James Yeoman – Representing the Spanish Civil War: Part 2

It is with great pleasure we present the conclusion to James Yeoman’s piece ‘Representing the Spanish Civil War’.

Tuck in readers, tuck in…

After Franco’s death the IBA discovered for itself a new role in British society, shaping public memory of the Spanish Civil War by casting their understanding of it into the physical landscape of Britain.  A number of memorials began to appear in British towns and cities throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, including a huge statue of the Spanish Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri in Glasgow and a memorial in Manchester Town Hall in 1983. With a growing campaign for national recognition of the volunteers plans were laid out for a memorial in London, backed by the Greater London Council, led by Ken Livingston, who regarded the statue to the British Battalion as a grand gesture of solidarity with the IBA’s cause. The London monument and its unveiling in 1985 epitomises the use of the history of the Spanish Civil War by the IBA in British culture.

The act of public commemoration requires a choice of what is to be remembered. In the Western World the First and Second World Wars and, more recently, the Holocaust are by far the most publicly remembered events of the 20^th century. In much of Europe, including Britain, the clearest message conveyed by the public commemoration of the First World War and the Holocaust are of tragedy, loss and, in the case of the latter, the need to learn from history the depths to which mankind descend. In much of Europe the Second World War holds a similar position, as even those countries which could claim ‘victory’ in the most appalling destruction of life in history had to come to terms with further occupation (as in Eastern Europe) or the historical taint of collaboration with the Nazis. Britain and the United States are unique in this respect. Whilst the idea of loss persists in the official remembrance ceremonies in these countries, there also exists a feeling that the Second World War was essentially ‘a good war’ and that its memory should be celebrated. A Manichean logic about Nazis, the Allies and the war as a whole persists in popular culture, a strong feeling that the Nazi, bad, ‘other’ was rightly defeated by the forces of good, whose exemplary moral position is affirmed by view of their enemy. It is a common trait of History courses to challenge some of these preconceptions in their students, asking them to draw distinctions between the Holocaust and Hiroshima, or the bombing of Dresden. This is not simply an exercise in academic gamesmanship, testing boundaries and highlighting moral relativism, but an attempt to try and understand historical events from a human level, breaking idealistic confidence in an understanding of the past. The value of this approach can be debated, but it does no harm to at least question the benefit to society to see ‘fascists’ and ‘heroes’ instead of humans in discussions of the past.

The portrayal of the Spanish Civil War by the IBA had much in common with this discussion. In all of the memorials across Britain the conflict is described as one of the volunteers fighting alongside ‘the Spanish people’ against the concept of fascism. The Spaniards, Italians, Germans and people of other nationalities (including some British and Irish) who fought for the nationalists in Spain are swallowed up in this one label, their humanity redundant and their history overlooked because of their ‘choice’ of side. This is a discourse which sits uneasily with most other official European modes of remembrance, which are primarily built upon shame, atonement and reconciliation (see the criteria for joining the EU for countries such as Turkey to acknowledge a genocidal past), yet it is a sentiment that one can easily find in British culture. It is not uncommon to read articles such as by military historian Corelli Barnett in the Daily Mail, which states that the Allies could not possibly have committed a single war crime during the Second World War as they had moral right on their side. This has the effect of raising those who fought ‘fascism’ (in Spain the nationalists were by no means exclusively fascist, but a collaboration between the army, the fascist Falange party, monarchists and ultra-traditional groups) to an unquestionable level of moral rightness.

For the IBA this meant that the Spanish Republic for whom they fought exists as an unquenchable beacon of good, its cause synonymous with any leftist struggle imaginable. In all of the press and publications surrounding the unveiling of the national monument in 1985 a specific understanding of history was given, one which linked the then Tory government of Margaret Thatcher to that of the grand fascist-appeaser Neville Chamberlain, tied the struggles in 1980s Nicaragua to those of 1930s Spain and declared that the striking workers of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun were fighting the same fight as those who had gone to Spain. The monument was portrayed as a symbol against racism, sexism and ageism, a sign of support to the oppressed of South Africa and ballast for the campaign against nuclear weapons. All of these disparate causes and people could, in the eyes of those who created the South Bank monument, find common cause in the memory of the ‘2,100 men and women who…went to fight side by side with the Spanish people in their heroic struggle against fascism.’ Any possible incompatibility between such correlations with the actualities of the Spanish Civil War, and indeed with each other, was left unarticulated.

