Jerez-Farran, Carlos y Samuel Amago (eds.) Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain.

Martin, Juan Carlos

Jerez-Farran, Carlos y Samuel Amago (eds.) Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 394 pp.

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain is a collection of thought-provoking and enlightening essays from various international experts in their respective fields (history, cultural studies, literary criticism, anthropology, and journalism) discussing the current and heated historical, political and cultural debate that arises from Franco's repressive legacy (ratified by the continuous discovery and exhumation of mass graves) and its impact on the re-configuration of collective and historical memory of contemporary democratic Spain. The book is divided into four distinct parts: 1) Franco's Mass Graves and the History of Forgetting; 2) Documentary Filmmaking and the Recovery of Historical Memory; 3) Speaking for the Dead: Literature and Memory; 4) Unearthing the Past: Anthropological Perspectives on Franco's Mass Graves. Each part is also preceded by a perceptive introduction and the critical comments of an expert in each of the disciplines mentioned above.

Part one discusses primarily the effects of Franco's post-war repression inflicted on the vanquished of the Civil War. The essay entitled "The Theorists of Extermination" follows the introductory comments by Soledad Fox on the three essays comprising part one. In this first essay, Paul Preston chronologically traces the origins of the Spanish Civil War and the ideological and political campaign the Spanish right wing orchestrated to delegitimize "the entire spectrum of the Left" (43), accusing the latter of being "anti-Spain" and the cradle of a "Jewish-Masonic Bolshevik conspiracy" (49). According to Preston, right-wing violence originates in its propagandistic ideas and rhetoric portraying the defenders of the Second Republic as "foreign and sinister", "subhuman", "anticlerical", unpatriotic and racially inferior (45). Preston further analyzes the role of the ultra-right wing press and its impact on fueling an anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, and anti-Communist crusade of violence and terror against the left wing masses that eventually would result, as the postwar proved, on a brutal campaign of "extermination" (66).

Hilary Raguer Suner discusses in "The Spanish Church and the Civil War" the role of the Spanish Catholic Church and the Vatican during the Spanish conflict. Raguer Suner argues that while most of the Spanish episcopacy pledged allegiance to the military uprising and did not condemn its atrocities, the Vatican "maintained indirect and covert contact with the Republic" until at least 1938 (69-70). In her analysis, the author draws a distinction between the passive, resentful, and sometimes vengeful approach of the greater part of the Spanish episcopacy towards the Second Republic and its supporters, and the exemplary Christian behavior demonstrated by a handful of clergyman such as Marcelino Olaechea, bishop of Pamplona, or Father Huidobro, who publically denounced the atrocities committed by the rebel army. In this regard, Raguer Suner outlines how the pious attributes of the chaplain Aita Patxi--who at times offered himself to take the place of prisoners sentenced to die--contrast with the "hard-heartedness of the chaplains in prisons and concentration camps" (77). Raguer Suner denounces the fact that despite sufficient time having passed since the Civil War and its aftermath, the Church in Spain has as yet failed to publicly apologize for its active involvement and support during Franco's repressive regime.

In his essay, "The Faces of Terror", Julian Casanova delves into the postwar era of violence and terror launched by Franco's oppressive regime after the war ended in 1939. Casanova argues that such relentless repression against the vanquished must be seen, not as a capricious occurrence, but a well-organized vengeful campaign of terror, legitimized by a "repressive legal system" (95) that continually reinvented itself throughout the years and through such charade laws as The Law of Political Responsibility and the Law of Repression of Masonry and Communism. This "travesty of justice" (92), which systematically approved beatings, torture, and executions without probing guilt, was responsible, according to Casanova, for the death of thousands of innocent victims. In his analysis of Franco's repressive regime the author underlines the ways terror was "institutionalized" (101) by the authorities and maintained through a mechanism of betrayals and denunciations, as well as by a "system of self-surveillance" that unfortunately also involved the general public. To conclude his essay, Casanova examines how this "machinery of terror" (102) would not have succeeded without the Spanish Catholic Church, and its direct involvement in policing the population and implementing a religious fundamentalism that made the church "an important accomplice in the military and Fascist terror", especially after the war (117).

