Spain: A Unique History (47 page)

What is particularly sinister about the countermyth invoking the so-called Second Transition is its similarity to the "myth of the Republic," sedulously propagated by Azaña and the leftist Republicans during the 1930s. They have in common absolute indifference — indeed, aversion to — real democracy in so far as the latter consists of free and fair democratic elections, responsible parliamentary government, and a constitutional state, or what has been succinctly summarized as "fixed electoral rules and uncertain electoral outcomes."

One might theorize at some length about the tendency of the modern mind, at least for the past century or so, to generate ever more severe forms of paranoia, which may be considered a relatively natural phenomenon in an atomized and increasingly subjective culture. One of the great achievements of the Transition was its success in overcoming the modern tendency toward paranoia, at least for a generation or so.

"Pact of silence" is simply a propaganda slogan. No such thing ever existed. The very opposite characterized the Transition, which was grounded in a keen awareness of the failures of the past and a determination to avoid them. Indeed, as Paloma Aguilar has written, "few processes of political change have drawn such inspiration from the memory of the past, and from the lessons associated with it, as the Spanish case."
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It is impossible to find another instance anywhere in which such awareness was any greater. What was agreed upon was not "silence" but the understanding that historical conflicts would be consigned to the labors of the historians and journalists, and that politicians would not make use of them in their parties' mutual competition, which would direct itself to present and future problems.
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During the Transition historians and journalists were active in the extreme, flooding the country with new accounts of the years of civil war and Francoism, which did not in any way disguise the most atrocious aspects. After a number of years there began to appear a series of detailed scholarly studies, such as those by Josep María Solé Sabaté, Joan Villarroya, Vicent Gabarda Cebellán, Francisco Alía Miranda, and others, which for the first time began to place the investigation of the repressions on a precise scholarly footing.
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All this was the very opposite of any "forgetting," and was much more careful and exact than the subsequent agitation about "la memoria histórica."

The consensus that rejected politicization of the history of civil war and dictatorship was generally maintained by all the major parties until 1993, when the Socialists were in danger of losing the national elections for the first time in more than a decade. The prime minister, Felipe González, then made a major point of warning that a vote for the conservative Partido Popular would run a major risk of restoring some of the grimmer aspects of franquismo. This was the equivalent of what in the United States in the decades after the American Civil War was called "waving the bloody shirt." In major elections the Republican Party, which in the American case had led the victors, would regularly "wave the bloody shirt," reminding its voters of the price paid in the Civil War and alleging that a vote for the rival Democrats would mean the return of the former "slave power." This was sometimes helpful to the Republicans but not always, and in Spain it did the Socialists less and less good in 1996 and 2000. There was briefly a point, after the complete failure of the Socialists two years earlier, at which José María Aznar declared in 2002 that the use of the recent past for partisan purposes had been buried.

This was premature, for once the genie was out of the bottle it became an increasingly common feature of Spanish politics. The normally sober Jordi Pujol, president of the Catalan government, had earlier made politicized references to the Spanish Civil War, and finally even the Partido Popular would do something of the same in the face of the new leftist agenda of Zapatero after 2004. For the Left, it simply became a standard tactic.

A new phase began in the first years of the twentieth century with the rise of the agitation concerning "la memoria histórica." This did not stem from a single movement but represented a variety of distinct constituencies, many motivated by political ends, others concerned for history and archaeology. The most serious sector has been represented by Emilio Silva and the Asociación Para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH — Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), which began to excavate its first unmarked common grave in 2000. Concern to identify, excavate, and properly bury previously unrecognized victims of the Civil War and post-Civil War repressions — or for that matter unidentified military casualties of the Civil War itself — is an important and laudable initiative, and one that should merit public support. Other groups went beyond that, demanding special political commemoration and formal recognition that leftists who had been executed had died "for democracy," and calling for further specific condemnation of Franco and his regime and, by implication, all those who fought against the Left in the Civil War. This was accompanied by shrill and hysterical denunciations of the Francoist repression, with the implication that was the only one, even exaggerating its character and extent. A very harsh and brutal policy was made to seem even worse, the equivalent of Nazi Germany or the most atrocious Communist regimes. Vague concepts of "memoria histórica" were thrown about, as though they were equivalent to the data of professional historical research. The result was a semisystematic attempt to rewrite and to falsify, and also sometimes to use that effort as a tactical weapon against the Partido Popular, the clumsiness with which the latter dealt with such issues only adding to the problem.

Thus it is important to distinguish between the different groups who have advocated "la memoria historica," and to keep separate the valid and laudatory efforts to recognize the often innocent victims of repression from the extensive attempts to generate political propaganda and falsify history. When the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was formed in 2004, it embraced "la memoria histórica" as part of its new leftist initiatives, but the terms of the final legislation approved in October-December 2007 were somewhat more moderate, as we shall see.

The term itself is unfortunate, constituting an oxymoron, a fundamental contradiction in terms, something that in strict logic cannot exist. Memory is strictly individual and is subjective and very frequently fallacious. Even people of good faith are constantly remembering details quite at variance with what in fact happened. Memory does not define or fully explain past events but simply provides one version or interpretation of the latter. History, on the other hand, is neither individual nor subjective, but requires the objective and professional empirical investigation of documents and other data and artifacts. It is a supra-individual process of the society of scholars, who debate and contrast results that strive to be as impersonal and objective as possible.

