Chapter 3
Familial trauma in democratic
Spain
Memory and reconciliation through
generations
The Spanish transition following the death of General Franco is generally considered a paragon of democratization to which aspiring democracies in both Latin America and Eastern Europe have aspired (Garton Ash 1998; Cuesta 2008). However, its exemplarity began to be disputed during the 1990s as democratization processes were increasingly judged in terms of their capacity to offer redress for human rights abuses and realpolitik became disaccredited. The acclaimed Spanish pact of oblivion, which promoted a simplistic acceptance of equal responsibility for the Spanish Civil War, was disputed as the ascent of a globalized human rights culture revealed its abundant flaws. This chapter seeks to examine the imbrications between a flawed democratization process, which promoted a spurious “reconciliation,” and the persistence of Republican family trauma.1 I argue that collective reconciliation pre-empted the resolution of Republican familial trauma by not allocating members of the “family” a public discursive space in which to negotiate and narrate their experiences. I then analyse how this unresolved familial memory transformed Spanish collective memory, in the mid-1990s, as “the generation of grandchildren” pressurized elites to introduce legislative measures of redress. Finally, the role of the family in combating trauma caused by collective social processes is addressed.
A flawed reconciliation process
During the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the Spanish Civil War was to occupy the position of the commencement of the Regime, the precursor to an era of social prosperity and peace in which Catholic and patriotic values were re-imposed, thereby annulling the debasement of the Spanish character attributed to the Second Republic. It was to be portrayed as a crusade, waged against dissolute, amoral Republicans, their degenerate state explicitly counterpoising them with the religious fervor and high moral calibre of the Nationalists. Another constitutive feature of the narrative of the Civil War memory was the externalization of the conflict: Republicanism became equated with a complete lack of Spanish qualities, such as patriotism and Catholicism, and, consequently, its proponents were deemed not worthy of the epithet. Repression and the control of memory combined with spectacular efficacy to reduce daily life for the defeated Republicans to a never-ending spiral of hardships, social stigma, and fear. In short, the silence imposed on the defeated obliged them “to swallow their own identity” (Casanova 2004: 30). The Nationalist memory of the Civil War was omnipotent: in the school, press, and radio while the Republican memory, as well as being actively denigrated in the aforementioned social outlets, was, as such, quarantined in prisons and concentration camps, where those who might have opposed the regime were prevented from re-entering society by a set of dubious legislation. This virulently antagonistic memory narrative was to prevail until the mid-1950s, when economic changes and the climate of moderation ushered in by the abating of international hostility towards the regime converted it into little more than an anachronism, thus making its continued propagation untenable. As emotions subsided concerning the Civil War, it began to be presented as a collective tragedy rather than the apogee of one long triumphal march sanctified by God.
The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 ushered in a new era in Spanish politics and society. As previously stipulated in La Ley Orgánica del Estado (The Organic State Law) of 1967, Don Juan Carlos de Borbón succeeded Franco as head of state. Proceeding with caution, the King soon substituted stalwarts of the Francoist regime, such as Arias Navarro, with more modern dynamic men such as Adolfo Suárez.2 In order to understand the rationale underlying the reconciliation project, it is first necessary to foreground the situation with which the aspiring democrats were confronted. The transition to democracy was marked by turbulence and strife. Adolfo Suárez confronted what were then regarded as insurmountable and potentially explosive obstacles: namely the existence of a Francoist bunker who vehemently opposed the democratization process, a belligerent military who were unwavering in their devotion to the memory of Franco and deeply suspicious of democracy, and the frustration of the opposition at the clear failure to overhaul the Francoist state apparatus. All these problems were to be overcome by Suárez's espousal of the reformista approach, which effectively meant that Francoist institutions remained virtually intact, but were nevertheless used to achieve democracy. This delicate equilibrium was often threatened by the existence of mutually exclusive aims, but in such cases the Francoists ceded to the new order, as was illustrated by the decision of the Cortes to vote itself out of existence when pressurized by the Suárez government. Other canny political manoeuvres such as the legalization of the Communist Party (PCE) and the trade unions, the granting of a political amnesty and the holding of free elections consolidated both Suárez's personal popularity and the democratic process.
Paul Preston, as well as detailing the aforementioned tensions in the democratic process, underscores the explosive atmosphere of transitional Spain where an amalgam of both left and right-wing splinter groups deliberately aimed to provoke one of the parties involved in the democratization process into retaliatory action, with the express aim of destabilizing democracy. For example, prior to the imminent legalization of the PCE, ultra-right terrorists killed five Communist lawyers in Atocha in Madrid, but the dignified response of the PCE deprived them of any political ammunition. Meanwhile, significant sections of the Army felt alternately menaced by the reforming zeal of General Gutiérrez Mellado, and infuriated by the specter of PCE legalization and the granting of autonomy to the Basque country. Indeed, Preston (1986: 120) maintains that the possibility of a violent clash loomed quite ominously in the summer of 1976. Added to all these factors was the fact that there was a palpable wish emanating from the Spanish people for change rather than confrontation, which explicated the public support for moderate figures such as Suárez and González, rather than perceived hardliners such as Santiago Carrillo and Fraga. Pérez Diaz also emphasizes the troubled economic situation of transitional Spain, the difficulties of which can be gauged by the following statistics: between 1973 and 1982, 1.8 million jobs were lost, while in the period 1976–1978, 16 million working days were lost annually (Pérez Diaz 1993: 226). Overall, Preston (1986: 188) asserts that given the magnitude of the problems faced by Suárez, his performance was commendable.
