Journal of War & Culture Studies

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Mi guerra, tu guerra: Claiming the Spanish Civil

War in literature and film

Martin Hurcombe

To cite this article: Martin Hurcombe (2007) Mi guerra, tu guerra: Claiming the Spanish
Civil War in literature and film, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 1:1, 25-30, DOI: 10.1386/
jwcs.1.1.25_0

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jwcs.1.1.25_0

Published online: 07 Sep 2013.

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Journal of War and Culture Studies Volume 1 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd
Position Paper. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.25/0

Mi guerra, tu guerra: Claiming the

Spanish Civil War in literature and film
Martin Hurcombe University of Bristol

Abstract Keywords
This paper presents an overview of general trends in a selection of representations Spanish Civil War
of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to the present in literature and film, arguing literature
that two different versions of the conflict have developed since the nationalists’ film
victory in 1939. It begins by examining how, following the rapid international- communism
ization of the conflict in 1936, the Civil War was considered increasingly as a anarchism
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battle between ideological absolutes, European artists or writers in particular falangism

electing to defend one cause over the other through their artistic representations commitment
of the conflict. However, with the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the war rapidly disillusionment
became a metaphor for the failure of ideological commitment in many subsequent
European representations of the war. Yet, while these tend to treat the Civil War
as international property, the pro-nationalist propaganda of the franquist era and
the silence of the Transition are now giving way in both Spanish and international
literature and film to attempts to reclaim a national memory of the Civil War. The
article concludes by considering how these might influence subsequent non-
Spanish representations of the war.

The Spanish Civil War is a doubly forgotten conflict; in Spain its memory
was at first impoverished by the simplifying, propagandistic discourse of the
victorious nationalists before being sidelined and then stifled during the
Transition. Elsewhere in Europe, the memory of Spain was eclipsed by the
experience and legacy of the Second World War. Yet this suppressed memory
of the Civil War continues to rise periodically to the level of consciousness
in European culture. (Witness, for example, recent cinematic treatments
such as Land and Freedom (Ken Loach 1995) and El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s
Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro 2006) as well as recent literary treatments
in Spain, such as Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s
The Shadow of the Wind.) Recent Spanish attempts to come to terms with
the nation’s past, however, reveal a markedly different conception of the
conflict from that of non-Spanish representations. The aim of this paper is
to explore briefly how these two radically different conceptualizations of
the same event, the Spanish and the non-Spanish, have emerged. The ori-
gin of this difference lies not only in the political and cultural isolation
that Spain experienced for much of the post-war era, but also in two dif-
ferent conceptualizations of the origins of the war itself. These origins were
profoundly Spanish. The insurrection of July 1936 began as a revolt by the
ruling cadre of the Spanish military who were predominantly motivated by
what they saw as the anarchist and communist excesses of the recently

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1. These initial military elected Popular Front, predominantly a coalition of socialists and liberals,
revolts were also but also by resentment at the new regime’s attack on the established hier-
actively supported
by the participation archy and their long-held privileges. Initially, therefore, the military pronunci-
of local and more amiento (‘announcement’) was intended as another in a long history of
politically radical conservative correctives that had prevented Spain from edging towards
falangists, however.
reform and modernity.1 The subsequent division of the belligerent fac-
2. All translations are tions into Republicans and nationalists reflected the division of
my own unless
indicated in the Spanish society into those liberals, socialists and communists, on the one
bibliography. hand, who defended the constitution of the Republic and who, along with
3. Quoted in La guerre Spanish anarchists, sought a more equitable distribution of both land and
civile espagnole et la wealth, and, on the other, those who had enjoyed such privileges under
littérature française the protection of various conservative regimes: the landed aristocracy, a
(de Muñoz 1971: 16).
wealthy urban bourgeoisie and the upper echelons of the Spanish Catholic
Church.
The war was to become rapidly internationalized. Hitler and Mussolini
lent their support to the nationalists, while the Soviet Union, after initially
supporting British and French policies of non-intervention, sided with the
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Republicans and thousands of young men from all over the world travelled
to Spain in order to join the Republican International Brigades. In the
summer of 1936, many Europeans could be forgiven for believing that the
next world war was about to begin and that Spain was to be its first battle-
field. Beyond Spain, the war was therefore often conceived as an interna-
tional conflict with international origins, the nationalists becoming
fascists for the supporters of the Republic, the latter becoming ‘reds’ or
Marxists for supporters of the nationalists. For the pro-nationalist French
writers Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche, Spain constituted an
arena in which the first ideological conflict of the twentieth century was to
be played out:

