Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking Between History and Memory

Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking between History and Memory A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kajsa C. Larson IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ofelia Ferrán May 2010 © Kajsa C. Larson 2010 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ofelia Ferrán, Patrick McNamara, Ana Forcinito, and Joanna O’Connell for their guidance and feedback throughout the writing process. Thank you to my family and friends for their love and encouragement, especially Xulio, Concha, and Ángeles. ii Dedication I dedicate this study to Concha Carretero, whose love, kindness, and friendship are an inspiration to me. iii Abstract Remembering the Thirteen Roses: Thinking between History and Memory examines the execution of thirteen young, communist women, named the Thirteen Roses, on August 5, 1939, to show how Spaniards in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have assigned meaning to and represented the memories of those who opposed Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Through the analysis of poetry, fiction, journalism, theater, and film, my dissertation documents the ways the Roses’ memory has been recycled and transformed over time from the remembrance of a historical event to a polysemic literary and cultural trope. This trope, in the postwar years, embodied communist political ideals but, with the passing of time, was converted into a symbol for democracy and, later, into a depoliticized tale of human suffering. The development of the Roses trope alerts us to the mechanics of collective memory, a concept coined by Maurice Halbwachs to explain how ‘memory’ is a socially constructed notion that is experienced within a group. The recollection of the women’s execution serves as a case study for how society manipulates and assigns different meanings to collective memories over time, highlighting the manner in which collective memory is both a cultural and discursive construct. Memories, like that of the Roses, intersect and negotiate specific political, historical, social, and cultural objectives in a social context. Remembering the Thirteen Roses combines history, memory studies, and literary scholarship to deepen our understanding of Spain’s recent social and political movements in favor of the recuperation of historical memory of the Spanish Civil War, as it is reflected in the ever-evolving representations of one tragic event. iv Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1 1. Who were the Thirteen Roses?……………..………………………….…………….45 2. The Story of the Thirteen Roses: A Journalistic Approach………………………...119 3. Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida and Jesus Ferrero’s Las trece rosas: Using the Past to Rethink the Present…………………………………………….…………………...158 4. Martina, la rosa número trece: The Family Experience as a National Tragedy.......193 5. Julia Bel’s Las trece rosas: The Spanish Civil War as a ‘Place of Memory’ in Contemporary Peninsular Theater………………..…………………………………...220 6. Emilio Martínez Lázaro and Pedro Costa’s Las 13 rosas: Turning the Roses Trope into a Cultural Commodity …………………………………………………………...260 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………………………289 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...302 Appendix A: Biographical Information on the Thirteen Roses……………………….310 1 Introduction As Walter Benjamin wrote, “An experienced event is finite—at any rate— confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before and after it” (Benjamin 202). The experienced event of my dissertation took place on August 5, 1939. A group of thirteen women— seven under the age of eighteen—were executed near Madrid’s Ventas prison in the Cementerio del Este a few months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. The women had been involved in the communist youth organization, the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. Many of them had been recruited to serve as communist liaisons in Madrid at the end of the war, when most of the socialist and communist political leaders had gone into exile. At their trial, which took place two days before the execution, they were accused of political rebellion against Franco’s regime. Their execution sent a strong message to those who opposed Franco; no one who went against the dictator, regardless of age or gender, was exempt from extreme punishment or death. As a remembered event, the execution would leave a lasting impression on those who experienced the war and also on generations to come. The news of the women’s death sent a ripple of shock throughout Ventas prison. Witnesses say that fellow women prisoners in Ventas named them the Thirteen Roses immediately after their death as a way to pay homage to them. During the postwar period, the story of the Roses’ unjust death spread through prisons and was immortalized in at least three poems. This oral story-telling allowed their memory to continue as a wartime legend among Republican sympathizers. The Roses’ death was told inside and outside of prison. Knowledge of this brutal event also reached France during the early postwar years. In 1946, a group 2 of youth organized in Bordeaux, France. Most of them were Spanish, Republican sympathizers who participated in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. The youth organization in France, named after Miguel Hernández, kept connected to Spanish culture by creating educational forums about theater, music, famous Spanish writers, and regional dances. In 1947, the Miguel Hernández youth group performed a theater production about the Thirteen Roses to an audience of 1,000 people. The Thirteen Roses became, early on, a symbol for the need to remember the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. The memory of the Roses would reappear in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in women’s first-person testimonies and memoirs about the war and dictatorship years. Following Spain’s transition to democracy, historians, journalists, fiction writers, and artists took an interest in the Roses’ execution. The Roses’ tale has been retold in newspaper articles, journal publications, book-length historical accounts, works of fiction, a television documentary, three theatrical productions, a dance, a film, and several contemporary songs and poems. With the passing of time, the historical account about the Roses’ execution has been transformed into a valuable account for several collective groups: war survivors, the children and grandchildren of war survivors, as well as younger generations. My dissertation traces and analyzes the development of the Thirteen Roses’ story to explain how it has been, and continues to be, retold using a wide variety of genres and discursive strategies in different time periods and for a variety of purposes. Each representation of the Thirteen Roses’ execution highlights specific aspects of the event to communicate different messages about the Roses: hope and inspiration, the brutality of Franco’s regime, tragedy and loss, a search for personal 3 and national identity, the current need for commemoration, or the desire to engage with an entertaining story. The versatility of the Thirteen Roses account –and its ability to be seen through different lenses and be represented through diverse art forms--has allowed this event to persist over time. This endless proliferation of texts that tell and retell the tale of the Thirteen Roses has allowed the execution to become a remembered event, a memory that continues to be passed on and whose interpretation has seemingly infinite possibilities. The Thirteen Roses: Transformation of Memory into Artistic Trope By tracing the development of the Thirteen Roses’ story through a variety of genres, it is possible to see how it has evolved into a trope, which Hayden White defines as a metaphor or figure of speech: The word tropic derives from tropikos, tropos, which in Classical Greek meant "turn" and in Koiné "way" or "manner." It comes into modern Indo-European languages by way oitropus, which in Classical Latin meant "metaphor" or "figure of speech" and in Late Latin, especially as applied to music theory, "mood" or "measure." All of these meanings, sedimented in the early English word trope, capture the force of the concept that modern English intends by the word style, a concept that is especially apt for the consideration of that form of verbal composition which, in order to distinguish it from logical demonstration on the one side and from pure fiction on the other, we call by the name discourse. (H. White 2) A trope is one way in which individuals manipulate language to create meaning or convey emotions or a “mood.” The application of White’s definition of trope to this study serves a dual function: 1) the transformation of the Roses’ memory is a case study for understanding how social groups draw upon their personal experiences, opinions and beliefs to interpret the significance of these women and their death. The Roses’ trope shows how these ideas emerge and are transmitted within a social framework over 4 time; and 2) the trope also helps to explain the various messages that social groups wish to communicate by transmitting the Roses’ story. These memories intersect in a social framework and negotiate specific political, historical, social, and cultural objectives. Tropes as a Way to Make Meaning The Thirteen Roses’ anecdote proves White’s idea of how a trope—as a figurative component of discourse—“turns away” from a literal understanding and adopts a more symbolic meaning. The various representations about the Roses “turn away” from the literal, or historical, understanding of the event. By looking at the Roses’ execution as a trope, it is possible to see how our personal and collective understandings of the past are not static. Instead, they are constantly being revisited, revised, and discussed. The Roses’ memory has been told as a way for individuals to try to make sense of the past. For White, tropes are created and transformed in hopes of “rendering the unfamiliar, familiar” (H.

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