remained friendly and on speaking terms with each other, without taking part in the slugfests of insults that occur a good deal in relation to the Spanish Civil War. The same is true for other scholars. I haven’t seen Juan Linz in many years, for instance, but when I was doing research in Spain in 1960-61, we’d have long nightly conversations walking in the streets of Madrid. We, too, were perfectly well aware of the fact that we occupied different political positions and were not going to interpret things the same way. Yet he was always very helpful. Of course, what Payne, Linz, and myself have in common is that none of us were direct victims; we had not been tortured or imprisoned.”

Objectivity

The Spanish Right, including Payne and Moa, has long charged liberal historians of the Civil War (Jackson, Preston, Graham) with a lack of objectivity. Jackson: “Is real objectivity, in the sense of emotional neutrality, possible? Well, maybe in some areas. I once took a course at Harvard College—not one of the ones I particularly enjoyed—about the economic development of the West. There were a number of lectures on the rise of the dairy industry in Wisconsin. I consider that to be a subject that can be dealt with without any emotions or any statement of personal beliefs in advance of the discussion. The Spanish Civil War, which can be honestly interpreted in such different ways, is a different kind of subject entirely. Here it’s impossible—and in fact not desirable—to try to conceal one’s emotions or political views. My idea of objectivity is that you don’t hide your emotions or pretend not to have them, but that you are honest and open about them from the outset. As an historian you have not only have to account for your sources, but also explain why you have the sympathies you have. The rest is up to the reader.”

Doing research in the 1950s and 60s, Jackson, as a foreign historian, enjoyed certain privileges over his Spanish colleagues. “Eisenhower was president, and I belonged to the first generation of Fulbright students. The thought process of Francoist officials was that if I was an American with a government scholarship under a Republican president, I must be okay—if not conservative, then at least neutral. Realizing this early on, I simply asked questions and kept my mouth shut about my own opinions.”

Foreign scholars had access to archives and documents that were barred to Spaniards. “Still, one of the places that I could not get into when I was researching my book on the Republic and the Civil War, around 1961, was the military archive. But I did have several interviews there.” Jackson chuckles: “I remember one of those meetings with the officer in charge of the archive. I was facing that famous mural of Franco as a kind of a medieval Christian warrior, which was painted over the archive’s entrance. The officer was chatting away, defending the coup, and complaining about us foreign academics. You foreigners, he said, you have no idea how many Communists came from outside during the war. I noticed there was a pile of documents on his desk, facing him. I tried my best to read them upside down. The one right on top seemed particularly interesting, because it appeared to be about the International Brigades. Like other researchers, I had been using the general figure of 40,000 international volunteers. You people just don’t understand, the officer said again, there were many, many more than that. And yet, when I was finally able to make out what was in the document on top of the pile in front of him, I saw that it, too, used the number of 40,000…”

Lincoln Brigaders

“I started meeting Abraham Lincoln Brigaders right after World War II. Among my long-time friends were Bill Sussman, Irving Weissman, and Abe Osheroff, all wonderful human beings, with whom I kept in touch right up to the time of their deaths. They were a feisty bunch, of course. Although I never had an actual fight with Bill Sussman, I was very much of aware of his disappointment in a novel that I wrote, in which the hero is a Spanish Anarchist, an illegal immigrant from Mexico to the United States. My evident sympathy for a certain kind of truly idealistic Anarchist was not something that Sussman appreciated. And yet Sussman was perfectly frank with me about his own problems with the Communist Party, as was Abe Osheroff.”

Jackson is a kind man. As an historian, he is a fundamentally sympathetic and forgiving student of human affairs. Yet there are limits: “For Franco I’ve never had the personal sympathy I’ve had for others who joined the military assault on the Republic. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, for example, the founder of Spanish fascism, meant to be a decent human being, although he was quite naïve about some political matters. I do hope I have recognized the real abilities of Franco—I don’t treat him as anybody’s fool. I think he deserves a certain amount of credit, for instance, for being the only dictator—that I know of—who took the trouble to be concerned with what would happen after he died. I think many Spaniards today take an overly negative view of the ‘Transition’ of the years 1976-79.  It is certainly true that the people had to accept the dictator’s decision, made in 1967,  that he would be succeeded by a Bourbon prince. But that Bourbon prince brought a larger measure of political liberty and civil peace to Spain than it had ever known, with the exception of the first two years of the Republic (1931-1933). And I am only one of many intellectuals who were asked by east European colleagues whether the Spanish transition might help them achieve a better post-Soviet future.”