The forgetting of the past was propagated as the sine qua non of democratization, a sacrifice upon which its success rested. In fact, the national reconciliation project was largely predicated on a symbolic rejection of the Civil War, a decisive political act which was interpreted at the time as further evidence of the reflective and exemplary nature of the Transition (Desfor-Edles 1998: 44). It was viewed as the outcome of a process of political learning, which can be defined as the influence of political events on the political beliefs of the individual (Bermeo 1992: 274). As a result of this political learning, the Civil War morphed from a nonnegotiable issue in the post-war period to a negotiable one by the early 1970s, thus permitting the government to re-construe it as a tragedy for which the two sides shared equal responsibility (Bermeo 1997: 310). Although the forging of a dominant memory is very often the “product of elite manipulation” (Bodnar 1992: 20), it still requires the nominal acceptance of the public. Prager posits that emotions in the present which survive from the past play an indispensable role in securing public approbation for governmental initiatives (Prager 1998: 83). By subscribing to the Freudian concept of the inevitable return of the repressed, Teresa Vilarós argues that while the trauma of the past had yet to be sublimated by 1975, a latent fear of the re-occurrence of such an event simmered in the Spanish collective psyche (Vilarós 1993: 9).
Hence, the politicians of the Transition manipulated the public's fear, by asserting that if politics did not metamorphose from the intransigent enemy/friend dyad to the moderate opponent/colleague relationship, another civil conflict would be inevitable. By constantly reiterating these arguments, politicians presented consensus, which implied a total lack of scrutiny of the past, as the only possible means of obtaining democracy and avoiding a repetition of the Civil War.3 To understand the persuasiveness of such an argument, one must firstly comprehend just how dramatic and polarized Spanish history has been. Gunther et al. observe that political instability has been a constant feature of Spanish life with seven military uprisings, four monarchical abdications, two dictatorships, two republics and four civil wars in the course of a century (Gunther et al. 1998: 16). Indeed, Desfor-Edles (1998: 5) ventures that “radical intervention by the armed forces was the standard means by which Spanish regimes alternated.” Due to this political turbulence, Spaniards internalized the rhetoric of a riotous national character, which was bolstered by Francoist propaganda, and consequently manifested an inordinately high estimation of civic values such as peace and public order. How compelling the consensus mandate proved to be can be deduced by the fact that Spaniards seemingly preferred to sacrifice the truth about the past for the much-vaunted political stability.
The consequences for Republican memory
Therefore, the much-vaunted consensus, the syncretic merger of the left and right wing, during the Transition, was achieved by an exclusively future-orientated gentlemen's pact which was largely predicated on un pasado inexistente (an inexistent past) (Morán 1991: 27). An example of this desire to erase the past was the inauguration speech of Don Juan Carlos de Borbón (Borbón 1975) in which he made no allusion to the Civil War, but instead hypostasized the importance of peace and reconciliation. The much acclaimed 1977 Law of Amnesty, which exempted those who had committed political crimes before this date from punishment, was flawed on a number of counts. J.C. Monedero (2004: 145) argues that it deliberately ignored the multi-faceted nature of the Civil War, intertwined as it was with class, regional and ideological conflicts, and ultimately subjugated collective memory to presentist needs. Amnesty International (2002: 53) underscores its concealment of human rights abuses during the Franco Regime, which forestalled the implementation of any judicial proceedings against the perpetrators.
Neither was change initiated in the public sphere. The official partisan history of Spain, promulgated in schools and universities during the Franco era, was not altered during the democratic period, thereby reproducing the Francoist falsification of history. A study carried out on secondary school textbooks of the period 1979–1999 found that the historical period comprising the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship varied from between 9.5 percent and 2.5 percent of the historical information provided. Its importance and duration, however, should have merited 44 percent of the informational space (Otalora 2007). This might partially explain why a high level of ignorance concerning the Civil War persisted well after the initial democratization period, with 35 percent of people in 1983 professing ignorance as to the ideological adhesion of the International Brigades (Preston 1990: 80). The absence of an inclusive history in the public sphere can have negative consequences:
It can result in a complete loss of a group's history … The real suffering as well as the crimes get buried in clichés and silences. Anything that might be learned, the empathy that is gained from realizing that no matter who one is, one is connected into families, communities, and nations whose own hands are not clean, the humility that is the beginning of tolerance – all are forfeited in the refusal to mourn.