There is a field of study called "historical memory" or "collective memory," but it is quite different from history and is merely a small part of the data examined by historical inquiry. During the past several generations a methodology concerning "collective memory" has developed within historical study, investigating attitudes, concepts, or opinions about the past, which are formed in various ways by activists, politicians, publicists, artists, writers, and sometimes also by society at large. In most cases these are not true collective "memories" in the sense that a majority of those who hold them have participated in or experienced the events to which they refer, but rather are the product of political, social, or cultural minorities that in various ways have propagated, diffused, or imposed their views with greater or lesser degrees of success. The founding theorists of this field, Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, have recognized this, but they argue that the study of "collective memory" is important because it is one of the artifacts that constitutes the historical record, influencing politics, society, and culture, and as such forms part of the data to be examined by history. It does not reveal history itself but is simply one part of the data that historians study.

The founding work was Halbwachs's
Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire
, published in 1925, but collective memory only emerged as a significant field in the latter part of the twentieth century. This was one aspect of the broadening and diversification of the objects and subfields of historical study that took place from the 1970s on, and has led to the development of a number of new specialized journals, such as
Pasado y memoria
, published by the University of Alicante. The first major work in this field to appear in Spain was Paloma Aguilar's
Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil Española
(1996), which remains the principal study of that theme as collective memory and is not to be confused with a considerable number of other works that record individual oral history data.

Specialists in the field have noted the particular problems and abuses that may appear. Enrique Gavilán has spoken of what he calls "the impossibility of and need for historical memory." He draws attention to the fact that in his final work,
La mémoire collective
(1950):

Halbwachs drew attention to the verbal excess implied by the expression historical memory. Collective memory is not historical but in fact anti-historical. To understand something in historical terms is to be aware of its complexity, to remain at sufficient distance to be able to see different perspectives, to grasp the ambiguities in the behavior of different actors, including their moral ambiguity. Conversely, collective memory simplifies, denies the passage of time, eternalizes, essentializes. Collective memory characteristically pretends to express an eternal or essential truth about a collective process.

Moreover, Halbwachs maintained that collective memory functions in the opposite way from what maybe supposed by common sense, for collective memory is not so much the result of the action of the past on the present, as we might tend to think, but of the present on the past. In other words, collective memory is less a discovery than a creation.

Therefore, if one accepts the ideas of Halbwachs, the expression historical memory should be used with care. Nor is the idea of recovery of collective or historical memory defensible, since one should speak rather of the construction of memory... The present plays a much greater role in configuring the memory of the past than is generally recognized.
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Similarly, in an essay published in
History and Theory
, Wulf Kansteiner speaks of the difference between those whom he calls "the makers of memory" and "the consumers of memory," and of the "abundance of initiatives of failed collective memory on one side and of the few cases of successful construction of collective memory on the other." He concludes that there is inadequate study of what he terms "the problem of reception" of collective memory, for "collective memory is not history" but rather "is as much a result of conscious manipulation and of unconscious absorption and is always mediated."
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He points out that the Israeli scholars Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam have concluded that collective or historical memory consists of what these two specialists call "myths."
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The philosopher Gustavo Bueno is yet more critical, insisting that in Spain all this merely amounts to a political maneuver, what he calls "the invention, on the part of the Left, of the concept of "historical memory"
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. He points out that the dean of recent memory studies, Pierre Nora, distinguished between history, whose research seeks objectivity, and memory, which is a subjective construction.
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Bueno insists that historical memory can never be more than a social, cultural, or political artifact. He defines the concept of "common historical memory" as "a metaphysical idea" that "proposes for us ... an abstract subject (Society, or Humanity, a sort of divinity that preserves everything and maintains it in the present) capable of preserving in its breast the totality of the past which present mortals need to discover."
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Yet a different enterprise is that of "oral history," which became a subdiscipline of history in the late twentieth century. Gavilán stresses that in this particular field "the work of historians does not presume the accuracy of memory. On the contrary, it is fully cognizant of the
inevitable
deficiencies of memory. Historians know that memory not merely deforms the understanding of what has occurred, but in fact does so inevitably. There can be no other possibility... The goal is not the past, but the present."
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In the objective task of excavations in funerary archaeology, we find that the contemporary European champions are not the Spaniards of the ARMH, who have sometimes done meritorious work but have excavated only a limited number of remains, but are in fact the Russians of the late twentieth century or the Slovenes in 2009. The country that most systematically ignored the existence of mass common graves of the dead, stemming from both the Stalinist executions and World War II, was the Soviet Union, some of whose Spanish coreligionists have been very active in the agitation about the "pact of silence" and "historical memory." Since the remains of many of the millions of Soviet war dead had never been recovered, even from the battles on Russian soil, during the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Russian volunteers devoted their spare time on weekends to the recovery of the remains of many thousands of soldiers.
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By comparison, Spanish agitators have shown very limited initiative. In Slovenia, a mass site was opened in 2009, which apparently contains the remains of literally thousands of victims of the mass executions carried out by Yugoslav Communists in 1945. The common graves uncovered in Spain in recent years are modest by comparison.

Moreover, the most elaborate use of a collective memory of the Spanish Civil War was probably not anything seen in Spain from the successors of either side, but rather the
cult
of the antifascist, revolutionary Spanish Civil War, which flourished in Communist East Germany (DDR). An important segment of the original DDR leadership had fought in the International Brigades (where their goal certainly had not been democracy for Spain) and, hand in hand with the revelation in the Soviet Union of the crimes of Stalin, the myth of the Soviet revolution was to some extent replaced by the myth of the revolution and antifascist struggle in Spain as a kind of founding myth of the East German regime. Needless to say there was no pretense that the Spanish Republic was a Western-style liberal democracy. The decline of the collective memory myth of the Spanish war during the 1980s coincided with the more general decline of the East German regime.
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