What does Jackson think about the calls for “recovery of historical memory” that have polarized Spanish media and politics for the past ten years? “The emotional force of the historical memory movement, it seems to me, is very easily understandable. After all, for sixty or seventy years people have been unable to speak about the most intimate sufferings in their lives. So when there finally is enough political liberty for them to dare to speak frankly, it comes out with enormous force. I have always thought— not just in relation to the Spanish Civil War, but also Stalinism, Hitlerism, many a bloody dictatorship in Africa, Asia, or Latin America—that you can’t put something really behind you until you have recognized its truth. It is no use trying to neglect it or bury it. It seems to me a colossal mistake on the part of Spanish conservatives to say That’s far past, let’s not rake the old coals. There can be no real closure while the Right continues to say that the call for historical memory is an attack on the existing constitutional democracy.”

Both Cheeks

Jackson, who holds double passports, will miss living in Spain. His life-long connection with the country is emotional as much as it is scholarly and intellectual. “Personal relationships with Spaniards have always been very important to me, even more so after I retired from UC San Diego. I have had more deep adult personal friendships in Spain than in the United States, especially after moving to Barcelona in the1980s. It’s strange: I felt at home in Spain as soon as I got there. There was something so recognizable to the hospitality of the families that I knew in both Madrid and Barcelona. Later I have naturally wondered about that. At one point I realized that my Spanish hosts, the parents of fellow student friends that I met in Spain, simply reminded me of my own East European Jewish aunts and uncles in New York. There was something about the style of invitation and the interpersonal behavior that simply reminded me of my own cultural background. Apparently there are cultural traits—though it’s often hard to define them precisely—that can last for centuries, even though the official religion, the language spoken, and the education system have changed completely. So yes, I will miss living there. What I will miss most? I like kissing people on both cheeks.”

Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, is Chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors.

Video: Helen Graham: A Very Short Introduction (8’42”)

“Telling big stories through individual human lives is a very powerful way of doing history. I am still very interested in theory, but I think that human lives—although obviously you have to pick the right lives—are in the end more complex than any theory.” Speaking is Helen Graham (born in Liverpool, 1959), one of the most prominent English-speaking historians of twentieth-century Spain today. She is the author, among other books, of The Popular Front in Europe (1988), The Spanish Republic at War (2003), and the bestselling The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005), a concise essay “that took me nine months to write and twenty-three years to prepare.” Together with ALBA board member Jo Labanyi, she also is editor of the seminal Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1995). Her new book in progress weaves together four biographies of individual participants in the war—two men, two women; two Spaniards, two foreigners. (One of them is Bill Aalto, a Finnish-American member of the Lincoln Battalion who in addition to being a Communist also happened to be gay; the others are Gustavo Durán, the composer who became a Republican military commander; Lucía Sánchez Saornil, futurist poet and founder of Mujeres Libres; and the Austrian-born photographer Margaret Michaelis, who was a refugee in Spain during the 1930s, lost part of her family in the Holocaust and lived the rest of her life as a portrait photographer in Australia. ) A professor of Spanish history at Royal Holloway (University of London), Graham currently holds the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Chair at New York University. On a Sunday evening in January she sat down to discuss her life-long fascination with the war, Spain’s attempts at “recovering” its historical memory, and the skewed way in which the war is still viewed by many U.S. scholars and intellectuals. An eight-minute video excerpt can be found here.

Magic Territory

Graham has spent more than two decades studying the Spanish Civil War in all its dimensions, but she has been particularly fascinated with the reasons behind the Republican defeat. The topic gripped her from the beginning. “The Spanish Civil War is without doubt the reason I decided to become an historian. I distinctly remember being overwhelmed by the fact that the Republic hadn’t won. How could that possibly be? Naturally you can’t win the war for the Republicans. But you can very usefully spend your live explaining in great, complex detail exactly why they didn’t. The Spanish Civil War was, in a sense, the war before the lights went out—the war that could have changed the course of European and world history if power actors had behaved in different ways. And it was such a transformational site, culturally, for so many different kinds of people, that it is really a bit of a magic territory.”