Bergen 2000
A survey concerning Spaniards’ perceptions of democracy also found that, while Spaniards distinguished between the Francoist period and the Transition, they were not viewed as dramatically different (Barnes et al. 2001: 46). This could be due to the fact that Francoists continued to play a very prominent role in Spanish public life. Undeniably, many individuals, practically all of the institutions, police, military and entrepreneurs who had happily co-existed in the Francoist State, continued not only to exert considerable influence with the incumbent government, but indeed to flourish professionally. Likewise, the two key actors of the democratization process had discomfortingly close links with the Franco regime. Adolfo Suárez had occupied various positions in the upper echelons of the Francoist bureaucracy such as Secretario General del Movimiento, governor of Segovia and director of RTVE. Furthermore, the King himself, the symbolic linchpin of the Transition, was literally Franco's heir apparent having being raised by him since he was ten years of age. Robert Fishman holds that the crucial role played by these political actors in the Transition undoubtedly conditioned its evolution and to the outcome by which the previous regime was never condemned, and was only forced to submit itself to a superficial overhaul designed to appease public demand – thereby allowing for a disturbing degree of continuity between the Francoist and Transition periods (Fishman 1990: 231). Both the continuity of the Regime and the erasure of a significant opposition combined to engender a non-adversarial and contradictory memory. Cardus í Ros maintains that while the Franco regime symbolized the antithesis of the democratic ethos, this did not translate into a repudiation of the Francoists themselves as they formed an integral part of the transition process (Cardus í Ros, 2002: 25). Thus, the lack of a significant change in the Civil War memory narrative can be partially attributed to “instrumental persistence,” the process by which actors try to conserve remnants of a certain past in order to assure their own political survival (Olick and Robbins 1998: 129).
It is opportune to question why the opposition parties did not protest at the silencing of their past and the refusal to redress the injustices. The answer lies in the fact that their cries, which progressively diminished during the Transition, were submerged by the constant reiteration of the nunca más (never again) discourse. Democracy, Desfor-Edles (1998: 55) postulates, evolved into a civil religion in transitional Spain, and, in so doing, it sacralized consensus and nonviolence and condemned violence and irrationality, the epitome of which was the Civil War. Thus, the memory of the Civil War became a coercive force exhorting the opposition parties to acquiesce to the government's agenda. In the period prior to the Transition, the Federación de Partidos Socialistas (Federation of Socialist Parties) had been adamant in their calls for a dismantling of the Francoist institutions such as the judiciary, which was held to be the prerequisite for the impeachment of those who had been actively involved in the repression. As late as 1974, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) (PSOE) had called for economic reparation to the victims of repression in their annual conference. Likewise, Santiago Carrillo had vowed never to accept Don Juan Carlos de Bórbon as king of the Spanish people. In the transitional period, opposition parties yielded to the dominant discourse of nunca más, lest they be accused of being vengeful troublemakers. Unfortunately, the dismissal of a ruptura completa (a complete break) as a valid political course of action also obviated their demands for a truth commission or indeed, any form of judicial inquiry.
The pact of oblivion—that is, the enforced forgetting of the Civil War and the worst crimes of the Franco dictatorship in order to secure much needed consensus—did not only have manifold political consequences, but also had diverse ethical ramifications. The eminent historian Santos Juliá (1995: 459) makes a careful distinction between “olvidar” (forgetting), which is a simplistic act of obliteration of the past, and “decidir olvidar” (to decide to forget), which is a conscious, much-deliberated choice to conserve the past but not to permit it affect the future. However, Todorov (2002) views any political control of memory as essentially negative. Forgetting is not the antonym of memory, he contends, but is instead an essential part of the act of memorialization. Memory is, due to its reconstructive nature, a selection by which we preserve certain aspects of an experience and deem the remainder unimportant or undesirable. Partly due to this reason, Todorov does not condemn forgetting per se. He argues that it is an indispensable constituent of memory and may be necessary on a personal level in order to overcome the trauma of a horrendous experience. Instead, he argues that it is the control exercised by the dominant group over our capacity to select the memorable from the forgettable that violates basic human rights (Todorov 2002: 153).
As previously mentioned, the Transition premised the renewal of Spanish politics and society on the valuation of the present to the detriment of the past. Juliá refutes this contention, by positing that the past was abundantly analysed in the cultural domain during the Transition, and that its muteness in the political domain sprang from an initiative by noble politicians abiding by the tacit agreement not to manipulate it to score political points (Juliá 2006: 10). Such a view, however, belies the complexity of memory politics as it presupposes that the past within the political domain is only of value in its capacity as a political lever, and fails to appreciate the world of politics as a locus for the rectification of victims’ grievances. How defective the transitional approach to the past was in the latter regard can be deduced by the fact that it failed to confront the issues of the identification of both perpetrators and victims, and the implementation of judicial procedures against the former, both of which are integral elements of transitional justice. Such inaction militates against the possibility of achieving genuine reconciliation as it precludes the public admission of guilt on the part of the perpetrators and the obtaining of redress for the victims, each prerequisites of authentic reconciliation (Cohen 1995: 41). Unsurprisingly, many Republicans did not feel that the reconciliation rendered in the Spanish transition was reflective of their victimhood. For example, the father of Fausto Canales was buried in Valle de los Caídos, Valley of the Fallen, the huge Francoist monument which was built to honor the Nationalist dead. He has spend years trying to resolve the indignity represented by the burial of his father in a monument honoring the opposing side, where General Franco himself lies buried (Junquera 2010a).
