The War and it’s Shadow

Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century

By Helen Graham

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 Helen Graham
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84519-510-6

Contents

The Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies,
List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1 A War For Our Times The Spanish civil war in twenty-first century perspective,
2 The Memory of Murder Mass killing and the making of Francoism,
3 Ghosts of Change The story of Amparo Barayón,
4 Border Crossings Thinking about the International Brigaders before and after Spain,
5 Brutal Nurture Coming of age in Europe’s wars of social change,
6 Franco’s Prisons Building the brutal national community in Spain,
7 The Afterlife of Violence Spain’s memory wars in domestic and international context,
Glossary,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

A War For Our Times

The Spanish civil war in twenty-first century perspective

The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.

We ourselves are the War. (Freikorps diary)

In Spain today the civil war, triggered nearly seventy years ago, is still “the past that has not passed away” and a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, internationally renowned for his championing of human rights, is currently debarred for reasons connected to his bid to investigate the crimes of the Franco dictatorship born of that war. In the UK, Garzón is better known for his bid to have another military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, extradited from Britain to answer for the forced disappearance and murder of some three thousand Chileans under his regime (1973–90). Franco was responsible for ten times that number of “disappeared”, as well as tens of thousands more extra- and quasi-judicial killings. Yet outside Spain there is still relatively little public awareness of this dimension of the war. The focus has remained instead on high politics and diplomacy: on the rapid military intervention by expansionist Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, bent on displacing Anglo-French hegemony in Europe – which turned Spain into the antechamber of continental, and ultimately, world war.

But it is the long shadow of the world war which is now bringing back centre frame the most disquieting aspects of what happened in Spain. The tectonic shift in Europe since 1989 has permitted an unprecedented empirical excavation of the continental convulsion of 1939–45 (more accurately, 1938–47), and is now beginning to reveal to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians – that this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians; moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours. A war of intimate enemies and local massacre, then, which occurred across Europe and whose intensity derived from their being culture wars as much, if not more, than of wars of politics: or, rather, they became possible as mass political conflicts by dint of their profound cultural roots. By “culture” what is meant here is the core narrative of how society is organized and how it is reciprocally explained by its inhabitants with reference to a set of collective values deemed appropriate to underpin it.

These protean conflicts were the microcosmic manifestations in daily life of “impersonal” processes of social transformation deriving ultimately from industrialization and urbanization. By the end of the nineteenth century their impact was becoming more evident, directly or indirectly, in the east, centre and south of the European continent too, an impact much accelerated by the effects of mass wartime mobilization – in the factories probably more than at the military front itself – during the Great War of 1914–18. This was a war which, before the event, had been envisaged by many, including among Europe’s traditional landed and imperial elites, as a “clamp” that would hold at bay, or even neutralize, the unintended social consequences of the industrial change which was already acting as a dissolvent on older forms of social and political order. But the “event” itself was rather different to how they had imagined. The acceleration of home front labour mobilization and mass military mobilization to meet the needs of modern industrialized warfare changed the balance of power forever across the continent. Indeed from nearly a century’s distance now, we can see how much of the economic mobilization and social shift which preceded the conflict was already actively influencing what would be the war’s mediumterm social and political outcomes. But, in the immediate term, the Great War produced a sort of stalemate or hung result – fatally wounding the continent’s old order of empire, elite rule, social hierarchy and deference, yet not finishing these off entirely.

In the 1920s and 30s there thus erupted a maelstrom of becoming. People were on the move physically, the demographic shift intensified by military mobilization and war work. And their ideas, their very sense of their own lives, were often on the move with them. Who should now speak through politics? Which counted for more – the new political rights conceded by emerging or developing constitutional systems, or duties and notions of service deriving from an older, and rigidly hierarchical, social order? What privileges – political, economic and cultural – could wealth still command over those whose only “capital” was their newly acquired membership/citizenship of a state or nation? How might secular ideas of community coexist with religious culture and values? Especially since these latter had not, by and large, been free-floating, but rather integral to bolstering and maintaining traditional (and therefore usually hierarchical) relations in the villages or small towns in which most inhabitants of continental Europe – central, east and south – still lived.