In the grey smoke of shellfire, under a sky crisscrossed by Russian and Italian
fighter planes, through blood, pain and death, ideological contradictions
were being resolved in this ancient land of conquerors and acts of faith.
Spain was conferring its blessing and its nobility on the war of ideas.
(Brasillach and Bardèche 1995: 406)2

However, this tendency to see before all else in the Civil War a European
ideological conflict often masked a lack of real understanding of the con-
flict on the part of non-Spanish commentators, as Frederick Benson noted
in one of the first comparativist studies of European literature of the war
(Benson 1968: 158).
Nevertheless, many European intellectuals felt the need to commit
themselves to the cause of one or other of the Spains. Artists, Louis
Aragon argued, should ‘initiate, with all the force of their genius, all the
generosity of their talent and of their heart, a new crusade: the crusade of
poetry and art on behalf of Spain’.3 While there is little doubt that the Civil
War galvanized a number of intellectuals into descending from their ivory
towers, the artists’ empathy or ideological affiliation with one Spain over the
other did not guarantee enduring art; as Peter Montreath observes, the
political radicalization of the artist does not necessarily lead to radicalized
forms of artistic expression (Montreath 1994: xiii) and both Spanish and

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non-Spanish representations of the war from 1936 to 1939 often favoured 4. See, for example,
the simplifications of propaganda over the complexities of art. The war in Goldmann (1964)
and Suleiman (1993).
such cases is reduced to a simple opposition of incompatibles, becoming a
conflict between abstract values. In this way, the specificity of both
nationalists and Republicans could be overlooked beyond Spain, enabling
the former, with its alliance of the military, monarchists, falangists, con-
servatives and Catholics, to become a model for the far Right in countries
not yet under the sway of far-Right regimes, while the Republic became a
model Popular Front regime for the European Left, uniting the latter’s
disparate factions and ideological agendas.
Where European artists did approach the war with the ‘force of their
genius […]’, the results were more complex, ambivalent and enduring. Yet
the European canon of Spanish Civil War literature is almost entirely
non-Spanish. It is also predominantly pro-Republican and has served to
shape a dominant, internationalized conceptualization of the conflict.
Moreover, its complexity often draws on the ideological tensions within the
Republican camp, tensions that were not only limited to the Republic, but
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which were suggestive of the tensions that underlay apparent left-wing

unity in the European democracies in the face of the fascist threat. Thus,
André Malraux’s L’Espoir (Man’s Hope 1937) is a study of these underlying
ideological differences, but also constitutes a call for increased discipline
and organization among the Republican ranks through the creation of a
single Republican army, a call that echoed that of both the Spanish and
French Communist Parties. Malraux’s novel has therefore been read as an
apology for the need to tame the revolutionary spontaneity that charac-
terized the first few months of the war and that was often associated
primarily with the activities of anarchist militias.4 Such a reading diamet-
rically opposes L’Espoir to the anti-Stalinist discourse of George Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia (1938). This latter recounts the repression of the
Trotskyite POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista – Workers’ Party of
Marxist Unification), for which Orwell fought, while Malraux exposes this
opposition between revolutionary spontaneity and the need to organize
the defence of the Republic in the form of a dialogued exchange between
characters, resolving the dilemma through the apprenticeship of Manuel,
a communist commander responsible for the Republican victory at
Guadalajara in March 1937, the novel’s point of conclusion. Non-Spanish
representations of the Civil War have therefore tended to dwell on the
opposition made by Werner in Gustav Regler’s The Great Crusade between
anarchist advocates of immediate revolution (‘Corpses by the roadside.
Dramatics and death. […] A little too spontaneous and too public […]’)
and communist supporters of discipline and order (‘Just the opposite. Not
spontaneous enough and too secretive. […] Everybody always spying on
himself, every man his own little Commissar’) (Regler 1940: 34).
The implosion of the Republic anticipated or depicted in these works
is not only suggestive of unresolved tensions among the members of the
European Left at the time, however. Since the Civil War, the manner of
the Republic’s defeat has become a metaphor for the failure of the Left in
twentieth-century Europe. The passage from hope to disillusionment which
informs Orwell’s narrative is echoed in the French novel’s return to Spain
in the minor wave of Civil War novels that emerged during the Algerian