In "Grand Narratives, Collective Memory, and Social History" Michael Richards concludes the first part of the book discussing the role of historical occurrences and communal memories in framing a contemporary collective understanding of the Civil War and its repressive aftereffects. Richards explores the function of grand narratives--"crusade, class war, fratricidal struggle" (128)--to historically construct the social, cultural and political dimensions of the conflict. The author underlines the implications of the repressive regime's "historical apparatus" (133) in normalizing history, in constructing an unlawful and demeaning historical examination of a Republican identity, and in monopolizing "primary sources by state officials" (134). According to Richards, this confinement of historical truth triggered the return of the collective repressed memory and a craving for personal narratives and popular history that have resulted in the proliferation of multiple efforts to recover historical memory. However, Richards warns us to be cautious when reconstructing the past through "overlapping" (141) history and memory, because such a process is always "complex and not unilinear" (142).

Part two of this volume is devoted to exploring the role of documentary filmmaking in the recovery of historical memory. The introductory comments by Anne E. Hardcastle in her essay "Representation in Documentary and Testimony" provide an insightful account of the three subsequent essays comprising this section. In "Investigative Journalism as a Tool for Recovering Historical Memory" Montse Armengou endorses the role of investigative journalism as a valid epistemological approach to the recovery of historical memory in Spain. Using three of her own documentaries--Franco's Forgotten Children (2002), The Spanish Holocaust (2003), and 927 on the Train to Hell (2004), all censored by Spanish public television until 2004--Armengou explores the role of the journalist as a kind of "history's explorer" and as an advocate for those victims without a voice in a public sphere (158). Through interviews and witnesses' accounts, and with the support of well-documented research, Armengou argues that journalists can better "piece together the jigsaw puzzle to reveal the full horror of the Franco years" (163). In her analysis on the role of the Spanish media, Armengou denounces the persistent dominance of the right wing and the Church over mass media in order to mask the brutality of "Fascist terror" (163). Moreover, the author also laments the failure of the leftwing media and the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) during the Transition to democracy to "link the Republic's struggle of yesteryear with today's efforts to turn Spain into a real democracy" (164).

In her essay "Mass Graves on Spanish TV: A Tale of Two Documentaries", Gina Herrmann analyzes the role of visual media, especially television documentaries, not just as mere cultural artifacts but as a genre with the potential to become "a primary didactic tool of history" (170). Drawing from Derridian reflections on televisual media and spectatorship, Herrmann draws several distinctions between two television documentaries--Armengou and Belis's Les fosses del silenci (2003) and Domingo and Bernaola's Las fosas del olvido (2004)--portraying the location and exhumation of mass graves in Spain. Herrmann points out that while both documentaries share common traits of television journalism, Armengou and Belis's documentary promotes a "concrete historico-political" perspective about the Republican victims, whereas Domingo and Bernaola's detaches itself from the historical and political circumstances and "turns on a fetishization of dead bodies" (171). By carefully comparing the narrative structure through visual frames from both documentaries, Herrmann claims that Les fosses clearly embarks on an "ideological retrieval" that seeks to contextualize "the ascription of blame" and "accountability", whereas Domingo and Bernaola's documentary continually "evades a discourse of recrimination and guilt" (176). According to Herrmann, by centering its narrative climax on the retrieval and the proper ceremonial burial of the bones alone, Las fosas del olvido seeks a "historical and ideological closure" that promotes the anonymity of those responsible for the massacres (185). However, Armengou and Belis's Les fosses "constructs a narrative around individual efforts to put a name and a face to specific perpetrators" (187).

Jo Labanyi concludes the second section of the volume by looking into a collection of printed testimonies from 2000 to 2003 about the Civil War and postwar repressive period. Labanyi argues that these specific testimonies, rather than shedding new light on the recovery of historical memory, create a kind of collective memory that "obscures the key political issues about the past and about how we deal with it in the present" (193). Testimonies, affirms Labanyi, not only inherently imply a "legal recognition" and "the entitlement to reparation" (194), but also their true value lies in their capacity for generating in the present an emotion towards past events. Unfortunately, denounces Labanyi, the fact that these textual narratives are chronologically and thematically constructed undermines the validity of testimonies concerning repressive past events, because not only is memory "notoriously nonchronological and nonfactual" (196), but this narrative approach--in which Republican and Nationalist victims' testimonies are also thematically or chronologically mixed in the chapters--clearly renders "a depoliticized vision" and ultimately pursues "the avoidance of partisanship" (201). Labanyi concludes with the idea that the obsession of these collections of testimonies with giving the Republican victims the status of "objects of historical events" (199) not only deprives those victims of present historical subjectivity, but the testimonies themselves fail to critically help understand "the complex structures of present-day feeling that they reveal" (204).