The conflicts of the European inter-war period were most saliently and predominantly ones that emerged from the meanings made by this still overwhelmingly rural majority, in which should be included the many inhabitants of provincial and market towns, in their encounter with encroaching social change – even if for many this remained a dull-rumoured one. Pre-existing economic tensions, especially where mass landlessness was present, became much more conflictive in the new atmosphere where the knowledge of mass war dead primed the emerging language of political rights. But even where no issue of landlessness obtained, the same questions loomed: how would new forms of politics, the fruit of new circumstances, address and reconfigure interests within the rural world itself? Those of the landed, with those of the ubiquitous, complex array of others of modest and middling means – whether landowning peasantry, tenant farmers, estate stewards and retainers, provincial officials, police and the broader commercial and service classes of the locality. A community of economic interest, even in the face of an uncertain future, was far from self-evident here, until a perception of it became solidified through a gradually emerging common set of social fears and anxieties – strongly felt, yet for quite some time also diffuse – appertaining to future social change and the threatened loss of reference points, familiar rules, the known local environment. It was these that would come to underpin the “gentry pact” as a recognizable new political alliance across the states and territories of inter-war Europe between the old and landed elites and other rural/village and small-town constituencies and “imperial” service classes anchored in the pre-1914 order.

Their fears were brought into focus and crystallized as an image of the city, becoming fixed upon it as a threat and above all as a source of destabilization. Obviously this was not about urban centres per se, which had long existed. Nor was their configuration as alien and other about physical separation or lack of exchange, as there was a regular, indeed increasing human traffic between city and country, including of migrant workers, and intermediate forms of identity and indeed space were already coming into being. It was, in fact, precisely this sense of social flux, of the shifting meanings that could inhabit urban space, which explains the emergence of new fearful popular imaginaries identifying the city with the new, sometimes egalitarian, but always destabilizing political desires taking shape within it. This is encapsulated in the social disgust, almost existential nausea, with which officers and cadets of the imperial armies (Wilhelmine or Hapsburg) described in diaries and correspondence the scenes of popular fervour and, to their eyes, the sheer aberration and mayhem of popular presence on the streets which greeted their return to the cities from the front. They evoked these scenes – in Berlin, Budapest and many other towns and cities of central Europe – as an outright confrontation, embittered by the military defeat also accelerating it, between their own honourable and order-loving values and the onset of social apocalypse embodied in the masses on the streets.

On a grey November morning, I was allowed to leave [the barracks] for the first time … When I came closer to the main streets of the city, I heard wild shouting. Soon I saw a larger crowd of people, among them several soldiers in combat uniform … Some were wearing red armbands. Roughly twelve or fifteen of them were beating up two young officers … A few civilians shouted and women were screaming “beat them to death, the damned officers!” … I quickly approached the scene … [but] I didn’t get very far … I was already surrounded by a group of soldiers and felt the first blows … They took my stars and my medals for bravery as well, and the “Große Silberne” [a high military decoration] with the Kaiser’s face was thrust into the dirty street. Suddenly they left us alone … I spat out the blood and collected the pieces of my sabre and my decorations for bravery in the field. “Damned rabble”, I thought, “there will be a day of reckoning for you.”

Similar scenes are repeatedly described, filtered through an already fear-saturated cultural script of the French revolution – and in which women out of control are notably present. This anxiety was of course precipitated by a more immediate perceived threat, the Bolshevik revolution, which as well as a new political menace, was hugely galvanizing because it crystallized everything the old order and its “gentry” supporters already feared socially.

Indeed one could say that most of what happens thereafter in Europe’s dark mid-twentieth century appertains directly or indirectly to this highly charged “coming to terms with the city” – unevenly, reluctantly and tacitly, a coming to terms with the heterogeneities and unorthodoxy, the sheer messiness and fracture of modern urban space and the “trouble” these signal to elites and all those other constituencies with some psychological investment in the values of the gentry pact. For the old rural world under threat was not just an economic order but also a set of social and cultural values perceived as clear and “unambiguous”: tradition, religion, “simple” peasant/yeoman virtues, a politically demobilized society; women in their place, in the family home. And more even than social and cultural, these things were felt as the necessary and essential constellation for psychological well-being too.