In equating remembering with retribution, the politicians of the Transition showed a very narrow grasp of what justice entails. It is not only concerned with punishment, as proponents of amnesties would have us believe, but instead with social issues, such as aiding reconciliation processes by publicly acknowledging the crimes committed against the group in question. The fact that transitional justice procedures do not hinder social harmony, but actively contribute to it, lends further credibility to the view that they are a vital element of democratic reconstruction (Kaminski et al., 2006: 300). However, a caveat must qualify their capacity for social transformation. Offe warns that such actions will not automatically transform the “cultural values, attitudes and behavioural patterns that have been cultivated under the old regime”; rather it will serve to create a more heterogeneous and inclusive society, by considerably reducing feelings of envy, hatred and frustration (Offe 1992: 197). And what greater frustration can there be than that arising from the total dismissal of one's experiences and the lack of input in a decision, such as that of the Transition, which affects one personally?
As such, the Spanish State, by presenting forgiveness as a fait accompli, deprived Republican families of their rights by withdrawing their right to forgive, a decision which would also result in the prolongation of social trauma. “Trauma” is a term that has evolved into something of a capacious, catch-all phrase, establishing facile dichotomies between the individual and the collective. To cite one example, the term “return of the repressed” is applied with a noticeable lack of rigor to the recuperation of traumatic memory in modern societies. Yet, the notion of a return of the repressed on a collective level, which would be applicable to millions of people who belong to a multitude of groups that exist within the whole, seems quite unviable and inappropriate. Not only this, but it is fraught with the potential risk of sidelining the individual memory or the memory of a minority. However, it seems somewhat injudicious to dismiss so hastily the use of the concept of trauma on a collective level. Instead, it should be re-defined as a composite of individual and collective phenomena. Becker conceptualizes this shift as follows: “Trauma can only be understood with reference to the specific contexts in which it occurs, including cultural norms, political context, the nature of the event, the organization of the community, and so forth” (quoted in Kaplan 2005: 39). Trauma can be defined then as an individual reaction to a set of socio-cultural circumstances, which prevent the articulation and negotiation of a painful memory; it often manifests itself in psychosomatic malaise.
The reaction of the Republican family
The traumatic experiences of the Republican family during the 1975–1996 period, therefore, did not encounter the necessary discursive frameworks in which they could publicly articulate their memories. Their family history was subject to a “mythologization” in the public space, which effectively denied its existence, and endowed their stories with a taboo-like quality. There were some private initiatives, whose primary aim was to raise consciousness about the issue, such as the excavation of a mass grave in Torrejón, and the erecting of crosses on sites that were believed to contain bodies. These did not, however, translate into widespread social contestation of the collective oblivion which buttressed the transitional process. Although bereft of essential public mnemonic supports, the memory of repression subsisted in the Republican family as a fragmented and partially formulated familial discourse. And it was this intergenerational transmission of memory which, in 1996, acted as a catalyst for “la generacion de los nietos” (the generation of grandchildren) to mobilize civil society in favor of the recuperation of Republican memory, which in turn, pressurized elites to address the question. Theorists contend that over-involvement with the family can lead to a lack of civic commitment (Burlein 1999:314), to the creation of a simplistic dichotomy between the family versus the state (Hirsch 2008: 99), when the social sphere is actually constituted by the dynamic interaction between the two. The case of Spain perfectly demonstrates their symbiosis for these grandchildren, who have been motivated by familial experience, have revitalized civil society as they founded organizations, such as the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory and a plethora of other regional organizations, in a country with historically low levels of civic and associational involvement. There are now one hundred and sixty associations of memory in Spain (Gálvez Biesca 2006: 30). A participatory society has, apparently, been engendered from the anger felt by the grandchildren at the excision of their grandparents’ memory narratives from the national memory narrative.
This generation has no lived memories of the war but are rather informed by trace elements of their parents’ memory and the boom de la memoria, (memory boom) – the cultural explosion of books and films concerning the Spanish Civil War since 1996. They manifest a far less respectful attitude to the transition, and are altogether more concerned with the Franco dictatorship, which, as previously mentioned, had been consigned to the past during the Transition. Their relative autonomy constitutes one of the fundamental prerequisites for mature and authentic reconciliation: ability for critical reflection and interpretation of past events. The commitment of the leaders of civic movements, such as the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, as well as the writers and historians of the cultural memory boom, to the reinstatement of Republican memory derived from an overwhelming sense of the unfairness of the injustices suffered by their grandparents.