Graham approaches the past with a great deal of respect, sympathy and nuance, taking into consideration everything from the psychology of political leaders to the evolution of class and gender relations. She categorically refuses to succumb to the temptation to explain the world in binary terms. “I am interested in history because it is the ultimate antidote to any kind of oversimplification. As soon as somebody says: That is always the way this should be, you can say: Ah, but it wasn’t that way in X time. In that sense, history is the perfect immunization against thinking in binaries and simplistic categories.

“In the Very Short Introduction, for example, I was very keen to talk about Communism as a social movement. The general public, even students today, buy into the ridiculous notion that Communism amounted to a kind of collective brainwashing. They don’t seem to understand—and this has become worse after 1989—that it was not just about ideology. In the European context particularly, you really have to start from the idea that Communism was a mass social movement that embraced millions of people, and that was about the whole of their lives. Its significance was cultural as well as political.”

The VSI is Graham’s most widely read work. “I purposely didn’t write it as a textbook. It’s an ethical essay on the Spanish Civil War that in some way distills all my previous work. The process of writing a book like this is a bit like Sudoku, there is something cleansing about it. I have to confess that it was quite a challenge. But I’m very happy I did it. I’m constantly amazed at the letters I get from readers about it. I was reading it on the Tube, someone will say, and I had to write to you.”

Crossing Borders

While British and American historians, from Brenan to Jackson and Preston, have played an important role in the development of Spanish historiography, their relationship with their Spanish colleagues has not been free of tension. “All British historians of Spain have stories about a certain amount of jealousy—This is not your territory, what are you doing here? There are historical reasons for this. The severe limitations imposed by Francoism on Spanish historiography caused the relationship between Spanish and foreign historians to be a bit odd, which may have caused Spanish historians to feel vulnerable. But that situation has been fading for a while now, and relationships have normalized. It is obvious, for example, that most archival Spanish history is now going to be written by Spaniards, who have more time and opportunity to delve into the materials than we do. And hey, some of my best friends are Spanish historians!”

Graham’s books, like those of Preston, have a wide Spanish readership. “Something that British historians of Spain have always had going for them is that they write well. I’d go so far as to say that their contribution to the field has not been so much in any particular content as in the delivery, the form. Specialist work in Spain, by contrast, is often still very dense. Even the really good stuff is not that easy to read.” Antonio Muñoz Molina, who, like Graham, holds the Juan Carlos Chair this semester, believes there are underlying cultural reasons for this. “I always had the idea that Spanish historians simply didn’t bother too much with readability because they were writing for their peers. But Antonio thinks that they actually believe it’s somehow beneath their dignity to write readably. To me that is counterproductive. If you want to reach the person in the street, you have to be readable. And I strongly believe that you can say quite complicated things in quite clear prose without being simplistic, in the same way that you can say very theoretical things without using very theoretical language. Perhaps philosophers cannot always do that—but cultural historians certainly can.”

For Graham there is no reason why historians should feel constrained by their national identity. “To the contrary, I think it’s very important that histories are not just written by nationals. If they were, history would be incredibly less rich. On the one hand, the point about being an historian of a country other than your own is that you look at it from outside and bring a different perspective to it. On the other, I don’t necessarily think of myself as English. Still less would I want to write the history of the English, nor indeed the fictions of their empire.

“Obviously I’m a citizen of the UK because it says so in my passport. But there are an awful lot of different cultural identities within the British Isles. I myself have always had a very problematic relationship with the English and Englishness. Much of this no doubt stems from my having been born and raised in the Republic of Liverpool, which in many ways is its own patria chica. There may well be a connection between one’s interest in a foreign country and a feeling of displacedness in one’s own society; it is no coincidence that British Hispanism has tended to be stuffed with people from the Celtic fringes. Now I don’t want to suggest that I am in any way traumatized or displaced myself. But if you come from Liverpool, or from any other peripheral northern city, your relationship to Englishness is clearly going to be different than if you’re born in the Home Counties. On the other hand, what are historians really doing when they write the history of their own country? Presumably everyone has now moved on from the idea that national historiography is basically a branch of nationalism, meant to glorify the national story. Fortunately that notion has disappeared by now—or at least it has among the people that I consort with. Everybody should cross more borders.”

