Helen Graham, The War and its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 2012)

In 1987, 43 years after the Liberation of France, Henri Rousso published his seminal book, Le Syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Editions du Seuil), in which he detailed the torturous ways in which the French had avoided coming to terms with the memory of the Vichy regime and their large-scale collaboration with the Nazis. In West Germany, although the Adenauer government made reparations payments to Israel, general awareness of the Holocaust among Germans was quite limited until the broadcast of the US television series Holocaust kick started broad public debate on how it should be remembered and commemorated. This came in 1979, 34 years after the defeat of the Third Reich and 30 after the creation of the democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Even so, the situation in Germany remains, to quote Saul Friedlander, "a constant seesaw between learning and forgetting" (Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 8). In Poland, which lived under a Communist dictatorship for 44 years, Jan Gross' 2001 book Neighbours (Princeton: Princeton University Press) provoked a huge controversy; so did his Golden Harvest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which led Solidarity hero and former president Lech Walesa to say that Gross was a "Jew who tries to make money."

I raise these examples because they illustrate the tremendous difficulties that European democracies, even one whose non-democratic experience was brief, have had in coming to terms with the dark realities of their recent pasts. Spain returned to democracy only in 1978, after a vicious three-year-long civil war and another 36 years of brutal dictatorship. The transition to democracy which followed Francisco Franco's death in 1975 included the so-called "pact of forgetting" which freed members of the Franco regime from any fear of punishment. In 2000, however, a grass-roots movement devoted to finding and unearthing mass graves put memory on the public agenda and led to the Socialist government's 2007 "Law on Historical Memory." The law was hugely controversial and satisfied no one, and the question of memory continues to roil.

If Spaniards are having trouble dealing with their traumatic past, this should not be in the least surprising. With memory politics, as with so much else in its modern history, Spain is very much part of the European mainstream and not an outlier. This background is essential when approaching Helen Graham's The War and its Shadow. This is not a straightforward history of post-Spanish Civil War memory and forgetting; readers looking for such an account will be better served by Michael Richards' After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-Making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rather, Graham, one of Great Britain's leading historians of the Civil War, has produced an uneven series of interconnected essays: the best tells the moving story of Amparo Barayon, a Republican woman married to well-known novelist Ramon J. Sender, who was imprisoned and then murdered by a death squad in October 1936. Less successful is the chapter on the International Brigades in which Graham tries to present the IBS, most of whom were orthodox Communists, as forerunners of our own progressive times, the embodiment of "hybridity and heterodoxy ... soldiers of cosmopolitan cultural modernity." (75-83)

These essays are undergirded by the proposition that the Nazi new order properly provides "the major analytical reference" (6) for understanding the Franco regime. The choice of the Nazis as the comparators is intriguing. Graham justifies it on the grounds that "Francoism was born of a war made viable by Nazi and Fascist intervention, with a political project conceived therein as a fundamentalist nationalism, extreme in its virulent extirpation of difference." (6) If I understand this sentence correctly, Graham is saying that Franco's exterminationist project was a product of the Civil War, not something the Nationalists had created beforehand and were prepared to implement in July 1936. This would contradict the main argument of Paul Preston's influential The Spanish Holocaust (London: HarperPress, 2012), as well as Graham's own contention that the violence of the Civil War was the product of a pre-existing "fearful imaginary projected into war". (3) Graham notes that "external war" (106) radicalized the Nazi project, but there is no suggestion she thinks that the dynamics of civil war might have had any effect on the Nationalists. Symptomatically, Stathis Kalyvas' important The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) appears in the bibliography, but nowhere does Graham engage with its arguments.

While Graham does note that there are some "pertinent" comparisons with the Soviet Union, these are mentioned in passing and never fully developed. In fact, Stalin's regime is a much closer comparator. Franco, like Stalin, killed his own people, while the vast majority of Hitler's victims were outside Germany. And both dictators imprisoned and executed large numbers of their own citizens after as well as during the war. Graham also employs some apples and oranges type statistics. Her discussion of extrajudicial murders compares Nationalist Spain between 1936 and the late 1940s, during and after the Civil War, to Germany between 1933 and 1939, when the Nazi regime was at its mildest, and when comparing the number of prisoners per 100,000 population, she picks the Franco regime at its height and the Nazi regime in November 1936. This is followed by one of the few references to the Soviet Union, one which shows that Stalin was much "worse" than Franco, but one which is then explained away. (110)

Graham is among those who claim a powerful therapeutic and political value for memory and the non-state movements that advocate on its behalf. While there can be no doubt that a full understanding of its past--which it should be remembered cannot be based on any single memory but requires attention to multiple memories--is important for any society, Graham sees memory movements as "the best holding action we have against resurgent fascism" and nothing less than the means by which we can achieve "our survival as something worthy of the name of 'humanity'." (151) These are huge claims, characteristic of the rhetorical register of the book as a whole. (Elsewhere she describes the Restoration monarchy as holding the country in an "iron grip" [5]; says that the Franco regime imposed "apartheid policies" [23]; and that comparing the Catholic rhetoric used to justify Franco's prison labour to the Nazis' Arbeit Macht Frei "isprobably a step too far" [111]--my emphasis.) However, one does not even need to leave Spain to find evidence that, whatever else it might do, "proper" memory provides no defence against exclusivist nationalism. In 2007, the regional government of Cataluna passed the Law of Democratic Memorial which created a public institution dedicated to the "recovery, commemoration and stimulation of democratic memory" for the period 1931 to 1980. Memorial Democratic has been hugely active since then, yet the one part of Spain with a "healthy" memory, and one that is often portrayed as a particular victim of Francoism, is the one part of Spain to have a xenophobic, anti-immigrant political party, Plataforma per Catalunya, which is now trying to export its poisonous platform to the rest of the country.

Adrian Shubert

York University