Jonathan Mayhew asked:
What’s the origin of your fascination with the Spanish Civil War?
I have been thinking about this for days because it is, indeed, weird that I should have such an intense emotional response to a war that happened many years ago in a different country.
When I took my very first course at the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill University (Intermediate Intensive II), I had never spoken a word of Spanish to anybody and had the vaguest kind of knowledge about the Hispanic culture. In the second week of the course, we had to create a dialogue with a famous person from the Spanish-speaking world. There was a list of suggestions and, for some mysterious reason, I was drawn to Dolores Ibárruri, or La Pasionaria. The very first essay I wrote in that department (still in English) was also on the Spanish Civil War. Something was drawing me to the subject almost against my will.
There is something in this conflict that touches me very deeply, and I’m still not sure what it is. Maybe I’m displacing onto it the emotions I have regarding the civil conflicts in my own country because they are too painful to approach. It is also very possible that my great-grandmother (whose life I’m replaying in endless ways) worked for the Soviet effort in the Spanish Civil War. Her activities were classified, so we will never know.
I’ll keep thinking about this because it puzzles me, too.
Clarissa's Blog 
(greetings from Zagreb, where for once I’m travelling [work related] with a computer)
I can think of a couple of things.
I’ve seen the SCW referred to as a dress rehearsal for WWII so a lot of the conflicts that defined the 20th century played out on a more comprehensible scale.
The ‘right’ side (for most people) lost and the results were on view for for the following 30 + years.
This also gives the whole undertaking the patina of a valiant, if hopeless, struggle that resonates strongly with people north of the balkans and east of germany.
It’s Spain, which figures much more strongly in the European imagination than its kind of marginal position vis a vis the rest of Europe would indicate (and the SCW both feeds off of and feeds this I think).
More later maybe…
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Yes, Spain is totally different. 🙂 Have fun in Zagreb!
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It was a very regrettable period in time in terms of human suffering but very worthwhile learning experience for humanity as such. It is also one of the most idealistic periods of humanity. I don’t feel even the French or the Russian revolution had the common people at that level of intellectual engagement as it existed during the SCW. That’s why I think is fascinating. You can feel its intensity in almost any work of art that you read from that period.
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And even today incredible works of art are being created about the SCW.
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well I have a fascination with aviation and planes being lost over water because my grandfather died that way in WW2
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Was he from Zimbabwe?
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Rhodesia. A British colony.
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I was never a great student of history, and my memory is faulty, but it seems to me that both the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil war were virtually ignored in my history classes in the U.S. in both high school and college. I’ve read a little about the Muslim conquest and control of southern Spain for several hundred years, and the efforts of the king and queen to regain control. I find that period of Spanish history interesting, and would like to learn more about Spanish history in general, and particularly the Spanish Civil War of the 20th century. Can you recommend a book that would be a good starting place for a beginner? Thanks.
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The very first book I read on the Civil War was Paul Preston’s The Three Spains of 1936. I think it is the title because I read it in Spanish translation. Paul Preston is a leading historian of the Civil War. There is also Helen Graham’s: Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, which is brilliant. And it’s also very short, so people who don’t have much time can use it to get informed.
On the subject of Muslim Spain, I highly recommend Maria Rosa Menocal’s The a Ornament of the World. She was my professor at Yale and she’s amazing. The book reads very easily and is aimed at a general audience. I’m still grieving Maria Rosa’s untimely death. She was so talented!
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Clarissa, thanks so much for your suggestions.
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SCW also had great PR. Hemingway and Picasso aren’t bad for building name recognition for an event. Then there were the volunteers from various countries. There was the idealism and the horror, both foreshadowing and in contrast to what was to come next.
Cliff’s point about the dress rehearsal is absolutely true. In truth, the Wehrmacht doesn’t overrun Poland as it did without perfecting the tactics in Spain. Without the sheer arrogance bloated by successes in Poland and France, would Hitler have ever attempted to invade the USSR? SCW was the misery to beget greater misery.
It’s almost funny that we are discussing this on the day that the Serbs are celebrating the assassin who ignited the War to End All War.
Humans truly never learn, do they?
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Gavrilo Princip isn’t as crucial as he was made out to be. There was no way the war could have been avoided even of he’d never been born. There would have been another pretext.
You are absolutely right that the SCW was used as a dress rehearsal. Stalin learned a lot from it and use that knowledge to defeat Hitler later.
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