Any representation of an historical event tells its audience a story, placing historical events into a narrative which not only conveys what its authors think about the past but also what they deem pertinent in the present. In this sense every use of history in the public arena is political. It is rare to be able to view moments when attempts to project history in the public arena as clearly as in 1985 with the unveiling of the monument to the Brigade. The year which followed the unveiling marked the 50^th since the Spanish Civil War began, an anniversary marked by a surge of plays, exhibitions, television programmes and remembrance events at local monuments, raising the profile of the International Brigades was raised as high as it has been since 1939, all the time carrying with it the messages imparted on its history by the IBA. The effect, if any, this had on British understandings of the event is difficult to establish, yet it is clear that at the moment when the profile of the Spanish Civil War has been at its highest in modern times the story told to those who listened was one of an international, ideological war, a precursor to the Second World War and a message for those looking for examples of solidarity and sacrifice.   To any with an interest in the Spanish Civil War such a portrayal is strikingly partial, if not grossly inappropriate, in its use of the history what was a fundamentally domestic conflict which for the greater part involved domestic issues and affected the Spanish people above all. However attractive it seems to view the Spanish Civil War as the last truly ideological war to do so romanticises history in a manner which does damage to its better understanding.

25 years on in 2011, the representation of the Spanish Civil War has changed in British culture. Perhaps we now live in less politically divisive atmosphere, where a blow for the history of events is no longer seen as a blow against the government or the need is felt to drown out alternative understandings of the past as a matter of doctrine. The IBA has evolved into the much more inclusive International Brigades Memorial Trust, which remains strong on its positive message regarding the volunteers is far less vitriolic in its treatment of alternative understandings. Yet perhaps this is also a sign that the Spanish Civil War has become a less prominent feature of contemporary discussion, no longer holding the symbolic weight that it had in the British political landscape. This year will undoubtedly see more representations of the Spanish Civil War than usual as anniversary years generate a hook on which to hang TV programmes, exhibitions, newspaper articles and films onto – see the forthcoming There Be Dragons, a big-budget historic epic set during the conflict. It will be interesting to see the approach taken towards the history of an event so often portrayed through foreign eyes and through foreign understandings.

If you’re interested in British representations of the Spanish Civil War you may want to have a look at these:

• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell: the most celebrated account of the Civil War in the English language, seen as the factual predecessor to the anti-totalitarian fiction in Animal Farm and 1984. Gives a very different interpretation of events to the IBA, strong in the themes of the betrayal of the Spanish revolution and the evils of Soviet influence.
•  Granny Made Me an Anarchist by Stuart Christie: an autobiographical account of a young man growing up surrounded by the memory of the Spanish Civil War. Chrisite was so politicized by the history of the conflict that he was driven to assassinate Franco and spent years in prison in Spain.
• Land and Freedom directed by Ken Loach: an over-simplified cinematic take on the experiences of Orwell. Overblown and romantic, it still manages to engagingly recreate something of the story of the Spanish Revolution in Catalonia
• The Spanish Civil War 6 part Granada TV series (mcmlxxxiii): by far the most balanced and informative documentaries I have seen on the subject, the 1983 series not only portrays the conflict from a Spanish perspective it contains interviews with participants on all sides, addressing every major issue of the war. Although out of print it can be downloaded fairly easily.
• There are numerous Spanish-language representations of the war, most prominently Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. For a very different take on the issues surrounding the memory of the conflict in Spain try El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), a beautiful, haunting piece of cinema from 1973.