Unlike the previous generation, who sought to distance themselves from their parents’ past, this generation define themselves as the descendants of the victims, proudly asserting their proximity to, and high estimation of the defeated of the Civil War: Emilio Silva's widely circulated letter to the newspaper El Pais in 2002 was entitled “Mi abuelo también fue un desparecido” (My grandfather was also a disappeared person) (Silva 2000). José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is the grandson of José Rodríguez Lozano, a Republican captain who was executed in 1936. Zapatero has referred on numerous occasions to his grandfather: on one occasion, he recalled how the proclamation of innocence in his grandfather's will – which was read to him when he was fourteen years old – impressed him greatly. Rodríguez Zapatero has also affirmed that his political convictions are largely forged by his grandfather's stated creed of “a desire for peace, love of good and the social improvement of the humble.” The first agreement concerning historical memory in 2004 was ratified in the San Marcos Hotel where his grandfather had been held prisoner during the Civil War (Jauregui 2005).
It seems evident that this generation finds more resonance in their grandparents’ Republican progressive values than in the conservatism of the Franco dictatorship. They are very orientated towards the grandparents, more so even than towards their parents, which implies a certain historical discontinuity. In fact, the two generations are joined by their adherence to a common set of values which translates into social commitment and a fight for justice, albeit in very differing circumstances. They aim to intertwine their individual biographical experiences with macro-historical social and historical processes. Moreover, the emotional traction of the familial memory narrative constitutes a sufficiently powerful force for the family member to attempt to modify the national memory narrative. Unlike their parents, who were restrained by both fear of social exclusion for being un rojo (a red) and the binding impositions of the Transitional national reconciliation, these grandchildren came of age in a consolidated democracy, which had shed its insularity in favor of unequivocal Europeanization. During the 1980s and 1990s, many European countries had confronted painful memories of collaboration: the 1986 Kurt Waldheim affair forced Austria to fully assess its self image as “the first victim of Hitlerite aggression,” while the indictment of Rene Bousquet, a friend of Mitterand, revived public debate concerning the French's collaboration with the Vichy Regime. Therefore, human rights discourse permeated public consciousness and caused a critical appraisal of realpolitik which had governed the 1970s “third wave” transitions such as Spain and Portugal. Given its historical links with South America, Spain was also influenced by South American transitions whose guiding principle had been that the powerful do not have impunity. The generation of grandchildren therefore was able to resolve their familial memories in a propitious socio-cultural setting.
Two grandchildren, Pablo Sánchez León and Jesús Izquierdo Martín recall how, as young boys, the silence enshrouding the Spanish Civil War during the transitional period led them to deduce that their teachers were embarrassed and uncomfortable about teaching it. These teachers tended to avoid the theme and, when unable to do so, they drastically reduced its importance. Their familial memory had created a deep interest in the theme and they were, therefore, puzzled by the lack of importance conceded to it in the educational sphere (Izquierdo Martín and Sánchez León 2006: 53–4). Izquierdo Martín and Sánchez León lament the tendency of historians, their chosen profession, to omit any reference to familial memory lest they be accused of subjectivity or lack of rigor. In their book on the theme, both categorically state that their interest in the theme is inextricably linked with their Republican familial memory narratives (Ibid. 2006: 24, 28). The first chapter contains their grandparents’ life stories, a fact which is made somewhat remarkable by the fact that they came from opposing sides: Ángel Martin Fernández was a Republican while Ernesto Martínez Campos Von Thode was a Nationalist. Their experience is indicative of the capacity of the small-scale mnemonic community to enrich the collective one. As Iwona Irwin-Zarecka comments:
The community bonded by that memory grows to include all the empathetic witnesses as well. The connection between experience and remembrance is now not severed, rather, it is redrawn to capture the complexity of effects of that experience beyond individual memories. Personal relevance of the traumatic memory, and not personal witness to the trauma, here defines the community. It is the meaning given to the event, rather than the event itself, which may create a community of memory.
Irwin-Zarecka 1994: 48–9
Paradoxically, the state's ambiguous stance on the Civil War, which oscillated between neutrality and bias, relegated the recounting of the Civil War memory narrative to the family. As information was curtailed in the public sphere, the children tended to increasingly value the stories told within the midst of the family because they were devoid of the awkwardness and evident discomfort that accompanied renditions in the educational sphere. Both León Sánchez and Martin Izquierdo are at pains to stress their gratitude to their families for the transmission of this memory.
Certainly, in the cases of the proponents of Republican memory, the family has acted as a mnemonic community, transmitting and preserving the memory of repression. Emilio Silva, the founder of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, attributes his generation's role to the intergenerational transmission of memory and its absence:
I think that, in some cases, like mine, the grandchildren wanted to change things because there had been a family story which maintained a connection. And in others, because the absence of a story created an emptiness and consequently, a need to investigate further. Of course, there is always a very strong emotional factor in being the son of a person who has had his life destroyed by the victors. As a grand-daughter, who rang me five years ago, said: “It's very sad that a cheerless mother brought me up.”
There is also an understandable anger at the left, who should have represented families like mine, but instead voted for an Amnesty Law which returned them their expropriated property and little more. That is another void, which is really inexplicable and in urgent need of explanation. It's also the lack of information, of not seeing your familial experience included in contemporary historical discourse.
