Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction by Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir

Author:Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Part II

The Past Recovered

© The Author(s) 2017

Gunnthorunn GudmundsdottirRepresentations of Forgetting in Life Writing and FictionPalgrave Macmillan Memory Studies10.1057/978-1-137-59864-6_5

5. Excavating a Troubled Past: Spanish Memory Texts

Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir1

(1)University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

Harald Weinrich claims in his seminal work on forgetting that ‘Wars are orgies of forgetting.’1 The Spanish Civil War is no exception, as from the end of the war, throughout Franco’s dictatorship, and in the transition to democracy, the public treatment of the recent past in Spain was fraught with repressive silence and imposed forgetting. The politics of memory were highly contentious, by turns characterised by fierce debate or resolute silence, although much has changed in the twenty-first century. There are many reasons for this silence; civil wars are notoriously difficult to maintain in a nation’s memory, and for some the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) only came to an end with Franco’s death in 1975. Josefina Cuesta notes that everything the war brought with it—death, repression, disappearances, victims and victors, silence, censorship, the loss of liberties, military rule—was all prolonged during the forty years of dictatorship, which suppressed and ‘managed’ the memory of the war. Franco’s regime imposed a ‘national’ truth and carefully and systematically made its mark on the calendar, street names, festivals, monuments, and school books, decided on the protagonists of history, and condemned the ‘other Spain’ to be forgotten: the victims, the exiled, the Republicans, the labour movement, and political parties. Cuesta argues that ‘During the dictatorship, the civil war served as the foundation, the legitimisation, as the glorious past and a celebration.’2 The ruling power was, thus, very aware of its role in creating and maintaining its version of the past in collective memory. The effects of the war were there for all to see, but, as Jordi Gracia explains, there was no language available to describe them as the people had no choice but to adopt the language of the victors, thereby ‘forgetting the past constantly present.’3 Franco’s legacy was also to influence the nature of the transition to democracy. There were no ‘truth committees,’ investigations or reckoning with the past; instead the so-called Pact of forgetting (pacto de olvido) came into being where the past was not to be used for political purposes, blame should not be laid, punishment metered out, or vengeance exacted. This was enshrined in law in 1977 with the laws of general amnesty and these two concepts are therefore joined, amnesia and amnesty. Weinrich explains how eighteenth century European efforts to forget and forgive previous conflicts areoften described formally as “amnesty and oblivion” (French, amnestie et oubli), a technical phrase in which the word of Greek origin and the word of Latin origin mean the same thing, namely “prescribed forgetting.” Put in legal terms, this clause formulates a duty, imposed on both parties to the treaty, to renounce all assignment of blame and punitive measures regarding past acts committed in the course of the war.4

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