Objectivity

Conservative commentators in Spain and elsewhere have accused historians like Graham, Michael Richards, Paul Preston, and Ángel Viñas of pro-Republican bias. Amateur scholars such as Pío Moa and César Vidal, backed by Stanley Payne, have made a lucrative career out of denouncing the leftist “myths” about the war which, they claim, inform most professional historiography of twentieth-century Spain. To Graham, their calls for objectivity ring hollow. “When people start talking about objectivity, there is generally some funny political business going on. Objectivity is not an equidistant position between any two points. This is what always bothers me in these debates. Let’s take it to an absurd extreme for argument’s sake: No one in their right mind would argue that an objective historiography of Germany in the 1930s should occupy a midpoint between the Nazis and those who they were attacking. I have never understood this association of objectivity with some kind of position in the middle. That whole idea needs some serious unpicking; there’s something fundamentally wrong with it.

“Look, what drives historians is the thirst to understand. Understanding presupposes that you don’t doctor the evidence, or tell it like it isn’t. And if that’s not about objectivity, I don’t know what is. Now of course we’re also human. We all have our stories, the things that interest us, the questions we want answered. In that sense, no account written by a human being is ever fully objective. But that doesn’t mean that it is distorted or bad. If that human being is a professionally trained historian who is honest with themselves and with the material—if they read everything, think about it all, and see how it fits together without hiding anything or making things up—then they are being faithful to the calling. Beyond that, I feel that we needn’t worry about any of this.

“To be sure, I personally find people who are bearing change within themselves—people who are outside on the margins, knocking on the door of politics—more sympathetic than those who hold a monopoly on political power in a traditional society. That’s me; I can’t change that, and it obviously has to do with my own background and values. But that doesn’t mean I can’t understand other kinds of political actors. Even if I’m not sympathetic to them, I can certainly write about them without simplifying them or turning them into two-dimensional cardboard villains. I can write in three dimensions about people whose experience is very far from mine. It’s funny: when you write about the Spanish Republic, people make all kinds of assumptions. Some Irish readers, for example, told me: We are surprised at how well you seem to understand religious belief. As if I didn’t!”

Living with Defeat

Graham’s turn to biography is a conscious choice. “It’s not just that human lives provide a window into the complexity of history. Biography also allows for a different kind of readership. Of course it’s not an either/or question. Monographic history based on national political papers is always going to be very important—and without it there are other things you cannot have. But in a lifetime you only want to write a certain number of very scholarly monographs. Initially it’s an apprenticeship. You have to show that you can hack it. Once you’ve done that, you probably want to be read by more people, which means that you need to do other things. And in the end, I write to be read.”

The four interwoven life stories that make up Graham’s new book—“I’m still struggling with the structure, I’m trying to avoid the conventional, chronological format of biography”—show how individual participants in the war managed, for good and for bad, to live with defeat. “It’s really a story that transcends Spain. To put it in a grandiose way, the book is about finding an ethic after destruction. It’s a bit like dealing with the Holocaust, which people want to explain into submission, with the idea that it’s all going to be alright: you assimilate defeat and move on. But there are some experiences that cannot really be assimilated or explained away like that. There are things from which you don’t just move on; you have to carry them with you. And I think that the Spanish Civil War, like the Holocaust, is one of those. You just have to find a way to live with the negatives. Writing these four lives is therefore something of a philosophical pursuit as well. It is a way of talking about how people live with a world that is not perfect, that’s very different from the one that they wanted to create—about picking up the pieces and making different kinds of political choices, choices that are about immediate solidarities with the people around you. It’s about investing in personal relationships rather than trying to change the world in some sort of huge, utopian way.

“Existentially and emotionally, there are other similarities between the Spanish Civil War and World War II as well. Some of the lives I deal with in this new book, for example, are affected by what I call the plenty phenomenon, after a play by David Hare called Plenty, which deals with people who lived the Second World War so intensely that they are not able to come down from it. The title is ironic: it refers to the plenty of the postwar period in relation to the austerity of the war, while for the characters it was the war years that were rich and plentiful, while the postwar is threadbare. Even though war was painful and difficult, it was when they were most alive. And they never recapture that.”

