Journal of Alternative Perspective s in the Social Sciences ( 2011 ) V ol 3, No 1 , 34 -56 Revisiting Spanish Memory: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia Dolores Martín Moruno , University of Geneva, Switzerland. Abstract: This article explores the way in which the Spanish Civil War has been traditionally shaped in the collective memory as a Manichean conflict fought between two well-defined sides, the Republicans and the Nationalists, in order to demythologise this common representation in contemporary Spanish society. According to the recent interest shown by Spanish population for recovering its national past, I consider the civil war as a “site of memory” that needs to be periodically relived in order to satisfy the changing needs of each generation. Therefore, this article aims at reviewing the legacy of the civil war from an unusual approach, a literary contribution can provide an alternative perception of this struggle: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). In this way, Orwell’s memories are analysed in order to understand the civil war as the beginning of a social revolution, which was crushed not only by fascist forces, but also by the policy exerted by the Soviet Union in Spain by means of the communist party. In conclusion, Orwell’s contribution is not only interpreted as an homage to the ordinary people who fought in order to create a new social order, but also to Georges Orwell, who led to posterity one of the most moving testimonies of the Spanish Social Revolution, an episode completely removed from Spanish memory . Keywords : Social Memory; Spanish Civil War; George Orwell; Homage to Catalonia. 1. The Legacy of the Spanish Civil War This essay explores the way in which the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) has been represented up to now as a clear-cut struggle between fascism and democracy from an unusual approach, i.e. through a literary contribution like Georges Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), because he provides an alternative model to shape Spanish memory in contemporary 34 Dolores Martín Moruno , Uni versity of Geneva, Switzerland society. With this aim in mind, I will first explain why it seems to me extremely reductionist to interpret the legacy of the civil war in terms of a savage discord throughout Spanish history, then to discuss after the relevance of Orwell’s writings to understanding this war as the beginning of a social revolution. In this way, this study should be considered not only an homage to the ordinary people, who fought in order to establish a new social order alternative to the injustices of Capitalism in 1936’s Spain, but also an homage to George Orwell, the man who left to posterity one of the most stirring testimonies of this period that is completely forgotten in Spanish collective memory. Wars are processes which are difficult to explain and often equally difficult to understand. No war can be forgotten, no social wound can be cured completely and this is even truer if we are speaking of a civil war, whose traumas continue to be a subject of disagreement in the current political affairs, such as in the case of the Spanish Civil War. The civil war broke out with an offensive led by right-wing officers of the Spanish Army against the Government of the Second Republic on the 18th July 1936 and finished with the victory of the rebel troops led by the General Francisco Franco on the 1st April 1939, indicating the beginning of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) that was supported abroad by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Thomas, 2010). More than seventy years later, we can see how this tragic episode is far from perceived as a merely historical event belonging to the past, if we consider the recent controversy prompted by the unsuccessful initiative of the judge Baltasar Garzón to investigate the crimes perpetrated during the civil war and its aftermath at the hands of Franco’s supporters with regard to the context of international human rights laws (Martín, 2010). Garzón, who ironically has already played a central role in the prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, has been finally suspended last May from his post in this trial, after being accused of perverting the Amnesty Law signed in 1977. i 35 Revisiting Spanish M emory: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia Indeed, Spain continues to be today the only one 20th century democratic regime, which has not adopted official policies aimed at establishing the truth and pursuing retroactive accountability like other countries that had suffered repression under authoritarian rules. Probably, this is why the civil war still seems to be already an underlying trauma in Spanish memory, because Franco’s Dictatorship imposed for almost forty years, a forced oblivion in relation to the testimonies of the defeated Republicans, which was reinforced by the so-called Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting ), when the different political parties agreed to not persecute Francoist repressors in order to achieve the stability of the Spanish democratic transition. As Madelaine Davis has observed what happened during the Spanish transition “was not that the Spaniards genuinely forgot the past but that a collective decision was made, for political purposes, to place a particular construction on the past to suppress or deemphasize those memories felt to be likely to endanger stability and consensus and to foreground those likely to promote reconciliation” (Davis, 2005: 27). In this social context, the majority of the population accepted a kind of collective amnesia in relation to the atrocities and crimes committed in the past, emphasising a new political account based on values, such as consensus and pardoning over justice and truth. It seems that the price to finish with violence and to get peace during the Spanish democratic transition was to erase the memories of the war and the repression exerted by the dictatorial regime. However, this way of dealing with the past was called into question during the last decade by a movement coming from civil society, which aims to put light on the fate of the 300,000 Republicans killed during the war, the 440,000 persons who went into exile and the 10.000 who died in Nazi concentration camps (Preston, 1990). In particular, this campaign has been led by the non-governmental Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) that was created in December 2000 with the aim of regulating the exhumation of corpses in mass graves and organising the relevant information in archives open to the general public. 36 Dolores Martín Moruno , Uni versity of Geneva, Switzerland After various unsuccessful petitions demanding governmental involvement, the ARMH succeeded in 2002, in getting Spain included in the list of countries made by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances . Furthermore, in 2007, when José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was elected as prime minister, the Spanish parliament approved the law of the Historical Memory recognising the right of those, who suffered violence or prosecution during the Civil War and Franco’s regime.ii According to this increasing interest for recovering Spanish memory, I will consider the Spanish Civil War as a lieu de mémoire , “a site of memory” that each generation has not only the right, but also the duty to appropriate in relation to the particularities of their present. Following Pierre Nora’s interpretation, a site of memory embodies a symbolic moment “where memory crystallizes (…) a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn”. In contrast to the notion of history, which “is a secular reconstruction of what is no longer”, memory is in permanent evolution and needs to be periodically revived by means of remembering the crucial events, which give sense to the national past (Nora, 1989: 7). Therefore, I would like to discuss the representation of the Spanish Civil War as a summary confrontation between loyalists of the Second Republic (1931-9) and nationalists who supported the uprising of the Spanish Army, with the help of a novel that has also been silenced for a long time in Spain. I am speaking about Georges Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , a book that had little success when it appeared for the first time in 1938 and, in particular, in Spain where it would be published during the 70’s after being completely distorted by the corrections imposed by Franco’s censorship regime. Even, in the 1978 edition, when the Spanish constitution was approved, Orwell’s work was judged as a poor literary contribution, which revealed the ignorance of the author “about the Spanish political history and of religious matters” (Lázaro, 2005: 121). Only in 2007, sixty- five years after Franco’s death and twenty-four after the first publication of Homage to Catalonia , a comprehensive 37 Revisiting Spanish M emory: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia Spanish edition would be published with the whole of Orwell’s political essays. Although Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is not an historical document, but rather an autobiographical account written as kind of documentary when he joined the POUM militia (The dissident Marxist communist party) in the winter of 1937, this novel should not only be regarded as a fictional work. Indeed, Orwell wrote this novel in the first person with the aim of giving a testimony close to reality, beyond the image of the war popularised by the party propaganda of that time. In contrast to other books inspired by the civil war, which supported one or other of the ideologies taking part in this conflict, Orwell’s memories questioned the image of the conflict given, by both, the Fascist and the Republican side, when the Soviet Union imposed its policy in Spain by providing munitions and military support.