Part three of Unearthing Franco's Legacy is comprised of three essays devoted to giving the dead a voice through literature and memory. In the first essay of this section, "Toward a Pragmatic Version of Memory," Antonio Gomez critically analyzes Joan Ramon Resina and Samuel Amago's articles discussing the role of memory, and also narrative, "as a privileged locus for resistance or contestation" (209). In his essay, Gomez champions the "political and performative mobilization of memory" to revisit or even reexamine a Spanish traumatic past (209). In this regard, claims Gomez, both authors advocate for an alternative vision of Spanish political modernity--which according to Gomez is supported by a "bogus and improvised" Spanish democracy (211)--that must "confront the Transition's deficits and simplifications" (210). The author further compares and contrasts Resina and Amago's essays, underlining key factors to understanding their ethical and political relevance for contemporary Spanish collective memory troubled with and by the recurrence of exhumations of unburied bodies of Franco's repressive legacy.

Joan Ramon Resina writes the second essay of the section entitled "The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion". Using Harald Weinrich's notions on memory, Resina focuses on three key points related to historical memory: the relationship of memory and the self, the implications of rituals of burial, and the role of public acts of memory to avoid forgetting. For Resina, the constant demand to revisit the Civil War and Franco's repressive past defies Transition's plan to "historicize" or, in other words, to degrade memories into events lacking the legitimate and proper political and emotional content (223). In this essay, as previously pointed out by Gomez, Resina denounces the passivity and inadequacy of the Transition--and its complicity to adapt and somehow preserve Franco's regime within democracy--in properly acknowledging and managing a traumatic past. The same passivity and complicity can be applied, continues Resina, to certain cultural products, film and narrative specifically, that entertain or "indulge audiences' melodramatic proclivities" that dangerously contribute and promote "the domestication of historical memory" (226). Discussing the political relationship and ontological implications of the terms amnesty and amnesia, Resina analyzes the ways the Transition "opened the way to a relativism" which allowed for the "cancellation of the guilt," the dissolution of "moral certainties," and the inability to distinguish "between victims and perpetrators" (229). Turning to Antigone's tragedy as a theoretical and rhetorical strategy, Resina explains the complex mnemonic power of rituals and monuments as well as the political authority inherent in memory. He concludes his essay by questioning historian Paloma Aguilar's approach to critical historical events and her role in facilitating the "nationalization of guilt" (240).

Drawing from Derrida's notion of hauntology, explained in his seminal work Specters of Marx (1994), Samuel Amago closes this third part of the volume discussing the ghostly nature of Javier Cercas's narrative as exemplified by his two war novels Soldados de Salamina (2001) and La velocidad de la luz (2005). In his essay entitled "Speaking for the Dead: History, Narrative and the Ghostly in Javier Cercas's War Novels," Amago analyzes the power of narrative, the role of authors such as Cercas--who "reflexively," and "selfconscious[ly]" embark on a "historiographical enterprise" conducive to giving "a voice to the dead" (245)--, and the role of narrators, "in the writing of history" and in "digging up and giving meaning to the past" (246). In this realm of "ethical exercise in historiography" (247), which in the case of Soldados could be interpreted as germane to all wars and all dead, Amago emphasizes "the power that the dead (and the past) have to haunt the present" and its exemplary influence in the characters and even the narrator's personal trauma in both novels (249). In Velocidad, Amago underscores the psychological effects of trauma that arise as a result of failing to work through traumatic events. In this regard, the author points out the relevance of Cercas's narrative to conceive the gothic image of specters and the legitimacy of his storytelling in helping the reader in coming "to terms with the things that haunt us--memories, ghosts, the dead, and their stories" (258).

