Guerra by Jason Webster

Author:Jason Webster
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407094885
Publisher: Transworld

12

Unamuno and Millán Astray

Few countries in the world are made up of such a rich mixture of peoples as Spain. Iberians, Celts, Basques, Alans, Suevi, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Persians, Slavs, Franks and Germans can all contribute to the genetic and cultural make-up of an average Spaniard. Typical of the contradictory nature of the place, though, the Spanish give great importance to the idea of ‘Spanishness’ – referring both to national character and ethnicity. The day set aside for its celebration is 12 October, the day Columbus (Genoese? Portuguese? Perhaps Ibizan, according to one of the latest theories) touched land on the far side of the Atlantic. Now they simply call it El Día de la Hispanidad. In 1936, just three months into the Civil War, it was more usually and bizarrely referred to as El Día de la Raza – the festival of the Spanish Race.

If Lorca, shot two months earlier, was the greatest poet and playwright in Spain at the time, Miguel de Unamuno was the country’s greatest intellectual and philosopher: a Catholic and an admirer of Kierkegaard. White-haired, and with a clipped white beard, he looked not unlike the elderly Freud, with his small round glasses, elegant suits and hunched shoulders, hardened after a life spent with books.

In his early seventies now, he was at the tail end of his academic career, having been professor of Greek at Salamanca University and now holding the post of rector of this, one of the oldest universities in Christian Europe. A Basque, he had spent most of his life at Salamanca, where he was regarded as something of a national treasure: a renowned Spanish writer, admired internationally, who had often been at the forefront of the galloping intellectual evolution in Spain over the past half-century. He moved to the political centre after being a member of the Socialist Party when young, becoming a celebrated liberal in the 1920s during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who exiled him to the Canary Islands for his attacks on the king and himself. Primo de Rivera finally gave in to pressure and pardoned Unamuno in 1924, but the proud philosopher took himself to Paris and then to the town of Hendaye, just over the border in France, refusing to set foot in Spain again until the dictator’s fall from power in 1930.

Now, in the early days of the Civil War, the old man seemed to have completed his political journey from Left to Right by declaring in favour of Franco and the rebellion, believing the Nationalist movement would restore order to the Republic, an institution he had greatly supported at its birth five years earlier. Like many moderate Catholics at the time, the sight of churches being burned by anarchists while the Popular Front government appeared to stand by perhaps blinded him at first to the brutality of those he backed. But in the early days of Franco’s rule in Salamanca, there was repression all around him which he could not ignore.

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