spaces of death Spain’s geography of war and remembrance
landscape | spanish civil war by mireya folch - serra
scale memory retribution revision correction
Seventy years after the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, a public inquiry about the 140,000 who disappeared during General Franco’s time is taking place. Presently, a veritable explosion of blogs and websites contemplate this piece of information, while articles on the subject of the mass graves where some victims of calculated violence were hastily interred appear on a regular basis in newspapers and other media. 1 In Spain, the lack of ‘truth commissions’ and trials to judge those responsible for deaths, torture and illegal detentions has resulted in the delayed recognition of events in history. After Franco’s death in 1975, his main civilian and military institutions were not purged; as a consequence, transitional justice did not take place and thousands were eradicated from the country’s awareness. It thus has taken decades to begin to recreate their lives and deaths. During the years of democratic rule initiated with the 1978 Constitution a consensus was established to silence the victims’ memory; events seen as posing a challenge to the status quo were kept out of sight for fear of rousing a split between the descendants of the victors and the defeated. However, the unearthing of graves located in trenches next to country roads and outside cemeteries –one well-known is Federico Garcia Lorca’s —have stirred debate. 2 Some argue that the dead should be left where they are while others would like to recollect and give proper burial to the victims of repression.
But while the defeated for the most part remain in anonymous mass graves, the victors have been memorialised in the Valley of the Fallen, an institutionalised monument-monastery built by political prisoners from 1940 to 1958. In Franco’s declaration, it was meant to perpetuate the memory of the fallen of his ‘glorious Crusade.’ As a result, the divisive aspects of this massive semiotic object would be reified during its construction and in the years that followed by ignoring its dogmatic origins. For the keepers of the status quo it was expedient to silence the forced labour involved in its construction while highlighting the monastery’s religious quality. This inversion of meaning made the monument’s uncritical acceptance possible. The media followed the official line and did not recognise the importance of its role as witness to events in history and the responsibility to record for posterity the totality of the project—including its most dismal aspects.
top: a newspaper clipping of a sketched map locating yet another mass grave from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. right: unearthing a mass grave. further right: Caidos por Dios y por España (The Fallen - for God and for Spain), an inscription on the Valley of the Fallen.
52 On Site review 22: WAR
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