Silva, quoted in Labanyi 2008: 145
In Silva's case, family memory constituted a coherent dissenting counter memory. Although his father had suffered greatly due to the stigma of being a son of un rojo (a red), and was frequently given savage beatings by the local guards, he ensured that his sons were familiar with their grandfather's political convictions. As Silva remembers it: “it was like I inherited something clandestine, a recipe which in that time you could not use, but which would be usable in the future” (quoted in Labanyi 2008: 144). Therefore, those, such as Silva, who possessed an intimate understanding of the devastating effects of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship on their families had to engage with a public sphere which not only did not corroborate this story, but repudiated it, and forestalled its articulation by conferring on it a taboo-like quality. These grandchildren are motivated to incorporate this taboo memory into the public sphere by a deeply personal desire to resolve their postmemory, that is, the inherited fragmented memory of their parents transmitted through silence, moods, expectations, or seemingly incoherent actions of their parents (Hirsch 1997: 234). Gabriel Rosenthal expresses the effectiveness of non verbal familial communication as follows:
Family secrets constitute some of the most effective mechanisms to ensure the continued impact of the threatened family past. Formulated generally, the more closed or guarded the family dialogue, or the greater the attempt to make a secret of, or whitewash the past, the more sustained the impact of the family past on the second and third generation. Parts of the family past are not talked about with family members, but through subliminal messages, they still manage to be transmitted to their descendants.
Rosenthal 2002: 228
Those afflicted by postmemory also seek to achieve a confluence between national and personal memory structures, in other words, they look to the macro social to explain the gaps in the micro social (Hirsch 2008: 108). One particular striking feature of Silva's interview is that he places the family as the central point of reference, even when the family is not the principal theme: for instance, his scathing opinion of the amnesty law is expressed in terms of its inability to help families such as his. The scant media attention paid to the issue of the Republicans in general is also related to his family. Similarly, Christina Hardt, the New York-born grandchild of Francisco Redondo, a Republican who was shot when he was only thirty five years of age, in 1948, made a documentary about her quest to find her grandfather's killer in the village where the shooting happened, El valle (The Valley) in Léon, a village where she had spend her holidays as a child. It was as an adult that a yearning to rationalize her familial past overcame her: “I started to interest myself in that part of my family history which was never spoken about in family gatherings. It was like a big secret: my grandfather was dead but nobody had explained to me how he died” (Hardt, quoted in Macías 2005: 84).
As a child, Christina's grandmother had shared with her her wartime experiences and her meeting with Christina's grandfather; however, the story came to an abrupt end, in 1948, when her grandfather was shot. Her grandmother eventually ceded to Christina's requests for information on this period, and it was her revelation that her grandfather's murder was not even acknowledged, attributed as it was to a cerebral hemorrhage, which strengthened Christina's inchoate resolve to investigate his murder. Therefore, it was the failure of the public sphere to recognize and incorporate Christina's familial history and her conviction that justice must be done retrospectively which propelled her to embark on her search. The documentary which Christina made of this search, Muerte en el Valle (Death in the Valley), demonstrates the formidable obstacles she encountered in this quest, such as fear of talking about this period and even tensions within her own family. When her investigation was in its quite advanced stages, her uncle became infuriated with her and remonstrated with her to stop her search. Interestingly, Christina could simultaneously respect her grandmother's decision to remain silent on the issue and reject it. As she says:
My grandmother became a widow at twenty-seven years of age with four children to bring up. It does not surprise me that my family preferred to forget. But I do not want to forget, therefore as I obtained new information, I gained more strength to keep trying to find out who had betrayed my family and the reasons why they had done so.
Hardt, quoted in Macías 2005: 86
This statement manifests the forging of an intergenerational understanding, which seems to transcend different viewpoints, as Christina Hardt's mnemonic community has not only given her the impetus to investigate her grandfather's past, but also to contextualize her grandmother's attitude to the same memory within its socio-historical context. The mnemonic community, therefore, is sustained by mutuality and autonomy. It also demonstrates that the familial mnemonic community facilitates the autonomy and flourishing of the individual memory, so much so that it can withstand the criticism of other members of the community, as was the case with Christina's uncles’ criticisms of her search.
These cases illustrate that the Republican family, despite its lack of where-withal, succeeded in preserving its memory and transmitting it to the next generation, a feat which necessitates an examination of the effectiveness of the family as a memory community. Annette Kuhn dichotomizes the family into the public and private face, the public being the family's performance in the public sphere, while the private refers to the family's actions within the home which can frequently diverge dramatically from the former (Kuhn 1995: 3). As the family home is relatively autonomous, and a relationship of trust exists between family members, this necessarily confers on each member sufficient independence to articulate prohibited or taboo memories. They may even elaborate their own familial mnemonic narrative, articulated only within the home. The family can counteract the undermining of the memory of the repressed in the public sphere by providing the necessary approval of the memory in question, as well as an opportunity to negotiate its complexities with other family members.