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5. Even Manuel, the War of Independence. As recently as 1995, the same dichotomy between
communist hero of the revolutionary spontaneity of the Republican militias and the Stalinist
L’Espoir, recognizes
that the solidity of imperative of military discipline could still be found at work in Loach’s
character and multinational production Land and Freedom, a film that draws heavily on
purpose he Homage to Catalonia, placing Republican divisions primarily within an
experiences as a
commander of the international context. The Spanish Civil War has therefore been used in
newly formed non-Spanish culture to suggest, if not the failure of leftist commitment,
Republican army is then at least its limitations. Land and Freedom remains a work of committed
temporary and that,
in a future devoid of cinema, but David Carr’s tearing-up of his Communist Party card visually
absolute certainties, embodies a broader refusal of commitment to a single, all-defining and
he remains open totalizing ideology to be found in a range of works produced since the
to the infinite
possibilities of being defeat of the Republic.5 Yet, paradoxically, while the Civil War destroyed
(Malraux 1992: 589). writers’ and artists’ faith in political ideologies, it nevertheless remained
6. Indeed, Guillermo del synonymous with a form of human persistence in the preservation of per-
Toro, the Mexican sonal ideals and principles or in a form of transcendental humanism, all of
director of Pan’s which survive the dirty business of ideological warfare – W.H. Auden’s
Labyrinth (2006),
‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ (Auden 1979:
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openly talks of a
need for the Spanish 54). Thus, Orwell is able to state of his experience of Spain: ‘the whole
people to reclaim the experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of
memory of the Civil
War, situating both human beings’ (Orwell 1989: 186).
Pan’s Labyrinth and As a result of the isolation that Spain endured after the nationalist vic-
his earlier Spanish tory, an isolation that was at once self-imposed and a product of the defeat
Civil War film, El
espinazo del Diablo/ of fascism elsewhere in Europe, a separate understanding of the Civil War
The Devil’s Backbone was able to develop. Moreover, censorship, propaganda and state control of
(2001), at times cultural production ensured that only a Franquist understanding of the
when the Spanish
Republic stood alone. war could emerge in Spain throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the memory
The latter takes place of the Civil War serving at this time, as Paloma Aguilar argues, as a means
in 1939 after the of asserting Franco’s authority over the nation (Aguilar 2002: 31). With
withdrawal of the
International Brigades increased resistance to the Franco regime in the 1960s, however, dissent-
and the former in the ing voices began to be heard. Thus the film El espíritu de la colmena/The
summer of 1944, Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973), set shortly after the war’s conclu-
focusing on Franquist
attempts to eradicate sion, depicts a society in silent denial of its recent past; like the bees kept by
a Republican guerrilla Gomez, the characters of the film carry about their daily activities appar-
unit. ently blind to each other and to anything other than the task that con-
sumes them. Erice’s film, with its long silences, anticipates the silence that
Aguilar considers social elites sought to prolong throughout the Transition;
to confront the nation’s past, it was feared, would be to unleash multiple,
opposing and ultimately destabilizing discourses concerning the war
years, reopening ideological divisions and undermining Spain’s fledgling
democracy (Aguilar 2002: 31–32).
The survival of Spanish democracy and Spain’s entry to the European
Union has, it would seem, led to a confidence in recent years that is allow-
ing contemporary Spanish artists to claim the Civil War as their own once
more.6 One of the most recent cultural expressions of a distinctive Spanish
memory of the war is Javier Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis, first published
in Spanish in 2001. The novel follows the attempts of the first-person
narrator to research a Civil War episode from the life of Rafael Sánchez
Mazas, a poet and a founding member of the falange. The project initially
reflects a vogue the narrator notes for rehabilitating those falangist writers
now vilified by ‘a few guardians of left-wing orthodoxy and the odd