A Toxic Story

Seventy years on, the Spanish Civil War remains as controversial as ever. In Spain, the grassroots call for the “recovery of historical memory” of the past decade has put the war and the Francoist repression front and center of public discussion, generating a flood of publications. Graham thinks this has been a necessary process. “In a sense, the whole explosion in the Spanish public sphere of historical memory—it should really be historical memories, in the plural—is obviously part of the democratic transition. What happened between the late 1970s and 1982 was a superstructural transition from a dictatorship from a parliamentary regime. But because of the particular way the transition was negotiated from the top down, there was a complete block on actually talking about what had gone on in the war and under Franco. Of course this partly happened for reasons of stability, and because of the position of the army. But in the end it wasn’t a terribly democratic process.”

“Spain is of course not unique in having to come to terms with a difficult past. In a sense it’s happening all through continental Europe, especially since 1989. But curiously the focus has been almost exclusively on northern Europe. Everyone goes on about the Stasi archives, for instance, and about the fact that everyone in the Eastern block was spying on everyone else. Sure—but wasn’t it exactly the same story in Spain, Portugal, and Greece? And yet, given the asymmetrical outcome of the Cold War, nobody talks about those countries. Decisions were made in all three of those democratic transitions not to open up those archives. But if they were, they would also show that large numbers of the population were spying on their fellows…

“What does make the Spanish case different from others is the fact the Franco dictatorship legitimized itself with a particular reference to the civil war, turned into a fairly toxic story of martyrs and barbarians. What is also unique about Spain is that the regime then went on to mobilize the population en masse, making it complicit through a huge system of trials and denunciations. Which is why there still is an awful lot of bad feeling, bad blood, bad faith in Spain—and guilt, an awful lot of guilt.”

Getting the Lincolns

The Spanish Right has been sharply critical of the so-called memory boom, warning that “opening old wounds” can be a dangerous thing. Graham thinks differently. “The whole notion that Spain as a country has to agree on one specific version of the past is part of the Francoist legacy. The idea that if we all don’t have a single view of the past it’s going to be chaos come again, we’re going to have another civil war, and we’re all going to hell in a bucket—that’s in itself also a Franco effect. Making the transition to democracy—coming through and out the other end—means coming to a point when you understand that we all don’t have to agree in order to achieve a form of non-lethal coexistence, there doesn’t need to be one single, monolithic, hegemony view of the past. It means accepting that although we may see the past differently, it will all be alright.”

While she respects and admires her Spanish colleagues, Graham has little patience for American scholars who approach the Spanish war from a narrowly U.S. perspective. “In a U.S. context, the Spanish Civil War punches above its weight because it really is not about the Spanish Civil War at all—in the end, it is always about getting the Lincolns. And therefore it is about post-1945 American history. My big bugbear with people like Ron Radosh and others is that they don’t know anything about the Spanish Civil War. Theirs is basically an imperialist take on the conflict. For them, Spain doesn’t exist until the great powers inscribe a meaning on the face of Spain. This is clearly going to annoy anybody who has spent twenty-odd years of their life working on all of the other debates and issues that were actually there in Spain to start with.”

“The greatest challenge of the new millennium,” reads Graham’s epigraph to the Very Short Introduction, “is not to mythologize our fears.” “Yes, if there is anything I would like people to take away from the book, it’s that. Mythologized fears, a hatred of difference: it’s what’s at the very bottom of the dark mid-twentieth century, when more people were killed by more people than at any other time in the history of the world. If you want to put it differently, you can say that the history of twentieth-century Europe—and Spain is right there at the heart of it—is about coming to terms with the city, with urban life. It’s migrants and urban dwellers who are widely viewed as the cause of all problems. General Mola famously said that everything would be alright if he could just drop bombs on Bilbao and Madrid and get rid of the miasma. Franco was slightly more realistic, but he was still driven by the same idea.”

Sebastiaan Faber and James Fernández are members of ALBA’s executive committee.

Further Browsing:

• Helen Graham’s Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway: “Border Crossings: Thinking about the International Brigaders before and after Spain” (podcast); see also the 10th Annual Bill Susman Lecture, ALBA/King Juan Carlos I Center, New York (lecture text; PowerPoint)
• Helen Graham: A Very Short Introduction, an 8-minute video excerpt of the interview