Part four of this collection of essays centers on the exhumation of mass graves from an anthropological critical point of view. In his introductory essay, "Memory Politics among Perpetrators and Bereaved Relatives about Spain's Mass Graves," Antonius Robben explores Francisco Ferrandiz and Ignacio Fernandez de Mata's anthropological approaches to the current political and emotional implications of exhumations in Spain. By insightfully drawing parallels between the politics of memory and mourning generated by Franco's mass graves and the way society in Argentina and Chile has dealt with their dirty wars and perpetrators, Robben further delves into the "incomprehensibility of the Civil War executions" (264). Following Robben's remarks, in his essay, "The Rupture of the World and the Conflicts of Memory," Ignacio Fernandez de Mata examines the difficulty of recovering and transmitting victims' traumatic memories and testimonies as a result of "the nonnarrativity of their pain" (283). According to the author, experiencing extreme violence brings about "a personal rupture of the world" (284)--especially for those children who experienced the terror and brutal murder of their parents during Francoist brutal repression--that in the case of the vanquished was enhanced by being politically "subalternized" and emotionally and socio-economically deprived (285). Through extensive interviews, research, and personal experiences, Fernandez de Mata not only analyzes the external and the internal, or intercommunal, disputes and tensions that eventually led to executions, but he concentrates on the "symbolic capital" (292) of mass graves and their remains as "undisputable witnesses to the extreme violence" suffered by the defeated (297). In dealing with traumatic effects of exhumations and the relevance and function of their remains, Fernandez de Mata points out that bones become "a site of negotiation" because they "mediate between perpetrators and victims" and as such they become socially and politically relevant to the discussion of recovering historical memory in Spain (297).

Francisco Ferrandiz's essay, "The Intimacy of Defeat: Exhumations in Contemporary Spain," closes this fourth section by looking into the massacre of seventeen people in Valdedios, Asturias, in 1937. The author employs this particular mass grave exhumation--which he conceives, as any other exhumation in Spain, as a landmark or "road map linking the political production of terror with the intimate experience of repression" (309)--and the personal search of Esther Cimadevilla, whose father was killed at that massacre, not only to exemplify the many thousands of Francoist executions on innocent civilians during and after the Civil War, but also to emphasize the current, and possibly future, "memory work taking place around mass graves" all over Spain (311). Exhumations, continues Ferrandiz, pinpoint in the Spanish geography "a formerly neglected cartography of terror and repression" (312) and they promote the recovery of memories and voices that have managed "to endure in the interstices of dominant versions of the past" (313). The author further explores from an anthropological standpoint what he calls "memories on the wane" that is, traumatic experiences that best reproduce "the long-lasting effect of fear and terror," which for Ferrandiz are "two fundamental political operators linking the repressive activities of the state with the most intimate spaces of experience" (314).

In this regard, Ferrandiz insightfully examines the implications of childhood memories shaped by the "fear [an attraction] of death associated with the ghosts of those massacred" which paradoxically kept "alive the memory of the massacre in a political regime based on the imposition of obedience, silence, and fear on the defeated" (317).

Giles Tremlett closes this collection of essays with an afterword entitled "The Grandsons of Their Grandfathers" in which the author traces in detail the genealogy of the controversial law of memoria historica. Tremlett not only reviews the political debate germane to this law, but also discusses the emotional and social debate it has generated among advocates of this law--who continue to demand the state's political involvement to vindicate basic human rights of Republican victims as well as to bring to justice the perpetrators--and those detractors that perceive this law as revisionist, as a gateway to open Civil War wounds, and as a direct attack to the democratic pacts signed during the Transition.

Unearthing Franco's Legacy is a thought-provoking volume of essays essential to understanding key contemporary issues surrounding the recovery of historical memory of the vanquished of the Spanish Civil and postwar. After reading Giles Tremlett's account about the government's unwillingness to fully acknowledge and vindicate the memory of Republican victims, one may ask if the recovery of historical memory in Spain may be after all futile. However, the critical interdisciplinary approaches that this collection of essays takes on the exhumation of mass graves not only prove that understanding and coming to terms with a traumatic past still troubles Spanish collective imaginary, but also confirms the role of scholarship in adding valuable insights about Franco's repressive dictatorship. Unearthing Franco's Legacy is definitely an essential reading that deserves close attention for those interested in forming an educated opinion about the historical, cultural and political heated debate surrounding historical memory in Spain and the current exhumations of Franco's mass graves.

JUAN CARLOS MARTIN

Stonehill College