The status of the dominant memory, that is, its entitlement to dominance, is maintained by commemorative rituals, and its propagation in the various loci of the public sphere. Its intolerance of the oppositional memory is crystallized and enforced through the repression of dissent memory and its consequent invisibility in the public sphere. The macro social validation that is denied to the holder of a repressed memory will be substituted by a micro social recognition, which has not only a compensatory function, but is wholly sufficient for the family member to withstand the vilification of his memory in the public sphere and retain his attachment to the counter-memory. The family sustains the dissenting memory by the elaboration of their own myths and rituals, thereby replacing the commemorative rituals of the dominant collective memory that do not resonate with the dissenting memory consumer. For example, during family gatherings, they will talk about the memory in question, and familial lieux de mémoire (realms of memory) (Nora 1989), such as photos and letters, will be brought forth to reinforce the younger generation's sense of connectedness with the past.
These lieux de mémoire may simultaneously be lieux d'oubli (realms of forgetting) in the dominant memory sphere, revenants of a prohibited or repressed memory, whose invocation causes discomfort to the adherents of the dominant memory. Conversely, the family's unity is concretized and fortified by the lieux d'oubli, which reinforce their self image as a distinct grouping or a bulwark against an intolerant social sphere. The power of the family as a mnemonic community has been augmented by the seismic reconfiguration of national identity that has been precipitated by globalization, secularization, and the demise of the nation-state as an overarching epistemological framework. These shifts have provoked a dis-identification with collective social identities in all their guises, ideological, religious, and political, and have occasioned the ascent of individualism. The idea of a monolithic unifying national framework is now considered anachronistic, and any images of society as harmonious and exempt from conflict are increasingly risible. Consequently, the notion of society as a locus of dissenting viewpoints and conflict has gained ascendancy. Basically, the nation no longer supersedes other identities, and it is no longer deemed desirable that it should do so. The individual is now possessed of far more agency and control over his allegiance to the interpretation of certain memories, which necessarily adds to the attractiveness of the familial memory for it personalizes a collective memory.
Conclusion
Intergenerational dialogue modifies, and sometimes transforms, memories as they gradually incorporate novel mnemonic frameworks. For instance, older members, who adopt the ethical gaze of younger members, may begin to feel dissatisfied with exclusionary memory narratives which they had previously adhered to on the basis of social conformity. Although younger members may have different value systems and ideological beliefs, familial members will establish an affective connection with the memory in question that may provoke a reassessment of their individual memory. Furthermore, the transmission of the memory in question to the child is propitious to the forging of a critical perspective because the child, who is not familiar with conventions, and who as yet has limited knowledge of the world, may view things in a different light. They can also ask probing questions which would be considered inappropriate for an adult with the result that their interrogations of national history – inevitably interpreted as just another childish foray into the world of adult knowledge – will not elicit distrust or resentment. The child is exempt from any suspicion of meddling or imposition of other value systems, and their insistent questions may actually force the adult speaker to articulate their own line of reasoning in a coherent fashion, an activity which may also serve as an opportunity for a more profound rationalization of deeply held ideological convictions.
In the case that this mutual reassessment does not occur, familial memory enables the members of the family to engage with alterity, that is, to interest themselves in the fate of victims who had opposing ideological or religious beliefs. The familial bond between descendants and the other generations causes family members to widen the parameters of their views on collective conflict and, consequently, they contextualize it within an ethical and moral framework. In short, they begin to acknowledge the emotional effect of the conflict rather than its role in the formation of historical processes. As familial memory possesses an emotive component, which is lacking in dominant memory narratives, it has a significant advantage in the normalization of the memory, a fact that is essential to its consequent adoption by individuals. Both dominant and familial memory narratives compete for the individual memory, and both offer coherent narrative structures in which the individual may contextualize his life experiences and strengthen his identity. The familial memory, although bereft of the resources of the dominant memory, is reiterated on a daily basis and contributes to familial unity. Moreover, it is imbued with an intimacy which the dominant memory is not able to replicate and, therefore, constitutes a counter-hegemonic form of resistance. The historical narrative, which exists in other spatial and temporal dimensions, is individualized and, thus, becomes part of the younger generation's reality. It reasserts the victims’ subjectivity and therefore undoes the effacement to which they are always subject to in the aftermath of conflict.
Family memory sustains personal identity as, in the words of Robin Fivush:
Placing one's own life in the context of family history that provides a framework for understanding one's self as a member of one's family that extends beyond one's birth and provides the stage upon which one's individual life will be played out. One's own life story is embedded in the stories of others in the past and in the present.
Fivush 2008: 8
Therefore, the familial memory narrative endows the individual member with another perspective on key events in contemporary history which, in the case of a dissenting familial memory, may culminate in the family member's disaffection with the national memory narrative. At the recent demonstrations in favor of Judge Baltasar Garzón, a judge who has tried to help Francoist victims, one of the demonstrators, Carmen Paez, expressed her confusion regarding her place in the national memory narrative: “Are we still evil and ‘reds’? Do we still have to fear?” (Junquera 2010b). Her words evince an insoluble connection with her grandparents’ identities, and a rightful indignation at their omission in the national memory narrative. Put simply, her grandparents’ identity is her identity. Their knowledge of the impact of these events on family members also means that they will be more inclined to judge the dominant memory in terms of its ethical ramifications. In fact, it has transcended the present as its resolution is now considered to be paramount to the future of Spain. In the aforementioned demonstration, the politician Gaspar Llamazares affirmed that “the future of our children depends on our success in dignifying their battle. If we want an honourable democracy, we have to honour them” (Junquera 2010b). Similarly, the writer Almudena Grandes was motivated to become involved in the movement for the recuperation of historical memory by her daughters’ biased history books.