Thus it was that the gentry pact came to be constituted as an audience for radical new incarnations of conservative nationalism, which from 1917–18 spoke directly to their needs and fears. Economic uncertainty, battles over resources and the crises produced by structural change, combined with war-induced dislocation, all ratcheted up the fear and intensified the operation of the “mythological transformer”, defining as the “problem” all those who did not fit. Provincial townsmen and the upper echelons of larger villages joined citizen “national guards” of various kinds – whether for immediate action, as in Hungary (the white terror), or, as in 1920s Spain, became members of bodies like the Somatén as a statement of intent. But everywhere such organizations defined “the national” from the outset in highly exclusive terms. Patriotism itself came rapidly to be understood as that which ensured social stasis on a traditionalist basis and in perpetuity. The organizations were both the manifestation of fears of change and – whether in action or embryo – a paramilitary instrument for resisting it by force by policing not only public order but also the social order. Concomitantly thus, the 1920s saw the effective expulsion and exclusion across Europe of many perceived not to “fit”: urban progressives, autodidact workers with attitude, labourers who were not prepared any longer to tug their forelock/observe due deference and the old ways. Although a minority within European populations as a whole, they were a significant one, numbering many thousands of people who left: from Finland (1918), from Hungary; Poland; Yugoslavia; Greece in the 1920s – part political exiles, part economic migrants.

Ethnicity could be a trigger in some contexts – in central Europe where this radical, ultra nationalist defence of social stasis overlapped with a popular culture of antisemitism – so for example in 1920s Poland there was a movement to mobilize ethnic Poles of the middling sort as a yeomanry guard to boycott Jewish commercial enterprises. But in numerous countries of continental Europe after the Great War a recognizably similar social and political cleansing occurred without any ethnic component – and the latter category which appears so clearly dominant in the light of subsequent events, clouds somewhat too, even in central Europe, in that the categories of Jewish people excluded often at that time mirrored the profile of non-ethnic social and political cleansing elsewhere. The “restless refugee boys” described in the discussion of the social history of the International Brigades in chapter 4, were both Jewish and not, but the reasons they left the places of their birth in the years after the Great War were very similar, whether they went from Finland or from Hungary, as in the case of the refugee from Budapest who became Robert Capa. In photographing the brigaders, he bore witness to their experience in Spain and afterwards, so “swept by roads and travelling” (see also the photo-essay in chapter 5 and the cover image of this book). Capa’s photographs provoke an immediate reaction through their intense charge of human connection. His was an immense, preter-natural talent underpinned by empathy deriving not least from an awareness that he was photographing a fate that might so easily have been his own. In all this, antisemitism was by the 1920s rather more than background noise, of course; but the drive to purify and homogenize envisaged, created and targeted a greater range of human “threats” and “dangers” – those perceived as bearing social change, a protean category which was not embodied by a single ethnic group.

Of those who felt compelled to leave, some took the established, time-worn path to North America, although the USA no longer offered the relatively easy access of earlier times. Many others departed to other European countries, France especially, where wartime losses combined with a falling birth rate provoked a substantial labour shortage. But in France too exactly the same mythological transformer was soon at work, and as the international political tensions of the 1930s mounted in the face of clear Nazi expansionist intent, so too in la France profonde, among the rural and small town majority there began to appear an intransigent, quasi ethnic form of nationalism which identified as the “problem” those groups of migrant urban labour in their midst, now swelled further by later arrivals, including batches of political refugees – all of whom, as antifascists and foreigners, were perceived as nefariously engaged in driving France into war with Germany. By the second half of 1938, and after the final collapse of Léon Blum’s last ditch (Popular Front) cabinet in April, the Daladier government decreed a series of restrictions on foreign labourers and refugees which both played in populist terms to existing fears, while also stoking a rising xenophobia and antisemitism in France which was only in part economically motivated, and which was indeed sometimes directly at odds with the macro-requirements of the French economy and defence. Accordingly naturalized citizens, especially if Jewish, were increasingly hedged about with de facto restrictions, while migrants or the naturalized returning from service in Spain as volunteer fighters with the Republic, against the Nazi-and Fascist-backed rebels, found themselves interned in camps, frequently indefinitely, by a peacetime and Republican French government.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The War and it’s Shadow by Helen Graham. Copyright © 2014 Helen Graham. Excerpted by permission of Sussex Academic Press.
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