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mischief-maker […]’ (Cercas 2004: 8), but is largely inspired by the desire
to discover the truth concerning Sánchez Mazas’s botched execution at
the hands of the retreating Republican army in 1939. His survival, the
narrator discovers, is due not to the poet’s guile, but to the Republican sol-
dier who, upon discovering Mazas hiding in the woods, allows him to
escape, and to three Republican deserters, known as the Forest Friends,
who shelter him in the woods until the nationalist army arrives. The
woods where the four men hide, ‘seething with runaways […]’ (Cercas
2004: 23), therefore become the crossroads of the two Spains in the last
days of the war as falangist and Republicans are drawn into an unlikely
alliance. Like the novel itself, the woods constitute a space in which the
specificity of the nationalists, but more particularly of the more radical
falange, and that of the old Republic collude in an attempt to construct a
national memory of the conflict.
Yet this pursuit of a national memory inevitably requires the rehabili-
tation of a memory other than that of the half-forgotten falangist poet:
that of the Republic itself. The focus of the novel therefore shifts away from
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Sánchez Mazas to the unknown soldier who refused to reveal the poet’s
whereabouts immediately after his failed execution. The latter, the narra-
tor believes, is Miralles, who, having fled Spain with the remnants of
Lister’s army, went on to fight in the French Foreign Legion, helping to
liberate Paris in August 1944. The figure of Miralles therefore begins to
reverse the dominant leftist trend to see the Spanish Civil War as the first
battle in the European war against fascism, in order to reveal the role
played in the anti-fascist struggle by the Spanish themselves; the Spanish
people through Miralles thus become active agents of the anti-fascist
struggle rather than victims of fascism.
The effect of Spain’s recent cultural interest in its own civil war and the
inevitable retrieval of those memories repressed either voluntarily or by
state censorship is now beginning to be felt in cultural representations of
that conflict beyond Spain. Del Toro’s multinational production Pan’s
Labyrinth, like Soldiers of Salamis, resurrects the memory of an alternative
Spain in the representation of those Spanish Republicans who continued
to fight the Franco regime in the 1940s in the vain hope that the Allies
would turn on Franco once Hitler and Mussolini had been defeated. The
regime is embodied by the stepfather of Ofelia, the film’s heroine, the
nationalist army captain Vidal, an unwanted, unloved presence that forces
itself upon the collective body of the family in an attempt to preserve its
own personal standing and lineage. (Vidal’s only interest in Ofelia’s preg-
nant mother is as the father of his heir.) While the film’s main focus is the
fantasy world into which Ofelia escapes, this is set against the struggle
between Vidal and the Republican guerrillas. It is the latter who mourn
Ofelia, reclaiming her body after she is shot by Vidal, dispatching the mur-
derous stepfather, and disappearing back into the woods with Vidal’s son.
Del Toro’s Republicans, like Cercas’, return from the woods in order to
remind us of an alternative, forgotten Spain.
There is therefore a Spanish influence in del Toro’s multi-national pro-
duction not simply born of the fact that Pan’s Labyrinth, despite its
intended international audience, was filmed with a Spanish script and
actors; Del Toro’s film reflects aspects of Spain’s ongoing struggle with its

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national memory of that conflict. It is therefore tempting to conclude that

del Toro’s film adumbrates the possibility of a new understanding of the
Civil War for non-Spanish audiences, one that moves beyond the primarily
international, ideological interpretation of the war and its restrictive para-
digmatic significance as a motif for the failure of political idealism and
commitment. We may yet see more of the Spanish Republic as it emerges,
like Cercas’s soldiers and del Toro’s guerrillas, from the woods; or, as the
seventieth anniversary of the Second World War looms large, will the
Spanish Civil War slip once more back into the European subconscious?

References
Aguilar, P. (2002), Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the
Transition to Democracy (trans. Mark Oakley), Oxford: Berghahn.
Auden, W.H. (1979), ‘Spain’, Selected Poems (ed. Edward Mendelson), London:
Faber and Faber.
Benson, R. (1968), Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War,
London: University of London Press.
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Brasillach, R. and Bardèche, M. (1995 [1939]), Histoire de la guerre d’Espagne, Paris:

Editions Godefroy de Bouillon.
Cercas, J. (2004), Soldiers of Salamis (trans. Anne McLean), London: Bloomsbury.
Goldmann, L. (1964), Pour une sociologie du roman, Paris: Gallimard.
Malraux, A. (1992), L’Espoir, Paris: Gallimard.
Montreath, P. (1994), Writing the Good Fight: Political Commitment in the
International Literature of the Spanish Civil War, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
de Muñoz, M.B. (1971), La Guerre civile espagnole et la littérature française, Montréal:
Didier.
Orwell, G. (1938), Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker and Warburg; edition cited
1989, London: Penguin.
Regler, G. (1940), The Great Crusade (trans. Whittaker Chambers and Barrows
Mussey), New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
Suleiman, S.R. (1993), Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as Literary Genre,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Suggested citation
Hurcombe, M. (2008), ‘Mi guerra, tu guerra: Claiming the Spanish Civil War
in literature and film’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 1, pp. 25–30,
doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.25/0

Contributor details
Martin Hurcombe is senior lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. He is the
author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the
Great War and has also published articles on committed literature of the 1930s with
particular reference to the Spanish Civil War. Contact: Martin Hurcombe, School of
Modern Languages, University of Bristol, 17 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TE.
E-mail: M.J.Hurcombe@bristol.ac.uk

30 Martin Hurcombe