There are limitations to the power of familial memory. It should be noted that not all grandchildren have unshackled the constraints imposed by the notion of the Civil War as a taboo subject. As Günter Schwaiger, the maker of On Santa Cruz, a documentary featuring interviews with the victims’ families, which centers on the town of Santa Cruz de la Salceda, observed:
There are still very strong taboos on the subject and many of the relatives interviewed said things like: ‘No, my grandfather wasn't a political man, they killed him because he was a good sort, because they were jealous, because he wanted the best for everyone’.
Schwaiger 2008
Likewise, elites have often used the concept of individual memory to avoid introducing substantial legislative measures. In the debates prior to the introduction of the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, politicians were careful to emphasize that the law would guarantee the right to an individual memory, but that the construction of a certain historical memory was not within their remit. While wholly commendable on initial analysis, these types of statements were also alarming insofar as they constituted subtle but categorical refusals to undertake the type of measures that are needed to address the lacunae in Spain's collective memory. As the collective memory favors the Francoist side, many large-scale projects such as museums and commemorations would need to be embarked upon to approximate to a balanced collective memory culture. It is also a cause for disquiet that families implored Judge Garzón to investigate the disappeared in 2008, a year after the ratification of the law, and that many of them did so after becoming heartily disillusioned with the tardiness of the implementation of the law's clauses. Moreover, most families do not fulfill the prerequisites for compensation as it is only applicable to victims of repression during the 1968–1975 period when the intensity of the repression had considerably reduced due to Spain's modernization in the 1960s, and the international furor caused by the execution of Julián Grimau in 1963. Therefore, they do not receive adequate financial restitution. Aside from these limitations, the memory of the Republican family, which was obviated by a pact of oblivion during the transition to democracy, has been one of the key factors in the enormous change wrought in Spain's mnemonic landscape since 1996. The grandchildrens’ insistence on public recognition and redress for the injustices suffered by their grandparents clearly demonstrates that a public memory, which discriminates against a certain sector of the population, eventually leads to an irreconcilable disjuncture between individual and public memory. Individual memory, which is anchored by a repressed familial memory, will subsist despite repression and the lack of a supportive social forum in which to articulate its tenets.
In short, the dismissal of a particular identity in the process of negotiating the past is ultimately counterproductive for the marginalized identity and memory can endure, and will eventually reclaim its rightful public space. Authentic reconciliation is based on a mature confrontation with discomforting past realities. For example, before the signing of the historic West German-Polish treaty in 1971, Willy Brandt knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto in a gesture of atonement and full acknowledgement of the barbarities that had been perpetrated there. His motivation sprung from an instinctual knowledge that, in his words:
I had to do something to express the particularity of the commemoration at the ghetto monument. On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them.
Brandt 1994: 99
Similarly, in a tradition started by Mitterand, French presidents have since the early 1990s placed flowers at the Vel d′Hiv, the site of the detainment of 13,000 Jews in Paris. Reconciliation is always premised on inclusiveness, even when that comes at a high political cost, and not on shirking the ramifications of human rights laws in the national interest.
It is, in fact, vital to the quality of Spanish democracy that the evident flaws in its memory culture be addressed. Spain is a country with high levels of voter apathy and poor levels of civic involvement which, one could surmise, may derive from a long-standing resignation to political structures that exclude groups that do not conform to the national ideal. The reincorporation of their memories by measures such as the foundation, in a similar manner to the conversion of torture centers in Argentina into museums, of a museum in Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), the huge Francoist monument and burial place in Madrid, would go some way to alleviating their sense of marginalization and replace their resignation with a new found interest in political life. It is illogical to expect citizens to participate in civil culture when the most rudimentary component of their identity, their memory, is not accorded respect and freedom of expression.
Notes
1 For the purposes of this chapter, the Republican family refers to three generations who were marked by the Republican defeat in 1939 and the subsequent Francoist repression during the dictatorship.
2 Don Juan Carlos de Borbón based his choice of Adolfo Suárez on the fact that “procedía del franquismo y porque no se le podía hacer sospechoso de pretender cambios demasiado radicales” (“he came from the Francoist period, and nobody could suspect him of claiming overly radical changes”) (de Vilallonga 1993: 97). This decision is representative of the King's methodical and unobtrusive approach to the transition to democracy: “We had to go from law to law. And that's how we did it” (Ibid. 99).
3 The nature of a democratic transition, to a certain extent, enlightens the rationale behind this approach. Benomar (1993: 5) contends that a transition is, at the best of times, a tentative enterprise, its fragility only to be overcome by the prioritization of future stability over the past. Therefore, collective amnesia is, to a large degree, a sine qua non of a collective transition, as any critical analysis of the past would resurrect former divisions thus jeopardizing the future (Evans 2003: 10).